

Why Developers are so Important - cjoh
http://infovegan.com/2010/06/24/why-developers-are-so-important/

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Empact
I certainly see myself in this description. I started working on
<http://votereports.org/> because I wanted to perform the basic civic duty of
voting, which is expected of every adult in the country, without the
superhuman requirement of scrutinizing all the bills and tabulating the votes
individually, which I wouldn't wish on anyone.

And by creating the tool for others as well there's a real chance it can make
a structural change in the popular literacy of legislative/political
accountability - reducing the role of yard signs, hypocrisy and party
politics, and increasing the role of issues and legislation.

Incidentally, please do message me if you're interested in the project. We've
got a lot to do between now and November.

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alsomike
This is certainly true, which is why the libertarian bent of some developers
who disavow any notion of social responsibility is so disturbing.

~~~
Empact
Aren't you conflating ethics with politics? It seems having a personal notion
of social responsibility is quite distinct from wanting that notion imposed on
all people by the state.

~~~
alsomike
Social responsibility needs to be imposed on those in positions of power. Or
would you rather we trust elites on their assurance that they are good and
kind and just? That's how the old feudal monarchies used to work.

~~~
Empact
Historically, as with feudal society, hasn't the government itself been a
major source of elite abusers? And today, see the military industrial complex,
corporatism, or the prison industrial complex (e.g. California prison guard
unions).

In my opinion, placing your faith in either elites or government is a mistake.
Rather, the goal is to create a decentralized system of accountability,
whereby the interplay of forces punish and deter foul play. Government is a
player in that, so are the elites, so are we.

~~~
alsomike
Despite all the enthusiasm around decentralization, I think it's a failed
option. It creates the illusion that power doesn't exist, when it's only been
hidden, making it harder to fight. I've written about that here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389356>

I agree on accountability. There will always be elites and the people need
strong collective institutions to hold them accountable. The fact that
government hasn't always acted in our interest is no reason to hand over
everything to the elites.

~~~
Empact
Re. Decentralization, you say: It creates the illusion that power doesn't
exist, when it's only been hidden, making it harder to fight.

So, a thought experiment is in order, consider the following scenarios, re.
restaurants:

* there only is a single restaurant allowed

* there are multiple restaurants, but they jealously prevent any new entrants

* there is a dynamic market of restaurants, which survive or close based on the patronage of individual diners

In each case, power is more decentralized, from an individual institution, to
a cabal of institutions, to a set of institutions selected by individual
patrons. Now, you could say that in the last case, there are still elites,
there are those who can spend more money, and there are the restaurant owners
who exercise power over their own establishments. But is it reasonable to say,
re. power that: "it's only been hidden, making it harder to fight"? Is
monopoly or oligopoly power indistinguishable from market power?

You give the example with restaurant reviews, saying that individual control
of reviews would still leave power to aggregators. But isn't it equally open
to all aggregators, just as the latter restaurant market is open to those who
can start a restaurant and attract a clientele? In decentralization, are we
really not also seeing the diminishing ability to exercise arbitrary power?

~~~
alsomike
In your restaurant example, I'd say there's no distinction between the second
and the third option. Even though there is a dynamic market of different
restaurants, by virtue of the fact that they are in competition with each
other, they are homogeneous at a different level. Obviously not in the same
way where all restaurants are collapsed into one enormous food court under
centralized control, but in the sense that they all draw from the same pool of
patrons, suppliers, employees, infrastructure, the same legal and monetary
system, etc. This fact means that it is, in principle, always possible to game
the system through those avenues. By virtue of the fact that there is a
playing field, it can be tilted. The possibility for abuse of power still
exists, although it's a different type of abuse than the arbitrary whims of
the chef at the one giant restaurant in town. One important difference is that
it's much more abstract and esoteric. It's easy to identify power when the
chef refuses to cook eggs because he hates eggs and you have no other choices
- this is a transparent kind of power. But when your favorite seafood
restaurant goes out of business because market manipulations behind the scenes
caused prices to suddenly spike, we don't see that as a result of power, it's
even naturalized as the market at work. An important point is that at the
naive, everyday level, everyone appears to have made a free choice - the
restaurant owner, the patrons, the newly unemployed workers, etc. A concrete
example of this is credit default swaps - some homeowners in California
default on their loans, and suddenly people in Iceland have to pay double for
food.

In the example of restaurant reviews, you could indeed create another
competing aggregator if it had been corrupted, but then you would need some
kind of aggregator aggregator, possibly a search engine. The example here is
torrent sites - its a decentralized system, but for that to be usable, torrent
search engines sprung up so that you could find things. You can't possibly
track down and sue everyone seeding a torrent, but you can shut down the
handful of search engines which is just as good. Further decentralization just
creates the same problem at a different level.

File sharing is also a good example of what I'm talk about with the different
kinds of power. If the cops raided your house because you borrowed some books
from a friend, that would immediately appear to you as an expression of power.
But the absence of a backup option when you put a DVD into a computer doesn't
(OK, unless you are technically savvy). Notice how this is operative at the
level of language: if you ask someone to backup a DVD, they will try and then
tell you: "You can't do that." But as we know, you can do it, it's been
disabled. Here again, power is naturalized, prohibitions and controls are
thought of as inevitable or physical impossibilities.

My point is that we are concerned about the overt forms of power, and pay very
little attention to the covert forms of power, those which determine our very
perception of freedom vs. non-freedom. One of the effects of network
decentralization is to make power more abstract, which is part of the reason
we have so many conspiracy theories today. Conspiracy theorists are like
creationists, they see complex phenomena emerge and attribute it to someone
behind the scenes coordinating it and pulling all the strings, which puts a
face on it, naively unabstracting it. A paranoid DRM conspiracy theorist might
believe the MPAA sent operatives into his house and installed software that
disabled DVD backups. There's some kind of twisted truth in it, but the
problem is that his mode of resistance is all wrong. Now he thinks he can just
hole up, board up the windows, buy a gun and he will be safe.

So this is another reason why developers are important - they can see and
resist power without naively unabstracting it.

