
You can't beat politics with new technology all the time - pkallberg
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-11/18/peter-sunde-hemlis-political-apathy
======
tikhonj
The actual quote is: "You can't beat politics with new technology all the
time."

This is _very_ different from the current HN headline! After all, sometimes
technology changes everything so much politics can do little more than try to
catch up.

People like to say "you can't solve social problems with technology". It's a
statement that's true enough of the time to be common wisdom but not enough to
be a natural law. Sometimes technology _does_ help with social problems.

This isn't to say that politics is unimportant. It is still central. But I
think dismissing technological solutions out of hand is also shortsighted. I
particularly think this of BitCoin, which feels like a monumental change.
BitCoin could, ideally, liberate transactions between individuals and
significantly reduce barriers for anything from microtransactions to donating
to fringe political causes. It certainly won't solve _all_ our problems, it
might even solve _none_ , but I think it'll definitely make for a better
world.

I really liked Balaji Srinivasan's speech on "Voice and Exit". BitCoin was an
example of "exiting" the existing financial system and providing an alternate
means of conducting transactions. Viewing it as such, just using and
supporting BitCoin is inevitably a political action, limiting the absolute
power of the government. To me, this makes BitCoin one of the technologies to
really watch for future social change.

~~~
wes-exp
_I think [BitCoin will] definitely make for a better world_

Bitcoin is inherently deflationary, which would be economically disastrous if
it supplanted the dollar. Granted, I think bitcoin supplanting the dollar is
unlikely, but it does make me question how beneficial bitcoin really is.

On top of that, bitcoin erodes transaction privacy. Is this really a step
forward?

~~~
crassus
How will we live if people aren't artificially pressured to consume their
wealth as quickly as possible? And we know those 8,000 years of civilization
using metallic money were not all "economically disastrous".

History gives us plenty of episodes of deflationary growth, such as America
after the civil war during resumption of the metallic standard. Yes, a sudden
collapse in a money supply is bad, but economies work fine under slow
deflation.

Economists are the worst intellectuals. Their predictions are always wrong and
their growth advice is ineffectual. I wouldn't take what you read from an
economist in a newspaper op-ed page at face value.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
America during the resumption of the metallic standard underwent _overall_
growth, but with frequent financial panics in which thousands of people lost
everything, went bankrupt, and in quite a few cases starved to death cold and
alone in a ditch.

That sounds like a _great_ model /sarcasm!

~~~
crassus
Statistically, the American economy has not been more stable since the
invention of the Federal Reserve. I think George Selgin has a paper on it.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Luckily, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than "Federal Reserve vs
Ron Paul".

------
mseebach
There is a tendency for people successful in a particular domain to believe
that their brilliance mean they have something insightful to say about
politics. Mr Sunde is a brilliant technologist but this interview reveals that
he has a high-school level naïvety about the democratic political process.

His ideology is mainstream statism (there is no particular evidence of
communism or socialism imo) and his general, overarching idea is the exact
same as every other young, idealistic candidate, from every mainstream
political party (give or take a couple of slogan-sized marginal political
differences): That everybody who already got elected are complacent about
changing the system, and if you'll only elect me, I won't become complacent
then everything will change.

The root problem, of course, isn't that we should just elect better
politicians, it's the iron law of bureaucracy.

And this is where I disagree fundamentally with Mr. Sunde: Technology is
_exactly_ what we can use to beat the bureaucracy. Uber and AirBnB is doing
more than 100 Peter Sundes running for office to reform taxis and rental
systems, Bitcoin is a powerful and plausible agent of reform in the banking
sector. There are tons of community owned banks and while they do some things
differently on the margins, at the end of the day, on the broad lines, they're
just like the big, commercial banks.

Finally, this: "This includes setting up cryptocurrencies that are difficult
to monitor and tax (Sunde is a firm believer in taxation, since it allows
communities to build shared infrastructure)". This is _rich_ coming from a guy
who made his name helping people avoid the taxation of Hollywood through a
hard to monitor technology.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
If he's engaging in naive statist technocracy, you're engaging in naive
proprietarian minarchism: "Just get the state out of everything except
property and contracts and it'll all work out fine somehow!"

~~~
Zigurd
The problem is an entrenched system that has nerfed the ability to impose
change at the ballot box, and it is the same problem for everyone looking for
substantive change. Statism, fascism, the military industrial complex,
corporatism... call it what you like. Voting, or even engagement with the
political process, is not the starting point.

Obamacare is the recent high water mark for change. Woo! Right? We have to
solve that problem first.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Ok, let me state very clearly my problem with the term "statism": it is a
negative. Not a negative in the sense of having a negative emotional
connotation, but a negative the way a piece of photographic film is negative.

"Statism" doesn't tell me anything about the position being labelled statist.
It only tells me that the person doing the labelling is a ~~libertarian~~
proprietarian minarchist. Left-anarchists don't even use the unvarnished term
"statist", not even as a term for policies they oppose.

I want people to stop using terms that tell me about their personalities and
start using terms that tell me about the politics under discussion.

~~~
mseebach
Oh, it's a good thing that all of your comments are so constructive and
engaging with the subject, then.

FWIW, in my usage "Statism", is a reference to the assumption that by default,
a problem should always be dealt with by the state, and when a problem isn't
dealt with correctly, the default assumption is that it's a symptom of the
state holding too little power and too few resources.

I think that these assumptions are not _always_ false, but they are false
often enough that the possibility that they are warrants careful discussion.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>FWIW, in my usage "Statism", is a reference to the assumption that by
default, a problem should always be dealt with by the state, and when a
problem isn't dealt with correctly, the default assumption is that it's a
symptom of the state holding too little power and too few resources.

These are "assumptions" that almost zero real people actually assume.

~~~
mortyseinfeld
_These are "assumptions" that almost zero real people actually assume._

No, that's pretty much the default assumption of the statist. It sounds like
you just don't like the term.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Find me the set of people who _self-consciously refer to themselves as
statists_. Not the ones who say "statist" if asked explicitly, "Are you
statist or anarchist?", but the ones who actually wave the word "statist" as
their own flag for an official ideology of Statism.

You can't. The word is used solely by anarchists to mean "everyone who's not
an anarchist", except that the left-anarchists decided they had more common
cause with non-anarchist socialists and dropped it. Thus, the only people
using the term "statist" of their own initiative are minarcho-capitalists, who
use it to mean, "Everyone who's not us."

There is no such party as the Statist Party. There is, however, such a thing
as Every Party But the Libertarian Party, which is what "statist" actually
means.

The word is thus empty of _specific_ semantic meaning, and is simply a smear-
word used by minarcho-capitalists.

~~~
mortyseinfeld
Yeah, obviously statists don't refer to themselves as statists. You leftists
hate the term obviously, but his definition was pretty accurate.

And you're wrong about only anarchists using that term. But I find your
minarcho-capitalists usage pretty amusing.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I say "minarcho-capitalist" because it's the _accurate_ terminology (though
you guys tend to prefer "anarcho-capitalist"). The problem being that
_anarchists_ as a whole are against _property_ as well as anti-state; most
anarchists are left-anarchists.

Hence why leftists aren't called "statists" by the way: because the Left
includes anti-state, anti-property leftists (who see no contradiction there:
they hold that it's the state which creates property in the first place and
property arrangements which create the superstructure in which the state
acts!).

------
kaoD
> Much of his time has been spent dealing with "haters" from the encryption
> community.

Hahaha! Oh wow! Let's see what "haters" means:

> One of the main criticisms [...] is that [...] it doesn't allow individuals
> to connect their own trusted servers [...] ("even though controlling the
> network is currently the only thing you can do to keep from being spied on,"
> says Sunde)

I would say a controlled network creates a single point of failure and a
narrow target for espionage (e.g. Lavabit).

> and that there are no plans to release the source code

Security through obscurity? Who wants audits from the community, when you can
just call them haters, right?

> Sunde sees these critics as elitist. "We want to give decent encryption to
> everyone -- not just tech people. But the tech people are the ones who are
> really upset that they can't connect their own server. We decided quite
> early on to stop listening to them."

Who's the hater here? Is closed source/optional personal network really going
to hinder massive adoption outside of tech circles? Does it matter at all?

------
kaoD
The interview makes clear he has a communist/socialist mindset.

Community owned banks? We have those in Spain, and those were the main
culprits of Spain's banking crisis because they were just politician's toys
both on left and right wing communities.

It's not that we distrust politicians: people just can't be trusted, not even
the people with good intentions! Economy can't be regulated effectively and
public banking demands high levels of regulation to prevent bad behaviour...
which is very hard (impossible?) to do right. People with money will always be
able to go around good legislation, while the common citizen still has to
fight against the system's errors.

He proposes fighting the State with the State instead of with techonology. My
opinion is that more State won't fight the State, it will just make it a
bigger monster to fight against.

~~~
ilaksh
I'm interested to hear more about the problems with community owned banks.
Actually there are a lot of people that are really hoping more of those will
solve many problems in the US. So I would like to know specifically why they
don't help and turned out so bad in Spain.

Sure, the State generally won't fight against itself, but I think that he
makes a good point though about not just completely giving up. I mean I have
given up on politics like a lot of people, but when I was reading that article
it made me think that if enough people tried, we _could_ make some
improvements and help at least ease the adoption of technologies that solve
structural/political problems.

There are a lot of people, especially in the US, that are really looking
toward social democracy (socialism) as the light at the end of the tunnel. I
think that its unfortunate that there isn't a better perspective for these
people on the realities of social democracies in Europe or of the historical
context of socialism. However, with such extreme inequality, its hard not to
lean in that direction in one's thinking.

I actually think the key problems are over-centralization, which occurs both
in capitalistic societies and socialist societies to a high degree, as well as
a lack of social and physical science being incorporated into decision making.
The communist/socialist ideal especially overcentralizes although it does a
better job of incorporating hard science into decision making. In that case
the main problem is lack of distribution of decision-making and diversity of
solutions which stifles evolution of the system.

The capitalistic ideal especially lacks the input of hard social and physical
sciences although it does provide a diverse set of solutions, at least until
monopoly takes over. We need to measure human and ecological well-being and
incorporate different scientifically motivated attempts to improve those
holistic measurements into our various enterprises.

Technology is going to be incredibly powerful in moving away from
centralization which should directly impact human well-being and inequality.

~~~
kaoD
> I'm interested to hear more about the problems with community owned banks.
> [...] So I would like to know specifically why they don't help and turned
> out so bad in Spain.

Spain is organized as a top-down centralist state where the central government
lends power to the Comunidades Autónomas (Autonomous Communities). These are
somewhat like USA's states but the other way around (the state is divided into
Communities instead of Communities uniting as a federal state).

The central state lending power to communities is because of political
instabilities during the transition out of Franco's dictatorship with
peripheral territories (Catalonia, Basque Country, Galicia...)

To put things in perspective, I like to think of Spain as a social democracy.
Our right-wing (Partido Popular, People's Party) would be considered left-wing
in the USA (regarding economy, though it's very conservative in the social
sense).

Communities regulate Cajas de Ahorros (literally: Savings Boxes, I guess
Savings Banks is more appropriate), which are like banks but non-profit
(although still businesses), and must spend part of their profits in social
purposes in exchange for taxing benefits. Each community's government controls
these cajas and elect their executives.

I'm sure you can see where this is going.

Of course these cajas were used for political purposes in both left and right-
wing communities, with BIG loans to the communities government to build
airports (deserted of flights), Formula 1 circuits (which only report losses),
etc. The purpose of this was to lure voters into thinking the economy was
buoyant. A famous case was Caja Mediterráneo, which (as we knew after the
crisis started) had people like a ballet dancer in its board of directors (of
course designated by politicians).

Fortunately the real estate was growing in Spain and these cajas could more or
less make it to the end of the year... until the real estate bubble exploded.
Our cajas' economy relied on it and collapsed like a house of cards. Suddenly
lots of loans were being defaulted (especially loans to real estate agencies,
construction companies and consumers) and a closer inspection on caja's
economy revealed a lot of toxic assets (just like in the US) covering the
losses from the loans to the communities.

To clean the toxic assets, cajas were taken over by private banks (in exchange
for huge amounts money, which of course the State paid) or forced to merge and
nationalized. Out of 45 cajas in 2007 only two were left untouched.

Of course the nationalized cajas had to be cleaned too and the central
goverment pulled a (blatantly obvious) trick: a bad bank was created (SAREB)
which bought (overpriced) toxic assets from the cajas. This bank assumes
losses, while the not-entirely-public cajas continue having profits and
distributing dividends. Many cajas managers were "retired" with millionaire
severance payments and that's it.

Of course this was all paid with EU's 125$ billion loan which the citizens
will have to pay (with interest of course).

> as well as a lack of social and physical science being incorporated into
> decision making.

I don't know your situation, but Spain's politicians are mainly attornies.
Unfortunately politics is thought to be a law problem, not a scientific one.

Of course, throwing laws at bad laws didn't help at all.

> I actually think the key problems are over-centralization, which occurs both
> in capitalistic societies and socialist societies to a high degree.

I agree a lot with this and the rest of your post :)

------
tehwalrus
To those arguing that his politics are bad, or that he is too small to make a
difference: you have missed his point.

The point is that geeks need to start _doing_ politics collectively. No, we
don't need to be in the same parties. No, we don't need to agree on
everything. But _yes_ , we _do_ need more software engineers in our
parliaments, calling out stupid stuff, and more geeks in there listening and
_voting against_ the stupid stuff.

He's not calling for you to all give up your Libertarian views (in my opinion,
equally as naive as his Socialist ones). He's calling on you to _care_ about
politics enough to _organise_ and _stand_.

And maybe, one day, win. Maybe.

------
thaumasiotes
This is purely a response to the title.

There is a popular line of thought that goes something like this:

1\. Owing to politics ("ethical considerations"), working with human stem
cells is, at best, quite difficult.

2\. That doesn't apply to nonhumans.

3\. If the technology appears, people will start to wonder why rich people can
get (hypothetically) anti-aging treatments and limb regeneration for their
dogs, but the same processes aren't available to humans.

4\. Politics loses, technology wins.

That example is quite specific (and suppositional), but I'd say the principle
is sound.

Another example might be the Japanese suppression of guns. Technology won out.
(Yes, it took a while. I'm comfortable with that.)

------
read
_it 's important to not think that we can solve problems with better
technology_

I'm surprised he says this. Effective solutions often come from a side angle,
not a frontal attack. Why would a frontal attack in politics work?

------
DanielBMarkham
In a similar vein, one of the things that's worried me is the technology
community's blind faith that helping the government automate is a good thing.
It is not.

For most western democracies, the government operates by a byzantine layer of
legal and regulatory mumbo-jumbo operated by a overworked civil service class.
This sounds bad, and it is to some degree, but what it means in practice is
very important: _not every law is enforced_.

People do not understand how critical to civility that statement is. Every day
people go too fast in their cars, drink and drive, skip out on toll booth
fees, spit on sidewalks, pay day laborers under the table, and participate in
all sorts of other non-violent, yet technically criminal activity. And the
world keeps spinning around. In fact, I'd argue that this rampant lawlessness
is a good thing. People can skate by without car insurance for a month or two
because they're getting a second job. They can have the roof fixed by cousin
Joe who is on disability because they can pay him under the table at much less
cost than hiring a contractor. All sorts of really good things get done
because there's a lot of wiggle room.

We start automating everything, and suddenly the system of inconsistent and
unintelligible laws become some sort of social operating system. One that is
tremendously complex, covers every aspect of our lives, and has never been ran
before at any level of completeness. That's a nightmare that any technologists
should be intimately familiar with.

So nope, you can't beat politics with technology, and in many cases you can't
even _fix_ politics with technology. Politics is about relationships between
people, fuzzy arrangements, and structures to facilitate that. Technology is
about machines, rigid structure, and boolean logic. The two do not go together
naturally.

~~~
mingmecca
This is exactly right. There is so much give in the system, and there has to
be, because enforcing all laws as written would be a truly dystopian scenario.

We don't want to live in the a world where it is impossible to get away with a
'crime'.

~~~
vkou
Instead, we are left in the world of selective enforcement, where most
individuals are fine with ridiculous laws, because they are unlikely to be
enforced against said individuals.

Unless they, to quote a Japanese proverb, stand up. The nail that sticks out
gets hammered, and all that.

The result is a brutal, repressive system, that is very precise in its
brutality - typically against minorities, troublemakers, or pretty much anyone
who ends up on a bureaucrat's hit list. And nobody has a problem with this
state of affairs.

------
moocowduckquack
Reminds me of some of the arguments from "Heresies: Against Progress and Other
Illusions" by John Gray

 _" The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge
in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the
contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and
defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to
alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to
wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that
powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these
technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an
unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the
growth of knowledge — not even in the long run."_

------
Radim

       "We need a revolution instead of a technology evolution."
    

I think we need a system that pays more attention to the reality and results,
and less to ideologies and ideas. And whether that improved process is based
on technology or not is secondary.

I mean, improve the process itself, try to add explicitness, hard data. Not
another _this-seems-like-a-brilliant-idea-lets-try_ revolution, followed by
_oops-maybe-not_.

Some time ago, I made a fun sketch of how the feedback process works in
politics vs technology: [http://radimrehurek.com/2013/10/technology-vs-
politics-round...](http://radimrehurek.com/2013/10/technology-vs-politics-
round-1/#comparison)

~~~
samscully
I suppose part of the difficulty is that no matter how good your process, you
still need an 'objective function', and that will always be defined by
ideology. I agree that having the measurement of results at least partially
based on hard data would be better though. Using measures that are less crude
than simply "Is GDP higher this year?" might help as well.

Unfortunately in politics you are unlikely to get any kind of consensus on
what this 'objective function' ought to be. Perhaps this is partly why smaller
more homogenous societies like the Nordic countries are often considered to be
better governed [0], it is much easier for them to come to a consensus about
what society's goals should be, and therefore it is easier to strive
efficiently towards those goals.

[0] [http://www.economist.com/news/special-
report/21570835-nordic...](http://www.economist.com/news/special-
report/21570835-nordic-countries-are-probably-best-governed-world-secret-
their)

------
phryk
Fuck that guy. HE of all people is talking about people being arrogant
bastards for trying to solve problems with technology?

If all the people in the Pirate Parties wouldn't have tried for years to get
their foot into the proverbial door of power but instead worked on
technologies and organizations to solve the problems they see in society, we'd
be way, WAY farther along the way.

It's not too hard to realize that changing things politically in any major way
benefitting humanity is improbable, if not completely impossible. But
apparently trying (pointlessly as well as fruitlessly) to get into power to
tell _others_ what to do means being less of an arrogant bastard.

The thing is, in politics you can only make changes the public won't be
rioting too much over. And while this is true in the positive sense that they
can't just go full oppression at once, they also can't make things much better
at once - even if they wanted to (which most of them don't, being corrupt and
all that). Big changes scare people.

As for gradual change - You probably know how long politicians usually think.
You should be able to extrapolate from there…

All too often 'nerds' like Sunde see their surroundings as being average -
they're not. The average citizen is much more okay with what the state does
than you'd think.

Summarizing, I can only say I'll pick someone working on an open technology
meant to make people more independent any day over any 'politician' who thinks
he's moving the world.

------
bsbechtel
To Peter's point, yes, people need to engage in the political process to get
what they want.

However, he forgets that we can use technology to make it much, much easier
(and enjoyable) to engage in the process.

Technology (computer technology) is just a tool for making communication more
efficient. A lack of communication is what is hurting our political process
right now. Come up with an engaging tool that makes the process easier and
more enjoyable for a large audience, things will change.

------
squozzer
It's naive to think either politics or technology, by themselves, will change
anything.

Sunde nibbles at the solution when he advocates a fundamental declaration for
digital rights. But he fails to mention that fundamental rights emerge from
the ashes of the "old order" and require years (or decades or centuries) of
commitment and pain.

------
pistle
You can't trust technocrats half as far as you can throw corrupt politicians.
If you don't recognize the add-nothing-greed-crowd within the start-up
community as a different arbitreur looking to supplant one unfairly unbalanced
system with another where all bitcoins flow to them instead... you are missing
the bigger picture of humanity within a single system inspired drugged up on
egalitarianism or subverting the hegemony.

Politics, even when done behind closed doors or in the woods requires real
people to commit real acts. Technocrats alter reality in ways, which to most
people, which are equivalent to black magic inside an incomprehensible device
connected to an incomprehensible network of related devices...

------
goshx
Please make sure you read the article to understand the context of this title
(which I find misleading).

While I don't agree that you can't beat politics with technology, I do agree
with what Sunde is saying, in the context he is putting it.

------
mcguire
One quote that I haven't seen any discussion of:

"'We are centralising everything on the internet,' Sunde says, pointing out
that Facebook is the dominant social network, Twitter is the dominant
microblogging site, Skype is the videophone chat service of choice. 'All of
them are based on central servers owned by an American company, which is
giving me a really bad vibe when you consider the revelations about the NSA,'
he adds. 'It would be impossible to have as much surveillance if we didn't all
use these centralised services.'"

------
ferdo
> "The distrust of the political system is unhealthy," he says.

Tell that to the dead souls of the Jewish, Russian/kulak, Native American,
Cambodian, Central American and hundreds of other communities that were
beneficiaries of these State-centered political systems that Sunde supports.

Trusting politicians and political systems is unhealthy. Healthy behavior is
antithetical to politics.

------
known
I think is
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29)
better

------
known
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29)
is better

------
etanazir
There may be truism that the wierdo playing with fire and rocks in the cave
may not experience any returns if his new steel can't manage the hordes of
club thugs.

------
Locke1689
This seems like a story with interesting points which are worth thought and
discussion, both of which will apparently not appear on Hacker News.

------
GrinningFool
Not just governmental politics.

Internal corporate politics are also something that people try to bandage with
technology - and it seldom works there either.

------
randallsquared
Technology might be the only thing that can drive lasting (as opposed to
cyclical or chaotic) political change.

------
Create
a law once called Ranum’s Law: “You can’t solve social problems with
software.”

