> Among the biggest political debates this year—gun control, immigration reform, deficit reduction—I see few signs of solutionism at play.
This single sentence ultimately highlights the failings of the entire philosophy that created the article. The reason he sees few "signs of solutionism" is that specific solutions for these problems abound, the "debate" is over which is acceptable. The author enjoys living in a world where whomever expends the most effort repeating their viewpoint through mass media eventually wins "political consensus" and some centrally-dictated incremental change gets made for their favored direction. Of course if you're a professional journalist who is ultimately supported by vested interests that align with your views, this is a great world to live in.
The fact that something as amazingly straightforward to solve as gun "control" (hint: there's two very simple solutions) is still and always "up for debate" just shows the brokenness of that system. It's not particularly surprising that techies, having chosen doing instead of talking all their lives, want to focus on ways to move the world forward instead of expending energy on the quagmire of politics.
(Of course none of what I said is addressing the looming problem that this "tech uber alles" philosophy gets watered down and ends up letting hackers comfort themselves that technically-deficient but socially-popular centralized websites are empowering individuals rather than merely different masters, but that's a topic for a different day)
This article is incoherent and mostly hand waving. The fact that everyone is disagreeing with it for different reasons either speaks to its shallowness or to the fact that it is just wrong about the valley being ideologically homogeneous.
The part you put in parenthesis is the true problem that every hacker should be contemplating every day.
This single sentence ultimately highlights the failings of the entire philosophy that created the article. The reason he sees few "signs of solutionism" is that specific solutions for these problems abound, the "debate" is over which is acceptable. The author enjoys living in a world where whomever expends the most effort repeating their viewpoint through mass media eventually wins "political consensus" and some centrally-dictated incremental change gets made for their favored direction. Of course if you're a professional journalist who is ultimately supported by vested interests that align with your views, this is a great world to live in.
The fact that something as amazingly straightforward to solve as gun "control" (hint: there's two very simple solutions) is still and always "up for debate" just shows the brokenness of that system. It's not particularly surprising that techies, having chosen doing instead of talking all their lives, want to focus on ways to move the world forward instead of expending energy on the quagmire of politics.
(Of course none of what I said is addressing the looming problem that this "tech uber alles" philosophy gets watered down and ends up letting hackers comfort themselves that technically-deficient but socially-popular centralized websites are empowering individuals rather than merely different masters, but that's a topic for a different day)