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> I hear so many bizarre technological “solutions” to what are ultimately policy issues. Tech is empowering, much moreso than playing politics. Consider somet
by jstarfish 7y ago
> I hear so many bizarre technological “solutions” to what are ultimately policy issues.
Tech is empowering, much moreso than playing politics.
Consider something like the Kafkaesque nightmare that is applying for (and keeping) food stamps. It doesn't need to be complicated (nor should it be!), but you can either try to convince elected officials to make the poor a priority and fix the process or roll up your sleeves and write a script to complete the forms in triplicate, generate mailing labels with delivery confirmation, remind users of deadlines and pull phone records to prove the social worker never called like they said they did in the denial letter.
Or you could petition, harass, bribe and cajole your way into enacting change, and have it all overturned with a change in administration.
In some part these technical solutions exist to fix people problems. Look at the internet itself-- where problems exist (a country's politicians/dictator makes the nation unroutable), you don't wait for a coup, you route around it.
But also in some part these solutions are just modern rent-seeking, so...
- kortilla 7y ago>you don't wait for a coup, you route around it. No, we’re still waiting for a coup in China, North Korea, and on and on for the citizens to access the internet.
- rarecoil 7y ago> Or you could petition, harass, bribe and cajole your way into enacting change, and have it all overturned with a change in administration. This is the reason why technological solutions are popular among the Silicon Valley crowd. No matter what, political solutions are plagued by human emotion and self-interest, and thus they become sticky, "corrupt", and slow. Technological solutions are subversive of that structure at the least, and a force multiplier in others. The computer will generally do what you tell it to do. You can spend hours of effort on something and get a deterministic result that will do the thing. You can spend your whole life in politics and get nothing out of it because the entrenched power structures won't let it happen.
- zepto 7y agoThe computer will do what people tell it to do, so it’s just as plagued by human emotion and the self-interest of those who program it. It’s just a different form of the same corrupt politics. The biggest problem with technology is this delusion that it somehow isn’t a reflection of human failings. If we at least admitted that then we’d be able to reason about it responsibly.
- bobthepanda 7y agoMore technology to process forms just enables the bureaucracy to create more forms, in the same way that computer programs have gotten more fat off of the increased power and capability of modern devices. It makes the process shitty for everybody else who don't want to pay for, can't pay for, or aren't covered by the nifty tech. Exhibit A being TurboTax. Technology is a band-aid, not a solution, and technology can also be used to make progress towards solving the problem decay, or actively worse.
- xkcd-sucks 7y agoI think "covering up gangrene" works well with the band-aid analogy
- JohnFen 7y ago> Consider something like the Kafkaesque nightmare that is applying for (and keeping) food stamps. I have long thought that this particular process was intentionally difficult as a means of helping to weed out people who aren't really in need.