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As one more thing to consider: there's some irony in that running for office isn't exactly privacy-friendly. I sometimes wonder if elected office, if not any an

As one more thing to consider: there's some irony in that running for office isn't exactly privacy-friendly. I sometimes wonder if elected office, if not any and all kinds of public service, necessarily selects for people who don't care too much about their own personal privacy, and what the consequences of that are. There's no way to get there without essentially throwing away whatever dregs of anonymity you've managed to hold on to. So, while I don't think I'm any of those things you list, and I've often thought that I would love to run for office some day, just glancing at the paperwork required to show up to the race is typically enough to turn me off of the idea for a while.

pmoriarty 6y ago
Not to disagree with what you said at all, but there are plenty of ways to get involved in politics without running for office. Things like organizing, volunteering your time and expertise to political organizations you support, protesting, documenting and reporting on abuses, or doing something that many HN readers are in a rather privileged position of affording to do: donate significant amounts of money to the organizations whose work they support.
- v6zfzcbq9cur 6y ago
  This is true, though I question the point. As far as I can tell, few to none of those things can actually make things happen. Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public. On top of that, and more to the point, most of those things come with the same basic cost- you won't make it past the front door anywhere without answering nosy questions that end up on record somewhere. Even donations aren't private; consider e.g. campaign finance law. I think the only thing on your list you can just show up to is protests, and those can come with severe costs in the end, too. The general rule of thumb I've come to is that most people who do not want to end up documented on some unexpected corner of the internet would be well advised to stay as far away from government or politics as they possibly can. Hence the irony: anyone who wants to work on fixing society's privacy problem- or anything else for that matter- at essentially any level will first have to throw away their own. This is a great reason to stay home, instead. (As a side note under "volunteering your expertise", I don't think I've ever seen any organization I cared about express need for e.g. volunteer developers. It seems to be an all but useless skill for fixing these sorts of problems.)
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    "Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public." Even if true, and I don't think it always is (as there's often a "power behind the throne", and many such powers prefer to run things from behind the scenes rather be in the public eye, partially for the reasons mentioned earlier in the thread), elected officials rarely run campaigns on their own -- they need a staff and lots of feet on the ground, and they also need competent advisors during the campaign and after they get elected. Though the ultimate deciding power may lie in the elected official (for those officials who aren't puppets), the smart ones listen to their advisors, so the advisors wield great power in how and what they advise. This doesn't even mention the power of various gatekeepers that can prevent or facilitate access to the official or are delegated power themselves, or are appointed by the elected official. In all of these ways one can affect change without holding elected office. Even when you can't directly influence an elected official you still have power in selecting which official to support.

pmoriarty 6y ago

Not to disagree with what you said at all, but there are plenty of ways to get involved in politics without running for office. Things like organizing, volunteering your time and expertise to political organizations you support, protesting, documenting and reporting on abuses, or doing something that many HN readers are in a rather privileged position of affording to do: donate significant amounts of money to the organizations whose work they support.

v6zfzcbq9cur 6y ago
This is true, though I question the point. As far as I can tell, few to none of those things can actually make things happen. Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public. On top of that, and more to the point, most of those things come with the same basic cost- you won't make it past the front door anywhere without answering nosy questions that end up on record somewhere. Even donations aren't private; consider e.g. campaign finance law. I think the only thing on your list you can just show up to is protests, and those can come with severe costs in the end, too. The general rule of thumb I've come to is that most people who do not want to end up documented on some unexpected corner of the internet would be well advised to stay as far away from government or politics as they possibly can. Hence the irony: anyone who wants to work on fixing society's privacy problem- or anything else for that matter- at essentially any level will first have to throw away their own. This is a great reason to stay home, instead. (As a side note under "volunteering your expertise", I don't think I've ever seen any organization I cared about express need for e.g. volunteer developers. It seems to be an all but useless skill for fixing these sorts of problems.)
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public." Even if true, and I don't think it always is (as there's often a "power behind the throne", and many such powers prefer to run things from behind the scenes rather be in the public eye, partially for the reasons mentioned earlier in the thread), elected officials rarely run campaigns on their own -- they need a staff and lots of feet on the ground, and they also need competent advisors during the campaign and after they get elected. Though the ultimate deciding power may lie in the elected official (for those officials who aren't puppets), the smart ones listen to their advisors, so the advisors wield great power in how and what they advise. This doesn't even mention the power of various gatekeepers that can prevent or facilitate access to the official or are delegated power themselves, or are appointed by the elected official. In all of these ways one can affect change without holding elected office. Even when you can't directly influence an elected official you still have power in selecting which official to support.