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I ask myself this question all the time. My answer is that I try to enact as much dissent as possible in small ways, including HN comments. This is not a satis

I ask myself this question all the time. My answer is that I try to enact as much dissent as possible in small ways, including HN comments. This is not a satisfactory answer, though. Even among HN readers there are a lot of people who are still very pro-establishment in the sense that they wholeheartedly defend the NY Times, major political parties, etc. This is part of the same youthful optimism that leads people to do startups... the idea that they will soon be part of the establishment so they might as well defend it now for karma. What do you think we should all be doing?

seigenblues 15y ago
you could be participating in your local elections. You could vote in primaries. You could be concerned about who's going to be your next local county sheriff, local zoning board officer, etc. You can get involved in the local political parties and affect them on a local level. (this is assuming that you already vote in all off-year elections, and already vote for president) HN sees only the top level of the abstraction and assumes that the system is a lumbering behemoth incapable of change. Pushing the system from the bottom, it's actually quite capable of very abrupt change. Unfortunately, those methods of change require copious amounts of time, and will probably replace or supplant much more enjoyable hobbies you'd rather have. In previous eras, this was considered the burden of citizenship... For a simpler answer: Call your congresscritter. They're actually very responsive to phone calls and real letters. It's not hard to do.
- angersock 15y ago
  Local government isn't usually a huge issue (there are some problems, see the shitshow over the sewers in Birmingham). It's federal government, which functions at a high level of abstraction by definition, that has the biggest issues and the worst interface for solving them. I vote in local elections and cheerfully pay taxes--but look only towards the treatment of the online petitions hosted by our current administration to see how much attention is paid. The difficulty of participating in government isn't something to be cherished--it's something to be fixed.
angersock 15y ago
I'd suggest something like the following: Treat this like a software development project, except we're coming up with a government instead of a program. 1. Setup a public bugtracker, where people can submit examples of federal government acting incorrectly (attached to bugs, have relevant news articles, studies, and impacts for why it is important). 2. Setup a repo with a "blessed" version of the founding documents of the government. Anyone can read the docs, and suggest changes. Any changes to the laws would have an easy-to-follow path in the changelog, and linked tickets from the bug tracker demonstrating that they were necessary. These docs can be forked, but the blessed branch gets the "official" reference implementation. We've had the tools to "fix" government for years now--we should start using them. Things I'd personally like to see: 1. Who controls the "blessed" version? This is a hilariously interesting problem, and likely would end up with some kind of set of "core" developers. That said, we have the tech to make relatively authenticated, secure votes (PGP or somesuch). I'd suggest using that to accept changes to mainline, and if it becomes obvious the core devs aren't paying attention we fork. This might be really slow to get things accomplished (past the initial bootstrap), but that's okay in government--the more conservative your creation of policies, the better. 2. A creation of a structured query language for determining if an action obeys a law. This would be really tricky, but if the core docs can unambiguously be parsed and tested against so many problems in government simply go away. I don't really expect this to get done, but it's an intriguing idea, no? 3. My personal belief is that a good government is like a good operating system: it provides basic infrastructure when you need it, is invisible when you aren't looking for it, and protects you from other things in the environment (and them from you!). So, a lean, simple, easily-verifiable government that protects basic rights and provides basic needs and which only intervenes when processes (groups) come into direct conflict seems like the correct goal--not this bloated ill-defined overreaching contraption we have today.
- farinasa 15y ago
  This is genius. I love the idea of developing law as though it were a software development project. I always thought that government could greatly benefit (the people) by implementing technology- even something as simple as online voting or perhaps an official online debate forum. But the point of having legislators is to have someone represent a group of people's opinion. With the internet, they are no longer necessary as each individual can state their opinion directly. Politicians, with the use of the internet, are essentially obsolete.

seigenblues 15y ago

you could be participating in your local elections. You could vote in primaries. You could be concerned about who's going to be your next local county sheriff, local zoning board officer, etc. You can get involved in the local political parties and affect them on a local level. (this is assuming that you already vote in all off-year elections, and already vote for president) HN sees only the top level of the abstraction and assumes that the system is a lumbering behemoth incapable of change. Pushing the system from the bottom, it's actually quite capable of very abrupt change. Unfortunately, those methods of change require copious amounts of time, and will probably replace or supplant much more enjoyable hobbies you'd rather have. In previous eras, this was considered the burden of citizenship... For a simpler answer: Call your congresscritter. They're actually very responsive to phone calls and real letters. It's not hard to do.

angersock 15y ago
Local government isn't usually a huge issue (there are some problems, see the shitshow over the sewers in Birmingham). It's federal government, which functions at a high level of abstraction by definition, that has the biggest issues and the worst interface for solving them. I vote in local elections and cheerfully pay taxes--but look only towards the treatment of the online petitions hosted by our current administration to see how much attention is paid. The difficulty of participating in government isn't something to be cherished--it's something to be fixed.

angersock 15y ago

I'd suggest something like the following: Treat this like a software development project, except we're coming up with a government instead of a program. 1. Setup a public bugtracker, where people can submit examples of federal government acting incorrectly (attached to bugs, have relevant news articles, studies, and impacts for why it is important). 2. Setup a repo with a "blessed" version of the founding documents of the government. Anyone can read the docs, and suggest changes. Any changes to the laws would have an easy-to-follow path in the changelog, and linked tickets from the bug tracker demonstrating that they were necessary. These docs can be forked, but the blessed branch gets the "official" reference implementation. We've had the tools to "fix" government for years now--we should start using them. Things I'd personally like to see: 1. Who controls the "blessed" version? This is a hilariously interesting problem, and likely would end up with some kind of set of "core" developers. That said, we have the tech to make relatively authenticated, secure votes (PGP or somesuch). I'd suggest using that to accept changes to mainline, and if it becomes obvious the core devs aren't paying attention we fork. This might be really slow to get things accomplished (past the initial bootstrap), but that's okay in government--the more conservative your creation of policies, the better. 2. A creation of a structured query language for determining if an action obeys a law. This would be really tricky, but if the core docs can unambiguously be parsed and tested against so many problems in government simply go away. I don't really expect this to get done, but it's an intriguing idea, no? 3. My personal belief is that a good government is like a good operating system: it provides basic infrastructure when you need it, is invisible when you aren't looking for it, and protects you from other things in the environment (and them from you!). So, a lean, simple, easily-verifiable government that protects basic rights and provides basic needs and which only intervenes when processes (groups) come into direct conflict seems like the correct goal--not this bloated ill-defined overreaching contraption we have today.

farinasa 15y ago
This is genius. I love the idea of developing law as though it were a software development project. I always thought that government could greatly benefit (the people) by implementing technology- even something as simple as online voting or perhaps an official online debate forum. But the point of having legislators is to have someone represent a group of people's opinion. With the internet, they are no longer necessary as each individual can state their opinion directly. Politicians, with the use of the internet, are essentially obsolete.