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Programmers: The New Political Elite

60 points by capkutay 15y ago

tejaswiy 15y ago
I don't get it. When did programmers and reddit / 4chan users become the same? If anything, this article speaks about the power of the internet in general, nothing to do with programmers.
itmag 15y ago
Hmmm... isn't lawyer supposedly the most common prior profession for politicians? (Except in Sweden, where it's "high school dropout"). A shift from laywers to programmers doesn't seem so bad to me :)
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  Depends which programmers. I've run across a few in Enterprise that would scare me worse than Lamar Smith.
  - itmag 15y ago
    Hehe, suddenly I imagine legislators writing laws called SOPAFactoryHelperMultiplexerWhalesemenAbstractBaseclassTemplateDongleSingleton. shudder
    - redthrowaway 15y ago
      You already have UnitingandStrengtheningAmericabyProvidingAppropriateToolsRequiredtoObstructandInterceptTerrorismAct. Someone in Congress knows Java...
moocow01 15y ago
I'd say doubtful. There definitely are some network effects that can be leveraged by 'coders' but look while we're all twittering and signing digital petitions you know who is actually exerting real political influence... - Lobbyists who work face to face with politicians - Corporations with buckets of money - And most importantly, protestors who can't be ignored by shutting down a computer Technologists may be building tools around which people can engage in discussion and bond to create a channel for political activity but if you think were going to code our way to a better political structure within the US I would guess you may be disappointed.
andreadallera 15y ago
> Code is becoming the new lingua franca of Web activists around the nation No, it's not. The sentence doesn't even make sense. > If you can code, you can launch new movements, upend traditional campaign dynamics and pressure candidates in a low-cost, high-tech and highly effective way. Your power to start a movement online has absolutely nothing to do with if you're a programmer or not. Honestly, I've stopped reading after this.
- microcentury 15y ago
  Completely agreed on both points. The first line is so baffling I read it twice. Do they think programmers talk to each other in this mysterious 'code'? The writer of this article would be deeply disappointed by a glance at Code Academy.
- moocow01 15y ago
  I pity the soul who as a result of this article goes to codecademy blindly thinking they are going to learn this new lingua franca that will allow them to 'upend traditional campaign dynamics'.
crdoconnor 15y ago
This is a hit piece by the washington post.
- pjscott 15y ago
  Are you sure? It's confusing enough -- and confused enough -- that I'm not sure what they're trying to hit.
- moocow01 15y ago
  You forgot an 's'
- dbattaglia 15y ago
  It's certainly a typical piece by the WP. Confusing and rediculous, full of half-truths. If you don’t speak code, you don’t speak the language of the election’s new activists capable of changing the political zeitgeist. Last time I checked Reddit works pretty well w/o any coding experience. I don't even know where coding fits into this article.
Swizec 15y ago
Programmers suck at politics. Always have, always will. Programmers are so far removed from the wants and needs of the average human we need translators (managers) to even speak with them. It is even common in programmer culture that we enjoy this great divide between ourselves and the "lusers". We make fun of people who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Similarly, your average programmer couldn't lobby their way out of a wet paper bag. Looking at the average HN/twitter/etc. comment, most of us can't even lobby for a nice office with a view, let alone influence a whole bunch of politicians to change their minds. The reason 4chan and reddit even remotely get anything done is because there are billions of them. And even they have so far shown practically no real political influence. The two biggest offline influences have been getting Moot to be person of the year and sparking the Wall Street protests ... which have been completely ineffective in getting anything done.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  I think you haven't quite reached the core problem. Many programmers understand "the wants and needs of the average human" just fine; that doesn't really cause as severe a problem as you suggest. We support non-programmers and non-experts, and we mostly frown upon people who attack newbies. More generally, beyond programming, we often have decent solutions for political and social issues, usually generated by ignoring the baggage associated with them and just dealing with the actual issues. The fundamental problem, in my opinion: as programmers, we hold rationality as a core value above most other things. We expect rationality from others, and we cope very badly with irrationality. To the extent programmers manage to understand irrationality at all, we have an almost moral inhibition against exploiting it. That makes us utterly awful at politics, which currently requires expert-level manipulative tactics to deal with the majority of voters, who don't deal with political and social issues in rational ways. Anyone who refuses to use such tactics will lose to those who do. A political hacker would need to have expert-level skill in rhetoric, not just in rational argument and problem solving. This doesn't seem like an impossible goal, but we first have to understand and accept the fundamental problem, and get over the constraints we've hamstrung ourselves with.
  - gldalmaso 15y ago
nextparadigms 15y ago
It's not the programmers. It's the whole Internet waking up. It's the people living and breathing the Internet who want the status quo politicians to stop trying to mess with it. And the vast majority of them are not programmers.
- wladimir 15y ago
  Indeed. It's not about (power-hungry) programmers. Programmers are important right now because they make things possible, but in the end it's about humans connecting to humans in ways, and at a scale, never before possible. People are suddenly connected across borders, bypassing and outmaneuvering the old, slow, hierarchical institutions. Though I don't think traditional politics will go away any time soon, this is bound to have far-ranging unexpected effects in the future (what we're seeing right now is only the beginning).
waterlesscloud 15y ago
Programmers are far too literal minded to succeed in politics, as the comments here prove. ;-)
ianso 15y ago
As a lot of people have pointed out, this is a rather confused article. I think what the author Dominic Basulto is trying to get at is that the Internet and new applications/platforms are being used to exert political influence in new ways. For me this is the logical consequence of the increasing "digitization" of the structure of our society, i.e. social networks etc. Basulto has jumped from this to Rushkoff's "program or be programmed" idea. But in the large scale the "programs" that define new social spaces is actually written by a very, very small number of people mostly in California, and have nothing to do with campaigning for anything. moocow01 is correct to say that people going to Codecademy to learn how to launch online campaigns will be disappointed. This is partly because we don't have an API layer for programs that organise social interactions, and this is one reason why I'm working on a project that does just that.
funkah 15y ago
SOPA is actually a perfect example of how programmers have very little clout at all. Basically the entire internet industry has relentlessly and loudly pointed out what a terrible idea it is on so many levels, and yet the people in Congress who support the bill are saying it has only a few opponents. I really don't think they're scared at all.
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
This is a dismal puff piece written by someone who barely knows anything about programming or programmers and has just cobbled together a mishmash of disjointed references to recent events without a coherent understanding of the dynamics. This, in particular, made me cringe: "The Internet 'hive-mind' is suddenly everywhere in cyberspace..."

60 points by capkutay 15y ago

I don't get it. When did programmers and reddit / 4chan users become the same? If anything, this article speaks about the power of the internet in general, nothing to do with programmers.

itmag 15y ago

Hmmm... isn't lawyer supposedly the most common prior profession for politicians? (Except in Sweden, where it's "high school dropout"). A shift from laywers to programmers doesn't seem so bad to me :)

redthrowaway 15y ago
Depends which programmers. I've run across a few in Enterprise that would scare me worse than Lamar Smith.
- itmag 15y ago
  Hehe, suddenly I imagine legislators writing laws called SOPAFactoryHelperMultiplexerWhalesemenAbstractBaseclassTemplateDongleSingleton. shudder
  - redthrowaway 15y ago
    You already have UnitingandStrengtheningAmericabyProvidingAppropriateToolsRequiredtoObstructandInterceptTerrorismAct. Someone in Congress knows Java...

moocow01 15y ago

I'd say doubtful. There definitely are some network effects that can be leveraged by 'coders' but look while we're all twittering and signing digital petitions you know who is actually exerting real political influence... - Lobbyists who work face to face with politicians - Corporations with buckets of money - And most importantly, protestors who can't be ignored by shutting down a computer Technologists may be building tools around which people can engage in discussion and bond to create a channel for political activity but if you think were going to code our way to a better political structure within the US I would guess you may be disappointed.

andreadallera 15y ago

> Code is becoming the new lingua franca of Web activists around the nation No, it's not. The sentence doesn't even make sense. > If you can code, you can launch new movements, upend traditional campaign dynamics and pressure candidates in a low-cost, high-tech and highly effective way. Your power to start a movement online has absolutely nothing to do with if you're a programmer or not. Honestly, I've stopped reading after this.

microcentury 15y ago
Completely agreed on both points. The first line is so baffling I read it twice. Do they think programmers talk to each other in this mysterious 'code'? The writer of this article would be deeply disappointed by a glance at Code Academy.
moocow01 15y ago
I pity the soul who as a result of this article goes to codecademy blindly thinking they are going to learn this new lingua franca that will allow them to 'upend traditional campaign dynamics'.

crdoconnor 15y ago

This is a hit piece by the washington post.

pjscott 15y ago
Are you sure? It's confusing enough -- and confused enough -- that I'm not sure what they're trying to hit.
moocow01 15y ago
You forgot an 's'
dbattaglia 15y ago
It's certainly a typical piece by the WP. Confusing and rediculous, full of half-truths. If you don’t speak code, you don’t speak the language of the election’s new activists capable of changing the political zeitgeist. Last time I checked Reddit works pretty well w/o any coding experience. I don't even know where coding fits into this article.

Swizec 15y ago

Programmers suck at politics. Always have, always will. Programmers are so far removed from the wants and needs of the average human we need translators (managers) to even speak with them. It is even common in programmer culture that we enjoy this great divide between ourselves and the "lusers". We make fun of people who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Similarly, your average programmer couldn't lobby their way out of a wet paper bag. Looking at the average HN/twitter/etc. comment, most of us can't even lobby for a nice office with a view, let alone influence a whole bunch of politicians to change their minds. The reason 4chan and reddit even remotely get anything done is because there are billions of them. And even they have so far shown practically no real political influence. The two biggest offline influences have been getting Moot to be person of the year and sparking the Wall Street protests ... which have been completely ineffective in getting anything done.

JoshTriplett 15y ago
I think you haven't quite reached the core problem. Many programmers understand "the wants and needs of the average human" just fine; that doesn't really cause as severe a problem as you suggest. We support non-programmers and non-experts, and we mostly frown upon people who attack newbies. More generally, beyond programming, we often have decent solutions for political and social issues, usually generated by ignoring the baggage associated with them and just dealing with the actual issues. The fundamental problem, in my opinion: as programmers, we hold rationality as a core value above most other things. We expect rationality from others, and we cope very badly with irrationality. To the extent programmers manage to understand irrationality at all, we have an almost moral inhibition against exploiting it. That makes us utterly awful at politics, which currently requires expert-level manipulative tactics to deal with the majority of voters, who don't deal with political and social issues in rational ways. Anyone who refuses to use such tactics will lose to those who do. A political hacker would need to have expert-level skill in rhetoric, not just in rational argument and problem solving. This doesn't seem like an impossible goal, but we first have to understand and accept the fundamental problem, and get over the constraints we've hamstrung ourselves with.
- gldalmaso 15y ago

nextparadigms 15y ago

It's not the programmers. It's the whole Internet waking up. It's the people living and breathing the Internet who want the status quo politicians to stop trying to mess with it. And the vast majority of them are not programmers.

wladimir 15y ago
Indeed. It's not about (power-hungry) programmers. Programmers are important right now because they make things possible, but in the end it's about humans connecting to humans in ways, and at a scale, never before possible. People are suddenly connected across borders, bypassing and outmaneuvering the old, slow, hierarchical institutions. Though I don't think traditional politics will go away any time soon, this is bound to have far-ranging unexpected effects in the future (what we're seeing right now is only the beginning).

waterlesscloud 15y ago

Programmers are far too literal minded to succeed in politics, as the comments here prove. ;-)

ianso 15y ago

As a lot of people have pointed out, this is a rather confused article. I think what the author Dominic Basulto is trying to get at is that the Internet and new applications/platforms are being used to exert political influence in new ways. For me this is the logical consequence of the increasing "digitization" of the structure of our society, i.e. social networks etc. Basulto has jumped from this to Rushkoff's "program or be programmed" idea. But in the large scale the "programs" that define new social spaces is actually written by a very, very small number of people mostly in California, and have nothing to do with campaigning for anything. moocow01 is correct to say that people going to Codecademy to learn how to launch online campaigns will be disappointed. This is partly because we don't have an API layer for programs that organise social interactions, and this is one reason why I'm working on a project that does just that.

funkah 15y ago

SOPA is actually a perfect example of how programmers have very little clout at all. Basically the entire internet industry has relentlessly and loudly pointed out what a terrible idea it is on so many levels, and yet the people in Congress who support the bill are saying it has only a few opponents. I really don't think they're scared at all.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago

This is a dismal puff piece written by someone who barely knows anything about programming or programmers and has just cobbled together a mishmash of disjointed references to recent events without a coherent understanding of the dynamics. This, in particular, made me cringe: "The Internet 'hive-mind' is suddenly everywhere in cyberspace..."