11 ms·

You can't beat politics with new technology all the time

157 points by pkallberg 13y ago

kaoD 13y ago
The interview makes clear he has a communist/socialist mindset. Community owned banks? We have those in Spain, and those were the main culprits of Spain's banking crisis because they were just politician's toys both on left and right wing communities. It's not that we distrust politicians: people just can't be trusted, not even the people with good intentions! Economy can't be regulated effectively and public banking demands high levels of regulation to prevent bad behaviour... which is very hard (impossible?) to do right. People with money will always be able to go around good legislation, while the common citizen still has to fight against the system's errors. He proposes fighting the State with the State instead of with techonology. My opinion is that more State won't fight the State, it will just make it a bigger monster to fight against.
- jbooth 13y ago
  jbooth's axiom of internet comment sniping: Anyone who accuses an article of being (insert ideological label) actually has a much harder ideological bias in the opposite direction.
  - kaoD 13y ago
    I don't accuse the article of being socialist. It's not only obvious, but also the article itself points it: "He's actually more of a socialist and would be more likely to vote for the left-wing parties". So I have a bias because I point at what happened with "community owned banks" in my country?
    - jbooth 13y ago
      I was just taking a drive-by shot. It was jbooth's axiom of comment sniping, not jbooth's axiom of carefully reasoned article analysis. Regardless of the guy's politics, strictly speaking, you can't fight the law with technology because the law can make your tech illegal. You need to either engage the existing power structures or have a complete revolution in order to make change happen. That's without getting into policy preferences or details, it's just the basic ground zero of the situation. That's what I got from the article.. it's facile, maybe a lazy conclusion, certainly not a great article but also not incorrect.
      - mseebach 13y ago
        > you can't fight the law with technology because the law can make your tech illegal But you can. Napster launched, what, 13 years ago, and desperate upon desperate law has not even put a dent into the explosive growth of piracy.
        jbooth 13y ago
        Napster's been dead for over 10 years, and music sharing, while rampant, is far enough underground that the music companies are making a ton of cash selling digital music.
        mseebach 13y ago
        It's probably hard to directly change the law, but you can definitely fight it. Napster has been dead for 10 years, but to quote fictive Sean Parker in The Social Network, "Do you want to buy a Tower Records store?", and plenty of services, not least Pirate Bay, has risen to fill its void. It's hard to argue that low-friction, even non-DRM, digital music sales wasn't brought around (or at least, brought around much faster) by piracy-induced pain. The RIAAs would have been more than happy to use the law to shut down piracy (in effect, their competition), but even tough the law obliged them, the customers didn't. I'd call that fighting the law.
        malka 13y ago
        music sharing ? rampant ? I dont know a single person that actually doesn't download music. Even my grand-mother does it. I live in France, and it may be different in other countries, but music (and other cultural stuff) sharing is not really underground here.
        PavlovsCat 13y ago
        At the same time, Napster et al. haven't made a dent in copyright laws..
        notahacker 13y ago
        Sure, you can subvert copyright law by making file sharing easier, just as you can subvert drug laws by making it easier to buy drugs. The actual problem for most people though isn't that copies or drugs are especially difficult to obtain, but that they might find themselves in a courtroom for procuring them. Technology hasn't changed that; arguably Napster and SilkRoad made it easier for vested interests to generate moral panics around pirating and drug use, and to ensnare people attempting to download music or mail-order contraband. You didn't get children facing lawsuits for making mixtapes in the 1990s.
    - ThomPete 13y ago
      You do realise there is a huge huge difference between "actually more of a socialist" and communist right?
      - kaoD 13y ago
        You do realise I said communist/socialist (slash included) because it is a wide spectrum and I can't place him in a single spot from a few comments in an interview? Also: communism sees socialism as the transition from capitalism to communism. The only difference is the long term.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    That's not just a pithy saying, it's a demonstrated truth. If you show the same article, or the same piece of TV news, to people with opposite partisan orientations, each of them will think the article is unjustly biased towards the other guy. Republicans will always see a bias towards Democrats, Democrats a bias towards Republicans, in the same material.
- ilaksh 13y ago
  I'm interested to hear more about the problems with community owned banks. Actually there are a lot of people that are really hoping more of those will solve many problems in the US. So I would like to know specifically why they don't help and turned out so bad in Spain. Sure, the State generally won't fight against itself, but I think that he makes a good point though about not just completely giving up. I mean I have given up on politics like a lot of people, but when I was reading that article it made me think that if enough people tried, we _could_ make some improvements and help at least ease the adoption of technologies that solve structural/political problems. There are a lot of people, especially in the US, that are really looking toward social democracy (socialism) as the light at the end of the tunnel. I think that its unfortunate that there isn't a better perspective for these people on the realities of social democracies in Europe or of the historical context of socialism. However, with such extreme inequality, its hard not to lean in that direction in one's thinking. I actually think the key problems are over-centralization, which occurs both in capitalistic societies and socialist societies to a high degree, as well as a lack of social and physical science being incorporated into decision making. The communist/socialist ideal especially overcentralizes although it does a better job of incorporating hard science into decision making. In that case the main problem is lack of distribution of decision-making and diversity of solutions which stifles evolution of the system. The capitalistic ideal especially lacks the input of hard social and physical sciences although it does provide a diverse set of solutions, at least until monopoly takes over. We need to measure human and ecological well-being and incorporate different scientifically motivated attempts to improve those holistic measurements into our various enterprises. Technology is going to be incredibly powerful in moving away from centralization which should directly impact human well-being and inequality.
  - davidw 13y ago
    Italy had banks controlled by politicians - and still does to some degree. What does not work is that loans are handed out on a political basis, rather than for economic reasons. I'm pretty happy with the credit union I have in the US - that seems to be a pretty good solution to me. It's beholden to its members, not to local politicians.
  - mseebach 13y ago
- skidoo 13y ago
  I think state owned banks would be a drastic improvement to handful of old rich guys owned banks. And that's my ultimate qualm with this. I love that Sunde (and Dotcom) are entering politics more as a means to legitimacy, but in all honesty- politics is a game for the masses to shield the actual decision-making. Democracy has never worked, because the greed of the few will always win out when the authority to instigate necessary change is left up entirely to those who would lose power in the doing. Playing the game within the system wins no battles.
  - shin_lao 13y ago
    State owned banks make it too easy for politicians to pass laws that will enable them to do whatever they want to do. Granted, private banks have the possibility to corrupt politicians to the same effect.
  - kaoD 13y ago
    Sure! It went really good for Spain. Check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390
    - skidoo 13y ago
      Personally, I don't see a need for banks at all though. It is legalized theft and nothing more. I gave up my account at the start of the 2007 bailout and have survived just fine ever since. I have never been in debt in my life either, which I do not see as being unrelated.
- atmosx 13y ago
  Word, given the fact that privately owned banks had no problems at all... oh wait! O jeez... they had a few...
  - kaoD 13y ago
    Are you making this up? Which private banks had problems? Unless you mean the same problems that worldwide private banking faced during the world crisis. Cajas problems were related but they couldn't make through because they were already ill. The financial crisis was just the final blow. In case you're unaware of what happened to public banks, check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390 Please, name a single private bank that had to be intervened during the spanish financial crisis.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  > The interview makes clear he has a communist/socialist mindset. Mmm. "Firm believer in taxation" opposes crypto-currency. Film at 11.
- Zigurd 13y ago
  We have cooperative banks in the US and even the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. There are many organizational structures apart from the investor-owned model.
- morkbot 13y ago
  Politics and economy is not a thing of 0s and 1s - there are no clear and easy solutions that will work perfectly in every country - it's always about finding some middle-ground, where pros outweight cons. E.g. banking regulation - sure, it won't prevent all the bad behaviour, but it will help (see Poland where state control over some banking regulations prevented banks from getting into bad mortgages). Does that mean that government should control everything? of course not! It can be somewhere in the middle (think Keynes instead of Friedman) and where's that middle also depends on the local environment and such - what worked in Poland won't necessarily work the same in Spain. Also, I disagree with the notion that he proposes fighting the State with the State - he wants people to be the State and I agree with that to a large extent. People like to complain about politics as if they (the politics) were some aliens from the different planet. Spain is a good example here, 2-3 years ago thousands of people were protesting with slogans like "no nos representan". Yet no one from the protesters had the guts to take that movement and actually do something with it, become a leader, a politician, take a responsibility, try to change something for real. Instead they preferred to shift that responsibility back to the politicians they were protesting against. Year later people went to elections and voted the same people as before, the ones that supposedly "no les representaron".
  - kaoD 13y ago
    The 15M situation was a catch-22. - When they proposed solutions they were called out as being "politicized". Both left and right-wing saw them as biased (in the other direction of course). - When they didn't propose anything, they were called out as being gutless (as you said), lazy, whiny... - When leaders tried to step out they were criticized as opportunists trying to kidnap the movement for their personal interest. - When assemblies were formed, they were criticized as slow and not effective (which they actually were). Of course all these criticism were promoted from the media to form mass opinion. In case you didn't like a statement, you had the contrary to criticize 15M as loud as you wanted. In the end nothing happened.
    - morkbot 13y ago
      Yeah, I might have gone too far with that gutless thing, but the important thing is the final outcome on which we both agree: in the end nothing happened.
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  In the U.S. we have credit unions, which are community-owned banks. They generally work very well. Community-owned does not have to mean government-owned.
- onetwofiveten 13y ago
  It's weird you say people can't be trusted. Do you really think that's true? Some people can be trusted. Some can't. People tend to follow based on charisma more than anything else. Unfortunately I think charisma is a really poor indicator of trustworthiness.
  - kaoD 13y ago
    Read that again: you couldn't even trust people with good intentions because economy isn't something you can control or predict. You can't even trust people with good intentions AND knowledge (why do economists miss their predictions SO much?) And especially you can't trust people when they're not risking their own money. They're just not going to put the same effort, even subconsciously, because... well, it's not their money.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      Translation: it is not popular knowledge which variables in the economy are stiff variables (where changing the variable effects a large change in the economy as a whole) and which ones are sloppy (changing them doesn't affect anything else, really). Some people might know; certainly, some few people have managed to do better than chance at investing, or at macroeconomic policy. However, it is not popular knowledge.
thaumasiotes 13y ago
This is purely a response to the title. There is a popular line of thought that goes something like this: 1. Owing to politics ("ethical considerations"), working with human stem cells is, at best, quite difficult. 2. That doesn't apply to nonhumans. 3. If the technology appears, people will start to wonder why rich people can get (hypothetically) anti-aging treatments and limb regeneration for their dogs, but the same processes aren't available to humans. 4. Politics loses, technology wins. That example is quite specific (and suppositional), but I'd say the principle is sound. Another example might be the Japanese suppression of guns. Technology won out. (Yes, it took a while. I'm comfortable with that.)
kaoD 13y ago
> Much of his time has been spent dealing with "haters" from the encryption community. Hahaha! Oh wow! Let's see what "haters" means: > One of the main criticisms [...] is that [...] it doesn't allow individuals to connect their own trusted servers [...] ("even though controlling the network is currently the only thing you can do to keep from being spied on," says Sunde) I would say a controlled network creates a single point of failure and a narrow target for espionage (e.g. Lavabit). > and that there are no plans to release the source code Security through obscurity? Who wants audits from the community, when you can just call them haters, right? > Sunde sees these critics as elitist. "We want to give decent encryption to everyone -- not just tech people. But the tech people are the ones who are really upset that they can't connect their own server. We decided quite early on to stop listening to them." Who's the hater here? Is closed source/optional personal network really going to hinder massive adoption outside of tech circles? Does it matter at all?
tikhonj 13y ago
The actual quote is: "You can't beat politics with new technology all the time." This is very different from the current HN headline! After all, sometimes technology changes everything so much politics can do little more than try to catch up. People like to say "you can't solve social problems with technology". It's a statement that's true enough of the time to be common wisdom but not enough to be a natural law. Sometimes technology does help with social problems. This isn't to say that politics is unimportant. It is still central. But I think dismissing technological solutions out of hand is also shortsighted. I particularly think this of BitCoin, which feels like a monumental change. BitCoin could, ideally, liberate transactions between individuals and significantly reduce barriers for anything from microtransactions to donating to fringe political causes. It certainly won't solve all our problems, it might even solve none, but I think it'll definitely make for a better world. I really liked Balaji Srinivasan's speech on "Voice and Exit". BitCoin was an example of "exiting" the existing financial system and providing an alternate means of conducting transactions. Viewing it as such, just using and supporting BitCoin is inevitably a political action, limiting the absolute power of the government. To me, this makes BitCoin one of the technologies to really watch for future social change.
- elemeno 13y ago
  If we're going to be accurate, it's - "You can't beat politics with new technology all the time. Sometimes you have to actually make sure that politics are in line with what people want. A lot of people are giving up on politics and thinking they can solve issues with technology. These kind of arrogant behaviours towards the rest of the society are a bit disgusting," - which isn't so far from the "You can't beat politics with technology" sentiment, and retains the color of the statement. Ultimately, technology can empower us to do amazing things, but to achieve it's full potential we've also got to be involved in society as a whole and push to bring the various ideas we believe in into the public's sight. Technology can be a powerful embodiment of a set of ideas such as free-culture, privacy, a decentralized financial system, or what have you. Making people take interest in those ideas and bringing the debate outside the technology sphere can only lead to a better outcome for all.
  - 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
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read 13y ago
it's important to not think that we can solve problems with better technology I'm surprised he says this. Effective solutions often come from a side angle, not a frontal attack. Why would a frontal attack in politics work?
Radim 13y ago
"We need a revolution instead of a technology evolution." I think we need a system that pays more attention to the reality and results, and less to ideologies and ideas. And whether that improved process is based on technology or not is secondary. I mean, improve the process itself, try to add explicitness, hard data. Not another this-seems-like-a-brilliant-idea-lets-try revolution, followed by oops-maybe-not. Some time ago, I made a fun sketch of how the feedback process works in politics vs technology: http://radimrehurek.com/2013/10/technology-vs-politics-round-1/#comparison http://radimrehurek.com/2013/10/technology-vs-politics-round...
- samscully 13y ago
  I suppose part of the difficulty is that no matter how good your process, you still need an 'objective function', and that will always be defined by ideology. I agree that having the measurement of results at least partially based on hard data would be better though. Using measures that are less crude than simply "Is GDP higher this year?" might help as well. Unfortunately in politics you are unlikely to get any kind of consensus on what this 'objective function' ought to be. Perhaps this is partly why smaller more homogenous societies like the Nordic countries are often considered to be better governed [0], it is much easier for them to come to a consensus about what society's goals should be, and therefore it is easier to strive efficiently towards those goals. [0] http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570835-nordic-countries-are-probably-best-governed-world-secret-their http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570835-nordic...
mseebach 13y ago
There is a tendency for people successful in a particular domain to believe that their brilliance mean they have something insightful to say about politics. Mr Sunde is a brilliant technologist but this interview reveals that he has a high-school level naïvety about the democratic political process. His ideology is mainstream statism (there is no particular evidence of communism or socialism imo) and his general, overarching idea is the exact same as every other young, idealistic candidate, from every mainstream political party (give or take a couple of slogan-sized marginal political differences): That everybody who already got elected are complacent about changing the system, and if you'll only elect me, I won't become complacent then everything will change. The root problem, of course, isn't that we should just elect better politicians, it's the iron law of bureaucracy. And this is where I disagree fundamentally with Mr. Sunde: Technology is exactly what we can use to beat the bureaucracy. Uber and AirBnB is doing more than 100 Peter Sundes running for office to reform taxis and rental systems, Bitcoin is a powerful and plausible agent of reform in the banking sector. There are tons of community owned banks and while they do some things differently on the margins, at the end of the day, on the broad lines, they're just like the big, commercial banks. Finally, this: "This includes setting up cryptocurrencies that are difficult to monitor and tax (Sunde is a firm believer in taxation, since it allows communities to build shared infrastructure)". This is rich coming from a guy who made his name helping people avoid the taxation of Hollywood through a hard to monitor technology.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  If he's engaging in naive statist technocracy, you're engaging in naive proprietarian minarchism: "Just get the state out of everything except property and contracts and it'll all work out fine somehow!"
  - mseebach 13y ago
    Please quote the bit where I said that? No? Ok, then. My position is that we do need the state, but we need to inject a lot more realism (ie cynicism) about what what government can realistically do (not to mention, do well) into the debate in order to get to a better place. EDIT: I suspect that you might be referring to my comments on different posts. I find that arguing the libertarian point of view is a useful method of injecting the mentioned realism. Do I find the stateless society appealing? Yes, in theory, as a construct to debate the extreme consequences of ideas. It's a rewarding intellectual exercise to consider how justice might work without the state. But I'm no utopian and I have no illusions about the extreme dangers of revolution. So my "real world" political contributions is in the space of injecting more cynicism into the democratic process in the hope of inspiring more people to avoid reflectively turning to the state to mend their ills and consider, for an example, technological solutions instead.
moocowduckquack 13y ago
Reminds me of some of the arguments from "Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions" by John Gray "The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge — not even in the long run."
tehwalrus 13y ago
To those arguing that his politics are bad, or that he is too small to make a difference: you have missed his point. The point is that geeks need to start doing politics collectively. No, we don't need to be in the same parties. No, we don't need to agree on everything. But yes, we do need more software engineers in our parliaments, calling out stupid stuff, and more geeks in there listening and voting against the stupid stuff. He's not calling for you to all give up your Libertarian views (in my opinion, equally as naive as his Socialist ones). He's calling on you to care about politics enough to organise and stand. And maybe, one day, win. Maybe.
bsbechtel 13y ago
To Peter's point, yes, people need to engage in the political process to get what they want. However, he forgets that we can use technology to make it much, much easier (and enjoyable) to engage in the process. Technology (computer technology) is just a tool for making communication more efficient. A lack of communication is what is hurting our political process right now. Come up with an engaging tool that makes the process easier and more enjoyable for a large audience, things will change.
goshx 13y ago
Please make sure you read the article to understand the context of this title (which I find misleading). While I don't agree that you can't beat politics with technology, I do agree with what Sunde is saying, in the context he is putting it.
phryk 13y ago
Fuck that guy. HE of all people is talking about people being arrogant bastards for trying to solve problems with technology? If all the people in the Pirate Parties wouldn't have tried for years to get their foot into the proverbial door of power but instead worked on technologies and organizations to solve the problems they see in society, we'd be way, WAY farther along the way. It's not too hard to realize that changing things politically in any major way benefitting humanity is improbable, if not completely impossible. But apparently trying (pointlessly as well as fruitlessly) to get into power to tell others what to do means being less of an arrogant bastard. The thing is, in politics you can only make changes the public won't be rioting too much over. And while this is true in the positive sense that they can't just go full oppression at once, they also can't make things much better at once - even if they wanted to (which most of them don't, being corrupt and all that). Big changes scare people. As for gradual change - You probably know how long politicians usually think. You should be able to extrapolate from there… All too often 'nerds' like Sunde see their surroundings as being average - they're not. The average citizen is much more okay with what the state does than you'd think. Summarizing, I can only say I'll pick someone working on an open technology meant to make people more independent any day over any 'politician' who thinks he's moving the world.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
In a similar vein, one of the things that's worried me is the technology community's blind faith that helping the government automate is a good thing. It is not. For most western democracies, the government operates by a byzantine layer of legal and regulatory mumbo-jumbo operated by a overworked civil service class. This sounds bad, and it is to some degree, but what it means in practice is very important: not every law is enforced. People do not understand how critical to civility that statement is. Every day people go too fast in their cars, drink and drive, skip out on toll booth fees, spit on sidewalks, pay day laborers under the table, and participate in all sorts of other non-violent, yet technically criminal activity. And the world keeps spinning around. In fact, I'd argue that this rampant lawlessness is a good thing. People can skate by without car insurance for a month or two because they're getting a second job. They can have the roof fixed by cousin Joe who is on disability because they can pay him under the table at much less cost than hiring a contractor. All sorts of really good things get done because there's a lot of wiggle room. We start automating everything, and suddenly the system of inconsistent and unintelligible laws become some sort of social operating system. One that is tremendously complex, covers every aspect of our lives, and has never been ran before at any level of completeness. That's a nightmare that any technologists should be intimately familiar with. So nope, you can't beat politics with technology, and in many cases you can't even fix politics with technology. Politics is about relationships between people, fuzzy arrangements, and structures to facilitate that. Technology is about machines, rigid structure, and boolean logic. The two do not go together naturally.
- mingmecca 13y ago
  This is exactly right. There is so much give in the system, and there has to be, because enforcing all laws as written would be a truly dystopian scenario. We don't want to live in the a world where it is impossible to get away with a 'crime'.
  - vkou 13y ago
    Instead, we are left in the world of selective enforcement, where most individuals are fine with ridiculous laws, because they are unlikely to be enforced against said individuals. Unless they, to quote a Japanese proverb, stand up. The nail that sticks out gets hammered, and all that. The result is a brutal, repressive system, that is very precise in its brutality - typically against minorities, troublemakers, or pretty much anyone who ends up on a bureaucrat's hit list. And nobody has a problem with this state of affairs.
etanazir 13y ago
There may be truism that the wierdo playing with fire and rocks in the cave may not experience any returns if his new steel can't manage the hordes of club thugs.
GrinningFool 13y ago
Not just governmental politics. Internal corporate politics are also something that people try to bandage with technology - and it seldom works there either.
pistle 13y ago
You can't trust technocrats half as far as you can throw corrupt politicians. If you don't recognize the add-nothing-greed-crowd within the start-up community as a different arbitreur looking to supplant one unfairly unbalanced system with another where all bitcoins flow to them instead... you are missing the bigger picture of humanity within a single system inspired drugged up on egalitarianism or subverting the hegemony. Politics, even when done behind closed doors or in the woods requires real people to commit real acts. Technocrats alter reality in ways, which to most people, which are equivalent to black magic inside an incomprehensible device connected to an incomprehensible network of related devices...
randallsquared 13y ago
Technology might be the only thing that can drive lasting (as opposed to cyclical or chaotic) political change.
squozzer 13y ago
It's naive to think either politics or technology, by themselves, will change anything. Sunde nibbles at the solution when he advocates a fundamental declaration for digital rights. But he fails to mention that fundamental rights emerge from the ashes of the "old order" and require years (or decades or centuries) of commitment and pain.
Create 13y ago
a law once called Ranum’s Law: “You can’t solve social problems with software.”
mcguire 13y ago
One quote that I haven't seen any discussion of: "'We are centralising everything on the internet,' Sunde says, pointing out that Facebook is the dominant social network, Twitter is the dominant microblogging site, Skype is the videophone chat service of choice. 'All of them are based on central servers owned by an American company, which is giving me a really bad vibe when you consider the revelations about the NSA,' he adds. 'It would be impossible to have as much surveillance if we didn't all use these centralised services.'"
deleted 13y ago
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ferdo 13y ago
> "The distrust of the political system is unhealthy," he says. Tell that to the dead souls of the Jewish, Russian/kulak, Native American, Cambodian, Central American and hundreds of other communities that were beneficiaries of these State-centered political systems that Sunde supports. Trusting politicians and political systems is unhealthy. Healthy behavior is antithetical to politics.
Locke1689 13y ago
This seems like a story with interesting points which are worth thought and discussion, both of which will apparently not appear on Hacker News.
known 13y ago
I think is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29 better
known 13y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29 is better

157 points by pkallberg 13y ago

kaoD 13y ago

The interview makes clear he has a communist/socialist mindset. Community owned banks? We have those in Spain, and those were the main culprits of Spain's banking crisis because they were just politician's toys both on left and right wing communities. It's not that we distrust politicians: people just can't be trusted, not even the people with good intentions! Economy can't be regulated effectively and public banking demands high levels of regulation to prevent bad behaviour... which is very hard (impossible?) to do right. People with money will always be able to go around good legislation, while the common citizen still has to fight against the system's errors. He proposes fighting the State with the State instead of with techonology. My opinion is that more State won't fight the State, it will just make it a bigger monster to fight against.

jbooth 13y ago
jbooth's axiom of internet comment sniping: Anyone who accuses an article of being (insert ideological label) actually has a much harder ideological bias in the opposite direction.
- kaoD 13y ago
  I don't accuse the article of being socialist. It's not only obvious, but also the article itself points it: "He's actually more of a socialist and would be more likely to vote for the left-wing parties". So I have a bias because I point at what happened with "community owned banks" in my country?
  - jbooth 13y ago
    I was just taking a drive-by shot. It was jbooth's axiom of comment sniping, not jbooth's axiom of carefully reasoned article analysis. Regardless of the guy's politics, strictly speaking, you can't fight the law with technology because the law can make your tech illegal. You need to either engage the existing power structures or have a complete revolution in order to make change happen. That's without getting into policy preferences or details, it's just the basic ground zero of the situation. That's what I got from the article.. it's facile, maybe a lazy conclusion, certainly not a great article but also not incorrect.
    - mseebach 13y ago
      > you can't fight the law with technology because the law can make your tech illegal But you can. Napster launched, what, 13 years ago, and desperate upon desperate law has not even put a dent into the explosive growth of piracy.
      - jbooth 13y ago
        Napster's been dead for over 10 years, and music sharing, while rampant, is far enough underground that the music companies are making a ton of cash selling digital music.
        mseebach 13y ago
        It's probably hard to directly change the law, but you can definitely fight it. Napster has been dead for 10 years, but to quote fictive Sean Parker in The Social Network, "Do you want to buy a Tower Records store?", and plenty of services, not least Pirate Bay, has risen to fill its void. It's hard to argue that low-friction, even non-DRM, digital music sales wasn't brought around (or at least, brought around much faster) by piracy-induced pain. The RIAAs would have been more than happy to use the law to shut down piracy (in effect, their competition), but even tough the law obliged them, the customers didn't. I'd call that fighting the law.
        malka 13y ago
        music sharing ? rampant ? I dont know a single person that actually doesn't download music. Even my grand-mother does it. I live in France, and it may be different in other countries, but music (and other cultural stuff) sharing is not really underground here.
      - PavlovsCat 13y ago
        At the same time, Napster et al. haven't made a dent in copyright laws..
      - notahacker 13y ago
        Sure, you can subvert copyright law by making file sharing easier, just as you can subvert drug laws by making it easier to buy drugs. The actual problem for most people though isn't that copies or drugs are especially difficult to obtain, but that they might find themselves in a courtroom for procuring them. Technology hasn't changed that; arguably Napster and SilkRoad made it easier for vested interests to generate moral panics around pirating and drug use, and to ensnare people attempting to download music or mail-order contraband. You didn't get children facing lawsuits for making mixtapes in the 1990s.
  - ThomPete 13y ago
    You do realise there is a huge huge difference between "actually more of a socialist" and communist right?
    - kaoD 13y ago
      You do realise I said communist/socialist (slash included) because it is a wide spectrum and I can't place him in a single spot from a few comments in an interview? Also: communism sees socialism as the transition from capitalism to communism. The only difference is the long term.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  That's not just a pithy saying, it's a demonstrated truth. If you show the same article, or the same piece of TV news, to people with opposite partisan orientations, each of them will think the article is unjustly biased towards the other guy. Republicans will always see a bias towards Democrats, Democrats a bias towards Republicans, in the same material.
ilaksh 13y ago
I'm interested to hear more about the problems with community owned banks. Actually there are a lot of people that are really hoping more of those will solve many problems in the US. So I would like to know specifically why they don't help and turned out so bad in Spain. Sure, the State generally won't fight against itself, but I think that he makes a good point though about not just completely giving up. I mean I have given up on politics like a lot of people, but when I was reading that article it made me think that if enough people tried, we _could_ make some improvements and help at least ease the adoption of technologies that solve structural/political problems. There are a lot of people, especially in the US, that are really looking toward social democracy (socialism) as the light at the end of the tunnel. I think that its unfortunate that there isn't a better perspective for these people on the realities of social democracies in Europe or of the historical context of socialism. However, with such extreme inequality, its hard not to lean in that direction in one's thinking. I actually think the key problems are over-centralization, which occurs both in capitalistic societies and socialist societies to a high degree, as well as a lack of social and physical science being incorporated into decision making. The communist/socialist ideal especially overcentralizes although it does a better job of incorporating hard science into decision making. In that case the main problem is lack of distribution of decision-making and diversity of solutions which stifles evolution of the system. The capitalistic ideal especially lacks the input of hard social and physical sciences although it does provide a diverse set of solutions, at least until monopoly takes over. We need to measure human and ecological well-being and incorporate different scientifically motivated attempts to improve those holistic measurements into our various enterprises. Technology is going to be incredibly powerful in moving away from centralization which should directly impact human well-being and inequality.
- davidw 13y ago
  Italy had banks controlled by politicians - and still does to some degree. What does not work is that loans are handed out on a political basis, rather than for economic reasons. I'm pretty happy with the credit union I have in the US - that seems to be a pretty good solution to me. It's beholden to its members, not to local politicians.
- mseebach 13y ago
skidoo 13y ago
I think state owned banks would be a drastic improvement to handful of old rich guys owned banks. And that's my ultimate qualm with this. I love that Sunde (and Dotcom) are entering politics more as a means to legitimacy, but in all honesty- politics is a game for the masses to shield the actual decision-making. Democracy has never worked, because the greed of the few will always win out when the authority to instigate necessary change is left up entirely to those who would lose power in the doing. Playing the game within the system wins no battles.
- shin_lao 13y ago
  State owned banks make it too easy for politicians to pass laws that will enable them to do whatever they want to do. Granted, private banks have the possibility to corrupt politicians to the same effect.
- kaoD 13y ago
  Sure! It went really good for Spain. Check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390
  - skidoo 13y ago
    Personally, I don't see a need for banks at all though. It is legalized theft and nothing more. I gave up my account at the start of the 2007 bailout and have survived just fine ever since. I have never been in debt in my life either, which I do not see as being unrelated.
atmosx 13y ago
Word, given the fact that privately owned banks had no problems at all... oh wait! O jeez... they had a few...
- kaoD 13y ago
  Are you making this up? Which private banks had problems? Unless you mean the same problems that worldwide private banking faced during the world crisis. Cajas problems were related but they couldn't make through because they were already ill. The financial crisis was just the final blow. In case you're unaware of what happened to public banks, check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390 Please, name a single private bank that had to be intervened during the spanish financial crisis.
fennecfoxen 13y ago
> The interview makes clear he has a communist/socialist mindset. Mmm. "Firm believer in taxation" opposes crypto-currency. Film at 11.
Zigurd 13y ago
We have cooperative banks in the US and even the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. There are many organizational structures apart from the investor-owned model.
morkbot 13y ago
Politics and economy is not a thing of 0s and 1s - there are no clear and easy solutions that will work perfectly in every country - it's always about finding some middle-ground, where pros outweight cons. E.g. banking regulation - sure, it won't prevent all the bad behaviour, but it will help (see Poland where state control over some banking regulations prevented banks from getting into bad mortgages). Does that mean that government should control everything? of course not! It can be somewhere in the middle (think Keynes instead of Friedman) and where's that middle also depends on the local environment and such - what worked in Poland won't necessarily work the same in Spain. Also, I disagree with the notion that he proposes fighting the State with the State - he wants people to be the State and I agree with that to a large extent. People like to complain about politics as if they (the politics) were some aliens from the different planet. Spain is a good example here, 2-3 years ago thousands of people were protesting with slogans like "no nos representan". Yet no one from the protesters had the guts to take that movement and actually do something with it, become a leader, a politician, take a responsibility, try to change something for real. Instead they preferred to shift that responsibility back to the politicians they were protesting against. Year later people went to elections and voted the same people as before, the ones that supposedly "no les representaron".
- kaoD 13y ago
  The 15M situation was a catch-22. - When they proposed solutions they were called out as being "politicized". Both left and right-wing saw them as biased (in the other direction of course). - When they didn't propose anything, they were called out as being gutless (as you said), lazy, whiny... - When leaders tried to step out they were criticized as opportunists trying to kidnap the movement for their personal interest. - When assemblies were formed, they were criticized as slow and not effective (which they actually were). Of course all these criticism were promoted from the media to form mass opinion. In case you didn't like a statement, you had the contrary to criticize 15M as loud as you wanted. In the end nothing happened.
  - morkbot 13y ago
    Yeah, I might have gone too far with that gutless thing, but the important thing is the final outcome on which we both agree: in the end nothing happened.
snowwrestler 13y ago
In the U.S. we have credit unions, which are community-owned banks. They generally work very well. Community-owned does not have to mean government-owned.
onetwofiveten 13y ago
It's weird you say people can't be trusted. Do you really think that's true? Some people can be trusted. Some can't. People tend to follow based on charisma more than anything else. Unfortunately I think charisma is a really poor indicator of trustworthiness.
- kaoD 13y ago
  Read that again: you couldn't even trust people with good intentions because economy isn't something you can control or predict. You can't even trust people with good intentions AND knowledge (why do economists miss their predictions SO much?) And especially you can't trust people when they're not risking their own money. They're just not going to put the same effort, even subconsciously, because... well, it's not their money.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Translation: it is not popular knowledge which variables in the economy are stiff variables (where changing the variable effects a large change in the economy as a whole) and which ones are sloppy (changing them doesn't affect anything else, really). Some people might know; certainly, some few people have managed to do better than chance at investing, or at macroeconomic policy. However, it is not popular knowledge.

thaumasiotes 13y ago

This is purely a response to the title. There is a popular line of thought that goes something like this: 1. Owing to politics ("ethical considerations"), working with human stem cells is, at best, quite difficult. 2. That doesn't apply to nonhumans. 3. If the technology appears, people will start to wonder why rich people can get (hypothetically) anti-aging treatments and limb regeneration for their dogs, but the same processes aren't available to humans. 4. Politics loses, technology wins. That example is quite specific (and suppositional), but I'd say the principle is sound. Another example might be the Japanese suppression of guns. Technology won out. (Yes, it took a while. I'm comfortable with that.)

kaoD 13y ago

> Much of his time has been spent dealing with "haters" from the encryption community. Hahaha! Oh wow! Let's see what "haters" means: > One of the main criticisms [...] is that [...] it doesn't allow individuals to connect their own trusted servers [...] ("even though controlling the network is currently the only thing you can do to keep from being spied on," says Sunde) I would say a controlled network creates a single point of failure and a narrow target for espionage (e.g. Lavabit). > and that there are no plans to release the source code Security through obscurity? Who wants audits from the community, when you can just call them haters, right? > Sunde sees these critics as elitist. "We want to give decent encryption to everyone -- not just tech people. But the tech people are the ones who are really upset that they can't connect their own server. We decided quite early on to stop listening to them." Who's the hater here? Is closed source/optional personal network really going to hinder massive adoption outside of tech circles? Does it matter at all?

tikhonj 13y ago

The actual quote is: "You can't beat politics with new technology all the time." This is very different from the current HN headline! After all, sometimes technology changes everything so much politics can do little more than try to catch up. People like to say "you can't solve social problems with technology". It's a statement that's true enough of the time to be common wisdom but not enough to be a natural law. Sometimes technology does help with social problems. This isn't to say that politics is unimportant. It is still central. But I think dismissing technological solutions out of hand is also shortsighted. I particularly think this of BitCoin, which feels like a monumental change. BitCoin could, ideally, liberate transactions between individuals and significantly reduce barriers for anything from microtransactions to donating to fringe political causes. It certainly won't solve all our problems, it might even solve none, but I think it'll definitely make for a better world. I really liked Balaji Srinivasan's speech on "Voice and Exit". BitCoin was an example of "exiting" the existing financial system and providing an alternate means of conducting transactions. Viewing it as such, just using and supporting BitCoin is inevitably a political action, limiting the absolute power of the government. To me, this makes BitCoin one of the technologies to really watch for future social change.

elemeno 13y ago
If we're going to be accurate, it's - "You can't beat politics with new technology all the time. Sometimes you have to actually make sure that politics are in line with what people want. A lot of people are giving up on politics and thinking they can solve issues with technology. These kind of arrogant behaviours towards the rest of the society are a bit disgusting," - which isn't so far from the "You can't beat politics with technology" sentiment, and retains the color of the statement. Ultimately, technology can empower us to do amazing things, but to achieve it's full potential we've also got to be involved in society as a whole and push to bring the various ideas we believe in into the public's sight. Technology can be a powerful embodiment of a set of ideas such as free-culture, privacy, a decentralized financial system, or what have you. Making people take interest in those ideas and bringing the debate outside the technology sphere can only lead to a better outcome for all.
- 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

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read 13y ago

it's important to not think that we can solve problems with better technology I'm surprised he says this. Effective solutions often come from a side angle, not a frontal attack. Why would a frontal attack in politics work?

Radim 13y ago

"We need a revolution instead of a technology evolution." I think we need a system that pays more attention to the reality and results, and less to ideologies and ideas. And whether that improved process is based on technology or not is secondary. I mean, improve the process itself, try to add explicitness, hard data. Not another this-seems-like-a-brilliant-idea-lets-try revolution, followed by oops-maybe-not. Some time ago, I made a fun sketch of how the feedback process works in politics vs technology: http://radimrehurek.com/2013/10/technology-vs-politics-round-1/#comparison http://radimrehurek.com/2013/10/technology-vs-politics-round...

samscully 13y ago
I suppose part of the difficulty is that no matter how good your process, you still need an 'objective function', and that will always be defined by ideology. I agree that having the measurement of results at least partially based on hard data would be better though. Using measures that are less crude than simply "Is GDP higher this year?" might help as well. Unfortunately in politics you are unlikely to get any kind of consensus on what this 'objective function' ought to be. Perhaps this is partly why smaller more homogenous societies like the Nordic countries are often considered to be better governed [0], it is much easier for them to come to a consensus about what society's goals should be, and therefore it is easier to strive efficiently towards those goals. [0] http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570835-nordic-countries-are-probably-best-governed-world-secret-their http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570835-nordic...

mseebach 13y ago

There is a tendency for people successful in a particular domain to believe that their brilliance mean they have something insightful to say about politics. Mr Sunde is a brilliant technologist but this interview reveals that he has a high-school level naïvety about the democratic political process. His ideology is mainstream statism (there is no particular evidence of communism or socialism imo) and his general, overarching idea is the exact same as every other young, idealistic candidate, from every mainstream political party (give or take a couple of slogan-sized marginal political differences): That everybody who already got elected are complacent about changing the system, and if you'll only elect me, I won't become complacent then everything will change. The root problem, of course, isn't that we should just elect better politicians, it's the iron law of bureaucracy. And this is where I disagree fundamentally with Mr. Sunde: Technology is exactly what we can use to beat the bureaucracy. Uber and AirBnB is doing more than 100 Peter Sundes running for office to reform taxis and rental systems, Bitcoin is a powerful and plausible agent of reform in the banking sector. There are tons of community owned banks and while they do some things differently on the margins, at the end of the day, on the broad lines, they're just like the big, commercial banks. Finally, this: "This includes setting up cryptocurrencies that are difficult to monitor and tax (Sunde is a firm believer in taxation, since it allows communities to build shared infrastructure)". This is rich coming from a guy who made his name helping people avoid the taxation of Hollywood through a hard to monitor technology.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
If he's engaging in naive statist technocracy, you're engaging in naive proprietarian minarchism: "Just get the state out of everything except property and contracts and it'll all work out fine somehow!"
- mseebach 13y ago
  Please quote the bit where I said that? No? Ok, then. My position is that we do need the state, but we need to inject a lot more realism (ie cynicism) about what what government can realistically do (not to mention, do well) into the debate in order to get to a better place. EDIT: I suspect that you might be referring to my comments on different posts. I find that arguing the libertarian point of view is a useful method of injecting the mentioned realism. Do I find the stateless society appealing? Yes, in theory, as a construct to debate the extreme consequences of ideas. It's a rewarding intellectual exercise to consider how justice might work without the state. But I'm no utopian and I have no illusions about the extreme dangers of revolution. So my "real world" political contributions is in the space of injecting more cynicism into the democratic process in the hope of inspiring more people to avoid reflectively turning to the state to mend their ills and consider, for an example, technological solutions instead.

moocowduckquack 13y ago

Reminds me of some of the arguments from "Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions" by John Gray "The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge — not even in the long run."

tehwalrus 13y ago

To those arguing that his politics are bad, or that he is too small to make a difference: you have missed his point. The point is that geeks need to start doing politics collectively. No, we don't need to be in the same parties. No, we don't need to agree on everything. But yes, we do need more software engineers in our parliaments, calling out stupid stuff, and more geeks in there listening and voting against the stupid stuff. He's not calling for you to all give up your Libertarian views (in my opinion, equally as naive as his Socialist ones). He's calling on you to care about politics enough to organise and stand. And maybe, one day, win. Maybe.

bsbechtel 13y ago

To Peter's point, yes, people need to engage in the political process to get what they want. However, he forgets that we can use technology to make it much, much easier (and enjoyable) to engage in the process. Technology (computer technology) is just a tool for making communication more efficient. A lack of communication is what is hurting our political process right now. Come up with an engaging tool that makes the process easier and more enjoyable for a large audience, things will change.

goshx 13y ago

Please make sure you read the article to understand the context of this title (which I find misleading). While I don't agree that you can't beat politics with technology, I do agree with what Sunde is saying, in the context he is putting it.

phryk 13y ago

Fuck that guy. HE of all people is talking about people being arrogant bastards for trying to solve problems with technology? If all the people in the Pirate Parties wouldn't have tried for years to get their foot into the proverbial door of power but instead worked on technologies and organizations to solve the problems they see in society, we'd be way, WAY farther along the way. It's not too hard to realize that changing things politically in any major way benefitting humanity is improbable, if not completely impossible. But apparently trying (pointlessly as well as fruitlessly) to get into power to tell others what to do means being less of an arrogant bastard. The thing is, in politics you can only make changes the public won't be rioting too much over. And while this is true in the positive sense that they can't just go full oppression at once, they also can't make things much better at once - even if they wanted to (which most of them don't, being corrupt and all that). Big changes scare people. As for gradual change - You probably know how long politicians usually think. You should be able to extrapolate from there… All too often 'nerds' like Sunde see their surroundings as being average - they're not. The average citizen is much more okay with what the state does than you'd think. Summarizing, I can only say I'll pick someone working on an open technology meant to make people more independent any day over any 'politician' who thinks he's moving the world.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

In a similar vein, one of the things that's worried me is the technology community's blind faith that helping the government automate is a good thing. It is not. For most western democracies, the government operates by a byzantine layer of legal and regulatory mumbo-jumbo operated by a overworked civil service class. This sounds bad, and it is to some degree, but what it means in practice is very important: not every law is enforced. People do not understand how critical to civility that statement is. Every day people go too fast in their cars, drink and drive, skip out on toll booth fees, spit on sidewalks, pay day laborers under the table, and participate in all sorts of other non-violent, yet technically criminal activity. And the world keeps spinning around. In fact, I'd argue that this rampant lawlessness is a good thing. People can skate by without car insurance for a month or two because they're getting a second job. They can have the roof fixed by cousin Joe who is on disability because they can pay him under the table at much less cost than hiring a contractor. All sorts of really good things get done because there's a lot of wiggle room. We start automating everything, and suddenly the system of inconsistent and unintelligible laws become some sort of social operating system. One that is tremendously complex, covers every aspect of our lives, and has never been ran before at any level of completeness. That's a nightmare that any technologists should be intimately familiar with. So nope, you can't beat politics with technology, and in many cases you can't even fix politics with technology. Politics is about relationships between people, fuzzy arrangements, and structures to facilitate that. Technology is about machines, rigid structure, and boolean logic. The two do not go together naturally.

mingmecca 13y ago
This is exactly right. There is so much give in the system, and there has to be, because enforcing all laws as written would be a truly dystopian scenario. We don't want to live in the a world where it is impossible to get away with a 'crime'.
- vkou 13y ago
  Instead, we are left in the world of selective enforcement, where most individuals are fine with ridiculous laws, because they are unlikely to be enforced against said individuals. Unless they, to quote a Japanese proverb, stand up. The nail that sticks out gets hammered, and all that. The result is a brutal, repressive system, that is very precise in its brutality - typically against minorities, troublemakers, or pretty much anyone who ends up on a bureaucrat's hit list. And nobody has a problem with this state of affairs.

etanazir 13y ago

There may be truism that the wierdo playing with fire and rocks in the cave may not experience any returns if his new steel can't manage the hordes of club thugs.

GrinningFool 13y ago

Not just governmental politics. Internal corporate politics are also something that people try to bandage with technology - and it seldom works there either.

pistle 13y ago

You can't trust technocrats half as far as you can throw corrupt politicians. If you don't recognize the add-nothing-greed-crowd within the start-up community as a different arbitreur looking to supplant one unfairly unbalanced system with another where all bitcoins flow to them instead... you are missing the bigger picture of humanity within a single system inspired drugged up on egalitarianism or subverting the hegemony. Politics, even when done behind closed doors or in the woods requires real people to commit real acts. Technocrats alter reality in ways, which to most people, which are equivalent to black magic inside an incomprehensible device connected to an incomprehensible network of related devices...

randallsquared 13y ago

Technology might be the only thing that can drive lasting (as opposed to cyclical or chaotic) political change.

squozzer 13y ago

It's naive to think either politics or technology, by themselves, will change anything. Sunde nibbles at the solution when he advocates a fundamental declaration for digital rights. But he fails to mention that fundamental rights emerge from the ashes of the "old order" and require years (or decades or centuries) of commitment and pain.

Create 13y ago

a law once called Ranum’s Law: “You can’t solve social problems with software.”

mcguire 13y ago

One quote that I haven't seen any discussion of: "'We are centralising everything on the internet,' Sunde says, pointing out that Facebook is the dominant social network, Twitter is the dominant microblogging site, Skype is the videophone chat service of choice. 'All of them are based on central servers owned by an American company, which is giving me a really bad vibe when you consider the revelations about the NSA,' he adds. 'It would be impossible to have as much surveillance if we didn't all use these centralised services.'"

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ferdo 13y ago

> "The distrust of the political system is unhealthy," he says. Tell that to the dead souls of the Jewish, Russian/kulak, Native American, Cambodian, Central American and hundreds of other communities that were beneficiaries of these State-centered political systems that Sunde supports. Trusting politicians and political systems is unhealthy. Healthy behavior is antithetical to politics.

Locke1689 13y ago

This seems like a story with interesting points which are worth thought and discussion, both of which will apparently not appear on Hacker News.

known 13y ago

I think is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29 better

known 13y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29 is better