The quasi-libertarian anti-politics of the tech nerd

I started reading Vox because it was co-founded by two of my favorite bloggers, Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein. But David Roberts has now overtaken them as my favorite writer there.

It is ludicrous how many pundits and activists ignore that political science is a real science with useful, counter-intuitive findings and predictive results. Roberts is doing great popularizing and translating those insights.

So many good points in here.

- There are no moderates

- one party is more extreme than another

- decisions are made by those who show up, and thus far "nerds" are not a big force, but they could be

The article appears to be making the mistake of assuming political spectrums to be linear or single-dimensional. They're not. As one of these "moderates" the article discusses, my disdain for American politics has nothing to do with trying to find a "middle ground" between a Democrat left and a Republican right because that entire line is way off into the "totalitarian corrupt police state" end of an at-least-two-dimensional spectrum.

This is why so many "nerds" swing "quasi-libertarian". Not only do they want both social and economic freedom (as a whole, both the Republicans and Democrats only seem to want one or the other), but they also tend to want individual freedom. They're tired of not actually having a voice because some big company like Comcast has better resources to bribe politicians. They're tired of being ordered around by basically the same people who were laughing at them and giving them wedgies back in the 80's. They swing libertarian because libertarianism is billed as the means of euthanizing the ugly, vicious beast that is the American political machine. Else, they simply give up, seeking to subvert the political system and exist beyond its reach. This is why candidates like Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul and Donald Trump are appealing to this particular demographic: because they promise to fight against the cruft instead of riding the status quo like quite literally every other goddamn politician in this country.

A well written article, but it's misguided if it thinks that us "nerds" are wrong for distrusting the American political system, as it seems to imply. Washington is in need of some serious percussive maintenance.

It seems to me that tech is primed to increase civic engagement much in the same way it's increased social engagement. FB does this obliquely with articles dominating newsfeeds these days.

For my own part I've been toying with the idea of a mailer or notification that encourages voting. Whether you voted or not is public record. You could mail out comparative statistics vs. your neighborhood or block. "You vote in X% of national, Y% of state, and Z% of local elections. Your neighbors are doing better because they vote in X+1% of national, Y+5% of state, and Z+10% of local elections. Get out and vote next week! Here's some information on how to get informed..." etc.