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Why Developers are so Important

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16 pointscjoh8 comments

I certainly see myself in this description. I started working on http://votereports.org/ because I wanted to perform the basic civic duty of voting, which is expected of every adult in the country, without the superhuman requirement of scrutinizing all the bills and tabulating the votes individually, which I wouldn't wish on anyone.

And by creating the tool for others as well there's a real chance it can make a structural change in the popular literacy of legislative/political accountability - reducing the role of yard signs, hypocrisy and party politics, and increasing the role of issues and legislation.

Incidentally, please do message me if you're interested in the project. We've got a lot to do between now and November.

This is certainly true, which is why the libertarian bent of some developers who disavow any notion of social responsibility is so disturbing.

Aren't you conflating ethics with politics? It seems having a personal notion of social responsibility is quite distinct from wanting that notion imposed on all people by the state.

Social responsibility needs to be imposed on those in positions of power. Or would you rather we trust elites on their assurance that they are good and kind and just? That's how the old feudal monarchies used to work.

Historically, as with feudal society, hasn't the government itself been a major source of elite abusers? And today, see the military industrial complex, corporatism, or the prison industrial complex (e.g. California prison guard unions).

In my opinion, placing your faith in either elites or government is a mistake. Rather, the goal is to create a decentralized system of accountability, whereby the interplay of forces punish and deter foul play. Government is a player in that, so are the elites, so are we.

Despite all the enthusiasm around decentralization, I think it's a failed option. It creates the illusion that power doesn't exist, when it's only been hidden, making it harder to fight. I've written about that here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389356

I agree on accountability. There will always be elites and the people need strong collective institutions to hold them accountable. The fact that government hasn't always acted in our interest is no reason to hand over everything to the elites.

Re. Decentralization, you say: It creates the illusion that power doesn't exist, when it's only been hidden, making it harder to fight.

So, a thought experiment is in order, consider the following scenarios, re. restaurants:

* there only is a single restaurant allowed

* there are multiple restaurants, but they jealously prevent any new entrants

* there is a dynamic market of restaurants, which survive or close based on the patronage of individual diners

In each case, power is more decentralized, from an individual institution, to a cabal of institutions, to a set of institutions selected by individual patrons. Now, you could say that in the last case, there are still elites, there are those who can spend more money, and there are the restaurant owners who exercise power over their own establishments. But is it reasonable to say, re. power that: "it's only been hidden, making it harder to fight"? Is monopoly or oligopoly power indistinguishable from market power?

You give the example with restaurant reviews, saying that individual control of reviews would still leave power to aggregators. But isn't it equally open to all aggregators, just as the latter restaurant market is open to those who can start a restaurant and attract a clientele? In decentralization, are we really not also seeing the diminishing ability to exercise arbitrary power?

In your restaurant example, I'd say there's no distinction between the second and the third option. Even though there is a dynamic market of different restaurants, by virtue of the fact that they are in competition with each other, they are homogeneous at a different level. Obviously not in the same way where all restaurants are collapsed into one enormous food court under centralized control, but in the sense that they all draw from the same pool of patrons, suppliers, employees, infrastructure, the same legal and monetary system, etc. This fact means that it is, in principle, always possible to game the system through those avenues. By virtue of the fact that there is a playing field, it can be tilted. The possibility for abuse of power still exists, although it's a different type of abuse than the arbitrary whims of the chef at the one giant restaurant in town. One important difference is that it's much more abstract and esoteric. It's easy to identify power when the chef refuses to cook eggs because he hates eggs and you have no other choices - this is a transparent kind of power. But when your favorite seafood restaurant goes out of business because market manipulations behind the scenes caused prices to suddenly spike, we don't see that as a result of power, it's even naturalized as the market at work. An important point is that at the naive, everyday level, everyone appears to have made a free choice - the restaurant owner, the patrons, the newly unemployed workers, etc. A concrete example of this is credit default swaps - some homeowners in California default on their loans, and suddenly people in Iceland have to pay double for food.

In the example of restaurant reviews, you could indeed create another competing aggregator if it had been corrupted, but then you would need some kind of aggregator aggregator, possibly a search engine. The example here is torrent sites - its a decentralized system, but for that to be usable, torrent search engines sprung up so that you could find things. You can't possibly track down and sue everyone seeding a torrent, but you can shut down the handful of search engines which is just as good. Further decentralization just creates the same problem at a different level.

File sharing is also a good example of what I'm talk about with the different kinds of power. If the cops raided your house because you borrowed some books from a friend, that would immediately appear to you as an expression of power. But the absence of a backup option when you put a DVD into a computer doesn't (OK, unless you are technically savvy). Notice how this is operative at the level of language: if you ask someone to backup a DVD, they will try and then tell you: "You can't do that." But as we know, you can do it, it's been disabled. Here again, power is naturalized, prohibitions and controls are thought of as inevitable or physical impossibilities.

My point is that we are concerned about the overt forms of power, and pay very little attention to the covert forms of power, those which determine our very perception of freedom vs. non-freedom. One of the effects of network decentralization is to make power more abstract, which is part of the reason we have so many conspiracy theories today. Conspiracy theorists are like creationists, they see complex phenomena emerge and attribute it to someone behind the scenes coordinating it and pulling all the strings, which puts a face on it, naively unabstracting it. A paranoid DRM conspiracy theorist might believe the MPAA sent operatives into his house and installed software that disabled DVD backups. There's some kind of twisted truth in it, but the problem is that his mode of resistance is all wrong. Now he thinks he can just hole up, board up the windows, buy a gun and he will be safe.

So this is another reason why developers are important - they can see and resist power without naively unabstracting it.

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