Programmers: The New Political Elite | Hacker News Reader

Programmers: The New Political Elite

washingtonpost.com

60 pointscapkutay34 comments

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.

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.

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).

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 :)

Depends which programmers. I've run across a few in Enterprise that would scare me worse than Lamar Smith.

Hehe, suddenly I imagine legislators writing laws called SOPAFactoryHelperMultiplexerWhalesemenAbstractBaseclassTemplateDongleSingleton. shudder

You already have UnitingandStrengtheningAmericabyProvidingAppropriateToolsRequiredtoObstructandInterceptTerrorismAct. Someone in Congress knows Java...

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.

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.

>> That makes us utterly awful at politics

But makes us fairly good activists that don't just use hype but real arguments (and in some cases real action).

Proper activism may not be able to change political scenes all the time, but it does usually leave a dent.

I agree. However, if we could ever manage to master both hype and real arguments and action, we could much more effectively change the world.

> But makes us fairly good activists that don't just use hype but real arguments (and in some cases real action).

You're joking, right?

Programmers, engineeers, scientists all will/do use hype so on.

Disagree? Emacs vs vi. risc vs cisc. There are plenty of examples near our "core" - do you really think that we get better as we get away from that?

To put it succinctly: "Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it."

I agree with it but I'm also inclined to agree with the defeatist attitude the quote represent. Your comment does point out the problem (which is a step in the right direction), but I fear there's no "sustainable in the long run solution" for the problem.

Opinion based news, short attention span, easy consumption of wide array of opinions, consumerism and the resulting sensationalist attention-grabbing behavior of companies/corporates/politicians is disconcerting to common populace and I, very much, count myself in this population. I've been swayed by one or more of these tactics more than I'd like to admit.

Citizens used to be apathetic, will it be better/worse if they become confounded?

> Citizens used to be apathetic, will it be better/worse if they become confounded?

Politics always attempts to confound people who don't subscribe to rational argument; they might as well get confounded in the right direction. This is not WarGames, where "the only winning move is not to play". We lose nothing by trying, and we stand to gain a great deal.

Yeah, but "Opinion based news, short attention span, easy consumption of wide array of opinions, consumerism and the resulting sensationalist attention-grabbing behavior of companies/corporates/politicians" (and of course, social media) is making it so much easier to disorientate general population.

Rationality requires constant introspection and vigilance; the short attention span and sensationalism is making it increasingly difficult. I'm not saying "the only winning move is not to play", I'm wondering, is there a winning move (the defeatist attitude that I alluded to in the previous comment)? Maybe I'm just looking for a quick fix that never exists for any serious problem.

Edit: Sorry if it looks like I'm thinking out loud.

Disruptive tech innovation is pretty much the only hope IMNSHO.

Ie invent something that makes politics irrelevant in some area. This is somewhat happening with education (ie Khan, Codecademy, Stanford, etc), for instance.

>sparking the Wall Street protests ... which have been completely ineffective in getting anything done.

You're thinking in Internet Time. In IRL Time, OWS has accomplished a great deal in terms of shifting the debate. No, the bankers haven't been sent to jail and students are still unemployed. Just yesterday, however, we had Newt Gingrich of all people saying that capitalism shouldn't benefit the few at the expense of the many, and that the reckless pursuit of profit at the expense of people is a perversion of capitalism. Were it not for OWS, we would never be hearing that (and certainly not from Newt).

We technorati tend to be pretty self-effacing, which is usually a good thing. When we ignore our real successes, however, we sell ourselves short and discourage future attempts to change things.

I agree, we're generally pretty bad at convincing people that we're right. We usually adopt the, "I know I'm right, who cares if this idiot agrees" attitude. That said, we've been very successful at empowering others to advance causes. We can acknowledge our failings without ignoring our successes.

Just yesterday, however, we had Newt Gingrich of all people saying that capitalism shouldn't benefit the few at the expense of the many, and that the reckless pursuit of profit at the expense of people is a perversion of capitalism. Were it not for OWS, we would never be hearing that (and certainly not from Newt).

I disagree. I think it only has to do with Romney's status as the front-runner. Romney portrays himself as a businessman that knows how to create jobs. Newt is trying to paint Romney as an 80s-style corporate raider. I am fairly certain OWS has nothing to do with it. If Newt was the front-runner, he wouldn't be bringing it up.

Were it not for OWS, we would never be hearing that (and certainly not from Newt).

Yes, Newt would certainly never advocate for statism over capitalism were it not for OWS.

Not only that, but OWS also caused Newt to advocate in favor of Obama/Romneycare (the individual mandate in particular), lobby on behalf of Fannie Mae, and support redistribution of wealth from the young to the old.

Oh, my mistake - Gingrich did all that other stuff years before OWS.

Gingrich was never a capitalist. He's just a christian nationalist who wants a big government (albeit a big government organized slightly differently). His current position is unsurprising, particularly since it helps him score political points against Romney.

> 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

My thought exactly. I was going to read the original article but then I saw something about visualising binaries with space-filling curves and read that instead. I think this is one reason programmers suck at politics.

Programmers don't just suck at politics, they tend to be actively apolitical. Or have some kind of abstract view of an ideal system that has more in common with eg Star Trek than real life. Real politics is just too tied to the cool kids in high school and their dynamics for status stratification and meme transmission.

I'm the same way btw so I'm not being holier-than-y'all.

historically true but coding is a much different pursuit than it was a generation ago. the population of programmers is changing from the legacy of i.t. department hermits towards people coding the internet as a means of self expression. as the net becomes indistinguishable from society itself this inevitably leads to politics.

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.

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..."

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.

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

This is a hit piece by the washington post.

Are you sure? It's confusing enough -- and confused enough -- that I'm not sure what they're trying to hit.

You forgot an 's'

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.

> 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.

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.

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'.

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.

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