This NSA thing, SOPA, drones etc got me thinking.
What would the US and world look like if hackers ran the White House?
- All states would be renamed to end in .io or .ly
- Political parties would be formed around programming languages and the mud slinging across parties would be way more dirty
- When the hunger and poverty rates climbed, we'd create an app for that ... problem solved
- Speeches would include swear words to provide emphasis to talking points
- We'd probably think it would be a great idea to collect analytics on uers so we can better understand them and subsequently "improve their user experience"
... Sorry were a smart group of folks but I genuinely think we'd be positively awful at it
Also there would be even less females in Washington.
When I think of hackers, I think of black hats like I once was, and most tech people know that knowledge is power, I think that hackers may justify what the NSA is doing and may take it further. (ex. how far do you track the ip's and associate them with users on a website)
Truth is though, with our generation being technically minded, it's inevitable that some of us will become the people in the background that fund political campaigns. Politicians are just front men with IOU's behind them.
My take is that the PRISM program could have started as a foreign intelligence program, but was adapted to a domestic one as well. I as a coder who has built web analytic tools before, how do you differentiate from a foreign user or a domestic one? Just because an IP or mac address is located in the US, it doesn't mean the end user is in the US or it's not spoofed.
Our future is not too far fetched than Eagle Eye or Minority Report.
They have to resolve conflicts as they occur within the existing paradigm & very few seem to have any sort of acknowledgement that those paradigms can change and ask questions / seek answers within the existing framework.
if you have real solutions, im sure they are all ears...
I mean, currency is a lot more efficient than bartering, I thought hackers liked efficiency?
Removing currency would be a very slow process but once you get past the behaviour and economic issues presented I think this lines up with hacker values quite nicely. Everyone would have the ability to create because they want to not because they need to.
In agriculture for example, the current business goals are like any other, the most profit with the least expenditure. In an environment where the concept of profit is foreign the goal becomes how do we feed the most people with the resources available.
This would be a very different environment to what we have now, there would be a whole host of other changes to support this. It would be an extremely long process to ween off the concept of money/debt and create the infrastructure for something like this but I believe it is very possible.
Why would the goal become 'how do we feed the most people with the resources available?' Wouldn't it be: 'how can I gain the most advantage from the resources I possess?' With or without currency, that remains the goal.
I'll admit I used to have the same view on this, where is the incentive? Why would someone do something without this immediate reward system? But it is this problem which I think would create the best (or at least most interesting) results. Without immediate reward the farmer will stop farming, why should he keep working for others? Agriculture then becomes a problem for society to solve in the most efficient way possible instead of a status quo job for a few individuals. In going back to the original point of this page, imagine the hacker community's response to that, a real, important problem to solve.
So to answer your last question, with the lack of currency/money there is no difference between them, the only form of advantage to be gained is in your social standing (interesting implications on leadership here), using your skills to help others and solve societies problems is your only way to gain any advantage over others.
I could enforce this by picking the meanest, biggest people in my town and feeding them in exchange for their protection.
You should remember that prior to the invention of capitalism and profit as a calling in the 19th century, many people in the western world lived like this.