Techies Must Educate Governments 223
Rub3X writes "Those in the know about technology must spend more time reaching out to governments and helping them understand the Internet's role in society, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Tuesday.
'The average person in government is not of the age of people who are using all this stuff,' Schmidt said at a public symposium here hosted by the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. 'There is a generational gap, and it's very, very real.'"
Oh, no, that's not the problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
Techies spend thousands of hours educating government in the US. They do it in hearings, they do it as advisors, they do it as assistants. Even PACs try to teach these people how various elements of technology work, albeit often for the wrong reasons. Lack of teaching is not the problem. Nor is the problem lack of information these representatives can access on their own, so they can learn on their own, as any of American's best and brightest citizens — such as many of those here on slashdot — manage each and every day.
Nor is the problem the age of the representative. I'm closing on 60, and I know a great deal about technology. My mother knew more than any representative I am aware of when she died recently, and she was almost 90. I inherited her dual CPU Dell running Red Hat SMP when she died. She wrote some pretty tricky perl scripts; I wish I could have converted her to Python, but alas. I didn't say she was perfect.
In the US, the problem is that the parties keep putting incompetent (and worse) people up for election. Consequently the American people, having no effective way of dealing with the two-party monopoly upon government seats of power, keeps voting these incompetents into congress and the senate.
So the Internet is a series of tubes, you can't say words on television that are common in every schoolyard, and the human body is a matter for shame. And those are the small problems. Worse, we've invaded a country under false pretenses, with no valid reason beyond those already exposed as nonsense, the bill of rights has been forsaken, and the congress and the senate have seen fit to make the entire judicial process one that the executive can control from start to finish.
The tree of liberty is dead. It has been shat upon by millions and millions of sheep, trampled by elephants and donkeys, and finally the pulp was sold by that lady with the blindfold and one tit hanging out for King George to write out "signing statements" upon.
I'd tell you to vote libertarian, but most of you are just going to put another democrat or republican into office anyway. Literally, a crying shame. We have fallen so far.
hold on... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, we don't have time. We're too busy destroying our lives [slashdot.org] playing WOW.
Re:Oh, no, that's not the problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Voting?!?!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, only one got in and I couldn't vote or benefit from his election.
Throwing away your vote. (Score:4, Interesting)
From: http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0706-09.htm [commondreams.org] "We the undersigned Members of Congress hereby request the Electoral Assistance Division of the United Nations Department of Political Affairs to send election observers to monitor the presidential election in the United States scheduled for November 2, 2004. We are deeply concerned that the right of U.S. citizens to vote in free and fair elections is again in jeopardy"
Sorry, We haven't been a Democracy for quite some time.
Re:Oh, no, that's not the problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
How is that a bad thing? At least the elected representatives have at least a basic understanding of lawmaking and its repurcussions. As well, they act as a buffer between the lawbook and this week's media-fed clamor to "think of the children!".
Even more important, representatives serve as a point of accountability. Their name and reputation are associated with their votes and actions, and this must have at least a slight restraining effect. No such restraint would operate in a pure democracy, where every person can anonymously support any fool proposition.
This is all beside the point though. The real value of democracy is that it diffuses political power, making it difficult for any person or small group to acquire very much for very long if they misuse it. The mechanism of election (i.e. republic versus democracy or whatever) isn't important.
Re:Age isn't really the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that why every time I work for a large North American company, each new wave of management that gets installed holds big "rah rah" sessions and rewards those who kiss ass and follow dumb orders the best?
Management desperately needs to figure out that it's not a football game, where team-play and short-term gains trump all. Instead, let's think chess, where wise, well-reasoned moves, made at the appropriate time, produce superior results over the longer term. An intelligent, longer-term strategy, executed consistenty quarter after quarter, accumulates compound results over time like the proverbial downhill-rolling snowball.
During Microsoft's rise, they bought up every brianiac willing to sell his soul. Google's rise shows similar properties - they're now the mecca for boffins of these arts. Brianiacs can win big, if you put enough of them in a room and relegate the football coaches to delivering soda and wiping up the twinkie stains.
Mod parent up (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a very insightful post. I agree almost 100%... however there are people who are adept at both politics and technology. Someone with both talents may seem scary to either group.
The way I see it - humanity stretches out between two extreems. On the one hand we have emotion and on the other we have logic. There is a knot of people at each end. The population in the middle may be rather sparse. As the author of the parent post correctly points out, for people at either end of the spectrum it can be very difficult to try to understand the other camp.
I would suggest that the political (emotional) side is substantially more heavily weighted than the technical (logical) side of this teeter totter. If we go back through history what we find is a slow progression of technology and science. It was only a few hundred years ago that observers of nature were routinely condeemed. Indeed many were imprisoned. If we consider primative people, what we find typically is a well developed emotional complex. It seems the hallmark of civilization is the development of logic. This is the essence of law for instance... that issues should be decided on fact and logic. Yet in spite of this, we find emotion running the show far too often.
Simply put, the logical individual is still in the minority. As I see it, the world is run primarily by emotion. Even very logical people often misunderstand how much decision making is governed by emotion. Emotional people of course don't consider the question.
Re:Oh, no, that's not the problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
You make some excellent points with regard to a properly functioning democratic republic; accountability, the ability to focus upon the job(s) at hand. I would add that another item in favor is that when dealing with foreign countries, it gives them someone with a modicum of authority to talk to for each region, which is useful for trade.
However, as we have seen, this mechanism can fail to operate properly. Our politicians are not very accountable by virtue of the public's apathy; they vote in ways detrimental to the public and corrosive to the government at large, but said apathy fails to either deter or alter the system that put them there or in many cases, even cause the individual responsible to be replaced. As this article bemoans, the focus they should have has not resulted in representatives who are well informed as to the issues; rather, it has resulted in representatives who have learned very well indeed how to work the PACs and the public.
There is also an underlying risk, which I believe we have seen come to fruition recently, in our particular democratic republic as compared to a "straight" democracy. It can be illuminated as follows:
We have about 300 million citizens. A maximum risk of a straight democracy for that population is that about 150 million of them may suffer the consequences of a decision made by the other 150 million plus one. This would be a very unfortunate result, and in fact, is the risk that most people refer to when they talk about the "tyranny of the majority." The underlying subtext, of course, being that tyranny is bad, and that the minority must be protected from this.
Yet, when we think carefully about the comparable risks of our democratic republic, we see that the worst case is when 100% of the population, all 300 million of them, may suffer the consequences of a bad decision made by a few hundred people (the majority of the groups of congress-critters and senators.) In this case, the risk isn't tyranny over the minority, it is tyranny over everyone.
One is immediately tempted to argue that a republic is safer because these people have time to focus on the job and so will make better decisions, so the odds of such massively bad decisions are unlikely in the extreme. But we have recently seen that this is not necessarily the case.
The bill of rights has been rendered irrelevant at the whim of the executive in some situations, and entirely in others. The constitutional authority that the government was legitimately operating under no longer exists by dint of the government having stepped far outside the bounds of the constitution. People are held without access to court or representation and are even forbidden to hear the charges against them. The government has turned our money into play money by backing it with an unconscionable degree of debt — and nothing else. Our means of exchange could fall apart on any given day. It is currently held up by nothing more than the ignorance of the body of the population and the conspiratorial silence of the financial community. We are at war in circumstances that are dishonorable in the extreme, with consequences I can only describe as utterly shameful.
So... perhaps it would not be out of line to risk some form of the tyranny of the majority. Certainly the tyranny of the republic has proved to be just as real, and the final effects are, as I have explained above, considerably worse.
Perhaps technology could come to our aid in qualifying those who wish to vote, as to how qualified they actually are to vote on an issue-by-issue basis. Votes could be weighted, if not actually gated. There are serious downsides to this — such as the potential disenfranchisement of the poorly educated and genetically poorly endowed, intellectually speaking — but I submit that the current system is deep into the process of melting down, and so it is perhaps already past time to try to come up with something better. I'm currently a proponent of qualifying voters and using straight democracy in conjunction with a more bulletproof — and specific — constitution than the one we have today.
Re:Oh, no, that's not the problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
Explain the umpteen state laws passed to curb the sales of 'violent video games'...and where they were summarily ruled unconstitutional by the judicial branch.
Even more important, representatives serve as a point of accountability. Their name and reputation are associated with their votes and actions, and this must have at least a slight restraining effect.
Votes and actions are used both for and against. I won't go into details, mostly because it's a pain to go back, but check out http://www.factcheck.org/ [factcheck.org] (not
(My personal favorite is how Reps call out Dems for "voting to raise taxes" when the actual vote was a 'Nay' on a tax decrease)
Re:Oh, no, that's not the problem. (Score:2, Interesting)