Slashdot Mirror
The "Techie" Vote?
Ironica writes "This Los Angeles Times article discusses a compelling trend: techies are making their collective voice heard in politics. Quote from the article: "After years as political agnostics, the programmers and engineers who orchestrated the technological revolution of the 1990s are trying to reboot government...They have money, earned during the boom. They have time, found since the bust. And they are using their technological savvy to recruit even casual Internet users to their causes." Perhaps instead of "boxers or briefs," our next presidential candidate will have to answer "POP3 or IMAP?""
This reminds me of a recent article about an internet millionaire who is sueing the government regarding privacy issues while flying. I think it is great that we techies are finally getting a voice in the government. Hopefully some of the issues we have been worried about, (patents, trademark, copyright, privacy, etc.) will begin to change.
Visualize the world of wine
This is not a big news story. The internet has given everyone a voice, but those who know how to speak are genreally understood more readily.
So we have this huge inter-connected network which spans the globe, now what do we do with it?
Hey! Let's talk to each other!
About what?
Politics...
the average techie, is lazy, speaking as an average techie myself.
Techies, Politics Now Click
The 'geeks' who once shunned activism amid the digital revolution are using their money and savvy to influence public policy.
By Joseph Menn ~ Times Staff Writer
August 11, 2003
The first call came before 9 a.m.
For the next eight hours, they kept coming: call after call at the rate of 20 per second, crippling the telephone systems of several U.S. senators.
The geeks were speaking -- in opposition to the imminent war in Iraq.
After years as political agnostics, the programmers and engineers who orchestrated the technological revolution of the 1990s are trying to reboot government. Top technology executives such as Bill Gates found their public voice years ago. Now, the tens of thousands of technology workers who toiled in cubicles writing software and creating gadgets are making their influence felt.
They have money, earned during the boom. They have time, found since the bust. And they are using their technological savvy to recruit even casual Internet users to their causes.
They want to make sure civil liberties aren't trampled in the push for greater security. They want privacy respected. And they want the media and the political conversation in general to be freed from the dominance of a small number of powerful groups and corporations. Otherwise, they are hard to place on the political spectrum.
One of the leaders of this loose-knit movement is Wes Boyd, a 42-year-old computer programmer who works out of a book-lined home office in a leafy section of Berkeley.
He made his money selling computer games and screen savers -- those flying toasters that became an early icon of high-tech chic. Then, disgusted by what he saw as the political grandstanding surrounding the impeachment of President Clinton in 1998, Boyd posted a Web site to vent.
MoveOn.org fielded 500 hits its first day, 7,000 the second. Within a few months, more than 250,000 visitors had signed an electronic petition calling for Congress to censure Clinton and "move on." Those early visitors formed the core of a group that now claims more than 1.3 million U.S. followers.
MoveOn members pay no dues but agree to receive e-mail notices of new positions and calls for action. Many pass on the information they get, becoming volunteer recruiters. MoveOn takes stands on a variety of issues, but describes itself primarily as a catalyst for grass-roots action -- on whatever its members think is important.
The group helped persuade more than 100,000 people to join an antiwar march in San Francisco in February, the largest such demonstration in the U.S.
It generated 150,000 electronic complaints to the Federal Communications Commission about its plan to let big media companies get even bigger, a policy change now under assault in Congress. And hundreds of thousands of MoveOn supporters took part in the February phone blitz of U.S. senators over their support of the Iraq war.
"You wish these things would be taken care of by other people," said Boyd, who founded MoveOn with his wife, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Joan Blades, after spending most of his life on the political sidelines. "But it turns out that if we don't play, if we don't work to make a difference, no one's going to do it. We just discovered that we couldn't look away anymore."
The organization raised $3.5 million to give to candidates who ran for federal office last year. In April, it said it was dedicating itself to unseating President Bush in 2004, though it has not come out in support of a candidate to replace him.
"We've been trying to engage people in other things, and almost always the answer comes back, 'Why bother? It's not going to matter if we don't get rid of Bush,' " Boyd said.
Dislodging a well-funded president might be beyond its reach. But some analysts see MoveOn and similar groups as a potent political force.
"I don't know of any group that has 1.3 million members who are as motivated to act when asked to,
There is a school of thought that recognises corporatism as a means of influencing public policy (be careful when googling, this is _NOT_ about the role of corporations but the role of interest groups in public policy) by giving interest groups a role to play in the determination of public policy. An alternative view is the pluralist view that takes interest groups as combatants with the public policy makers trying to "win" concessions to their particular interest.
It is clear that the techie vote will rise as the status quo proceeds to piss us off more and more (the size of the electorate in question is really pretty vast). But whilst that is interesting, it is reactionary, and by that very nature limited in what it can really achieve.
What is interesting is the idea that bodies made up from within the technically educated will form and be _consulted_ about the formulation of public policy. In the US this is made more problematic by the nature of your "democracy" but in places like Europe, more and more more input from more and more credible tech groups (EFF, FSF for example) will only increase the likelihood that when it comes time to look at the next idiot DMCA debacle, these groups will be sounded out _before_ the policy is drafted.
A good day indeed. Probably 5 - 10 years away unless some event occurs to precipitate the problem.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
I'm going to be helping this former IT geek with his campaign:
http://www.EmmonsForCongress.com:81
this guy spent 18 years in the biz, only to have to train his 'less expensive' replacements.
I'm sure I'll be in the same boat sooner than later, however, I refuse train anyone. If upper-manglement wants to replace me with some cheap labor, THEY can figure my code out.
This makes me think that maybe the techies/geeks SHOULD band together (with groups like the EFF) to shape tech legislation and stop this government from taking away our personal freedoms, like routers, NAT, firewalls, and encryption.
Just a thought I've had for a while now.
No way. We need to resolve the whole "vi" vs "emacs" issue first. After that, "tabs" vs "spaces", then the whole issue of placement of braces (not to mention brace-less languages like Python). After all thats settled then maybe we'll be ready for email transport preferences if the browser wars don't flare up again first.
The tech community is a fractious bunch and thus completely useless as a political group. Why? Because "Speciality in IT" != Any political agenda. The camps of liberal, conservative, and libertarian thinking are wide and diverse. Hell, look at any thread on the RIAA. Probably the only platform all tech folks are for is rational copyright law (i.e. showing SCO who's the daddy). But other than that, there is no cohesion.
There's a reason why police unions, the AFL-CIO, and the Christian Right are all strong forces: they have a complete package of beliefs that they can get a large body of voters to agree on. Religion? Government? Taxes? The tech community could never get such a gestalt.
I think it is one of the great tech-urban legends that IT is a uniformly liberal RMS-style social group or ever was.
What is music when you despise all sound?
But more importantly, techies need to be more aware of politics than they are as well. Politics are about more than just the RIAA.
US slashdotters: Show of hands for everyone who saw the Democratic debate last night. Watch the upcoming forums, and be sure you register to vote.
I'm one techie who's not voting for *anything* unless there's a CowboyNeal option.
* Please do not read my signature.