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Techies Must Educate Governments
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.'"
Voting! Or, as V put it, "People should not be afraid of the government. The government should be afraid of the people."
They are not dense. They are very intelegent, and work hard at doing their jobs.
Which is getting elected. That is what they are paid for, that is what counts.
The important part of a politician's job is gathering votes. Not ruling a country. We are supposed to only give votes to those who we think will do a good job of ruling, but the measured quantity in a politician's life is the number of votes they get.
It is not that they are not smart. It is that they have learned that applying smarts to ruling a country does not get them as many votes as applying smarts to getting votes does. I'm not sure how to change that, but that is the root problem.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
My party is already formed. It is the libertarian party. The American people have determined that they are not interested in liberty, nor even particularly in the constitution; they want a mommy government that controls everything they do without thoughtful guiding principle, underlying legitimate constitutional authority, or any semblance of honor. And that is exactly what they have received. Unfortunately, that means I have received it as well. Hence my extreme dismay.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Except that liberatrians are against net neutrality, see nothing wrong with Microsoft's conduct, and generally seem to think that if left alone, corporations will benefit everybody else by profiting off of them. What we really need to do is educate the general public more -- for instance, explaining to people what DRM actually is, rather than just waiting for them to come crying when they discover that they cannot play iTunes music on their MP3 player. Again and again, people give me a funny look when I say that software and medicine should not be patentable, or that the RIAA has not been hurt by file sharing (which can be backed up by real statistics). If the general public was actually educated in these matters, politicians would actually listen.
Palm trees and 8
As someone pushing 60 myself, I generally agree with your remarks, but I don't think it's all about the politicians. (If anything, we need older people to work in these areas because they're likely to have more influence with the political elites.)
From where I sit, most "techies," especially the younger generation, have aligned themselves of late with political forces that are opposed to policies advocated by extremely powerful and wealthy organizations. Educating government officials about the virtues of open source, the application of fair-use principles to digital copyright issues, the value of open file formats, and the like, won't matter if their supporters can't wield any political muscle. As someone whose career has spanned academia, consulting and nonprofits, I'd love to spend the next decade working on moving these issues up the political agenda. That won't happen without organization, and while volunteerism can play a role here, money does matter.
If Schmidt thinks this is so important, maybe he should set up a foundation.
So form your own party, see how well you can do it.
I don't think you understand the issue. When he said it is a two-party system, he meant laws have been passed to insure only members of those two parties are likely to be elected. Two registered presidential candidates with thousands of backers were forcibly ejected from the last presidential debates and not allowed to participate. The last time I voted it said right at the top of the ballot that if I voted for candidates from multiple parties, my ballot would be invalid and discarded. That means I could vote for the the better of two candidates for congress (democrat), or I could vote for the libertarian candidate for mayor, but not both.
The laws have been written to prevent the people from electing anyone not republican or democrat and they have been written by the incumbent social groups to maintain their dominance. We will never have electoral reform because no one in favor of it can get elected.
Remember that democracy is the worst posible political system, except for all the others.
Ahh, but we don't quite have a democracy anymore, since the laws are written to make sure the will of the people is not enacted, but rather the will of those who are supposedly representative of the people.
I thought America was the place where people believed "live free or die", not "live under oppression or move on". America today sure isn't what it used to be.
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Problem is, in my HS Government/Civics class, I was taught democracy was "Majority Rule, Minority Rights." I used to be so idealistic and naive...
Anyway, it falls apart where we don't live in a democracy. We live in a democratic republic. Very important distinction. The people do not make the laws in the US (outside of the rare ballot initiative), the people elect representatives to make the laws.
Maybe what we need is to get people to stop throwing around the word "democracy" like a placebo.