You "hackers" are looking and competing in every direction to disrupt, to change the world, to make an impact. Yet no-one is talking about disruption in the lower levels of the system: the state itself.
The problem is that the status-quo benefits those that are in control. There's no incentive for them to change it - quite the contrary.<p>Getting into politics itself is based on who you know as opposed to actual skill or knowledge (unlike in tech, where skill alone will usually get you in a decent position).<p>Once you're inside, your tenure depends on keeping everyone satisfied, and "everyone" includes people with vested interests as well as simple idiots (who can be exploited by other people with an agenda), both within the government and the general population.<p>Any attempt at disruption is unlikely to pass and will often just signify the end of your political career. Finally, if you've actually made it thus far, you might very well get complacent and happy with the benefits of the job (including "donations") and decide to keep quiet and not make too much noise.
I’ve been downvoted for making this comment before, but I really don’t care. Sure the details are fuzzy and I’m sure it has its problems, but here goes: legislation outside that of basic human rights things (like murder, theft, rape, etc)
should have an expiration date. It would force legislators to revisit some of the more asinine laws that no longer have a place in society. Drug legalization comes to mind here. Maybe that’s a bit simplistic and I acknowledge that but there’s something in expiring unnecessary and unneeded legislation that’s so appealing.
The system does everything it can to preserve itself and its power.<p>I've tried looking into technology that could make a difference, but I didn't get much input from HN. I think the big thing is education. Educating people about their rights, about how the system is supposed to work, about how it actually works (or doesn't), and what resources are available would be a huge step in the right direction. Most of the issues in the system remain unaddressed because people are ignorant. The laws in my state allow for a person to be thrown in jail for up to 90 days and fined $100-500 for their dog escaping their yard. Do you really think the public agrees that throwing someone in jail for a loose dog is just? This law exists because the people don't know about it. There are many activist organizations working on reform, but most people don't know about them (many are state specific).
There is plenty of research to "hack" government. Examples in the US would be ranked-choice voting or universal basic income.<p>As with anything people want to "hack," it's much harder to do it if:<p>- millions (or billions) of lives can be lost due to a mistake<p>- powerful interests want things to stay the way they are<p>- changes must go through committees and voters before being implemented
One attempt to hack representative democracy is a party controlled by an app. It works like this:<p>An app is created which lets citizens vote on every issue in the legislature. A party is formed whose elected members vote according to the app results. Citizens elect members from this party. Once the party achieves an elected majority, the legislature becomes controlled by the app, and transformed into a digital direct democracy.<p>There’s a few projects that attempted this. The one that’s still active is Flux Party of Australia: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(political_party)" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(political_party)</a>
Loads of people are doing this, all over the world, at every level of state/politics.<p>What would you call Cambridge Analytica if not disrupting politics?<p>(On a less salubrious level there are loads of polling and canvassing companies trying to do the whole "getting elected" and "staying popular" thing a bit cleverer, without being totally amoral, using more sophisticated statistical modelling and database setups on the public electoral register.)<p>Emmanuel Macron's campaign apparently fairly successfully fought off a state-sponsored attack on their systems when he ran for president in 2017.<p>Estonia has held parliamentary elections using internet voting.<p>Tax/Revenue bodies all over the world use cloud computing and machine learning methods to detect money laundering, among other things. It's not ledgers and adding machines in there.<p>Health authorities in several countries analyse de-identifed location data from Apple and Google as part of Covid-tracking efforts.<p>Ireland is (somewhat controversially) rolling out a single sign on for all online interactions with the state - tax, social welfare, renewing a passport etc.<p>Those examples are all off the top of my head. The suggestion that there's no "disruption" in politics or the public service is incorrect.
For starters The State isn't just one thing. Additionally there's so much money involved. The United States M1 money supply is about 4 trillion dollars. Finally, I'm not sure this is the right word, but<p>"unit transaction inertia." (UTI)<p>The higher some system's UTI the less likely it is to fundamental change.<p>So, ordering food at a restaurant or getting a taxi is mostly a one-off. It's UTI is near 0 and rarely moves. Paying rent's UTI is a bit bigger. The renter is staying there for a while, the rent is a significant amount of money, the land lord has invested a lot in the property. Also a marriage is going to have a large UTI, just not in terms of money. Ostensibly each party is in it for life and they interact many times every day.<p>Now, on to the state. Any State's UTI is going to be huge. Lots of specialized workers have invested a lot of time and The State interacts with a lot of people and for usually all their lives.<p>Certainly you could use fleas to change the course of a train. But it'll take a lot.
There are electorates that are not as enlightened basically. Trump got the second largest vote total of any American president (aside from Biden). That’s the reality of who is actually out there in the country.<p>Contrary to popular belief, our representative democracy actually works. The representatives suck because look at who they represent. Mitch McConnell actually gets voted in every year.<p>Many electorates are not evolving or are evolving at a generational pace. Most of our common sense reforms like marijuana legalization or gay marriage are happening due to a generational shift where the new electorate votes differently than the last one. It will seem like disruption, but what will happen is we will stagnate again as this generation never changes their views again until they are dead.<p>This is very hard to disrupt unless we make most electorates across the nation open minded, willing to try different things, nimble (not necessarily fickle), and willing to vote differently throughout their lifetime.<p>You can take a look at how many times gay marriage legalization actually failed as a California ballot referendum, and that’s in the most liberal democratic state in the country. We consider that state to be a decade or two ahead of others in terms of ideas, and even they are slow.
<a href="https://www.codeforamerica.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.codeforamerica.org/</a> and their local brigades <a href="https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/brigades/" rel="nofollow">https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/brigades/</a> do.