The tech industries appear to have provided most of the foot soldiers, many of the generals and pretty much all the lunacy behind Musk’s ongoing coup attempt.
For which many of us in the industry sincerely apologize.
For the most part, these modern tech philosophers don’t know anything about political philosophy that you can’t get from the Cliff’s Notes edition of Atlas Shrugged, and have spent less time seriously thinking about it than they’ve spent watching Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Which may explain why they’re so deluded about the capabilities and utility of “AI”.
But there is at least one thing that computer programmers know very well that should be applied to U.S. politics.
We know how to collaboratively edit text.
And frankly, that’s the core of what legislating is.
You have a pre-existing text (the Constitutions and laws of the federal government and the states) that you want to get some changes made to.
In tech, we use what are called Version Control systems for that (the current favorite of which is called “git”, though “subversion” is still in common use as well). These systems keep track of who proposed each change and can present lists of the differences between various versions. They can even be set up to automatically apply proposed changes after a certain threshold of approvals are attached to them.
Which is pretty much what legislatures do.
But with the added bonus of accountability.
See, at it stands now it’s not uncommon for a law to be passed with no one able to say who came up with any particular piece of it. This is not good, since it allows legislators to slip in little time bombs and bits of legislative sabotage with complete impunity.
(This is absurdly common in California, which has some extra-special stupidity all its own around how bills are drafted.)
So, let’s require that legislatures use version-control.
We know exactly how the process needs to work and even have software that can do it with only minimal changes. We have hundreds of thousands of programmers and sysadmins who use this stuff every day.
It is, as we say, mature technology.
We should have deployed this years ago.
Because knowing who did what may become really important in the near future, as we try to sort through the wreckage they’re making of our federal government.
