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Inside Out, Outside In, Perpetual Change
Reihan Salam, blogging about the Change Congress launch I covered last week, links to an interesting kitchen-sink post by Jeff Jarvis. He's working on a book, WWGD? (What Would Google Do?), attempting to reverse engineer the company and apply the stuff that works to, in this post, democracy. The bullet points...
* Abolish the Freedom of Information Act. Turn it inside-out. Why should we be asking for information about and from our government? The government should have to ask to keep things from us.
* Government officials and agencies should blog. This ethic of openness should go beyond official documents and files. Openness should be part of the work habit of government officials and conversation with constituents should be an ethic of government.
* Webcast government. The government should put C-SPAN out of business by videoing itself. Obama has said he wants to webcast agency meetings. I say the same should be the case for Congressional meetings and, yes, court sessions, including Supreme Court hearings. I’ve suggested that radio stations and newspapers should get citizens to record and podcast all their local government meetings.
* Start GovernmentStorm. If Dell and now Starbucks can do it, government should. These storms, powered by Salesforce.com, enable customers to make suggestions and then to vote and comment on others’ suggestions. In general, good ideas attract votes and conversations and bad ideas die on the vine.
* Personal political pages. Where we can, if we choose, reveal our stands, opinions, alliances, and allegiances and where we can—here I call on Doc Searls’ Vendor Relationship Management project—manage our relationship with government, campaigns, and movements. Call it PRM, political relationship management.* The dawn of the human politician. Speaking of Facebook… It will not be long before we see a candidate for office having to admit some youthful foible because it was memorialized on Facebook.
* Rule by engineers. At Davos, I was struck by the different approach to solving problems I saw from Google’s founders. After hearing Al Gore trying to fix the environment through taxes and regulation, I heard the Google guys try to do the same through invention and investment in reducing the cost of power. Engineers don’t waste their time with cool ideas. They seek a problem and solve it. And they are spoiled that in their world of technology, unlike the messier world of people, most problems do have solutions. Still, I look forward to rule by engineers. I think it will be more rational, more logical, less flashy (unless it’s President Jobs we get). And because these are people of few words, we’ll see more results than rhetoric. We can only hope.
I'd be lying if I claimed not to cringe at some of this. The "rule by engineers" concept seems periously close to the Simpsons episode where MENSA takes over Springfield. (It ended badly.) And I see an implicit lack of faith in the media's ability to root out failure and corruption in government. But maybe I'm not much of a reverse-engineer. I have trouble imagining transparency as a norm, and from there I have trouble imagining the vast majority of Americans making time to take advantage of this transparency. Voters split into two camps: those who want government to help them and don't want to watch the "sausage" being made, and voters who want government to leave them alone and are only interested in process as it illustrates why government should be butting out of their lives.
That said, the Calvinish elect who did take advantage of this hyper-transparency could do a lot of good. I'm not drunk on Jarvis's ideas, but I like where he's heading.
Related, here are Julian Sanchez's thoughts on the Change Congress launch.
UPDATE: Pseud confession: I thought of The Simpsons and it took Eric Alterman to remind me how Lippmanish this actually is.
Even “if there were a prospect” that people could become sufficiently well-informed to govern themselves wisely, he wrote, “it is extremely doubtful whether many of us would wish to be bothered.” In his first attempt to consider the issue, in “Liberty and the News” (1920), Lippmann suggested addressing the problem by raising the status of journalism to that of more respected professions. Two years later, in “Public Opinion,” he concluded that journalism could never solve the problem merely by “acting upon everybody for thirty minutes in twenty-four hours.” Instead, in one of the oddest formulations of his long career, Lippmann proposed the creation of “intelligence bureaus,” which would be given access to all the information they needed to judge the government’s actions without concerning themselves much with democratic preferences or public debate. Just what, if any, role the public would play in this process Lippmann never explained.
The Jarvis difference is that the masses would still be making decisions, just more informed ones.
Steve Verdon|3.25.08 @ 12:00PM|#
Engineers don't waste their time with cool ideas. They seek
a problem and solve it.
I'm having a hard time getting past my anecdotal evidence that
often some of the most ardent supporters of Intelligent Design are
engineers...or at least claim to be.
|3.25.08 @ 12:02PM|#
The government should put C-SPAN out of business by videoing
itself.
Or they can pay C-Span to do it for them.
As it stands right now, what is said on the floor of the
house/senate is public domain, but all the rights to videos of
committes/hearings/etc are owned by C-Span. That seems odd to
me.
Kolohe|3.25.08 @ 12:03PM|#
The "rule by engineers" concept seems periously close to the
Simpsons episode where MENSA takes over Springfield. (It ended
badly.)
Agreed. For that matter, it was also the concept when the Marxists
replaced the Czar. That too, ended badly.
|3.25.08 @ 12:03PM|#
Old joke:
Three people were arguing about the nature of God.
The first said: "God must be a sculptor. Look at the beautiful
shape of women and the perfection of the curves."
The second said: "God must be a dancer. Look at the grace of
women's movement and expression."
The third said: "God must be an engineer. Only an engineer would
put a playground next to a sewage outlet."
|3.25.08 @ 12:04PM|#
I have trouble imagining the vast majority of Americans
making time to take advantage of this transparency
The vast majority wouldn't. But a dedicated few would and
disseminate that info in easy to parse ways to anyone who wants it
-- if they wanted it.
Better than not being available, no?
|3.25.08 @ 12:05PM|#
Steve: Engineers are as dogmatic as anyone else out there. If anything, the can be even worse, because they have a tendency to take disagreement as a personal affront. See any random Slashdot thread about [Java/BSD/XML/etc...].
Kolohe|3.25.08 @ 12:13PM|#
I'm also surprised you didn't mention re: #2 the much heralded TSA blog. (Seriously, I think the blogging and the webcasts are the two best ideas up there.)
TXLimey|3.25.08 @ 12:13PM|#
Um, didn't we try the whole "rule by experts" thing back in the
early 20th century? I know that this guy didn't explicitly say
"social engineers", but still a little too close for comfort for
me.
I'm also not sure that a flood of ephemera and blogs from the
thousands upon thousands of government employees would really be an
aid to transparency. Seems more like a way to just generate so much
information that gleaning anything meaningful from it becomes
impossible. If we slashed the size of government by a good 80% or
more it might have more value, but then if we could to that then we
wouldn't have so many problems to begin with.
|3.25.08 @ 12:24PM|#
Warty,
True enough. On the other hand, they're capable of explaining the
rationale behind their dogmatism, twisted and circuitous though it
may be. Most dogmatists can't get beyond "'cuz God said so!" or
some such.
|3.25.08 @ 12:28PM|#
Be very careful what you wish...I'm an engineer and I wouldn't want anyone like me or the other engineers I know in charge of anything. Besides putting engineers in charge generally just ruins perfectly good engineers.
|3.25.08 @ 12:31PM|#
Hehe. The version I saw was different types of engineers, and it was (I believe) the civil engineer who would have routed a waste disposal pipeline through a recreational area.
|3.25.08 @ 12:34PM|#
Timon19: I've been rereading Cryptonomicon, and there's a great line in there about how younger nerds will get incensed when somebody nearby starts uttering declarative sentences, because it implies the existence of a gap in the nerd's knowledge.
|3.25.08 @ 12:34PM|#
For that matter, it was also the concept when the Marxists
replaced the Czar. That too, ended badly.
For that matter, we've had an engineer as President before, Herbert
Hoover. That too, ended badly. I don't necessarily want my
politicians to be looking for problems to fix too much.
|3.25.08 @ 12:34PM|#
peachy,
That's the form I always heard. CivEs are commonly referred to as
those who couldn't cut it in any other engineering
discipline.
DADIODADDY,
You speak the truth. Most engineers I know (and work with) who have
any management responsibility truly hate it, and also are fully
aware of the skill-sucking effect being in charge has.
|3.25.08 @ 12:36PM|#
Warty,
I think many engineers (myself included) show signs of that. It's
an occupational/character flaw.
robc|3.25.08 @ 12:40PM|#
While a congress of all engineers would be a bad idea, replacing half the lawyers with engineers would only make things better.
|3.25.08 @ 12:40PM|#
Engineers don't waste their time with cool ideas.
Sure they do. The business world is littered with companies founded
by engineers, or based on cool ideas that staffs of engineers
worked on but couldn't get to work.
Besides putting engineers in charge generally just ruins
perfectly good engineers.
The skill set required to be an engineer and the skill set required
to manage people and organizations are very different. Ask anyone
who ever had an engineer for a boss.
|3.25.08 @ 12:42PM|#
There are a couple of points that have been touched on already,
but I thought I'd wrap them all up in a bow.
-All laws are social engineering.
-Most engineers like to overdesign things.
-Therefore, rule by engineers would be unlikely to increase
freedom. If anything it would probably decrease it. Engineers
(myself included) have a tendency to focus on the solution to the
problem and ignore/discount the viability/desirability/implications
of said solution. And that will probably lead to utilitarianism at
best, and really extreme "solutions" at worst.
I do agree with robc, however, that if we were to introduce a
minority (say 10%) of engineers into Congress, it could only get
better. Of course, you could say that about any non-lawyer
profession...
|3.25.08 @ 12:45PM|#
The key to using engineers effectively is be to define the "problem" in the most advantageous terms possible. Otherwise, the engineers will be looking to maximize efficiency, growth, recycling, whatever. But tell them to maximize freedom, and you'd probably be happy with the results.
Anonymoose.|3.25.08 @ 12:47PM|#
Abolish the Freedom of Information Act. How are
they suppose to ask to keep something secret without telling us
what it is?
Government officials and agencies should blog.
Blogs have become nothing more than streams of well-disguised press
releases. We really don't need more government press
releases.
Rule by engineers. Ohhhh man, that's a good one.
You've clearly never had to deal with engineers. Furthermore the
idea that "Engineers don't waste their time with cool ideas" is
just bullshit. Google's Labs is the perfect example of that.
My bet is that "WWGD?" is another one of those pop-psuedo-smart
books, like that book about the long tail and blink.
Rimfax|3.25.08 @ 12:47PM|#
Representative Bill Foster is the first of our new geeky overlords. I, for one, welcome them...with the Vulcan salute.
|3.25.08 @ 12:55PM|#
The 2 US Presidents who were engineers were Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. Nuff said.
|3.25.08 @ 12:56PM|#
Stinky Italian Cheese,
Don't insult engineers like that. We're not socialists who like
make-work projects. If anything, we'd want to create as FEW jobs as
possible for realizing our solutions/projects. Efficiency and all
that.
hamilton|3.25.08 @ 1:00PM|#
More seriously, do you really think we're better off being
represented by lawyers? Doctors like Frist? Cops? Ex-military?
Economists? Dogma-spouting philosophers?
I mean, jeez.
|3.25.08 @ 1:00PM|#
hamilton,
So you're one of the miserable fucks who can't use your primary
skills for good because you're busy generating shitstorms above and
below you?
hamilton|3.25.08 @ 1:07PM|#
Absolutely. Now go write me up a goddamn project plan with three
backup contingencies, not to mention a failure analysis in both
fishbone and FMEA format. If you need help, remember F=Ma. I'll be
in my office prepping for my Senior Staff presentation. Don't
worry, I won't commit to anything we can't handle.
Jeez, I really SHOULD be president.
|3.25.08 @ 1:08PM|#
The "rule by engineers" concept seems periously close to the
Simpsons episode where MENSA takes over Springfield.
Ooh! That reminds me of another bullet point:
* More gazebos for shemales.
Mike Laursen|3.25.08 @ 1:11PM|#
I'm having a hard time getting past my anecdotal evidence
that often some of the most ardent supporters of Intelligent Design
are engineers...or at least claim to be.
From your About page, it looks like you live in the South. If
that's right, you need to correct your anecdotal evidence for local
conditions.
|3.25.08 @ 1:24PM|#
I don't think any profession should have a
near-monopoly; indeed, it might be advantageous to structure the
system to encourage diversity.
This was actually one of the arguments in favour of retaining
pocket (or 'rotten') boroughs during the great series of debates
over Parliamentary reform in merry olde England (the during the
1780s and 90s especially) - the more electorally legitimate county
seats skewed very heavily towards 'country gentlemen', so the
boroughs were usually the only route in for lawyers, merchants,
military officers and so forth. Despite the eccentricities of the
system, many thought it provided a pretty good balance - a solid
foundation of gentlemen with a healthy leavening of
professionals.
Mike Laursen|3.25.08 @ 1:25PM|#
Just don't put software engineers in charge. You'll end up with a government that works great at first but becomes an unmaintainable mess within five years -- with no documentation.
Abdul|3.25.08 @ 1:35PM|#
Yasser Arafat was a civil engineer before he went into politics, and look how far that society got.
robc|3.25.08 @ 1:36PM|#
Episiarch,
"Rule" by anyone is asking for trouble. Engineers
included.
People included, too.
Mike Laursen|3.25.08 @ 1:37PM|#
I've suggested that radio stations and newspapers should get
citizens to record and podcast all their local government
meetings.
Better yet, if they could pick out the most interesting clips and
make them available. I don't think I've ever been to a local
government meeting where the important issues on the agenda were
reached before folks with kids had to go home.
My hometown newspaper could do something like this on their
website, if their editor weren't so busy writing editorials about
how awful it is that the newspaper industry is being taken over by
Big Corporations.
|3.25.08 @ 1:48PM|#
Just don't put software engineers in charge. You'll end up
with a government that works great at first but becomes an
unmaintainable mess within five years -- with no
documentation.
So that's what happened to Our Fair Republic!
Kolohe|3.25.08 @ 1:49PM|#
For that matter, we've had an engineer as President before,
Herbert Hoover.
Ah, that's right. And to further your point, so was Jimmy
Carter
hamilton|3.25.08 @ 1:55PM|#
Just don't put software engineers in charge. You'll end up with a
government that works great at first but becomes an unmaintainable
mess within five years -- with no documentation.
Yes, but if you shut the country down, count to 5, and then
re-establish it again, everything will be working fine.
Mike Laursen|3.25.08 @ 2:02PM|#
No, no, wait one minute, not count to five.
Or, if you have the United Nations wonder, you don't have to wait
at all. Whoops, wrong allusion.
|3.25.08 @ 2:12PM|#
As another engineer wasting time at work...I'd like to point out that we aren't a hive mind. You have good engineers and bad engineers. Some engineers could be quite good at solving technical problems that plague society. In fact they do on a daily basis (sewage managmement, traffic control, other systems). However, NO ONE is truly qualified to rule a nation of millions of individuals. The dynamics are too great. That why our own government is wrong 99% of the time. They can only take in so much information to make decisions and so its pretty much a miracle if they find the right path to follow. The best we can do is try and limit the number of wrong decisions they make by taking away power from them. Its not that engineers are worse at government than anyone else, its that they are seen as experts sometimes and allowed to make more decisions because of that, and they are wrong 99% of the time.
Brandybuck|3.25.08 @ 2:46PM|#
The reason rule by engineers (I am one) is such a phenominally apalling idea, is how they think. Most engineers (particularly software engineers, such as you find at Google) live in a deterministic, obedient and comprehensible universe. They do not negotiate or compromise, they command and control.
Kolohe|3.25.08 @ 3:00PM|#
Carter was trained as an engineer by the navy nuclear power program, (as was I)
robe|3.25.08 @ 4:02PM|#
Kolohe,
Carter was trained as an engineer by the navy nuclear power
program, (as was I)
I dont mean to be insulting with this (thats never a good lead in,
is it?), but while getting my NukE degree I had classmates who came
out of the Nuke Navy. I wasnt impressed.
That said, I would make a good president, up until the point I was
impeached and removed from office sometime early in the 2nd year of
my term.
|3.25.08 @ 4:22PM|#
Still, I look forward to rule by engineers. I think it will
be more rational, more logical, less flashy (unless it's President
Jobs we get). And because these are people of few words, we'll see
more results than rhetoric. We can only hope.
Thanks Weigel. I look forward to being your overlord.
|3.25.08 @ 4:31PM|#
Being an engineer and a libertarian, I am always struck by the
anecdotally disproportionate amount of libertarian engineers taht I
find. Even in places outside the States.
I should say that it is a function of being logical, but my heart
tells me it's because we are nerds.
|3.25.08 @ 4:43PM|#
However, NO ONE is truly qualified to rule a nation of
millions of individuals. The dynamics are too great. That why our
own government is wrong 99% of the time. They can only take in so
much information to make decisions and so its pretty much a miracle
if they find the right path to follow. The best we can do is try
and limit the number of wrong decisions they make by taking away
power from them. Its not that engineers are worse at government
than anyone else, its that they are seen as experts sometimes and
allowed to make more decisions because of that, and they are wrong
99% of the time.
Excellent comment. One of the things that continually pushes me
towards minarchist libertarianism are my experiences in control
systems. Malfunctions and unintended behavior are the rule, not the
exception. Expect things to go wrong.
The point being that even well designed control systems fuck up
sometimes, in which case the control system ceases to be well
designed. The prospect of unintended consequences is too great in
an overly complex system. These systems also have a tendency to
lose flexibility with increasing levels of complexity.
And sometimes...shit blows up. When dealing with peoples lives,
money and liberty that prospect is too much risk.
T|3.25.08 @ 5:32PM|#
Speaking as yet another libertarian engineer, I will gladly
accept the responsibility of governing you unruly fuckers. I'd just
like a 'no lynching' clause in the contract. I figure impeachment
is a sure thing, but I'd like to live through the experience.
Honestly, I am the last guy you would want running the country.
Most engineers fall into the category of next-to-last. Don't we
already have enough arrogant bastards convinced of their own
intellectual superiority running things?
|3.25.08 @ 5:45PM|#
While engineers may not have been the best presidents, land surveyors (Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln) haven't done too bad a job.
Mike Laursen|3.25.08 @ 7:18PM|#
One of the things that continually pushes me towards
minarchist libertarianism are my experiences in control systems.
Malfunctions and unintended behavior are the rule, not the
exception. Expect things to go wrong.
I see it this way, too, based on years of software experience.
There's just no way in hell our representatives have the bandwidth
to gather all the data nor the computing power to process all of
the information to do a good job managing everything going on in
our society.
Kolohe|3.25.08 @ 7:18PM|#
robc-
FWIW, I think there's a lot of 'you must unlearn what you have
learned' factor in play - in both directions. My impression is that
the people that had Nuke E degrees seem to have had a harder time
than average with the pipeline. And one of my buddies, who'll
probably be an admiral one day, failed the engineer certification
exam the first time he took it despite being having a nuke e
degree.
Also, the pipeline differences between enlisted and officer are
substantial; the officer side is more theory based, while for
instance the enlisted side tries to get away without ever teaching
calculus.
And I probably won't vote for you :)
|3.25.08 @ 11:52PM|#
I read this article at work the other day. While not directly
applicable it seems to give some insight into potential unexpected
behaviors that the engineering mindset might produce. As a
practicing engineer I say leave it to the politicians. It is the
natural order. Engineers with political skills give me the creeps.
Consider a zebra with spots!
http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jihad.pdf
|3.26.08 @ 8:43AM|#
I suppose it depends on what kind of engineer. I work with Mech E's everyday, and dear God, I haven't met a group of people so enamored with regulations, traditions and habits in my life. If it isn't documented and certified, it doesn't exist. There's zero room for deviation, improvisation or experimentation. It sounds a bit like a libertarian nightmare to me. I'd wager that engineers would rule as utilitarians, which doesn't bode well for liberty.
|3.26.08 @ 10:26AM|#
I should also add to my statements that I think engineers would
make disastrous leaders.
We are doers. It's noble. We should be happy about it, but let's
just leave it at that.
Mike Laursen|3.26.08 @ 10:55AM|#
I work with Mech E's everyday, and dear God, I haven't met a
group of people so enamored with regulations, traditions and habits
in my life. If it isn't documented and certified, it doesn't exist.
There's zero room for deviation, improvisation or
experimentation.
Software Engineers are the opposite. Of course, we Software
Engineers aren't really engineers.
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