HN Explorer

What if hackers ran Washington?

6 points by cpursley ↗ HN
Washington D.C. and state capitals nation-wide have been run by mostly lawyers since, well, the beginning.

This NSA thing, SOPA, drones etc got me thinking.

What would the US and world look like if hackers ran the White House?

29 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 76.9 ms ] thread
lucb1e
Bitcoin would be the national currency.
dbond
A major aim would probably be to abolish currency.
pathy
Back to a bartering system? I don't know about you but I much rather have a currency than having to trade my homegrown tomatoes for my neighbor's wheat.

I mean, currency is a lot more efficient than bartering, I thought hackers liked efficiency?

teawrecks
So you think our current monetary system is the most efficient system possible?
pathy
Probably not, but it sure is more efficient than bartering and if you don't barter then you will have to have some kind of currency.
dbond
Only if you retain the concept of having to buy things.

Removing currency would be a very slow process but once you get past the behaviour and economic issues presented I think this lines up with hacker values quite nicely. Everyone would have the ability to create because they want to not because they need to.

ameister14
That only works post-scarcity, a point that we have not and will not reach.
dbond
Hence the slow process, this is the problem with currency and money in general, by design it can store debt indefinitely allowing profits which is incentive to create scarcity.
ameister14
Except that debt exists without currency, so removing currency won't solve the issue.
dbond
Debt exists because of scarcity. Removal of currency/money and the concept of personal profit can be used to create abundance of our needed resources (food, water and shelter). This isn't magically caused by the removal of currency but by the changes in behaviour that tag along.

In agriculture for example, the current business goals are like any other, the most profit with the least expenditure. In an environment where the concept of profit is foreign the goal becomes how do we feed the most people with the resources available.

This would be a very different environment to what we have now, there would be a whole host of other changes to support this. It would be an extremely long process to ween off the concept of money/debt and create the infrastructure for something like this but I believe it is very possible.

ameister14
Let's say you get rid of currency. What incentive do farmers then have to produce enough food for everyone? How does that produce more water?

Why would the goal become 'how do we feed the most people with the resources available?' Wouldn't it be: 'how can I gain the most advantage from the resources I possess?' With or without currency, that remains the goal.

dbond
Water was just listed as one of the items we need to survive as opposed to something we want, we pretty much already have it in abundance in the first world.

I'll admit I used to have the same view on this, where is the incentive? Why would someone do something without this immediate reward system? But it is this problem which I think would create the best (or at least most interesting) results. Without immediate reward the farmer will stop farming, why should he keep working for others? Agriculture then becomes a problem for society to solve in the most efficient way possible instead of a status quo job for a few individuals. In going back to the original point of this page, imagine the hacker community's response to that, a real, important problem to solve.

So to answer your last question, with the lack of currency/money there is no difference between them, the only form of advantage to be gained is in your social standing (interesting implications on leadership here), using your skills to help others and solve societies problems is your only way to gain any advantage over others.

ameister14
If everyone's goals were pure, you're correct. But if I continued to farm and then caused the people around me to become indebted to me in exchange for the food, then I could perhaps force them to farm for me in order to pay their debts; of course, eating any food would put them farther into debt so they would never get out, but I wouldn't have to farm any more yet would still own everything.

I could enforce this by picking the meanest, biggest people in my town and feeding them in exchange for their protection.

You should remember that prior to the invention of capitalism and profit as a calling in the 19th century, many people in the western world lived like this.

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rytis
Sad thought, but I think they would soon turn into... well, lawyers.
meerita
Probably make a passport would be made online, delivered in your home next day and entering US trough airports will be faster than entering any metro station.
VandyILL
The frustrating thing that I've picked up on in law school is that the adversarial nature of our law system makes lawyers ask what is instead of what can be.

They have to resolve conflicts as they occur within the existing paradigm & very few seem to have any sort of acknowledgement that those paradigms can change and ask questions / seek answers within the existing framework.

gyardley
It'd be a well-meaning technocratic mess - a lot of ambitious plans and actions, but most with unintended consequences that end up being worse than the problems they're trying to fix.
krapp
So, basically like a third Obama term?
dragonwriter
Just like it does now: the people that get to the top of the political system are hackers (or are the public-face partners of hackers), just the domain (people vs. computers) is different.
quackerhacker
I'd actually leave the US.

When I think of hackers, I think of black hats like I once was, and most tech people know that knowledge is power, I think that hackers may justify what the NSA is doing and may take it further. (ex. how far do you track the ip's and associate them with users on a website)

Truth is though, with our generation being technically minded, it's inevitable that some of us will become the people in the background that fund political campaigns. Politicians are just front men with IOU's behind them.

krapp
Hackers built that program and hackers are running it, and hackers are responsible for the pervasive social media/analytics infrastructure that made it possible. Hackers have an ethos but like anyone else, they can put it aside when money, power or principle suits them.
quackerhacker
Of course coders built the programs and networks that made up PRISM, but do you think the PM's and lobbyists that approved the programs were technically minded. The coders just did what they were hired to do.

My take is that the PRISM program could have started as a foreign intelligence program, but was adapted to a domestic one as well. I as a coder who has built web analytic tools before, how do you differentiate from a foreign user or a domestic one? Just because an IP or mac address is located in the US, it doesn't mean the end user is in the US or it's not spoofed.

Our future is not too far fetched than Eagle Eye or Minority Report.

moocow01
- Lots of legislative initiatives would be started, get half way finished and then be subsequently abandoned when the next exciting legislative initiative came along

- All states would be renamed to end in .io or .ly

- Political parties would be formed around programming languages and the mud slinging across parties would be way more dirty

- When the hunger and poverty rates climbed, we'd create an app for that ... problem solved

- Speeches would include swear words to provide emphasis to talking points

- We'd probably think it would be a great idea to collect analytics on uers so we can better understand them and subsequently "improve their user experience"

... Sorry were a smart group of folks but I genuinely think we'd be positively awful at it

ibudiallo
Let me add flame wars to the list.

Also there would be even less females in Washington.

kjs3
Same as it is now. They would communicate and legislate in a vernacular only they understand, adhear to an insular moral code unrecognizable to an outsider, and if you didn't like it, they'd call you a st00pid n00b, persecute you and continue to do whatever the fuck they wanted to.
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