Without stealing too much from President Obama, I’d like to suggest that we are the wonks we’ve been waiting for.
Appendix A. A Special Note: Dear Programmer
“It circulates intelligence of a commercial, political, intellectual, and private nature, with incredible speed and regularity. It thus administers, in a very high degree, to the comfort, the interests, and the necessities of persons, in every rank and station of life. It brings the most distant places and persons, as it were, in contact with each other; and thus softens the anxieties, increases the enjoyments, and cheers the solitude of millions of hearts.”
Six thousand years ago, there was a professional class of people that had a better relationship with information than everybody else. The professional scribe, armed with the ability to read and write, had a better ability to figure out the world than anybody else. Scribes became more than just stenographers for the courtrooms of power; they explored the sciences, becoming mathematicians, scientists, architects, and physicians. For millennia, the scribe wasn’t just a professional class, it was the backbone of civilization.
Through the development of the printing press, and a global push for basic literacy, the scribe class became obsolete. Knowing how to read and write wasn’t a trade secret for a professional class—it was a necessary asset for economic survival. Scribes went extinct, and were replaced in society by journalists, who had marginally better abilities to read and write, to preserve the link between the people and the truth.
But our romantic idea of the journalist speaking truth to power has now gone all but extinct. As our media companies have consolidated and sought shareholder returns over civic responsibility, there’s not much left for the investigative reporter; local newspapers just don’t have the budget for investigative reporting, and larger media companies are making too much money peddling affirmation over information.
The invention of the printing press brought with it the Protestant Reformation—a democratization of the people’s relationship with God. Once the Bible could be purchased by the middle class, every man, in the eyes of Martin Luther, could become his own priest. Today, the invention of the Internet has democratized information such that professional journalists alone cannot own the relationship with the facts anymore.
Today, programmers are the new scribes. Whether it is the developers at Google, determining which search results are accurate for a particular query; the developers at Microsoft, building the browser that most of us use; the developers at Apple, building the latest phones so that we can have a printing press in our pockets; or the developers at Facebook, figuring out which of our friends are the most relevant to us—the developers build the lenses that the rest of us look through to get our information.
This book’s agenda is to help people make more sense of the world around them by encouraging them to tune into the things that matter most and to tune out the things that make them sick. The ones who can link the public with the truth most effectively today aren’t journalists, they’re developers. As the digital divide continues to close, and as a generation of children grows up knowing how to use an iPad from the age of two, developers must take the mantle of scribe seriously and responsibly.
The opportunities for developers to make a difference are unparalleled. The self-driving cars being engineered at companies like Volkswagen and Google aren’t just novel inventions that allow us to watch movies on our way to work; they’re life-saving devices. The self-driving car promises a future in which drunk driving deaths no longer happen.
The World Bank has opened most of its data to the public, hoping that developers can find more effective ways for the organization to distribute financial and medicinal aid to developing nations.
Code for America is creating an army of developers to create technology that helps the government provide cheaper, more transparent, and more reliable services. In its first year, it managed to create new ways for civic leaders to work with one another in Philadelphia and Seattle, and provided more educational transparency to the city of Boston. Through its Civic Commons project, it’s helping municipalities work together to lower the costs of the software they procure by connecting the cities together to share.
Just after the devastating earthquakes in 2010, I hosted a “Hack for Haiti” event at the Sunlight Foundation. In just 48 hours, a small group of developers at a company in Washington called Intredia developed software that allowed relief workers on the ground to translate Creole into English without the need for an Internet connection.
Most developers haven’t taken this new responsibility to heart. A half-century ago, the brightest minds of the generation were working on putting a man on the moon. Today, the 20-something research scientist and data team lead for Facebook, Jeff Hammerbacher, put it best: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”[94]
If you’re a developer, you can do more than this: you can solve problems. With the right data, and working with the right people, you can find efficient ways to connect vaccines with the people who need them the most, and prevent them from being wasted on the people who need them the least. You can find ways to close the gap between the reality-based community, and the folks stuck in epistemic loops, by linking them more closely to the levers of power in their community.
My plea to you is that you take your role in society seriously. Find an issue you care about: the environment, cancer, space exploration, education, rewiring communities, pet adoption—anything—and dedicate some portion of your time to finding new ways to put your skills to use in that community.
You needn’t ask for permission to do this. Do not wait for a nonprofit or advocacy group to ask you donate your time. While it’s useful to partner with organizations, it’s likely that they’re more interested in your skills to help them fundraise than they are to solve problems. Instead, find ways to interview and understand experts in the field, and then invent new ways to solve problems big and small. The best ideas do not rely on a government’s or organization’s permission or compliance for implementation. The best ideas provide irrefutable insight and solve problems.
The lean startup world that many technology-focused people find themselves in usually starts with a business-oriented cofounder, and a technology-oriented cofounder. To make an interesting social contribution, try partnering up with a journalist. Cynicism aside, there are still a few good reporters working in the world, who know how to ask the right questions and get the most out of the data that you can process.
There are networks of journalists looking for developers across the country. Check out the organization Hacks/Hackers, which is attempting to do just that: link great developers with great investigative reporters to combine the best of both worlds. Watch the work of the Knight Foundation, too. They’re investing millions of dollars in reinventing media for the digital age.
Keep in mind that this isn’t a call for you to build apps for your favorite nonprofit. Unless you’re willing to support and maintain each application, and help constantly ensure its usage and adoption, you’re wasting your time. Your nonprofit likely doesn’t have the kind of resources or knowledge it takes to ensure success. Rather, it’s a call for you to solve problems using your skills.
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http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-business/why-this-tech-bubble-is-different-20110415-1dhbm.html#ixzz1YEPeAxNW