Thanks. But I believe that it would be more beneficial to de-gamify politics than to get elected to any particular position. One person can only do so much. The ideal situation would be to reboot the entire government, elect new people in every position, all at once. I think it's possible, actually. But it would take a ground swell movement. I've shared the idea on how to do this with some friends, and they like the idea, but it's not quite ready for public consumption. If you like I might write about it here.
It's not just about elections. Hackers have a much bigger role to play in modern civics, in my opinion, than they currently have. We need to be writing open-source software platforms for city, state and even federal governments and putting them on github. It's time for software to eat the bureaucracy. We need to have software that's ready to use, free, and with all the features we, as technologically enlightened citizens, know that it needs. Good technology would lessen the leverage bureaucrats wield over elected officials, because it would make them easier to hold accountable and to replace.
(We could write open-source banking platforms too, while we're at it. The software could have a "transparency slider" that banks could set according to their whim. But more importantly, it would reduce the barrier to entry for new, small banks to arise and compete with the incumbents.)
There is one policy change I think is very important: put limits on the complexity of law, and end what I call "The Tyranny of Complexity" (a take on Mill's "Tyranny of the Majority"). Complexity lies at the heart of many of our political and societal ills, perhaps most directly expressed as the brutality of our justice system, a system that punishes you for years whether or not you are found guilty. But complexity is also the enemy of transparency, which hurts accountability and prevents the voting public from being informed. One simple measure, at the federal level, would be to put a hard upper-bound on the size of the United States Code - and require all new bills to be written out in longhand by the congressperson proposing the bill. The law of the land is too important to delegate the writing of them to underlings. Our laws should be short, to the point, and meaningful - and writing them out, pen on paper, helps to ensure that. Word-processing and hired help have made our body of law so unwieldy and impossible to comply with that hardly any law makers read the bills that they vote on. A similar rule can and should be instituted on the state and local level.
I'd be interested, public or private. I'm working on such an idea myself, though as a person, I'm ill-suited for actually getting it to work.
> Hackers have a much bigger role to play in modern civics, in my opinion, than they currently have.
Than they've currently taken. They do. This is one of the reasons "everyone should learn programming" is actually a good policy; even if they're not experts, they can take data and draw conclusions.
Another thing we need is stronger collaboration infrastructure. The NSA got themselves that shiny new Utah datacenter which can apparently hold all the data in the world. (That's probably an exaggeration.) Why wasn't that money spent on improving citizens' ability to communicate with each other? Our discussion tools are extremely weak. I wish I could give better specs, but if I could, I'd be building it.
> We need to be writing open-source software platforms for city, state and even federal governments and putting them on github.
Being a politician doesn't actually preclude you from doing this.
> There is one policy change I think is very important: put limits on the complexity of law, and end what I call "The Tyranny of Complexity" (a take on Mill's "Tyranny of the Majority").
I think it'd be interesting if someone could figure out an algorithmic way to rate the complexity of laws. I recently came up with the notion of a body that would at least garbage-collect law by checking for rulings of unconstitutionality and just writing a repeal for submission, but I assume the idea has problems I haven't figured out yet.
Without such a standard, it'd be difficult to objectively determine over-complexity.
It's not just about elections. Hackers have a much bigger role to play in modern civics, in my opinion, than they currently have. We need to be writing open-source software platforms for city, state and even federal governments and putting them on github. It's time for software to eat the bureaucracy. We need to have software that's ready to use, free, and with all the features we, as technologically enlightened citizens, know that it needs. Good technology would lessen the leverage bureaucrats wield over elected officials, because it would make them easier to hold accountable and to replace.
(We could write open-source banking platforms too, while we're at it. The software could have a "transparency slider" that banks could set according to their whim. But more importantly, it would reduce the barrier to entry for new, small banks to arise and compete with the incumbents.)
There is one policy change I think is very important: put limits on the complexity of law, and end what I call "The Tyranny of Complexity" (a take on Mill's "Tyranny of the Majority"). Complexity lies at the heart of many of our political and societal ills, perhaps most directly expressed as the brutality of our justice system, a system that punishes you for years whether or not you are found guilty. But complexity is also the enemy of transparency, which hurts accountability and prevents the voting public from being informed. One simple measure, at the federal level, would be to put a hard upper-bound on the size of the United States Code - and require all new bills to be written out in longhand by the congressperson proposing the bill. The law of the land is too important to delegate the writing of them to underlings. Our laws should be short, to the point, and meaningful - and writing them out, pen on paper, helps to ensure that. Word-processing and hired help have made our body of law so unwieldy and impossible to comply with that hardly any law makers read the bills that they vote on. A similar rule can and should be instituted on the state and local level.