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In 2004, I'm voting 'Hacker.' Here's why you should too! By David Coursey, AnchorDesk January 24, 2001 9:00 PM PT URL: http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2678186,00.html?chkpt=zdhpnews02 It's time to organize, and you can be among the first to join in. What America needs -- right now -- is something I'm calling the "Hacker Party," modeled after the European Greens. Of course, it won't be called the Hacker Party, though it might grab more attention if it were. Instead, it will have a more serious name appropriate to its very legitimate purpose -- to unite people who care about how technology is used and abused. While the Greens started as a radical environmental party before going mainstream, my Hacker Party will be about the promotion of technology and its responsible use. Since it's clear our two existing parties don't understand technology and the role it can play in solving many important problems, it's time for technical people -- like you -- to unite and take responsibility. In so doing, the party could empower our engineering minds to take an even greater role in making our nation great. Too often, technologists have been pushed aside by politicians. My idea is that the technically astute -- in all walks of life -- can drastically change the existing political order. THE HACKER PARTY PLATFORM would be that technology should be used to solve many problems -- especially those caused by technology itself. This would be a party of hard science, hard research and hard choices, charged with protecting our families, nation and planet in ever more complex times. The one-sentence version of the Hacker platform is to provide equal access to the benefits of technology for everyone and to protect them from its abuse. This platform sounds simple but it's also profound. I'm not talking about the computer-age equivalent of "a chicken it every pot" -- well, not just. The platform would describe a commitment to give every American the full benefit of medical technology, for example. All Americans deserve the same access to the miracles of science. And if the ones we have can't be provided to all, then the goal must be to find better solutions that can. This is the party of education and training and of no easy outs. This is the party that stands for returning inventors to the stature they once enjoyed and of knocking the lawyers down a notch. This is the party of do-ers, not sue-ers. This requires a commitment to interactive education that gives every learner -- of all ages -- access to our best instructional techniques. It means reasonable privacy protection and an end to spam and misleading online business practices. It also requires finding a real balance between pro-business and pro-social policies, which the current political environment usually positions as mutually exclusive. IN THE BEGINNING, the Hacker Party could exist within the existing two-party system, uniting Republicans and Democrats around a common approach to solving problems. For this reason, it's probably best for the party not to take sides in some issues. Like the American labor movement, as compared to the European unionists, it would be based not on ideology but on pragmatism, focusing on practical solutions to real problems. This "if-then" approach could work on issues like: The death penalty. The Hacker Party has no stand on the death penalty, but does support steps to use every technical means to insure that only guilty people are executed. This means better evidence collection and processing, but it also means an end to innocent people being wrongly put to death. Gun control. The Hacker Party would support technology to make firearms as safe as possible while limiting the intrusion of the safety devices. Welfare reform. Technology can reduce welfare fraud and make sure benefits get to people who need them. And the information economy needs trained workers so badly that we're importing them from overseas. It seems like we can do so much better in training millions of underemployed Americans as systems engineers, LAN administrators and for a variety of entry-level IS positions. The leadership of the Hacker Party should come from the trenches, not the boardrooms. Silicon Valley is rife with people willing to imagine and promote anything in order to make a buck -- how else to explain the dot.com boom and bust we're experiencing. BILL GATES is probably not a good leader for our party either, although he could certainly fund our efforts out of the rounding error on his billions and some people, like ZDNet's Lee Schlesinger believe he has excellent qualifications. Which, in comparison to Ross Perot or Steve Forbes is doubtless true. And, please oh please, keep Ralph Nader as far from this endeavor as possible. As an interim choice for party leadership, I'd probably want someone like Tom Campbell, the Silicon Valley Republican who yielded his congressional seat in a losing bid for the U.S. Senate. Another possible leader is Jim Barksdale, the former Netscape boss. Venture capitalist John Doerr would be a remarkable leader. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We -- the technologically literate -- are this country's best and brightest. But we have yet to commit ourselves to solving the real problems our democracy faces. These challenges seem beyond the capabilities of the existing two parties to address. So what say we create a third? Do you agree that it's time for our nation's technology elite to organize and take a more active role in addressing the great issues of the day? Or do you think this is a specious, if not fruitless, call to action. TalkBack to me. And be sure to take our QuickPoll below. Should technology-literate Americans unite to make better use of technology in solving our nation's problems? Yes -- I'd be willing to sign up No -- Technology people are the problem, not the solution

-- Anonymous, January 25, 2001

Answers

There is nothing new under the sun. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The first time something like this was tried it was by the Encyclopaedists in France in the late 1700s.

In the early 1930s there was a brief boomlet for something called "technocracy" that very closely resembles this suggestion. It actually captured a lot of attention for a couple of years before it faded into deep obscurity.

The Natural Law Party has whiffs of the same sort of ideas, but they are saddled with too close associations with Transcendental Meditation, so they will never fly. Or should that be "never levitate?"

-- Anonymous, January 25, 2001

"never levitate".........LOLOL!!

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2001