Tom Morris

Keep analysts and VCs out of politics

Okay, first read Keep developers out of politics, please and then read Keep stereotypes of software developers out of politics, please.

I’d suggest, given the arc of the thread thus far, that it would be far more useful to keep the existing political class out of politics. That means lawyers, that means money-men and that sure as fuck means bankers. Software developers are ill-suited to politics? Perhaps I have too much self-interest in perpetuating this stereotype but software developers are, by and by, the group of easily identifiable people I know that are least likely to fall into the ‘greedy asshole’ category.

And greedy assholes are the problem. To understand the problem with politics, don’t look so much at ideology, look at greed. You want to understand the bailouts? Greed. Want to understand the lack of a decent regulatory framework around the financial sector that led to worldwide economic collapse? Greed. The response to Deepwater Horizon? Greed. You go to Westminster or Washington and you’ll find fucktons of greedy assholes being fed bullshit ideological lies sweetend with bullshit pay-offs by other greedy assholes. And, if those people were in the IT industry, they’d be the suits. Or, these days, they’d be the assholes in suits who don’t wear ties to look cool and trendy.

However crazy Richard Stallman gets, I’d much rather have him serving in US politics than some fucking Gartner analyst. He may be nutty and do embarrassing and impractical things, but the Richard Stallmans of this world are far more genuine and non-asshole-ish - even when they are being assholes! At least they are being assholes for a good cause, rather than just being assholes to further their own greedy self-interest. Richard Stallman is being an asshole so that you can have a free and open source copy of Emacs. The fucking legislature are being assholes so that they can get a handjob from some big business lobbyist in a vague and unfulfilled promise to bring jobs.

And, to be honest, anyone who has done web stuff knows about governance. If you are building social systems, you know what huge differences very small changes can bring. Write the copy slightly differently and you get a huge reduction in trolls. Think Slashdot’s karma system. Think of the process of trying hard to build niche community sites that are filled with good content rather than assholes. While the social media people and their corporate overlords are happy to pull a Wordpress or phpBB thing off the shelf and stick it up, we know that sometimes you have to put some effort in if you want to get the reward out. Again, think Hacker News or Stack Overflow. The economics and political science crowd have discovered this kind of thing recently with all the behavioural economics “nudge” stuff.

Given Douglas Adams’ very simple rule that the people who are best qualified to rule are the people least desiring of power, I think software developers are a pretty good fit. We’ve got a public relations man in No. 10 at the moment. Yes, David Cameron is formerly of the PR industry. Compare: software developers are paid to tell you the truth. And we try to not hesitate in that task. If you ask me what I think of a particular database or programming language, I’m not going to beat around the bush. David Cameron is a PR man. A man whose former profession is nothing more than the task of lying for money.

This is nothing personal or partisan about Cameron, but how can I believe anything he says when his former profession is lying for money? How could I believe Blair with the omnipresent Alistair Campbell whispering in his ear? Our leaders are either turning into celebs - Schwarzenegger - or being surrounded by such a huge layer of PR bullshit as to insulate them from reality, and to free them from the petty demands of truth and reality. This is no grand or original observation: it is simply cold, hard fact. And what are the results? Crap. Government seems to think that issuing press releases is making policy, giving press conferences is implementing policy - and the actual policy itself is being written behind the scenes by lobbyists.

The governments of the Western world have brought us the Digital Economy Bill, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, crazy fucking libel laws that allow assholes to persecute our fellow geek brothers and sisters (the Singh v. British Chriopractic Association case) for attempting to bring scientific understanding to these idiots. Our governments are ripping up funding for basic academic research and replacing it with bullshit like the Research Excellence Framework.

And rather than stopping to realise the craziness of all this, they seek to impose it on everyone through international bodies: through the IMF, through the WTO, WIPO, the UN, through bullshit trade agreements like ACTA.

Our governments have padded their own nests in creating voting systems that are totally unfair, outdated and more suited to a time when it was only the lord of the manor who could vote and not the servants or peasants around him. They’ve promised change alright - for decades. Do we believe them? Occasionally. We are then promptly disappointed.

Now we have governments who, to fix the problems caused by their asshole friends in the banking industry are taking it out on the worst off in society.

My question is just this: where are you going to find more concern about this? At some hoity-toity analysts and VCs conference like Web 2.0 or LeWeb or at a hackers conference? Just what have our industry’s money-men done about this? Sweet fuck-all, it seems. Silicon Valley, and its offshots, is filled with a rampant and totally fucking stupid technolibertarianism. They’re all off in Ayn Rand la-la land, believing that if we can just privatise the roads, that’ll sort everything out. Yeah, assholes. Yes, yes, you can go on about boring things like the Internet being created by the US government under DARPA, and the public funding given to CERN, and how much of all this is public infrastructure, about the key role that universities have been playing in fostering startup cultures (MIT, Stanford, Cambridge etc.). You’ll just get back a load of Ron Paul propaganda and exhortations to read Atlas Shrugged.

But, come back down to earth. Software engineers seem to be much less assholish than that. There’s a reason why we try and keep things like BarCamp free and low-cost. Because we’re not all rich assholes. The Web 2.0 Summit costs four thousand dollars. BarCamps are free. The BarCamp crowd mostly aren’t rich assholes. They’re people who are just trying to do useful and fun things with the skills they’ve got.

What makes software development slightly different is that it is a relatively creative act - not the only creative act (some people, for some reason, seem to think that if we say building software is a creative act, we are saying that it is the only creative act. I do not know where this stereotype comes from, but people have made a lot of hay out of it.), but a creative act. Those who are involved in it get to spend time solving relatively interesting problems and are reasonably well paid for it. Admittedly, you have to spend all day in front of a computer. But you aren’t spending most of that time answering e-mails from assholes.

I can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would want to exclude software developers from politics. They are genuinely some of the least assholeish people I know. Oh, wait, I do know. Certain existing powers would much rather have our government made up of easily-bribed, industry-lobbyist-fed assholes who will preserve their comfy status quo and bend over backwards the next time Goldman Sachs wants to run our economies into the ground and walk away with a giant fucking bailout.

Software developers: we may not be pretty or be dynamic and exciting speakers, but we try hard not to be assholes. That is a huge asset in a world run by assholes.

BBC muddle graduate tax discussion

I was just listening to the BBC Best of Today podcast. God, they sure fucked up their discussion of the graduate tax proposals.

Basically, I’ll explain the background. University education used to be like the NHS - free for the student, paid for out of general taxation.

This has changed over time: initally, students had to pay a tuition fee which capped out at about a grand a year. The last government introduced “top-up” fees which increased the fees from just over a grand to over 3,000 pounds. As I’ve repeatedly remarked: that’s not a top-up, that’s a refill. But that’s beside the point.

But, say the Lib Dems, this is unfair: you have students who go on and become city bankers and they have to pay as much as the social workers and teachers and so on. If you are making a low income even though you are providing a valuable service, you are still getting grounded with the same amount for student loans. Instead of this, we should have a graduate tax.

First off, I don’t see how a graduate tax follows: a much simpler way, as far as I can tell, is to make it so that those socially valuable professions are given a grant by government to pay back their employees student loans with. So the graduate who goes off and becomes a nurse or a copper or a teacher or whatever it is that the government puts in this category would be given a special fund which they could use to pay off the student loans. This would also mean that the government couldn’t sneak in a student fee hike in while they are changing the system (oh, just watch ‘em).

Anyway, that’s not what I found annoying about the BBC reporting. The got a Lib Dem MP on - Tim Farron - who explained that in an ideal world (i.e. one which hadn’t been clusterfucked by greedy banker assholes), the state would pay for all higher education out of general taxation. Indeed, this was Lib Dem and even Tory party policy last time around. I remember Howard or one of the other pre-Cameron Tory leaders campaigning on reduce-places-and-drop-tuition-fees back in 2004 (was it?).

He was interrupted by the presenter who said something to the effect of: what, you mean non-graduates should pay for graduates?

The presenter had earlier said that this used to be the key point of the debate - whether non-graduates should pay for graduates - and it had been decided in favour of graduates paying for their education rather than non-graduates.

This is completely moronic. That’s not the only choice. There are this other rather large chunk of taxpayers in Britain that are neither graduates or non-graduates. They aren’t even people at all. They are called corporations. Why not a little raise in corporation tax to subsidise education? I’m not advocating it - but I’m saying that if we are trying to find a way of funding higher education, the choice is not simply between direct tuition fees/graduate tax and “taxing the non-graduates” (which, you know, isn’t strictly true: if you take money from general taxation, graduates pay that too - just like healthy people pay for sick people to be treated on the NHS). There are other ways you can raise money for something. There are voluntary taxes - in the sense of the tax being on a product that you can choose to not purchase.

The government could come up with some other crazy way of funding higher education. Personally, I would quite like a special tax on public ignorance: basically, just like we tax cigarettes and alcohol, we need to figure out ways of taxing ignorance to show our social disapproval of it. We already have the National Lottery which is a state-run ignorance tax, but I can think of two more. Firstly, a dramatic tax hike on quackery. All those homeopaths, chiropractors and other quack medicine shitheads - tax them into oblivion. If they shut up shop as a result, that’s fine.

Here’s another rather more poetic tax on ignorance: an ignorant statement tax. Basically, you’d have on-the-spot fines for saying something so fucking wrong it hurts. It wouldn’t be for anyone though: just people “in public life”. Politicians, journalists, celebrities, advertisers: if you say something that is demonstrably wrong and if a reasonable person in your position should know better, you have to chuck five hundred quid into the kitty. That would go to help pay for the next generation to not be as fucking ignorant as you. It is a voluntary tax too: if you don’t want to be taxed, stop saying ignorant shit and read a fucking book once in a while. It would also get rid of all the bloody trolls that write for newspaper opinion columns. It would rid the BBC News website of republished phony PR-funded studies and stupid surveys.

Ignorance taxes would just be government replicating a successful model from the private sector: casino gambling.