I agree that "the system" has no intrinsic value, and is purely an engineering problem. This is obvious. But this sentiment is often erroneously taken as an argument for naively re-architecting the current system.
Us engineer/programmer types know that the last thing you want to do is a total rewrite of a working system, because its precise setup often contains domain knowledge that we don't have. "I don't know what this piece does, but it's ugly and seems problematic" does not necessarily imply "this piece should be removed or changed using my current level of expertise".
The analogy is not perfect, because civilizations are not really intelligently designed, so they can often contain crud that's just crud, but the same goes for you own body. Do you have the domain knowledge to determine that the appendix does nothing, the little finger is noncritical, and the liver is critical? Do Snowden or Swartz have the domain knowledge of the workings of civilization to make a decision like that for everybody?
It's that kind of naive wholesale re-architecting that dropped the ball on the Congo, Zimbabwe, etc, and caused a hundred million to die by communism.
As much as I think Swartz was right to challenge the rent seekers in science publication, and Snowden was right to undermine the NSA, I think there's really something to be said for being careful with this stuff.
Sure there's a lot of apparent problems in our current civilization, but please consider that we might occupy a relatively optimized position in a sea of dysfunctional possible societies, and that the exact mechanics of that may be nontrivial and beyond the understanding of you or me or any of these other "Generation W" troublemakers (of which I am one). The stakes are high enough that we really ought to be careful.
>Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.
This doesn't seem like rational thought, it seems like endorsement of destructive mob behavior backed by quasi-religious ideals.
Would you recognize naive problematic restructuring when you saw it, or are you just using this sentiment as another soldier in the war against some fixed enemy?
> Do Snowden or Swartz have the domain knowledge of the workings of civilization to make a decision like that for everybody?
They didn't make a decision "for everybody", they just made a decision that happened to affect a lot of people. It is part of the romanticism that surrounds the modern state to assume that every action with implications for a Government must be a decision for everybody. No it isn't. The NSA isn't "everybody". The Obama administration isn't "everybody". The fate of human civilization does not depend, and has never depended, on the actions of one Swartz and one Snowden.
The good thing about changes that take place over generations, like what I was trying to describe above, is that they take a long time. We're talking about 30-50 years here, if not longer. The boomers won't be dead until the 2050s, and it will probably take just as long for someone who grew up worshiping Swartz and Snowden to occupy the White House. As Max Planck said, progress happens one funeral at a time. Guess what, modern medical technology has made funerals rarer than ever before.
One Swartz and one Snowden won't change the world. I'm not even sure whether the kind of behavior they exemplify should be encouraged at all. But the thing is, those leaks weren't one-man attempts to re-architect the USA. Rather, they are symptoms of a wider political and psychological change that has been going on for a couple of decades already, and will likely accelerate whether we like it or not. This is not about some violent revolution, it's about social progress, and progress takes a long time.
Patches are coming. The pull requests won't be as polite as they used to be. Not a single line of code will be taken for granted, not even those written by the BDFL himself. But none of this needs to involve a complete rewrite. Just a series of incremental improvements.
>But the thing is, those leaks weren't one-man attempts to re-architect the US
This is a good point.
The same applies to many other things in history; communism wasn't some kid who thought up a new ideology in his basement and pushed it on everyone else; it took the endorsement of the intellectual elite and a broad movement to make it happen. Still it went badly for billions of people.
Your implication is that this stuff is happening whether we like it or not, and that that somehow invalidates criticism of the naivety of it all. But then you side with it. If it is an inevitable march of history, surely it is as reasonable to criticize it as it is to endorse it, or as futile to endorse as it is to criticize?
The thing is that these broad movements are made up of people like Snowden and Swartz and so on who make things happen because they believe in it, and we do have some control over that. For example, if the international intellectual community had been less naively infatuated with democracy and independence movements, perhaps they would not have pushed so hard on Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo, Zimbabwe and the DRC would be first-world countries instead of hellholes.
If you make the inevitable march of progress cool, it will happen faster, whether it's a good thing or not. If we make reasoned caution and sanity cool, we might get a better outcome for the future of humanity.
This is a good description of the conservative vs liberal mindset, at least one way of looking at it (there are many others, of course).
Conservatives tend to err on the side of caution, aware that many things work well for reasons we're not aware of, so you should respect institutions because they've got experience and longetivity on their side, and the consequences of changing/dismantling them may be far worse than you'd imagine. Humility is good, and don't mess with what works.
Liberals tend to err on the side of improvement, with a belief that we can understand things, and then intelligently change them to make the world a better place. Obviously, this can produce much more positive change, and make the world a far better place... but can also lead to the kind of societal breakdown that conservatives fear.
But don't try mapping this to political parties... they're organizations with agendas, not so philosophical.
Us engineer/programmer types know that the last thing you want to do is a total rewrite of a working system, because its precise setup often contains domain knowledge that we don't have. "I don't know what this piece does, but it's ugly and seems problematic" does not necessarily imply "this piece should be removed or changed using my current level of expertise".
The analogy is not perfect, because civilizations are not really intelligently designed, so they can often contain crud that's just crud, but the same goes for you own body. Do you have the domain knowledge to determine that the appendix does nothing, the little finger is noncritical, and the liver is critical? Do Snowden or Swartz have the domain knowledge of the workings of civilization to make a decision like that for everybody?
It's that kind of naive wholesale re-architecting that dropped the ball on the Congo, Zimbabwe, etc, and caused a hundred million to die by communism.
As much as I think Swartz was right to challenge the rent seekers in science publication, and Snowden was right to undermine the NSA, I think there's really something to be said for being careful with this stuff.
Sure there's a lot of apparent problems in our current civilization, but please consider that we might occupy a relatively optimized position in a sea of dysfunctional possible societies, and that the exact mechanics of that may be nontrivial and beyond the understanding of you or me or any of these other "Generation W" troublemakers (of which I am one). The stakes are high enough that we really ought to be careful.
>Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.
This doesn't seem like rational thought, it seems like endorsement of destructive mob behavior backed by quasi-religious ideals.
Would you recognize naive problematic restructuring when you saw it, or are you just using this sentiment as another soldier in the war against some fixed enemy?