[benwerd]

Wow. I hadn't thought of it in these terms, but you're absolutely right: we're one of the few industries that doesn't contribute much in the way of lobbying or other contributions, so we lose out unless we fall in line. It's shocking - our government is a protection scam.

It strikes me that this is a great opportunity for technologists to get into politics. It's been done before, of course, with semi-lighthearted endeavors like the Pirate Party. But there's certainly room for a new kind of democratic party that works like the web and espouses the combination of social libertarianism and progressive business that so many of us are behind. Human society is a complex system, made up of graphs and dependencies; there are so many political approaches we can apply to that idea.