| "You can't make people care." Not until they've personally been hurt by something. Unfortunately I can't recall who said this, it was the beginning of a tech talk and it made something instantly click for me. We have almost no way to influence both politicians and corporations because an individual informed vote gets lost in the avalanche of votes by people who don't care. The biggest lie a few hundred years ago was that "all men are created equal" told to the general population by people who owned slaves. The biggest lie in our generation is that we have democracy. 1) It's impossible to vote for what you really want because the choice is restricted to predefined options - political parties are only a few points in a highly dimensional space representing what people actually want. 2) Everyone votes on everything and every vote has the same weight. It's impossible to target your vote to one issue you researched deeply - it'll be lost in the noise of people who are voting about something completely unrelated but their vote picks a party which in turn affects your issue. 3) Corporations, especially in tech, have just as much influence as the government and they're little dictatorships. Not even their workers can influence their decisions directly. |