Does Brexit show us how poor we are at making informed choices — and can we learn something from GIT?

The recent referendum in the UK on whether the country should remain a part of the European Union has highlighted many divisions across many fault lines, but the thing that stood out for me was howpoorly informed the entire debate was — on both sides.

The leave campaign used outright lies and misinformation to convince people that all their problems were the fault of immigrants whilst the remain campaign tried to convince people to vote remain with the fear of the impact to the economy — an economy that was already failing most people in the country.

So the vote happened and the country woke with the mother of all hangovers wondering what the hell happened last night. Very quickly the leave campaign backtracked, the Daily Mail started printing stories about the negative effects of leaving — prompting many readers to ask why they weren’t told this before the vote, and journalists scurried around interviewing bemused ‘leavers’ now claiming to regret their decisions, not actually expecting the vote to go the way it did.

What was lacking from all of this was any real analysis of the impact of the vote, in either direction. Nobody on either side seemed have any credible data to back up their claims and no real analysis seems to have taken place. Why not? Were the number of variables just too great for deep blue to process? Is our economy so complex and unpredictable that no modelling could have been done? Maybe it was — or maybe people were just sick of listening to experts?

It got me pondering the future of politics. Our world feels more complex and confusing than ever. The old narratives of good vs evil that the media used to cling onto have been shattered by wars where nobody is ‘good’ and where politics seems so disconnected from our lives and powerless in the face of globalised capitalism that politicians don’t know who to blame anymore. The rich are bad, but we need them. The poor need help but they are clearly not trying hard enough. There aren’t any jobs — but the economy is growing, unemployment is down but food banks have never been busier. Immigrants are bad, but we need to help refugees…don’t we…or do we…?

Perhaps it’s time to admit defeat. Maybe the decisions we are faced with are just too complex and confusing for our puny distracted minds. Maybe it’s time to hand responsibility for our economy and the distribution of wealth over to the algorithms? Sure — they mess up from time to time and wipe millions of the price of stocks — but only for a few milliseconds — and who cares about stock prices anyway? Do stock prices get you a job? Do stock prices put food on the table? Companies don’t go under because of their stock value — CEO’s and board members get fired, sorry — resign — because of it, but nobody is shedding a tear given the severance packages they tend to negotiate.

What if we open sourced our politics? What if we treated it like version control — what if we could all make pull requests to the algorithms to tweak the distribution of wealth for instance? We need more money for healthcare, fine — make a pull request — get it peer reviewed and if enough people like it, the change gets merged. If it doesn’t work — we revert the change and try something else. Our current politics is too slow. We need Lean politics. We need to create Minimum Viable Policies that we do some user testing on, get their feedback, refine and rebuild.

Our current political systems don’t work. They are outdated and too easily corrupted. Whatever we do next — we at least need version control so we can see who made that stupid commit and messed up our economy. Oh — it was Thatcher and Reagan — will somebody please revert their changes!