Hack Brexit

Now Hack Brexit is a few months old, the time has come to share what we have been doing.

So what exactly is Hack Brexit?

Well firstly it isn’t the code name for an Anonymous mission to hack into official Parliamentary records and reverse the result of the EU referendum. It is a collective of developers, activists, product managers, data scientists and systems architects creating tech solutions that drive positive actions and dialogue post referendum.

Those of us within Hack Brexit have different reasons for our involvement. For me, the referendum was an enormous diversion from the discussions society should be having. It was a gigantic Kansas City Shuffle.

What the future holds

The technological change that is coming over the next few decades will change everything. Nothing will be the same. We’ll have a self-sustaining fully-automated economy, artificial general intelligence, life by design, and much more.

What’s the limit on building things today? It’s mostly the engineering designs (limited by our knowledge) and manpower. Remove humans from every level of the industry. If you have computers trillions of times more powerful than we have today that design the robots that build the robots who build the things we consume, then cost ceases being a relevant factor. Price is meaningless. Robots and computers don’t get paid; they don’t need HR or retirement or insurance. You can literally grow at an exponential rate.

We can’t even imagine a post scarcity economy where we can build things from the molecules up and where we make machines orders of magnitude more intelligent than ourselves.

I highly doubt we’ll need politics anything like we do today. Why have politicians when you are all linked to a system that instantly knows the wishes of all people? It can assess the digital psychological copies of all personalities of all humans, simulate a quadrillion outcomes of those actions, weigh all consequences of the general desires of the public then issue guidance based on those actions. Then the real public can assess that recommendation and make a decision. In nanoseconds.

If humanity doesn’t balls it up first.

Some have taken it for granted this is an inevitability, but is it? Surely the ones who can make it happen need to do so ASAP, and for the benefit of those that can’t.

Right now politics and government should be focused on solving people’s collective problems and preparing for the future. The current discourse utterly fails at this.

This is my rationale for Hack Brexit.

So what are we up to?

Apologies again to those hoping for tales of cyber black ops orchestrated from concrete bunkers with field agents charming their way into highly secure private networks.

We held a hackathon about a month after the referendum to bring people together to create tech solutions that drive dialogue, unity and positive action. There was a lot of interest from within the tech sector, as most of its participants are aware of the existential threat that abolishing free movement of labour would cause (perhaps more than any other sector). It also has more than its fair share of dreamers and idealists, which I believe is no bad thing (having been a pretty cynical neg-head in the past).

During the hackathon weekend, ten open-source projects were designed to create a more open dialogue between the opposing sides of the Brexit argument. You can see those projects here.

Building on that momentum a decision was made to create an open-source accelerator programme for two of these projects. Run it for three months with continuing support from ThoughtWorks, Code First: Girls and We Rock Tech. Hold sessions every fortnight at ThoughtWorks’ office in Soho to bang out some code, and create a meetup group to attract more devs and do-ers to the cause. So far so good.

The two projects chosen were What the Fact — a fact checking browser extension that flags up any suspicious looking statements within the article you’re reading — and Ministers Under the Influence — a website that makes MP’s lobbying data easily available to the public, in order to track spheres of influence and encourage transparency within policy-making. I’ll deep dive into both projects within separate posts.

We’ve been chosen for this year’s MozFest, the world’s biggest open internet festival, which is awesome news, and we plan to develop a pipeline of other projects that will bring society together and solve many of the issues facing politics and government today.

If any of this interests you then we’re always looking for more collaborators. Best way to get involved would be joining our meetup group.

Please do come along to one of our sessions, the invitation is there for everyone who wants to work towards a fairer, more open and forward-looking society. Plus the food’s pretty good too ;)