Learn how your government works, not how to code a blog
An army of casual coders is the last thing we need
A recent post by Ven Portman is gaining popularity through Hacker News and Twitter. He describes how we have centralized a lot of the key parts of a once open and free internet, and that this centralization leads to bad things, like censorship and an Orwellian state. I believe most of what he writes to be worth reading, but in the section defining solutions, he suggests people stop taking the easy way out, like using sites similar to Medium, and instead learn to code and build things themselves. Here’s a quote:
If you can’t figure out how to make a link to another site without using a button to do it, how the hell are you going to figure out how to create a new Internet where all of the packets are encrypted?
This solution is the equivalent to asking a 3 year old to learn mixed martial arts in order to defend herself against an adult kidnapper.
Yes, people can learn to code. Go to Code Academy and learn some HTML/CSS. Hell, throw some node.js in there while you’re at it. You’ll technically be coding, but it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything remotely complicated or that you’ve somehow looked behind the curtain. Do we really expect the average person to purchase a server from Linode, build out nginx, manually set their firewall and hand code an HTML page simply to share some pics with friends? Oh, and also check back every two months to make sure there’s not some gaping security hole that’s been recently found.
Defeating the surveillance state will not come from amateur developers throwing up shitty, bug riddled code onto Github. It’s going to come from informed, educated people electing informed, educated people. It’s going to come when we stop electing oblivious baby boomers who don’t know what encryption even means, let alone what it does. It’s going to come when kids grow up excited about being involved in politics, instead of entering the real world with zero knowledge of how any of it works. It’s going to come when people stop giving Facebook every ounce of their personal information in exchange for something to kill time at work.
No, don’t learn to code. Leave that to the men and women, like myself, that live, eat and sleep this stuff 24 hours a day. Instead, go to Sunlight Foundation, learn about your legislators and vote out any who support legislation that contradicts the core ideals of this country.
If you really want to make the future a better place, start electing scientists and engineers instead of lawyers.
