> I hear so many bizarre technological “solutions” to what are ultimately policy issues.
Tech is empowering, much moreso than playing politics.
Consider something like the Kafkaesque nightmare that is applying for (and keeping) food stamps. It doesn't need to be complicated (nor should it be!), but you can either try to convince elected officials to make the poor a priority and fix the process or roll up your sleeves and write a script to complete the forms in triplicate, generate mailing labels with delivery confirmation, remind users of deadlines and pull phone records to prove the social worker never called like they said they did in the denial letter.
Or you could petition, harass, bribe and cajole your way into enacting change, and have it all overturned with a change in administration.
In some part these technical solutions exist to fix people problems. Look at the internet itself-- where problems exist (a country's politicians/dictator makes the nation unroutable), you don't wait for a coup, you route around it.
But also in some part these solutions are just modern rent-seeking, so...
> Or you could petition, harass, bribe and cajole your way into enacting change, and have it all overturned with a change in administration.
This is the reason why technological solutions are popular among the Silicon Valley crowd. No matter what, political solutions are plagued by human emotion and self-interest, and thus they become sticky, "corrupt", and slow. Technological solutions are subversive of that structure at the least, and a force multiplier in others.
The computer will generally do what you tell it to do. You can spend hours of effort on something and get a deterministic result that will do the thing. You can spend your whole life in politics and get nothing out of it because the entrenched power structures won't let it happen.
More technology to process forms just enables the bureaucracy to create more forms, in the same way that computer programs have gotten more fat off of the increased power and capability of modern devices. It makes the process shitty for everybody else who don't want to pay for, can't pay for, or aren't covered by the nifty tech. Exhibit A being TurboTax.
Technology is a band-aid, not a solution, and technology can also be used to make progress towards solving the problem decay, or actively worse.
Tech is empowering, much moreso than playing politics.
Consider something like the Kafkaesque nightmare that is applying for (and keeping) food stamps. It doesn't need to be complicated (nor should it be!), but you can either try to convince elected officials to make the poor a priority and fix the process or roll up your sleeves and write a script to complete the forms in triplicate, generate mailing labels with delivery confirmation, remind users of deadlines and pull phone records to prove the social worker never called like they said they did in the denial letter.
Or you could petition, harass, bribe and cajole your way into enacting change, and have it all overturned with a change in administration.
In some part these technical solutions exist to fix people problems. Look at the internet itself-- where problems exist (a country's politicians/dictator makes the nation unroutable), you don't wait for a coup, you route around it.
But also in some part these solutions are just modern rent-seeking, so...