[update: Well, I was wrong! But I think this is still an interesting read, and there are a few aspects I intend to follow up wrt proportional representation, how the coalition deal was a great political "hack" (and how the unexpected hack destroyed my analysis and just about everyone else's), the highly Liberal nature of this new "Conservative Led" government, and a few interesting things I noticed in the ongoing (mainstream and social) media coverage.]
Here’s the (much) longer version of mythreetweets from yesterday.
I have been watching the UK election with some fascination since the results indicated a “hung” parliament. My knowledge of British Politics is scant – it simply hasn’t been all that interesting up till now for those of us with no British heritage (unlike the majority of my countrymen, my closest non-Kiwi relatives are Americans). But things have become very interesting indeed now that there is chance for massive political reform in the oldest democracy in the world.
I speak, of course, of the potential for the Britain to switch to Proportional Representation, which is, to quote Joe Biden, a big f’king deal.
The difference between “First Past the Post” and true Proportional Representation is like Dawn and Day. The Tories are right to fear PR – it’s a massive step towards ending generations of electoral injustice that have traditionally worked in their favour, and will do so even more if they get a chance to re-gerrymander the electoral map (Note, the British gerrymandering in recent elections has been far less egregious than it used to be long ago, it’s not a super-partisan process as they have in the USA). To do so is actually one of their election promises, although their phrasing of that particular promise is something along the lines of “cut the cost of Westminster on the ordinary citizen by reducing the number of MPs”.
Even if it is done 100% fairly, redrawing the electoral boundaries won’t end the structural unfairness for long, and neither will it end members of the Duopoly suppressing 3rd party chances in the more obvious way: by warning the voters that a vote for a 3rd party is effectively a vote in favor of the other half of the Duopoly – thus compelling voters to vote tactically for the lesser evil, rather than strategically for the party they actually want to support.
The LibDem leadership surely knows this. They are not stupid. In fact, although I’d never even heard of him before, five minutes of listening to Lord Menzies on the BBC website this morning was enough to convince me that he is probably one of the smartest guys in the house.
Meanwhile, their deputy leader, Vince Cable, appears to be an economics wizard – he probably has folks like Stiglitz, Roubini, Summers, Geithner and Volcker on his speed-dial already, just waiting for his chance to get stuck in and help save our global macro-economic petard from the misdeeds of the last decade (or arguably, the last century).
And of course, Clegg himself appears to be pretty sharp. I am going to go out on a limb here, and extrapolate that the rest of the LibDem front bench are also highly competent.
So, as I said, these guys are not dumb. They know that a Lab-Lib coalition is going to be best for their party and best for Britain, and hence their A-team is likely in the midst of negotiating as good a coalition deal they can get from Labour and the rest of a required “rainbow” / “traffic light” alliance/coalition, while their B-team also negotiates in good faith, for a Lib-Con deal they believe Cameron can never follow through on – because his party would rather hang *him* than accept it.
Cameron himself would probably give the LibDems almost anything they want in exchange for the keys to Number 10, and presumably his front-bench would too. Their problem is that if they give the LibDems too much they risk of being given the boot by their own caucus in very short order – perhaps before they even get to the Queens Speech bit (this is one of those areas where a days worth of surfing the UK intarwebs, interspersed with updating my about page, and believe it or not, some actual work, is quite inadequate, I have no idea how fast the Tories could stage a backbench revolt).
Anyway, and this is a guess, the Achilles heel that will keep Cameron from number 10 is this: the common or garden unreconstructed Tory backbencher has ideological blinders so big he can barely see his chauffeur if he sits on the wrong side of the Jag.
Furthermore, his core constituency is likely similarly impaired (minus the Jag…) – or they wouldn’t have elected him.
I could be wrong on both counts. Maybe Cameron can overcome his own party and come up with an acceptable deal. But I wouldn’t bet on it, because any deal is going to have to get past not just Clegg but *his* backbenchers, due to the triple lock clause.
This is the sort of situation you end up with in an FPP electoral system where the electoral lines are redrawn only rarely – or worse are redrawn by the legislatures, as in the US Congress (and State congress) redistricting, in which incumbents always seek to feather their nest with a few more acres that match their demographic niche, while trading away the acres that have switched sides to neighboring incumbents of the opposing party, who are usually only too happy to receive them.
In a properly designed PR system, this sort of thing just doesn’t happen – the parties can gerrymander all they want and it won’t change who gets into power the next time around, so they don’t even bother trying, and the electoral needles gravitate back towards the center, eventually resulting in honest, centrist MPs who really care for their electorate – partly because their electorate really has a shot at turfing them out the next time around.
Perpetuating FPP, along with slow or biased redistricting, and backroom deals done with the usual suspects, is how a two-party duopoly maintains its power – for decades or even centuries. Chances to overthrow such a Duopoly and introduce Proportional Representation (AKA: Actual Democracy) come along less than once in a generation – and this is Britain’s big opportunity.
The LibDems have waited 90 years for this moment, and I refuse to believe that Clegg’s team are going to risk waiting another decade or three before it comes along again – regardless of what Cameron offers them in “other” inducements. They also know that to accept a Tory offer will require overcoming the “triple lock” voting formula that gives their backbench, and members, even more power than the Tory equivalents.
They will negotiate in good faith regardless, it puts more pressure on the A-team and their counterparts to come to a deal quickly, and regardless, it’s keeping an election promise from Clegg, and it’s important to start building up trust with the electorate. But eventually they will almost certainly follow the logical path from here into….
…a Rainbow “alliance” comprising: (1) a Lab-Lib coalition, (2) “anyone but Brown” in Number 10, and (3) as many minor parties as possible providing confidence and supply (for which they will rightly demand concessions, but coalition partners in theory get to pick and choose between a few competing offers, and given the urgency of the moment, sane voters from minor parties are likely to understand that a bird in the hand as big as Proportional Representation is worth a dozen in the bush, and thus they should not risk overplaying their hands.
Ideally, the coalition should bring as many of them as possible into the “big tent” in order to ensure continuity in the event of by-elections and greater legitimacy in the eyes of the voters (and as they say, better that they’re in the tent, pissing out of it…)
That’s how it gets done in New Zealand, and so far, it’s actually worked out pretty well – even with the oddest of parliamentary bedfellows. Of course, there are extremists on all sides who will swear blind that it’s been a complete betrayal – which is how you know that they’ve done the right thing.
A year ago, when Google asked for “Big Ideas” to improve the lives of as many people as possible, so they could spend 10 million dollars on good works to celebrate their 10th Birthday, I was seriously impressed. This was one serious philanthrohack! Competitions like this almost always create more value than just spending money on stuff, and now Google has shown that over 150,000 people will compete just to win some kudos, help a lot of people, and see their idea brought to life – without even a promise of cash or contracts to the people with the winning ideas.
I had a couple ideas of my own that I thought might fit the bill, and I managed to get one of them out of my head in sufficient detail to submit*. Amazingly, my idea seems to have ended up in the 16 Idea Themes that over 3000 Googlers distilled from over 150,000 submissions!
My submission was one of the two bundled into this theme (other themes had as many as 6 relevant submissions)
As you might imagine, I’m pretty stoked. Of course, “Enable people to submit bug reports about problems in the real world” is just the first line of a longer submission – not too long – Google wisely required everyone to refine their submission to answering 6 short questions and supplying an optional short video. Good thing, given they got 150,000+ ideas to read through!
She’s everybody’s sister… she’s symbolic of our failure… she’s the one in fifteen million who can help us to be free.
“Watching TV”, from Roger Water’s amazing album “Amused to Death“, contains surely one of the more poignant statements of the value of mass media in evolving peaceful democracy that you’re ever going to hear. Given the events of the day, I suggest giving it a listen. (And if you haven’t already, you might want to buy the album, and listen to it on a good sound system, it really is awesome. )
Roger’s Yellow Rose was a student of philosophy. So was Neda Agha-Soltan. So was I.
I’ve made a few updates to my Technoprogressive page. It’s always been little more than a half-baked collection of thoughts, I should really tidy it up properly one of these days. Still, a few interesting nuggets in there if you’re into that sort of thing.
Ada Lovelace was the world’s first programmer, writing code for a machine that never got finished, the Babbage differential engine. She died far too early at the tender age of 36 – the same age as her Father, Lord Byron. Today is her day, and to celebrate it over 1500 bloggers, including this one, pledged to blog about one of our Tech Heroines on this date[1].
I’ve found it really hard to pick only one Tech Heroine. I know so many of them. But you’re supposed to just pick one for Ada Lovelace Day so I’ll do a follow up post later mentioning several other Tech Heroines I could have written about (and might write about for #ALD10!) Several of my tech Heroines I know personally, but I think for today I’ll play it safe and talk about someone I’ve never met but have always admired: Gina Trapani. As a promoter of how software and technology can improve our lives, she is a first class Technoprogressive, and worthy of great thanks and praise.
Many of you will know her as the founding editor of the uber-famous (well, in tech circles) Lifehacker, a phenomenally successful blog covering tips, tricks, software and sites that offer a multitude of ways to improve your workflow and lifestyle. Sadly, the sheer number of suggestions forced me to stop reading Lifehacker a while ago – chasing up all those potential speed improvements wasn’t helping me get anything done in the short term! I’m looking forward to achieving a somewhat more measured pace of life improvement from reading Gina’s new blog; Smarterware.
The fact that so many of these posts were of good value, and the fact that Gina was churning out a dozen or more every day, day after day after day, is certainly a Heroic feat in my opinion. I don’t think I’ve managed a dozen blog posts inside a single month, let alone in a single day.
While researching Gina’s life (a remarkably easy task, given how much she has written or had written about her in the last decade), I discovered an article that mentioned the genesis of Lifehacker – it turns out she was already working for Nick Denton as a coder when he bought the domain name, and her enthusiasm for the what could be done with it made him offer her the editor job on the spot. Many will realize this was probably one of the best HR decisions Nick made in his life, and it has to be said he’s made some good ones in his time.
“The one blogger I wished we had landed at Weblogs, Inc. was Gina Trapani from LifeHacker. I tried every two months for a year I think… no offer was good enough. Very, very frustrating.” – Jason Calacanis
To go from being a full time professional coder (with a pretty impressive resume) to being a full time professional writer is no small feat. Both involve using a keyboard and your brain – after that the similarities start to die off pretty fast. So that’s another reason Gina is a Tech Heroine.
I was actually aware of Gina well before she started Lifehacker, in that she was one of the few girl geeks who was seriously blogging, and there was a time (pre-2004) when just running your own blog qualified you as being moderately cool. I looked in the WayBackMachine and discovered she’s been blogging since late 2001 – which makes her a serious early adopter. Here’s her first post.
Another reason she’s among my Tech Heroines is that she’s the author of quite a few Firefox Addons, and I would say she’s contributed just as much to the success of Firefox through constantly blogging about Firefox and Firefox add-ons on Lifehacker, and providing early examples of add-ons for people to learn from, as almost anyone who actually works for the Mozilla Foundation. They should give her a medal or something. One of the earliest “Top X Firefox Add-ons” lists features her app “About this site”.
For reasons that may not be immediately apparent, the success of Mozilla ranks up there with the success of Google, Wikipedia, and the W3C as reasons why the web is so damned useful today, as opposed to mired in a morass of crappy over-commercialized portal sites and walled gardens, so Gina’s contributions to the success of Firefox are no small thing in the world of Tech Heroism.
Gina has said that her book is one of the things she’s most proud of, so I really must get around to buying it sometime soon. [2] Her book is called “Lifehacker – 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Life”.
If you can’t wait to get the book, or don’t feel like perusing thousands of lifehacker articles for your dose of wisdom from Gina, the interviews she gave to Tim Ferris and The New York Times should at least whet your appetite.
It’s not for nothing that in 2007 she was ranked 7th by Forbes in a list of 25 Web Celebrities, one above Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook.
Herein endith my tribute to Gina Trapani. To read about more Tech Heroines on Ada Lovelace Day, check out this huge list of posts, which is also available referenced by subject, and the locations of the bloggers writing about them!
[1] “Today” being a somewhat amophorus concept for me. Lets just stay I started this post on the 24th, NZ time, and will finish on the 24th, American time.
[2] My book reading has slowed to a crawl now the internet feeds me pretty much everything I need, but I make exceptions. It doesn’t help that book prices in New Zealand are at least twice what they are in the USA, if we’re lucky. This is another reason the internet is a great leveller – eliminating the edge once enjoyed by readers in large markets with better enconomies of scale. Imagine what it would be like if everything on the internet was priced differentially by where you lived, or you weren’t allowed to watch clips from an upcoming movie because it wasn’t available in your country….ok, bad example. Eventually the creative industries will realise how batshit crazy they are to do this to their international fans.
