No Matter Who Our Next President Is, They Won't Understand Technology
from the that-seems-like-a-problem dept
Politico has an article with a misleading title -- the return of the Luddite president -- which discusses how neither of the two major party Presidential candidates are even remotely tech savvy. The headline is an unfortunate oversell. Luddites aren't just people who don't know anything about technology. They're people who actively dislike certain technologies, in the belief that such advances will harm their own livelihoods. In a broader sense, the term is used to discuss people who generally dislike the march of technological progress. Again, that does not appear to be the case with either of the two candidates, who (at best) might just be described as agnostic to/indifferent to new technologies and somewhat ignorant on what that might mean from a policy perspective.Clinton's tech travails are all over the headlines, including the lax security of her home-brewed email server and her documented struggles with fax machines — and the recently disclosed hacking of the Democratic National Committee's emails won't do much to burnish her party's image of cyber competence.Of course, this is still problematic! Technological innovation is going to have a massive impact on a huge list of issues that any President is going to face over the next four years. And not understanding those issues, let alone how they may impact the policy choices that are being made is worrisome -- just not as worrisome as someone who actively dislikes technological progress.
But Trump's hardly a candidate for the Geek Squad either, despite the prolific round-the-clock tweeting strategy he uses to dominate the headlines. He has boasted that he hardly ever sends emails — and, like Clinton, he often relies on staff to print news articles off the internet.
“I’m just not a believer in email,” Trump said during a news conference Wednesday where he criticized Clinton's use of a private server when she was secretary of State.
Still, there are reasonable concerns here:
“These are two candidates who don't have their hands on the technology, and that’s unfortunate, because without that it’s difficult to understand this stuff on a deeper, more visceral level,” said Peter Leyden, a futurist and former managing editor of Wired who was an early Obama backer in Silicon Valley....Unfortunately, that doesn't seem likely. And that's probably going to keep us at Techdirt pretty busy for the next four years.
[....]
“We're on the verge of a fundamentally different economy that’s being absolutely transformed by the next wave of technology,” Leyden said. “It will have huge ramifications on society. And someone running the goddamn country has to know that."
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Filed Under: donald trump, hillary clinton, innovation, policy, politics, president
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Bullshit claim!
They do need to gather the right advisors however. There is just too many fucking things to know in the world to expect a president to know a lot of things.
And besides, people are generally stupid and largely ignorant of tech as well. To solve the problem at the top, you have to solve the problem at the bottom first.
Good luck with that shit, because even here at TD there is a lot of ignorance and political bullshit even for a "tech" focused site!
I work in IT, I simply cannot expounding upon the number of people working in this industry that should not be working in IT. On top of that, constantly having to show people where they are wrong on technology and then wasting that time & energy to only have your advice disregarded? Yea, expecting any president to understand technology any time soon is asking too much.
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Re: Bullshit claim!
With the current list of presidential contenders, all their knowledge combined wouldn't match that of the local village idiot.
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Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
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Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
Or possibly an imaginary one.
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Re: Bullshit claim!
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Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
While this may be true for some, it has been my experience that no matter how you explain it, if it costs more money or the party you are talking to will be required to do something, it will not get done.
We had POINTED to a device that was not ours to maintain and told the owners, point blank, no one maintains this and it is the single point of failure for a communication system they used. They said thanks for the info and pressed on. Two years later when it failed, they asked us why we didn't warn them. We pulled the email from our archive and showed them where we had told them about it. Now they are interested it solutions.
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Re: Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
I am sure there have been times were I did not explain things to someone's satisfaction, it's just going to happen, but this assclown made it clear he would ignore any advice because their ass itched or because he felt butt hurt about something.
Not sure I would willing admit that I was that shallow of a person just to repudiate someone.
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Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
Yes, it is heart breaking to see idiots like you running around, but laying blame at the feet of someone not being able to "talk down" enough is a pure cop out and smacks of an unprofessional attitude.
I stay around more than long enough explaining things and answering any questions.
Apparently your company pays you to waste resources. Instead of admitting that you know jack shit you act like you understood what the techies say, and make a different choice because EGO or the sales guys bought you off with a kickback. Seen your type plenty of times before.
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Re: Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
how many different companies have you worked at ?
it is THE NORM, not due to awkward nerds with deficient communication skills, that PHBsWILL ignore any/all warnings UNTIL it bites them in the ass...
that is the culture, NOT, oh, youbetter pay atte tion to the nerds...
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
You are correct, the culture is definitely as you say it is.
They must be bitten right in the ass to change things. No amount of explaining to talking about things will change their mind, in many cases they are just going through the motions and listening to my spiel while they have already made up their minds.
I once had an Executive claim that "their" choice of a vendor took security seriously after my team proved that we could access another organizations emails that we were sharing tenancy with. But because HE made the choice to go with these guys, he suppressed it because he could not reveal the egg on his fucking face so there we where... unsecured vendor and all the other tenants had to do to see our data was to just simply look.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
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Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
I don't work in IT, but that's the role that friends sometimes ask me to play.
In the not too distant past I once spent over two hours on the phone trying to explain to someone how to do something simple, but because I didn't have the exact same version of Windows and use the same webmail as them, they were completely unable to understand what to do. It should have been simple; Email them a Zip file of a game, they save the file, unzip it and create an icon. Just getting them to save the Zip file from the email took forever. From there, they couldn't understand the concept of an archive file and couldn't tell if they were looking at the contents or the unzipped files. In the end, they gave up and just brought the laptop over for me to do it.
You can sit right in front of most people today and use the graphic card properties to flip the screen 180 degrees. They can watch you every step of the way, but unless they take notes, none of them will have the faintest idea how to change it back.
Imagine if nobody knew how to turn on the wipers on their car, or how to change the volume on their TV. What if people needed a "cheat-sheet" to remember how to use a microwave, or set an alarm clock? That's effectively the level of probably 99% of the average computers users today.
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Re: Bullshit claim!
It's never asking too much to ask any president or politician to understand technology.
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Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
I bet you would pick the Arrogant Doctor doing surgery on YOUR BRAIN saying everything is going to be okay, no problem, instead of the Humble surgeon describing what might go wrong and they might be worried about making a mistake with a scalpel actually touching your brain!
Confident is is a requirement to go places with this job.
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Re: Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
"Confident is is a requirement to go places with this job."
Confidence is helpful to advance in any field, but confidence is a very different thing than arrogance.
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"and, like Clinton, he often relies on staff to print news articles off the internet. "
Citation needed.
"“I’m just not a believer in email,” Trump said during a news conference Wednesday where he criticized Clinton's use of a private server when she was secretary of State. "
So at the very least he is smart enough to know to NOT use email.
So why this "comparison" here...
"“These are two candidates who don't have their hands on the technology, and that’s unfortunate, because without that it’s difficult to understand this stuff on a deeper, more visceral level,” said Peter Leyden, a futurist and former managing editor of Wired who was an early Obama backer in Silicon Valley...."
Ahhhhh... it's the old your candidate is just as bad as mine ploy.
At least if Trump didnt have the skills he'd PAY someone that DID.
LOL Hills... just have the staffers shut down the email server for a while... that will make the hacker go away for sure man. LOL.
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Re:
I might vote for Trump just to see all of their pissed off faces and to hopefully begin an exodus from the US.
Email is notoriously easy to compromise, sending anything sensitive through email is like passing an open note around a class room... hoping that no one reads it or the "teacher" does not intercept it before it makes it to its final destination.
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Re:
Using a technology (or not) isn't a faith-based decision. Unless you're arguing that it's against some quirky religion he's part of...
So at the very least he is smart enough to know to NOT use email.
Smart enough not to? Assuming you're some kind of "IT Guy" do you also advocate not using email at the company you work for, as it's not the "smart" thing to do?
If you don't, then what's the purpose of that comment?
At least if Trump didn't have the skills he'd PAY someone that DID.
Why would he even consider doing that, given his lack of "belief?"
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My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20 with a tape Drive!!! So I've been growing up with them all my life.
I have to agree. There's no return of a Luddite president. They don't hate tech and want nothing to do with it. They're just OLD and didn't grow up with it. They use it, but skill level is low. Why some people don't understand this? Computers have come a long way in such a short period of time. We're still in the transitional phase of those that grew up when there wasn't Home Personal Computers to those that are playing on a tablet at 3 years old and have been growing up with computers their entire life. Have zero concept that not long ago they didn't exist.
There's so much you can ask a kid these days and they have no idea what you are talking about because they haven't existed for a number of years, which is just starting to show your own age.
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Re:
I know 20 year olds that are complete USERS.
"Commodore Vic-20 with a tape Drive!!!" That was called a cassette tape back in my day. LOL.
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Re:
I disagree that age is a huge factor as you make it out to be. For example, my wife and I are roughly the same age (within a year) and we are both just over 50. While my wife is very competent using her computer and new technology, she has never had the desire to know what makes them work. (She also feels the same about electricity: she couldn't care less about electrons, parallel circuits or calculating amperage - she just expects the light to go on when the switch is flipped).
To be honest, with all of apps and "app stores" and whatnot, we are creating a generation of what I always called "application idiots" - people who can run a basic application, but not much else. This group is worse (IMHO) than those who are actually completely clueless about technology because they tend to "think" they know a lot more than they actually do.
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My first computer was a C64 and tape drive (unfortunately). Got a disk drive the following Christmas and things really took off from there.
Just one problem; While early computers required users to at least learn a little about them, today's computers have become appliances. Computer knowledge today amounts to double-clicking icons or inserting some kind of media and waiting for Windows to prompt you for what to do with it. Someone who can install software is considered an advanced user, and if you know how to do such magical things as editing INI files and creating your own shortcuts, you're an "expert". Anyone who can fix problems or crate a batch file to automate tasks is elevated to the status of "computer wizard".
People today literally throw away perfectly good computers because they get loaded with crap and slow down to the point that they become unusable. They destroy perfectly good hard drives because they believe the myth that nothing can ever truly be erased and think that "hackers" will be able to recover their personal information even after the drive has been wiped.
I met one kid who thought that the Nintendo 64 was the third generation of video game systems. To him it went NES -> SNES -> N64.
I wish I could find it again, but I once watched a video on YouTube of a young kid (from his attitude and the sound of his voice) reviewing a pack of Activision Atari 2600 games for one of the Xboxes. He kept going on about horrible the graphics were, how could they sell crap like that, etc.
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Lets be honest here...An Amiga could make a better president than either of them, especially with an Atari 2600 as a running mate.
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willful ignorance
What infuriates me to no end is the near malicious enthusiasm with which these people crow about their ignorance.
I can't think of the last time a hearing on any scientific or technological issue went all the way to the end without someone on the panel laughing off how little they knew about the subject. (Often throwing in an insult to the "so-called experts"---or just the "nerds"---just for good measure.)
What could possibly be the harm in honestly admitting, "You know, I don't know a whole lot about this, and I personally prefer doing things the way I've always done. But this is an important issue and I'm going to do my best to learn enough about it to make an informed decision."
The answer, of course, is that if everyone would act like the adults they supposedly are then it wouldn't be any harm at all. But in the playground mentality that pervades nearly every aspect of politics, that would make you look "weak", and we can't have that.
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Re:
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I don't know anything about diplomacy or foreign policy. How would you feel about me being put in charge of dealing with Russia or the middle east?
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Balderdash.
These people came of age with the IBM 360, CDC supercomputers, Multics timesharing system; the Gemini space capsules were being launched with onboard minicomputers; within a decade, Bill Gates would be dumpster-diving for monetizable microcomputer software.
My 85-year-old non-college-graduate liberal-arts-major mother can effectively (and critically) research her family's genealogy or medical conditions on the internet--and yes, use email. She didn't "grow up with it", nor did she use a computer until she was over 60. (She could, however, use a slide rule.) On the other hand, she's not a con artist, or even a very skilled liar.
It's not age. It's a matter of what use you put your intelligence to.
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Thing Always Said
Is something often -and only- uttered by some jerk with a team of people doing and managing their email and communications for them.
He most certainly DOES "do email"...at least as much as he "builds hotels", in the sense that other people print them out, highlight the easy words, and reply on his behalf. His cluelessness is hardly a virtue.
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Why yes, yes it is, but the mainstream media (and based on this and other articles here, Techdirt) will do or say anything to put Hillary in a good light and dump on Trump.
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Re:
They have teams of advisers letting know about everything they do. They pay people to come up with all manner of ways to think about how to say shit for best effect!
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Re: off the deep end
You are WAAAAAAAAY off the deep end if you think this article is somehow pro-Clinton and anti-Trump (well, it is anti-Trump but only in the sense that it's anti- both of them).
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Re:
Which is predictable, and..um..is what happened.
If she were devious enough to deliberately use her own email to avoid FOI, then she would also be clever enough to never send or receive any message from any official account.
What you propose is like a cheating husband using his "burner" phone to call his wife to see if he should pick up milk.
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Re: Re:
Yeah, and she got to delete whatever emails she wanted to with no consequences. I doubt that would have been the case had she used official state department email.
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Also, how does this article criticizing Clinton and Trump for the same exact thing "put Hillary in a good light and dump on Trump?"
Take off the conspiracy blinders.
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Re:
Samey same? I think not.
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Re: Re:
> Again, that does not appear to be the case with either of the two candidates, who (at best) might just be described as agnostic to/indifferent to new technologies and somewhat ignorant on what that might mean from a policy perspective.
> and, like Clinton, he often relies on staff to print news articles off the internet.
> These are two candidates who don't have their hands on the technology
"Samey same?" Yes. EXACTLY.
Fucking loon.
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Re: Re: Re:
If Trumps reason for "not believing in email" are due to the security concerns, then they are damn sure not even close to the same.
One person is illegally using an email server in contravention of security protocol and one just does not believe in it.
There is a quite a bit of difference in those two statements. So you might be the loon you accuse others of being.
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
But this article is not about her decision to use her own email server. That is not a tech issue. This is about her failure to understand the ramifications, which is a tech issue, and is no worse than what any tech-clueless politician is doing.
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Failure to understand ramifications
And that's not mere ignorance, but dangerous ignorance.
That is a problem.
That's the sort of problem that can cost lives when operational intelligence is compromised.
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AND???
1 has been in politics since NIXON..
2. Is a corp stooge..that isnt very good at it.
NEITHER has been poor enough to even NEED to buy their own food.
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Who is the loon?
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Re:
You're suggesting Putin is a loon for believing that? Seems totally plausible given what we've learned in the past several years.
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"But Trump's hardly a candidate for the Geek Squad either"
Apparently, we're still in the SOPA era of I'm not a nerd, but I disagree.
But I suspect that Clinton's opinion can evolve, and Trump can just be distracted by recalcitrant immigrants.
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Re: "But Trump's hardly a candidate for the Geek Squad either"
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Geek Squad's tech support.
Eventually the techs were phased out and replaced with sales people and actual fixing was outsourced.
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Travail might imply suffering or a painful experience of some sort, but that suffering is arrived at through toil, it's not just any suffering.
"Woes," or, "troubles," would have been better choices.
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Speaking for an article with a misleading title
There are more than two parties running for president.
Not only that, Clinton is Luddite. She has a fear of video games, Uber, and encryption and works to actively limit them.
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"There are more than two parties running for president."
If you vote for a third party you're not voting against the one you don't like.
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Re: Speaking for an article with a misleading title
There are others running, but it is the next best thing to absolutely certain that the next President will be a Democrat or Republican.
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Constitutional rights are constantly ignored
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Take another look at the US Declaration of Independence.
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Really?
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Re: Really?
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She said it was for convenience, but that doesn't fly. Not wanting a record in a government system is the only reason that makes sense.
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Clinton's tech plan is pretty great
Also on the Clinton campaign, they have a well-staffed group of software developers and data scientists, whereas Trump has his Twitter account.
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