February 22, 2008
Scoble Goes to Washington
Robert Scoble weighs into the debate today regarding Washington and tech:
Talking with Andrew Feinberg, editor of Capitol Valley Media, I was challenged several times about why I, other tech bloggers, and why Silicon Valley itself doesn’t get involved more in what’s happening in Washington D.C.Politics and geeks rarely mix. Geeks want to build stuff. Politicians want to serve their constituencies and, often, that means regulating what the geeks are trying to do.
I've been arguing this point for over a year—one of the biggest threats to both U.S. competitiveness and technology is that too much of Washington doesn't get technology.
Washington's power structures today are built to limit and stifle innovation. No lobbyist in Washington is tasked with ensuring innovation. Instead the entire lobbyist crowd is focused on protecting each industry's or company's existing turf. That means that old power structures like the telecom companies have a huge leg up over the nascent efforts of Silicon Valley.
As I said in the Washington Post this winter, "In past generations, the U.S. government turned to men such as the brilliant and forward-thinking Vannevar Bush, who led the nation's science policy during World War II and got the government to invest in the programs and research that helped invent the computer age. Today, the nation's best minds quickly end up in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street, where their entrepreneurial spirit and lust for 'the new new thing' is powering an economy that's increasingly detached from the government overseeing it. This disconnect points to a major problem: The new economy still lacks a political infrastructure. The older industries are still the best organized, most entrenched and therefore most powerful. They can land the meetings with officials that lead to government loans; their armies of lobbyists can operate in the back rooms, slipping in tax breaks and increasing the competition for newcomers."
In "The First Campaign," I tell the story of Nancy Scola at SXSW:
Nancy Scola is another Democratic technology expert and five-year veteran of Capitol Hill, who at the 2007 South by Southwest technology conference in Austin, Texas, pleaded to a room of lap-top wielding geeks for more experts in the new world to become politically active. "You can't really overstate how poorly understood technology is in Washington," she told them. She pointed to the example of the 2006 Deleting Online Predators Act, whereby 410 House members voted to prohibit social-networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster from being used in libraries and schools so as to hinder the ability of child sex predators to gain access to them. It was a remarkably boneheaded bill that could have passed only in a body with no understanding of where the internet and online communities were headed.
We have too low of a bar for our leaders in understanding technology. Ted Stevens' "series of tubes" speech isn't funny—it's a sad commentary on our outdated political system's understanding of the future.
Will someone like Larry Lessig help in Congress? Yes is the short answer. The long answer is that he'd probably get incredibly frustrated dealing with the arcane and outdated way that legislation moves through Washington. Google's just learning the ropes here, after ignoring Washington for a long while itself.
What about all of the rest of the social web/Web 2.0 movement? Facebook now has a single rep in Washington. MySpace has its NewsCorp lobbyists. What about everyone else?
Washington and tech should have hugely mutually beneficial relationship—the internet is what will power the U.S. economy for the coming decades—but so far they're like oil and water. That's bad news for the country and bad news for the economy. And it's terrible news for geeks.
RELATED THINKERNET OP-ED: Who'll Be Tech's Voice in the Oval Office?
