For the Silicon Valley Ecosystem, Politics Can’t be a Dirty Word | PandoDaily
I think it's perfectly normal to gaze upon Washington and despair. However, ignoring their game only makes them stronger. As a former professional activist, I know how genuinely EASY it is to influence outcomes to your favor in that scene.
However, I think part of the reason the valley is so adverse to playing the game is we live in one-party region, with seats controlled for decades by incumbents and their machines. The political parties pay attention to weak districts, where there's a damn good chance an incumbent will lose in the upcoming cycle. They do NOT pay attention to safe seats. Safe incumbents do not need to be responsive to their constituents, and opposition parties will not bother to invest their resources.
If the bay area were genuinely competitive electorally, we'd have higher turnover in the local congresscritters, and actually have developers and engineers representing us instead of self aggrandizing machine hacks.
You are of course right, but there's not a whole lot we can do about it, short of importing 100k angry libertarians to create balance here.
Sure there is. It just requires building a political ecosystem unbeholden to either the Democrat machines, or the GOP nutjobbery. Most of the valley scene could rightly give a crap and the few that do, tend to lean Democrat. However, the left/right dichotomy is a largely a sham only meant to keep the crowds interested in the game, like major league sports or WWE wrestling.
So what needs to happen is a wholly cynical move to continually unseat incumbents, both in primaries and in general elections.
Getting politically involved enough to unseat incumbents seems like the kind of thing that people with a lot of time can do.
Basically, college students and retired people.
Everyone else is struggling to survive and bring our products to market. :)
And you've touched on the ultimate reason why it hasn't happened.
It just bugs the crap out of me that there are NO developers or engineers in Congress, and that the Bay area delegation has hardly changed since the 70s.
