It’s Time to Update the Machine of Government
The government is a vehicle. It gets us from here to there. It was designed masterfully in its time by the founding fathers of the United States to build and grow a democratic nation in pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness for all citizens. We often speak of the ‘body’ of government. In metaphor, we relate our government to ourselves, an organic, evolving entity capable of adaptation to new situations and circumstances. In this article, I am proposing that the government is not, in fact, a body. Our government is a machine, and we have not updated the parts since the constitutional convention in 1787. These updates are necessary if we wish to achieve any level of societal progress.
The body of which we speak is the people who serve and create the government. We must do a better job of differentiating between these two distinct aspects of our government and recognize that we are wholly capable of upgrading the mechanical parts of this government when they have become outdated. Further, we must update the mechanical aspects of government if we wish to see any genuine progress in modern social and political life.
Mechanical Progress
Technology has progressed in the modern world through continuous reiteration and refinement. Continuous advancement has been made possible through this process. The government has fallen behind the radical growth in technology that has occurred in modern times and seems incapable of catching up. For this reason, a serious analysis of government as a machine, and subsequent upgrade of that machine, must be undertaken if we are to solve the most severe social issues that plague our nation.
Machines are created and updated upon three foundations: principle, parts, and product. To explain, I will use the automobile as an example. For centuries, the automobile’s principle has existed: a carriage with wheels connected to some power source that enables the person’s independent movement driving the contraption. Early iterations of this principle included chariots, horse and buggy vehicles, and covered wagons. The principle; the underlying functional purpose of these early vehicles was the same as our modern cars: getting people from point A to point B without walking. The parts used — horses, wooden wheels, wooden frames, etc. — and the product of these parts — low speed, little precision, etc. — differ wildly from our modern vehicles but meet the same end: transportation over longer distances than a person could comfortably walk.
Over time, better technology was discovered and invented; tires, the internal combustion engine, and, recently, solid-state battery power. This better technology was put to use in service of the same principle served by the earlier forms of transportation and accomplished the same product of the previous methods more efficiently. Machines function on a simple principle that informs the structure of the machine. Parts vary over time and need to be updated as new technologies are developed that update those parts. Changing the parts of a machine should be an increase in efficiency over previous iterations of the machine.
Government: a Mechanical Approach.
Let’s take this analogy and apply it to the government. The American government’s principle is the democratic representation that allows all citizens a say in that government’s functioning. The American bill of rights is a document of principles. It outlines the chief aims and decrees of democratic government. It is like stating that “a vehicle moves people from one place to another with wheels and a form of power.” The bill of rights outlines what representative government is and provides certain principles of how a free and fair society should function. The constitution is a document of parts: it outlines the systems and structures that carry out government principles. It lays out the branches of government and gives form to the how of the principles outlined in the bill of rights.
Some parts changed entirely from the horse and buggy to the automobile, while others were only upgraded. An internal combustion engine is wholly different from a horse in its degree of technological advancement, but a tire is only marginally different from a wooden-spoke wheel. The parts in this scenario are upgraded on an as-necessary basis and have seen various improvement forms over time. Today we see another shift from the internal combustion engine to the battery-powered motor.
For nearly 250 years of its existence, the American government has not seen an upgrade in parts. This lack of change has been mainly on purpose. It is intentionally difficult to change the characteristics of such a massive machine. This machine has, until recently, worked relatively well. Any changes that generations past have made in the form of amendments have been changes in principle; greater degrees of inclusion and freedom, greater breadth of coverage for constitutional protections. These have been changes that said something about who the nation was and what its aims were. The same parts of the government carried out these changes to principle and produced a superior product for most people.
Today we are witnessing a time when we must update the parts of government. There is a clear and specific reason for this change. Alongside the American government, there has always existed an ‘invisible fourth estate.’ This fourth branch of government has functioned alongside the primary three to keep it accountable and aligned with the people whom it served. This fourth branch was the press. The news media has operated to report on and connect the government’s affairs and the American people from the rise of the printing press to modern television. People held voting power and contacted their representatives individually, but the news could mediate essential and necessary conversations between these two groups. The news and media have played a vital role in intermediating and making sense of the government’s inner workings: they have packaged and explained the machine as it was working.
Today, we are witnessing a phase-shift in the media. Singular, reputable sources of information, i.e., news outlets, no longer maintain exclusive access to the government’s inner workings. The sources of government information are no longer singular: the news media no longer controls and distributes information to the American people. Social media gives everyone who has access to the internet the ability to communicate directly to everyone else with that access. Lawmakers can now speak directly to the people they serve en masse. Nobody can hold them accountable for the truth of their words or the repercussions of those words.
The internet has created a different accountability structure for the government than has ever existed before. The principles of democratic government have remained the same, but the parts no longer correspond to a coherent product. A set of uniquely modern problems has arisen from this state of affairs: Increased polarization, decreased collective decision-making capacity, and an overall lack of sense-making about making decisions properly. The people, whom the government is supposed to serve, are getting an increasingly fuzzy picture of the government because they view it through a new lens. Social media has acted as a revealer of the parts of the government. It has shown us that these parts are in serious need of an update.
We recognize now that political interests pull lawmakers to say and act upon their interests rather than the country’s interests. There is a disparity between useful information and well-informed lawmakers. With the rise of the virtual information commons, this is becoming increasingly clear. Furthermore, the communication models from these lawmakers to the people is outdated. Those who make the laws should be good fact-finders and sense-makers, able to look at all sides of an issue and make decisions following what seems correct to them based upon their own and their nations’ principles and all the necessary information. In reality, we are now rapidly discovering that those who make laws are more often than not those who maintain the status quo to keep their funding, jobs, and social status in Washington, D.C.
System Update
If all of this sounds confusing, it’s because it is. Our government is a convoluted mess of people with varying competencies, backgrounds, and ideas about how to do this thing called democratic government. For a long time, this worked. The most competent people rose to the top while the others were happy to collect a paycheck, hold some status, and vote along party lines. Today, this status has become overgrown; Lawmakers can hold office for indefinite amounts of time. They maintain a stranglehold on making laws and communicating to the public about the laws they make. They are not held accountable to rely on expertise or data on what would be best for that public. Politicians advocate for positions that benefit interested corporations who pay for lobbyists over those that would help the American people. All of these factors have caused an overwhelming breakdown of the parts of the system. Gunk, dirt, rust, and broken pieces run rampant in the halls of government, and it’s time we take a serious look at these outdated and inadequate parts and seek to replace them with cleaner, clearer, and safer models for the future.
These changes look like many different things. When we swapped the car for the horse and buggy, relatively minor adjustments had to be made to the wheels and carriage, while the method of locomotion improved in distinct and significant ways. I propose that we make the minor adjustments that can be made and work towards more major ones. Immediately, placing term limits on lawmakers would disincentive pandering and disempower lobbyists from maintaining power over politicians. Reversing the citizens’ united decision and getting dark money out of politics would shut down the damaging super-PACs, putting more power back in the people’s hands.
Reforms, however, will need to go further. The branches of government’s internal workings must eventually be re-ordered, and an additional branch may need to be formed. Lawmakers should be reigned in. Senators and congresspeople must be held accountable to a more objective standard than their own opinions. With the rise of the virtual information commons, we have an increased and increasing ability to know what is scientifically accurate, statistically valid, and mathematically probable. Politicians are not necessarily experts, but experts exist. The government should employ and engage experts more transparently to provide sound reasoning for lawmakers’ decisions.
Furthermore, the design of laws themselves will need to change to some degree. The ability to pile small clauses and hidden agendas into seemingly benign government acts is problematic because it obfuscates the relationship between lawmakers and the people. These hidden agendas empower bad actors to enact their motives with little to no accountability. Today, we have a powerful model for codification that allows for great flexibility, clarity, and action: computer code.
Computer code aims to create programs and processes that can be carried out automatically by a machine. Computer code’s goal is not to say one thing and have the machine do something else that is esoteric and hidden. A line of computer code begets a result. It may take many thousand lines of code to compile a comprehensive, intuitive, and user-friendly work, but a skilled coder could read that code and tell you exactly why it produced the result that it did. Anything that did not create this result would confuse the process and result in that code’s final product not working correctly.
In legal matters, lawmakers intentionally fill their laws — the code upon which our government’s machine operates — with bugs that affect other parts of the machine. In computer terminology, code that carries bugs for different parts of the machine is called malware: software that contains a virus. As anyone who has experienced a computer virus can tell you, they are no fun. They crash computers, wipe hard drives, and render them useless chunks of metal. I propose that laws must be re-thought on the governmental level. We must strive to make laws singular in purpose, clearly understandable to the general public, and backed in clear rationale based on statistical analysis, scientific reasoning, and the general population’s will.
Proposals for Change
These two proposals — the addition of experts to be impartial judges and consultants to government and the change of law-writing to be clear and straightforward — are by no means exhaustive. They represent precise changes to parts needed to fully build a technologically empowered, just, and seamless government of the future. They would, however, go some way towards these ends. The principles of freedom, fairness, and collective decision making would continue, the parts would be upgraded, shifting the inner workings of the machine of government in nuanced and modern waysThe product of these changes would be more clarity, more sense-making, and an increased capacity to make informed decisions, in line with all people’s desires and the pursuit of a better future for everyone in economic, social, and political terms. By replacing the parts of government one by one, we will slowly build something completely new.
This new thing will be different in degree. The top speed of a horse and buggy was about 15 miles per hour. Today’s top sports cars can top 315Mph. That’s a 2000% increase in rate — the product — by swapping out the parts in a relatively short amount of time. It’s time we design some new parts for our government through careful, thoughtful design and applied technology. We can solve our day’s problems and build a product of tomorrow that is beyond our wildest dreams.