One of the biggest reasons that eighteen-year-olds are not very interested in conventional politics is that technology has become radically more participatory in the last twenty years, with the resulting rise of a hacker class, a new kind of revolutionary vanguard. The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein foresaw this of course, long before it happened. Government and corporate funding is becoming progressively less important. There are vast numbers of young people who are passionately interested in the potentialities of things they can make with their own hands. Compared to that, what can some second-rate politician's "cult of personality" offer?
Out of this passionate experience has grown an equally passionate politics. This politics simply does not appear at national level. The issues the hackers care most about mostly have to do with the law of intellectual property, telecommunications, and the more technical aspects of freedom of the press. These are the laws which impinge upon them. On these subjects, both parties are approximately equally venal. Venal and stupid, at the level of the British ministry between 1763 and 1775.
I doubt if John Kerry even grasps why the Patent Office is a Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization and should be abolished. George W. Bush, naturally, is even worse. "When in the course of human events..." There is ominous talk going around about mass emigration, a "Vortrek" in the Afrikaner manner.
If eighteen-year olds were allowed to conduct their own election, from scratch, complete with caucuses to define their own issues, one of the most formidable candidates would be Richard M. Stallman of GNU and the Free Software Foundation. Another would be John Perry Barlow, the Electronic Frontier Foundation man, and also the author of a "declaration of independence of the internet." Linus Torvalds is of course not a native-born American citizen... come to that, while he has lived in California for years, and recently moved to Oregon, I don't know if he still possess Finnish nationality. The question is practically irrelevant.
That raises another point. A new kind of nationality is evolving in certain parts of the internet, eg. Slashdot, approximately corresponding to Winston Churchill's "English-Speaking Peoples," together with significant numbers of German and French cyber-immigrants. There is a certain amount of jubilation at the moment, because a couple of days ago, a court in Munich, in Bavaria, in Germany, upheld the General Public License. Not an appeals court, either, just a court of the first instance, albeit a specialized one. Can you imagine the degree of transformation required for young men in Iowa to care so passionately about the finer technicalities of Continental law?
I doubt these young people will ever march in the streets. Liberal arts majors march in the streets, but these guys aren't liberal arts majors. When they reach a sufficient level of exasperation, they will simply begin conducting electronic warfare.
The war in Iraq hasn't produced very much agitation among 18-year-olds because the Army has been meeting its manpower requirements through things like stop-loss orders and recalling reservists. Instead of spreading the risk out, they pitch on one young man who is already in the Army, and tell him in effect that he's got to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan for twenty years, as a foreign legionary instead of a citizen-soldier. That doesn't produce generational politics; it produces local politics. Even within the military, the same thing is happening. The Navy and Air Force are actually discharging sailors and airmen early, because their automation programs are going better than expected, and refusing to organize their superfluous manpower as infantry formations.
by Andrew D. Todd on July 26, 2004 at 7:36 PM