> Do Snowden or Swartz have the domain knowledge of the workings of civilization to make a decision like that for everybody?
They didn't make a decision "for everybody", they just made a decision that happened to affect a lot of people. It is part of the romanticism that surrounds the modern state to assume that every action with implications for a Government must be a decision for everybody. No it isn't. The NSA isn't "everybody". The Obama administration isn't "everybody". The fate of human civilization does not depend, and has never depended, on the actions of one Swartz and one Snowden.
The good thing about changes that take place over generations, like what I was trying to describe above, is that they take a long time. We're talking about 30-50 years here, if not longer. The boomers won't be dead until the 2050s, and it will probably take just as long for someone who grew up worshiping Swartz and Snowden to occupy the White House. As Max Planck said, progress happens one funeral at a time. Guess what, modern medical technology has made funerals rarer than ever before.
One Swartz and one Snowden won't change the world. I'm not even sure whether the kind of behavior they exemplify should be encouraged at all. But the thing is, those leaks weren't one-man attempts to re-architect the USA. Rather, they are symptoms of a wider political and psychological change that has been going on for a couple of decades already, and will likely accelerate whether we like it or not. This is not about some violent revolution, it's about social progress, and progress takes a long time.
Patches are coming. The pull requests won't be as polite as they used to be. Not a single line of code will be taken for granted, not even those written by the BDFL himself. But none of this needs to involve a complete rewrite. Just a series of incremental improvements.
>But the thing is, those leaks weren't one-man attempts to re-architect the US
This is a good point.
The same applies to many other things in history; communism wasn't some kid who thought up a new ideology in his basement and pushed it on everyone else; it took the endorsement of the intellectual elite and a broad movement to make it happen. Still it went badly for billions of people.
Your implication is that this stuff is happening whether we like it or not, and that that somehow invalidates criticism of the naivety of it all. But then you side with it. If it is an inevitable march of history, surely it is as reasonable to criticize it as it is to endorse it, or as futile to endorse as it is to criticize?
The thing is that these broad movements are made up of people like Snowden and Swartz and so on who make things happen because they believe in it, and we do have some control over that. For example, if the international intellectual community had been less naively infatuated with democracy and independence movements, perhaps they would not have pushed so hard on Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo, Zimbabwe and the DRC would be first-world countries instead of hellholes.
If you make the inevitable march of progress cool, it will happen faster, whether it's a good thing or not. If we make reasoned caution and sanity cool, we might get a better outcome for the future of humanity.
They didn't make a decision "for everybody", they just made a decision that happened to affect a lot of people. It is part of the romanticism that surrounds the modern state to assume that every action with implications for a Government must be a decision for everybody. No it isn't. The NSA isn't "everybody". The Obama administration isn't "everybody". The fate of human civilization does not depend, and has never depended, on the actions of one Swartz and one Snowden.
The good thing about changes that take place over generations, like what I was trying to describe above, is that they take a long time. We're talking about 30-50 years here, if not longer. The boomers won't be dead until the 2050s, and it will probably take just as long for someone who grew up worshiping Swartz and Snowden to occupy the White House. As Max Planck said, progress happens one funeral at a time. Guess what, modern medical technology has made funerals rarer than ever before.
One Swartz and one Snowden won't change the world. I'm not even sure whether the kind of behavior they exemplify should be encouraged at all. But the thing is, those leaks weren't one-man attempts to re-architect the USA. Rather, they are symptoms of a wider political and psychological change that has been going on for a couple of decades already, and will likely accelerate whether we like it or not. This is not about some violent revolution, it's about social progress, and progress takes a long time.
Patches are coming. The pull requests won't be as polite as they used to be. Not a single line of code will be taken for granted, not even those written by the BDFL himself. But none of this needs to involve a complete rewrite. Just a series of incremental improvements.