A few weeks ago there was a story bouncing around the internet about a Google employee who had started a petition to replace the US government, basically, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. This was apparently not done with any form of approval from Mr. Schmidt, and you can read more about the person behind this at Quartz. If you heard about this, it’ll give you some idea of the person behind the petition, Justine Turney.
To put it politely, I find Ms. Turney’s idea to be ill-thought out and lacking a sense of the larger picture, as well as impolite about Mr. Schmidt’s lack of free time. It felt like a Deep Geek idea, to reference my previous theories, disconnected from reality.
As I discussed it among the gang, something came to the surface how many times we run into political theorizing that doesn’t seem to involve an understanding of how the world actually works? It’s a problem whose distribution may vary among people, political groups, and such, but it’s a problem you find everywhere.
We don’t know what we don’t know. Which may qualify you if your career is to be “random pundit who yells a lot,” but really doesn’t help solve problems. It is, in fact quite good for creating them, as anyone who has ever worked on a project that was poorly defined without repercussions knows. I’m guessing that’s all of us.
Now as much as I’d like to see a lot more people address this lack of knowledge about lack of knowledge, it’s something we geek citizens should also address in ourselves.
In fact, I’d say we need to be extra responsible.
