No Matter Who Our Next President Is, They Won't Understand Technology
from the that-seems-like-a-problem dept
Politico has an article with a misleading title — the return of the Luddite president — which discusses how neither of the two major party Presidential candidates are even remotely tech savvy. The headline is an unfortunate oversell. Luddites aren’t just people who don’t know anything about technology. They’re people who actively dislike certain technologies, in the belief that such advances will harm their own livelihoods. In a broader sense, the term is used to discuss people who generally dislike the march of technological progress. Again, that does not appear to be the case with either of the two candidates, who (at best) might just be described as agnostic to/indifferent to new technologies and somewhat ignorant on what that might mean from a policy perspective.
Clinton’s tech travails are all over the headlines, including the lax security of her home-brewed email server and her documented struggles with fax machines ? and the recently disclosed hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails won’t do much to burnish her party’s image of cyber competence.
But Trump’s hardly a candidate for the Geek Squad either, despite the prolific round-the-clock tweeting strategy he uses to dominate the headlines. He has boasted that he hardly ever sends emails ? and, like Clinton, he often relies on staff to print news articles off the internet.
?I?m just not a believer in email,? Trump said during a news conference Wednesday where he criticized Clinton’s use of a private server when she was secretary of State.
Of course, this is still problematic! Technological innovation is going to have a massive impact on a huge list of issues that any President is going to face over the next four years. And not understanding those issues, let alone how they may impact the policy choices that are being made is worrisome — just not as worrisome as someone who actively dislikes technological progress.
Still, there are reasonable concerns here:
?These are two candidates who don’t have their hands on the technology, and that?s unfortunate, because without that it?s difficult to understand this stuff on a deeper, more visceral level,? said Peter Leyden, a futurist and former managing editor of Wired who was an early Obama backer in Silicon Valley….
[….]
?We’re on the verge of a fundamentally different economy that?s being absolutely transformed by the next wave of technology,? Leyden said. ?It will have huge ramifications on society. And someone running the goddamn country has to know that.”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem likely. And that’s probably going to keep us at Techdirt pretty busy for the next four years.
Filed Under: donald trump, hillary clinton, innovation, policy, politics, president
Comments on “No Matter Who Our Next President Is, They Won't Understand Technology”
You don’t understand, Mike. She’s a W O M A N! The rest doesn’t matter.
Bullshit claim!
They do not have to understand technology to effectively lead.
They do need to gather the right advisors however. There is just too many fucking things to know in the world to expect a president to know a lot of things.
And besides, people are generally stupid and largely ignorant of tech as well. To solve the problem at the top, you have to solve the problem at the bottom first.
Good luck with that shit, because even here at TD there is a lot of ignorance and political bullshit even for a “tech” focused site!
I work in IT, I simply cannot expounding upon the number of people working in this industry that should not be working in IT. On top of that, constantly having to show people where they are wrong on technology and then wasting that time & energy to only have your advice disregarded? Yea, expecting any president to understand technology any time soon is asking too much.
Re: Bullshit claim!
“There is just too many fucking things to know in the world to expect a president to know a lot of things.”
With the current list of presidential contenders, all their knowledge combined wouldn’t match that of the local village idiot.
Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
that is insulting a poor village idiot. Maybe if that village was filled with dejected village idiots…
Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
To be fair, with Trump’s contribution to that equation you will always end up with a negative number no matter what you add it to.
Or possibly an imaginary one.
Re: Bullshit claim!
I work in IT as well, I have always said, I am paid to know this shit, you are not. The fact that they don’t listen to you is because you do not explain it to them in a way that they will listen. You need to use terms their training will understand. Then again, your apparent dislike for non-tech people seems to have you in a tizzy, so when you told them what needs to be done, they probably went the other way just to piss you off. I would.
Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
“The fact that they don’t listen to you is because you do not explain it to them in a way that they will listen.”
While this may be true for some, it has been my experience that no matter how you explain it, if it costs more money or the party you are talking to will be required to do something, it will not get done.
We had POINTED to a device that was not ours to maintain and told the owners, point blank, no one maintains this and it is the single point of failure for a communication system they used. They said thanks for the info and pressed on. Two years later when it failed, they asked us why we didn’t warn them. We pulled the email from our archive and showed them where we had told them about it. Now they are interested it solutions.
Re: Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
Yes, this happens quite a lot, the path of least resistance is often the chosen path and they willingly travel it despite any information given to them.
I am sure there have been times were I did not explain things to someone’s satisfaction, it’s just going to happen, but this assclown made it clear he would ignore any advice because their ass itched or because he felt butt hurt about something.
Not sure I would willing admit that I was that shallow of a person just to repudiate someone.
Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
Going the wrong way and wasting corporate resources just to piss someone off? And you admit to this?
Yes, it is heart breaking to see idiots like you running around, but laying blame at the feet of someone not being able to “talk down” enough is a pure cop out and smacks of an unprofessional attitude.
I stay around more than long enough explaining things and answering any questions.
Apparently your company pays you to waste resources. Instead of admitting that you know jack shit you act like you understood what the techies say, and make a different choice because EGO or the sales guys bought you off with a kickback. Seen your type plenty of times before.
Re: Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
wtf?
how many different companies have you worked at ?
it is THE NORM, not due to awkward nerds with deficient communication skills, that PHBsWILL ignore any/all warnings UNTIL it bites them in the ass…
that is the culture, NOT, oh, youbetter pay atte tion to the nerds…
Re: Re: Re:2 Bullshit claim!
Worked many places large and small.
You are correct, the culture is definitely as you say it is.
They must be bitten right in the ass to change things. No amount of explaining to talking about things will change their mind, in many cases they are just going through the motions and listening to my spiel while they have already made up their minds.
I once had an Executive claim that “their” choice of a vendor took security seriously after my team proved that we could access another organizations emails that we were sharing tenancy with. But because HE made the choice to go with these guys, he suppressed it because he could not reveal the egg on his fucking face so there we where… unsecured vendor and all the other tenants had to do to see our data was to just simply look.
Re: Re: Re:3 Bullshit claim!
That culture is not unique to IT. It’s in fact so old and so common that in my language there’s an old proverb about this culture: “to fill up the well after the calf has drowned in it”. Sums it up quite nicely.
Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
I don’t work in IT, but that’s the role that friends sometimes ask me to play.
In the not too distant past I once spent over two hours on the phone trying to explain to someone how to do something simple, but because I didn’t have the exact same version of Windows and use the same webmail as them, they were completely unable to understand what to do. It should have been simple; Email them a Zip file of a game, they save the file, unzip it and create an icon. Just getting them to save the Zip file from the email took forever. From there, they couldn’t understand the concept of an archive file and couldn’t tell if they were looking at the contents or the unzipped files. In the end, they gave up and just brought the laptop over for me to do it.
You can sit right in front of most people today and use the graphic card properties to flip the screen 180 degrees. They can watch you every step of the way, but unless they take notes, none of them will have the faintest idea how to change it back.
Imagine if nobody knew how to turn on the wipers on their car, or how to change the volume on their TV. What if people needed a “cheat-sheet” to remember how to use a microwave, or set an alarm clock? That’s effectively the level of probably 99% of the average computers users today.
Re: Bullshit claim!
I work in IT, I simply cannot expounding upon the number of people working in this industry who are so arrogant, that even if they know what they’re talking about, you can’t take them seriously due to their arrogance. On top of that, constantly having to deal with RTFM-type-people who aren’t always wrong on technology, but are very wrong on human nature, so their arrogance and anti-social habits end up wasting lots of time & energy as their arrogantly provided advice is disregarded.
It’s never asking too much to ask any president or politician to understand technology.
Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
Not saying it is right, but that is the nature of this nasty beast, it literally DEMANDS that IT professionals either BE arrogant or ACT arrogant or be side lined!
I bet you would pick the Arrogant Doctor doing surgery on YOUR BRAIN saying everything is going to be okay, no problem, instead of the Humble surgeon describing what might go wrong and they might be worried about making a mistake with a scalpel actually touching your brain!
Confident is is a requirement to go places with this job.
Re: Re: Re: Bullshit claim!
Oh, BS. Not only are IT professionals not required to be arrogant asses, being an arrogant ass is a good indication that the IT professional isn’t very good.
“Confident is is a requirement to go places with this job.”
Confidence is helpful to advance in any field, but confidence is a very different thing than arrogance.
LOL. I love the way they portray Trump as technologically clueless… but that’s not what he said. He said he doesn’t use it, not that he doesn’t know how to use it. LOL.
“and, like Clinton, he often relies on staff to print news articles off the internet. “
Citation needed.
““I’m just not a believer in email,” Trump said during a news conference Wednesday where he criticized Clinton’s use of a private server when she was secretary of State. “
So at the very least he is smart enough to know to NOT use email.
So why this “comparison” here…
““These are two candidates who don’t have their hands on the technology, and that’s unfortunate, because without that it’s difficult to understand this stuff on a deeper, more visceral level,” said Peter Leyden, a futurist and former managing editor of Wired who was an early Obama backer in Silicon Valley….”
Ahhhhh… it’s the old your candidate is just as bad as mine ploy.
At least if Trump didnt have the skills he’d PAY someone that DID.
LOL Hills… just have the staffers shut down the email server for a while… that will make the hacker go away for sure man. LOL.
Re: Re:
The media has been spending a lot of time trying to twist things Trump says.
I might vote for Trump just to see all of their pissed off faces and to hopefully begin an exodus from the US.
Email is notoriously easy to compromise, sending anything sensitive through email is like passing an open note around a class room… hoping that no one reads it or the “teacher” does not intercept it before it makes it to its final destination.
Re: Re: Re:
As a gay, pot smoking atheist… I endorse the message.
Re: Re:
“I’m just not a believer in email,” Trump said
Using a technology (or not) isn’t a faith-based decision. Unless you’re arguing that it’s against some quirky religion he’s part of…
So at the very least he is smart enough to know to NOT use email.
Smart enough not to? Assuming you’re some kind of “IT Guy” do you also advocate not using email at the company you work for, as it’s not the “smart” thing to do?
If you don’t, then what’s the purpose of that comment?
At least if Trump didn’t have the skills he’d PAY someone that DID.
Why would he even consider doing that, given his lack of “belief?”
Both these people are OLD! They don’t hate the tech, they just didn’t grow up with it. It wasn’t until their later years that all this stuff came out. It’s hard to teach a old dog new tricks!!! I deal with this, with my Dad who lives with me in my house. He kind of knows how to use his Mac and iPad and iPhone, but just the most basic things. Has no idea about my Gigabit network when I wired my house for that. Or all my Network stuff. How PLEX works with all my movies. I have Harmony 900 remotes which makes things much simpler with a pretty of a button or he would really be lost. He’s on Facebook, but all the other places? No. It’s enough to get by. Same goes with my Grandma who is now 90. I’ve been tying to teach her Windows over the years. Just the most basic things. Repeat a number of times. I have to fix the computer issues a number of times.
My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20 with a tape Drive!!! So I’ve been growing up with them all my life.
I have to agree. There’s no return of a Luddite president. They don’t hate tech and want nothing to do with it. They’re just OLD and didn’t grow up with it. They use it, but skill level is low. Why some people don’t understand this? Computers have come a long way in such a short period of time. We’re still in the transitional phase of those that grew up when there wasn’t Home Personal Computers to those that are playing on a tablet at 3 years old and have been growing up with computers their entire life. Have zero concept that not long ago they didn’t exist.
There’s so much you can ask a kid these days and they have no idea what you are talking about because they haven’t existed for a number of years, which is just starting to show your own age.
Re: Re:
Age has nothing to do with it. I’m 47 and it wasn’t until I was 22 that I got INTERESTED in tech.
I know 20 year olds that are complete USERS.
“Commodore Vic-20 with a tape Drive!!!” That was called a cassette tape back in my day. LOL.
Re: Re:
Both these people are OLD! They don’t hate the tech, they just didn’t grow up with it. It wasn’t until their later years that all this stuff came out. It’s hard to teach a old dog new tricks!!!
I disagree that age is a huge factor as you make it out to be. For example, my wife and I are roughly the same age (within a year) and we are both just over 50. While my wife is very competent using her computer and new technology, she has never had the desire to know what makes them work. (She also feels the same about electricity: she couldn’t care less about electrons, parallel circuits or calculating amperage – she just expects the light to go on when the switch is flipped).
To be honest, with all of apps and “app stores” and whatnot, we are creating a generation of what I always called “application idiots” – people who can run a basic application, but not much else. This group is worse (IMHO) than those who are actually completely clueless about technology because they tend to “think” they know a lot more than they actually do.
Re: Re:
Age has nothing to do with it, while a complete inability to ask experts how to solve a problem is a major problem, for everybody else.
Re: Re:
My first computer was a C64 and tape drive (unfortunately). Got a disk drive the following Christmas and things really took off from there.
Just one problem; While early computers required users to at least learn a little about them, today’s computers have become appliances. Computer knowledge today amounts to double-clicking icons or inserting some kind of media and waiting for Windows to prompt you for what to do with it. Someone who can install software is considered an advanced user, and if you know how to do such magical things as editing INI files and creating your own shortcuts, you’re an “expert”. Anyone who can fix problems or crate a batch file to automate tasks is elevated to the status of “computer wizard”.
People today literally throw away perfectly good computers because they get loaded with crap and slow down to the point that they become unusable. They destroy perfectly good hard drives because they believe the myth that nothing can ever truly be erased and think that “hackers” will be able to recover their personal information even after the drive has been wiped.
I met one kid who thought that the Nintendo 64 was the third generation of video game systems. To him it went NES -> SNES -> N64.
I wish I could find it again, but I once watched a video on YouTube of a young kid (from his attitude and the sound of his voice) reviewing a pack of Activision Atari 2600 games for one of the Xboxes. He kept going on about horrible the graphics were, how could they sell crap like that, etc.
” Luddites aren’t just people who don’t know anything about technology. They’re people who actively dislike certain technologies, in the belief that such advances will harm their own livelihoods.”
Lets be honest here…An Amiga could make a better president than either of them, especially with an Atari 2600 as a running mate.
Of course, none of this is an accurate description of what the Luddites were about anyway.
willful ignorance
Honestly I don’t even necessarily care that a president (or Senator, or whatever) doesn’t understand the latest technology. As others have said, no one should be reasonably expected to have an expert’s knowledge of everything in order to be qualified for that kind of job.
What infuriates me to no end is the near malicious enthusiasm with which these people crow about their ignorance.
I can’t think of the last time a hearing on any scientific or technological issue went all the way to the end without someone on the panel laughing off how little they knew about the subject. (Often throwing in an insult to the “so-called experts”—or just the “nerds”—just for good measure.)
What could possibly be the harm in honestly admitting, “You know, I don’t know a whole lot about this, and I personally prefer doing things the way I’ve always done. But this is an important issue and I’m going to do my best to learn enough about it to make an informed decision.”
The answer, of course, is that if everyone would act like the adults they supposedly are then it wouldn’t be any harm at all. But in the playground mentality that pervades nearly every aspect of politics, that would make you look “weak”, and we can’t have that.
Tech-challenged rubes aren’t qualified to be presidents in this day and age. Relying on advisors to inform them of issues they are unable to grasp no matter how hard they try is a farce. Besides, we all know these two dolts will end up listening to the anti-tech hysteria surveillance crowd that represents authority, not tech-savvy organizations that provide useful input, like EFF. Who would have thought the nightmare presidency of Obama would soon be looked upon as the good old days 😉
Re: Re:
So you expect a President to know everything about everything? You will set yourself up for a life’s full of disappointments in that thinking.
Re: Re: Re:
I don’t know anything about diplomacy or foreign policy. How would you feel about me being put in charge of dealing with Russia or the middle east?
>Both these people are OLD! They don’t hate the tech, they just didn’t grow up with it.
Balderdash.
These people came of age with the IBM 360, CDC supercomputers, Multics timesharing system; the Gemini space capsules were being launched with onboard minicomputers; within a decade, Bill Gates would be dumpster-diving for monetizable microcomputer software.
My 85-year-old non-college-graduate liberal-arts-major mother can effectively (and critically) research her family’s genealogy or medical conditions on the internet–and yes, use email. She didn’t “grow up with it”, nor did she use a computer until she was over 60. (She could, however, use a slide rule.) On the other hand, she’s not a con artist, or even a very skilled liar.
It’s not age. It’s a matter of what use you put your intelligence to.
Thing Always Said
“I’m just not a believer in email”
Is something often -and only- uttered by some jerk with a team of people doing and managing their email and communications for them.
He most certainly DOES “do email”…at least as much as he “builds hotels”, in the sense that other people print them out, highlight the easy words, and reply on his behalf. His cluelessness is hardly a virtue.
Do you really think Hillary didn’t know exactly what she was doing? The only reason to set up a private email system is to circumvent any potential FOI requests and eliminate any sort of transparency. She knew exactly what she was doing, and by doing so, isn’t that called conspiracy?
Why yes, yes it is, but the mainstream media (and based on this and other articles here, Techdirt) will do or say anything to put Hillary in a good light and dump on Trump.
Re: Re:
This is correct, far too many people believe that they are incompetent.
They have teams of advisers letting know about everything they do. They pay people to come up with all manner of ways to think about how to say shit for best effect!
Re: off the deep end
Re: Re:
I don’t agree. Did Hillary use her own email account to send/receive emails from ANY official account? Because, if so, her email practices would certainly come out under any investigation that reviewed the other people’s email.
Which is predictable, and..um..is what happened.
If she were devious enough to deliberately use her own email to avoid FOI, then she would also be clever enough to never send or receive any message from any official account.
What you propose is like a cheating husband using his “burner” phone to call his wife to see if he should pick up milk.
Re: Re: Re:
Which is predictable, and..um..is what happened.
Yeah, and she got to delete whatever emails she wanted to with no consequences. I doubt that would have been the case had she used official state department email.
What are you even responding to? She probably did know what she was doing (or wanted to do) in a general sense. That doesn’t mean Hillary has personal knowledge of modern technology.
Also, how does this article criticizing Clinton and Trump for the same exact thing “put Hillary in a good light and dump on Trump?”
Take off the conspiracy blinders.
Re: Re:
The article puts Hillary and her criminal behavior on the same level with Trump saying “I don’t use email”
Samey same? I think not.
Re: Re: Re:
Whoooa! Damn! You are REALLY fucking out to lunch!
> Again, that does not appear to be the case with either of the two candidates, who (at best) might just be described as agnostic to/indifferent to new technologies and somewhat ignorant on what that might mean from a policy perspective.
> and, like Clinton, he often relies on staff to print news articles off the internet.
> These are two candidates who don’t have their hands on the technology
“Samey same?” Yes. EXACTLY.
Fucking loon.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
You are the loon, they are not the same.
If Trumps reason for “not believing in email” are due to the security concerns, then they are damn sure not even close to the same.
One person is illegally using an email server in contravention of security protocol and one just does not believe in it.
There is a quite a bit of difference in those two statements. So you might be the loon you accuse others of being.
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
One person is illegally using an email server in contravention of security protocol and one just does not believe in it.
But this article is not about her decision to use her own email server. That is not a tech issue. This is about her failure to understand the ramifications, which is a tech issue, and is no worse than what any tech-clueless politician is doing.
Re: Re: Re:3 Failure to understand ramifications
I think that if Clinton (or whatever ignorant staffers of hers) did understand the ramifications, she wouldn’t have done it.
And that’s not mere ignorance, but dangerous ignorance.
That is a problem.
That’s the sort of problem that can cost lives when operational intelligence is compromised.
AND???
What do these 2 KNOW??
1 has been in politics since NIXON..
2. Is a corp stooge..that isnt very good at it.
NEITHER has been poor enough to even NEED to buy their own food.
Rumor has it Putin doesn’t allow his staff to use computers (and forces them to use typewriters) because he believes the NSA (or at least the US Govt.) had the chip makers (AMD/Intel) build into motherboards ways to transmit anything done onto the computers back to the US.
Who is the loon?
Re: Re:
Who is the loon?
You’re suggesting Putin is a loon for believing that? Seems totally plausible given what we’ve learned in the past several years.
"But Trump's hardly a candidate for the Geek Squad either"
That’s okay. The Geek Squad doesn’t do actual tech support anymore. They’re sales guys who outsource the tech work to India.
Apparently, we’re still in the SOPA era of I’m not a nerd, but I disagree.
But I suspect that Clinton’s opinion can evolve, and Trump can just be distracted by recalcitrant immigrants.
Re: "But Trump's hardly a candidate for the Geek Squad either"
Did the Geek Squad ever actually do tech support?
Re: Re: Geek Squad's tech support.
According to a Cracked article from an ex-squadmember. they used to do a lot of in-house repair and troubleshooting. But then the Best Buy hard-sell culture metasticized (was imposed as policy) on the tech department.
Eventually the techs were phased out and replaced with sales people and actual fixing was outsourced.
Maybe they just don’t have an editor at all. From the first quoted paragraph:
Travail might imply suffering or a painful experience of some sort, but that suffering is arrived at through toil, it’s not just any suffering.
“Woes,” or, “troubles,” would have been better choices.
Speaking for an article with a misleading title
There are more than two parties running for president.
Not only that, Clinton is Luddite. She has a fear of video games, Uber, and encryption and works to actively limit them.
Re: "There are more than two parties running for president."
Yes, but you only get to vote against one of two primary candidates.
If you vote for a third party you’re not voting against the one you don’t like.
Re: Speaking for an article with a misleading title
It’s not so misleading.
There are others running, but it is the next best thing to absolutely certain that the next President will be a Democrat or Republican.
Constitutional rights are constantly ignored
I doubt they would even understand why America was created in the first place the way the candidates act like british royalty from prior to the 13 colonies rebelling.
Re: Take another look at the US Declaration of Independence.
You might discover that a lot of Jefferson’s indictments against King George are relevant today.
Really?
Apparently you have not considered Donald Trump. He knows tech. He knows everything.
Re: Really?
Trump will tech you so hard that you’ll be sick of being teched.
en route to technical interest or otherwise of aged people becoming presidents, we should be more concerned about his or her intent – the executive may love/hate publicly the latest technology, but puts in policy measures for the ‘good’ of the country but intent being the new technology won’t come back to bite him/her later, that is the r e a l issue.
Derek, which is easier? Use the email address that is attached to a phone (and laptop) given to her by the government or to create your own and then have to hook that up?
She said it was for convenience, but that doesn’t fly. Not wanting a record in a government system is the only reason that makes sense.
Clinton's tech plan is pretty great
Aside from Clinton’s personal email and fax problems, her campaign’s Initiative on Technology is excellent: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/06/27/hillary-clintons-initiative-on-technology-innovation/
Also on the Clinton campaign, they have a well-staffed group of software developers and data scientists, whereas Trump has his Twitter account.