Some thoughts on the US elections

I apparently am not going to get anything done today until I write this. Some thoughts, in no particular order.

• The most heart-breaking thing for me this morning, and last night, is the reactions from people I know who are not white, not male. Who are LGBT, or immigrants, or Muslim. They're hurt, and they're scared, and they feel like the United States just slammed the door in their faces.

  A lot of Trump supporters will be offended by this, or dismissive of it. A lot of Trump supporters don't feel like that was what the campaign was about at all. And I strongly believe that many, many people voted for Trump for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with sexism or racism. But whether or not you believe Trump supported the alt-right, the alt-right supported Trump, and a lot of people are really scared this morning. That feeling is real.

  To all of those people, all I can say is this: the most meaningful inclusiveness is how we all treat each other on a day-to-day basis. How we, as individuals, act towards other individuals. Governments can change a lot of things that matter a great deal in terms of legal recognitions and legal protections, but they can't take away our individual determination to see each other as fellow humans and to treat every person with respect and open-hearted welcome.

  If you believe, as I do, in welcoming and supporting every single person, regardless of race, creed, gender, sexuality, or any other such distinction, now is a really good time to say so, and to act like it. To your friends, to your co-workers, to the people you meet in stores, to the people you see on the street. Whoever you voted for. People are scared. People are hurt. People need to hear that they're not alone, that the world didn't turn on them last night.

  As a well-off white man, a member of, supposedly, the winning demographic class of this election last night, I want to say to everyone in the US who is angry and scared and despairing today: I have your back. Nothing has changed for me. Nothing has changed in how I'm going to see you. To the extent that I can contribute to this, the US will continue to become more inclusive, more welcoming, and more supportive at the level of day-to-day interactions between all of us. Workplaces that have a true ethical committment to diversity will continue to support that. Multicultural, diverse cities that have welcomed everyone in all their wonderful variety will continue to do so.

  An election can cause a lot of damage. I'm scared too. But no matter what, I believe in tolerance, I believe in diversity, I believe love wins, and there are a lot of people out there like me. A lot. And we'll continue to act in accordance with those principles no matter what government is elected.

• There is going to be a lot of ink spilled over the next few days dissecting this election, and a lot of theories put forward for why it went the way it did. A lot of that is going to come in the form of blaming people, and a lot of that analysis is going to be more of the same insider political horse race analysis. I think we should question that. Sharply.

  Going all the way back to the US primaries, and also looking at votes in other countries like Brexit in the UK, a much more foundational theme leaps out at me.

  The status quo is not working for people.

  Technocratic government by political elites is not working for people. Business as usual is not working for people. Minor tweaks to increasingly arcane systems is not working for people. People are feeling lost in bureaucracy, disaffected by elections that do not present a clear alternate vision, and depressed by a slow slide into increasingly dismal circumstances.

  Government is not doing what we want it to do for us. And people are getting left behind. The left in the United States (of which I'm part) has for many years been very concerned about the way blacks and other racial minorities are systematically pushed to the margins of our economy, and how women are pushed out of leadership roles. Those problems are real. But the loss of jobs in the industrial heartland, the inability of a white, rural, working-class man to support his family the way his father supported him, the collapse of once-vibrant communities into poverty and despair: those problems are real too.

  The status quo is not working for anyone except for a few lucky, highly-educated people on the coasts. People, honestly, like me, and like many of the other (primarily white and male) people who work in tech. We are one of the few beneficiaries of a system that is failing the vast majority of people in this country.

  I don't think right now is the best time to talk about the solutions I favor. For good or bad, the US just asked Trump to try his approach. We'll see how that goes. But I think it's very important to see how important this failure of our institutions and our economy was in the outcome of this election, and to see the echoes of that in Sanders's campaign on the Democratic side, and to think hard about what that means.

  This is something that unites us as a country. The status quo is not working for the vast majority of people in this country, whether black or white or Latinx, whether urban or rural, of any gender.

  Let me talk for a moment to the left in the US. The temptation in human psychology, when one is scared and angry, is to fall back on zero-sum thinking. To try to get back what we feel like was stolen from us by "those people." The left has been criticizing the right in the US for that type of thinking for years now. But you will see the same style of thinking on the left this morning because it's just human psychology. So here's the test. Do we really believe in inclusiveness and in finding a way to escape the zero-sum trap? If so, the way forward isn't to write off half the country as racist, or ignorant, or duped, or otherwise to react out of anger and create more divisions. It's to regroup and rebuild on top of something that unites us.

  The status quo isn't working. We all need something better than incremental tweaks of a broken system by elitist technocrats funded by inherited money and multinational corporations.

• The result of this election was a huge surprise largely because the voices of a substantial portion of Americans were not heard by the polls. If you talk to those Americans, you will quickly find that they're unsurprised, because they don't feel heard by anything else in our society either.

  This sort of failure is possible because we're not talking to each other. Many Clinton voters do not know a single Trump voter. Many Trump voters do not know a single Clinton voter.

  There are many causes for this, but as someone who works in tech, I think we have to own a large part of this failure. We, as the people who write modern communication tools, have failed our country, and are failing the world.

  The two communication mediums on the rise, the ones that are replacing traditional newspapers and TV news as the source of information for a vast number of Americans, are Facebook and Twitter. Both of them, whatever their merits for other uses, are absolutely awful for our political discussions, for our understanding of each other, and for our democracy.

  Facebook is a closed bubble of people who think like you. It is optimized and designed to expose you to your people: to the people you are the most connected to, to the people you therefore probably agree with, to the people who think the same way and react to the same things. Everything from reactions by your friends down to the news you see on Facebook is filtered to align with your implicit biases as best as Facebook's algorithms can determine them. It isolates you from disagreement by design. You can, of course, reach out intentionally, and families will always cut across political divides to some extent, but Facebook will default you into a bubble in which you are not having thoughtful, intelligent discussions with people who disagree with you.

  Twitter, by contrast, is a public screaming match. To express any controversial political opinion on Twitter, left or right, is to invite an onslaught by a raging mob. A small number of people can manage to heavily filter that environment and have some semblance of a conversation. Almost no one is going to bother. It feels profoundly dangerous. It's terrifying to say something that might attract real attention. Only very unusual people are able to risk opening up their heart and mind on Twitter and being vulnerable enough to possibly change their minds.

  We have to do better than this.

  I don't know how to do better than this. I don't have any grand plan. I'm not the person to start a project. I don't have a start-up idea, or a free software concept. But if we, as programmers and designers and free software developers, cannot do better than this, who will?

  We have to have a way to enable thoughtful conversations between people with real and profound political disagreements in an environment where there is some mutual respect, some foundation of politeness, and a sufficiently supportive environment that people are willing to risk being convinced. And it has to somehow bypass the filter bubble and allow us to come into contact with people who do not think like us, do not come from the same walk of life, the same region, the same race, the same religion, the same economic circumstances.

  This is a profound challenge. But the news media is not going to suddenly revive. TV news is not going to magically become a venue for intelligent and thoughtful discussion. And people largely do not change their minds through being preached at by "thought leaders." People change their minds through contact with other people, through having their assumptions and conclusions questioned in an environment that supports enough of a foundational level of decency that they can get out of the trap of being afraid and defensive.

  We don't have that platform. We need it. Or I fear we're in for a continual whipsaw of zero-sum voting, as factions with no communication channels to each other whip up xenophobia in an attempt to outvote each other.

I don't have any profound conclusions. I'm honestly pretty upset. And pretty scared. But we have to talk to each other. And we have to listen to each other. And we have to persaude each other. And we have to be willing to be persuaded.

And please go tell someone this morning that you have their back.