Politics, Technology

2016 -- The Year Technology Began Disrupting Government

Once upon a time, we needed representatives in Congress.

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Donald Trump (Photo by Isaac Brekken/Getty)

Donald Trump (Photo by Isaac Brekken/Getty)

Maybe it’s because I live in startup land, but I believe that the advances in technology over the past eight years have a lot to do with how the last eighteen months went down. That’s not to discredit the explanations of racism, the Supreme Court or even master persuaders, but consider this a supplementary explanation.

Whether we noticed it or not, we are living in an increasingly flat world. We no longer take our cues from experts. We get our news analysis from social media, choose restaurants using Yelp and read the comments sections on Seeking Alpha before buying stock (ordinary people used to have stock brokers). Plus, smart phones have made things like raising our hand to call a taxi or deposit a check with a teller at the bank, things that we were doing just a couple of years ago, seem ancient. Technology has wildly adjusted our expectations to the point where now government, as it exists today, no longer really makes all that much sense.

Remember “Give me liberty or give me death?” Once upon a time, people were passionate about our system of government. But the problem is that our system was designed for 1776. Democracy was great when it was being compared with tyranny, but today, people want their government to function as efficiently as their smart phone.

And it doesn’t.

Once upon a time, we needed representatives in Congress who would vote for our interests because information was hard to come by and we couldn’t physically be there in Washington D.C. But, today, information, albeit imperfect, is always at our fingertips. Our representatives are glorified middle men and women, and they’re not particularly good ones. They rarely vote our interests; instead, they vote based on partisanship and back room deals with lobbyists. And while we choose our President, we really choose between two people who the experts picked for us.

The whole thing is soooooo 1980!

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But that’s just not how 2016 rolls, is it?

2016 gave us not one but two candidates in Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders who were the people’s choice, plain and simple. Did you need Wikileaks to tell you that the DNC was doing everything it could to push Hilary (their candidate) over Bernie? And, it seems like every week since July there is yet another establishment Republican penning a somber op-ed about how they are dropping out of the GOP. Trump, like Bernie, was not their choice.

Call it technology induced chutzpah, but both Bernie and Trump made popular positions that seemed so ludicrous e.g. free college tuition and building a wall on the Mexican border. Those positions sound crazy, but so does Airbnb, drones and machine learning. People reason that if IBM can build Watson, we can build a wall and/or give people free university.

Now, disruption doesn’t always win the day, see e.g. Airbnb’s lawsuit. Bernie’s got knocked out this summer and Trump might not win today. The establishment never goes silently into the night. But, make no mistake about it, the seeds of disruption have been sowed.

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Zach Abramowitz is a former Biglaw associate and currently CEO and co-founder of ReplyAll. You can follow Zach on Twitter (@zachabramowitz) or reach him by email at zach@replyall.me.

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