Two articles grabbed my attention yesterday that touched on a growing concern I’ve been wrestling with far longer than SOPA/PIPA or any individual bill has been bouncing around; namely, that the people making decisions about legislating the future of the technology have little, if any, understanding of it.

As Clay highlights in his post:

Our 111th Congress has 2 professional athletes in it. There’s an astronaut, two radio talk show hosts, and a driving instructor in there too. There are three carpenters, a meat cutter, a toll booth collector and a river boat captain in our Congress. Our Congress has an FBI agent in there and even a parliamentary aide in the British House of Commons. Of course, according to Congressional Research Service’s Profile of the 111th Congress, most politicians in Congress just list their profession as “politics” or “business.” Our Congress has more vineyard owners than developers in it.

The point Clay makes is that we need more developers and hackers in Congress and I agree.

The other article was Alexandra Petri’s OpEd in the Washington Post. Recounting her experience watching the SOPA hearings yesterday she notes:

If I had a dime for every time someone in the hearing used the phrase “I’m not a nerd” or “I’m no tech expert, but they tell me . . .,” I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet. If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.” There ought to be a law, I think, that in order to regulate something you have to have some understanding of it.

I got my California Driver’s License in the mail yesterday.

Now, I don’t build cars, nor do I write the rules of the road, but I have been driving for the better part of 20 years so I have a pretty good understanding of how those two aspects of driving work. Despite all of that accumulated experience, the state of California wouldn’t let me operate a car, and put the lives of others in danger, without taking a basic two page, closed book, multiple choice quiz.

At 16 I failed my drivers test 4 times before they handed me a license. With those 20 years of experience behind me I passed this California exam with flying colors.

That lawmakers who’ve not been similarly credentialed with something as rudimentary as a multiple choice quiz have license to make legislative decisions on the future of technology is troubling.

Addressing this growing technology divide- through technology natives infiltrating the system or through some mechanism for certifying technical competency- is becoming more and more pressing with every passing day.