Politics is about the future, and WIRED embraces optimism

WIRED HAS NEVER BEEN NEUTRAL.

For nearly a quarter of a century, this organization has championed a specific way of thinking about tomorrow. If it’s true, as the writer William Gibson once had it, that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed, then our task has been to locate the places where various futures break through to our present and identify which one we hope for.

Our founders—Louis Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe, and Kevin Kelly—all supported a strain of optimistic libertarianism native to Silicon Valley. The future they endorsed was the one they saw manifested in the early Internet: one where self-organizing networks would replace old hierarchies. To them, the US government was one of those kludgy, inefficient legacy systems that mainly just get in the way.

Over the past couple of decades, we’ve gotten to watch their future play out: We’ve seen the creative energies of countless previously invisible communities unleashed—and, well, we’ve watched networks become just as good at concentrating wealth and influence in the hands of a few people as the old hierarchies were. We’ve seen geeks become billionaires, autocrats become hackers, and our readers (people curious about how technology is shaping the world) become the American mainstream. Like any sane group of thinkers, we’ve calibrated our judgments along the way. But much of our worldview hasn’t changed. We value freedom: open systems, open markets, free people, free information, free inquiry. We’ve become even more dedicated to scientific rigor, good data, and evidence-driven thinking. And we’ve never lost our optimism.

I bring all this up because, for all of its opinions and enthu­siasms, WIRED has never made a practice of endorsing candidates for president of the United States. Through five election cycles we’ve written about politics and politicians and held them up against our ideals. But we’ve avoided telling you, our readers, who WIRED viewed as the best choice.

Today we will. WIRED sees only one person running for president who can do the job: Hillary Clinton.
RIGHT NOW WE see two possible futures welling up in the present. In one, society’s every decision is dominated by scarcity. Except for a few oligarchs, nobody has enough of anything. In that future, we build literal and figurative walls to keep out those who hope to acquire our stuff, while through guile or violence we try to acquire theirs.

In the other future, the one WIRED is rooting for, new rounds of innovation allow people to do more with less work—in a way that translates into abundance, broadly enjoyed.

RIGHT NOW WE see two possible futures welling up in the present. In one, society’s every decision is dominated by scarcity. Except for a few oligarchs, nobody has enough of anything. In that future, we build literal and figurative walls to keep out those who hope to acquire our stuff, while through guile or violence we try to acquire theirs.

eddie wrote:So correct me of I'm wrong, simplified, this WIRED is claiming that Clinton has an optimistic quality / view / message, that Trump lacks?

eddie wrote:The best interview I've seen of Trump (which I stuck on here somewhere) was when he said that black people in the US needed a future and he planned on giving them one.  That was a positive message, I think. He seemed quite earnest.....?

Original Quill wrote:

eddie wrote:The best interview I've seen of Trump (which I stuck on here somewhere) was when he said that black people in the US needed a future and he planned on giving them one.  That was a positive message, I think. He seemed quite earnest.....?

Yes, given I believe in Wisconsin, where there are mostly white voters.  

The wise money says he is not, by such professed urban generosity, courting the black vote.  Rather, he is courting the younger white voters, who respond to concerns about how blacks are treated in this country.

In fact, you are in that group, I would imagine.  Didn't you respond favorably when you heard it?  It was messaging meant for your genre.

eddie wrote:

Original Quill wrote:

Yes, given I believe in Wisconsin, where there are mostly white voters.  

The wise money says he is not, by such professed urban generosity, courting the black vote.  Rather, he is courting the younger white voters, who respond to concerns about how blacks are treated in this country.

In fact, you are in that group, I would imagine.  Didn't you respond favorably when you heard it?  It was messaging meant for your genre.

Yes of course I responded favourably. I thought it was great that he said it and if he means it and does it - all the better.

eddie wrote:You're probably right. He just looked very convincing and sincere.
I never liked him way back when I used to watch boxing alot and he'd be interviewed as the manager of some fighter and he'd come across as arrogant then....as though this fighter was nothing more than meat to make money.
He was, as my dad put it, "A greedy, ugly man"