Collective action problem is the term political scientists use to describe any situation where a large group of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s easier for everyone to pursue their own interests. The essential work of every government is making laws that balance the tradeoffs between shared benefits and acceptable restrictions on individual or corporate freedoms to solve this dilemma, and the reason people hate the government is that not being able to do whatever you want all the time is a huge bummer. Speed limits help make our neighborhoods safer, but they also mean you aren’t supposed to put the hammer down and peel out at every stoplight, which isn’t any fun at all.

Every Verge reader is intimately familiar with collective action problems because they’re everywhere in tech. We cover them all the time: making everything charge via USB-C was a collective action problem that took European regulation to finally resolve, just as getting EV makers to adopt the NACS charging standard took regulatory effort from the Biden administration. Content moderation on social networks is a collective action problem; so are the regular fights over encryption. The single greatest webcomic in tech history describes a collective action problem.

The problem is that getting people to set aside their own selfishness and work together is generally impossible even if the benefits are obvious, a political reality so universal it’s a famous Tumblr meme. 

In general, I don’t like to discuss politics on here. I figure if you’re reading my blog, you probably have a vague idea of what my political beliefs are.

But this endorsement of Kamala Harris isn’t just an endorsement of her and her politics. In fact, there is hardly any mention of her in here.

In fact, this endorsement is an endorsement for the concept of democracy.

The key part about Kamala is toward the end, which sums up why I’m gonna vote for her:

In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.

People love to say “the government is broken”, but often fail to ask any follow-up questions. You know, like "why is it broken" and "how can we fix it?"

When I see something broken, my first instinct is to figure out how it got broken in the first place. "Broken", by definition, implies there is a state of "functioning." If we want to "fix" it, we need to agree on what "functioning" means.¹

If we agree that our country is broken, then we need to agree on a vision for what a functioning country is.

When building software, there are plenty of excuses we could make as to why our system is broken. A junior engineer might blame the users. They're dumb, they're using it wrong, they don't understand the elegance of the solution we've built for them.

As you get more senior, you start to realize just how reductive and silly those arguments are. We can't control our users, and we will likely never understand them. But we can perform user testing and spend time with our customers. We learn how they actually use the software. We dig to uncover other problems they have so we can adjust our software to meet those needs.

I think what bothers me about our current political climate is that we are quick to jump to these reductive ideas which are proven to be ineffective. We have to work together and keep trying new things.

We're better than this. We all need each other, often more than we are willing to admit.

It’s a lesson I’m trying to impart on my kids. They constantly fight with each other, their feelings pouring out of them like a fire hydrant when they don’t get what they want.

I get it. It’s like The Rolling Stones said: “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try, you’ll find you’ll get what you need.”

We need America. We need to come together and curb our natural tendency toward hostility against anything that is different.

But even if you’re apolitical, I encourage you to read this excellent essay. It makes me proud to be an American at a time where it feels dangerous to be proud.