Tech It Easy Congress – A Generational Divide

Aging committed evangelicals are fading fast away and white-haired wrinkled white Congressmen are serving their final years. American demographics, notwithstanding an incumbent effort to marginalize the expected results of the 2020 Census, are changing. More women with a legislative voice. Diversity better represented. And younger, younger, younger. The picture above says it all. Older incumbents see the writing on the wall… and struggle to suppress the new and attempt to epoxy their values into long-term judicial appointments that will frustrate younger generations for decades.

While I cannot castigate aging Boomers (I am one) with a unitary brushstroke, suggesting that they simply do not or even cannot understand the technological shift that has escaped most of those old white Congressmen, it still staggers my mind to think that this Congress is charged with directing, governing and regulating our social and technological shifting tectonic plates… when too many struggle even with sending and receiving emails, already an increasingly archaic form of communication.

Can they understand how data scraping, using intrusive cookies, operational real-time analytics, self-writing messaging (tailored to individuals) controlled by “bots” deployed through artificial intelligence, GPS-tracking, the difference between a petaflop and a belly flop, the social ramifications of cryptocurrency, blockchain encryption, the seminal change as 5G becomes ubiquitous… or the malevolence of commercial avarice that sear through Facebook, Google and Twitter? Privacy is sacred to the white hairs. It doesn’t exist, as most younger people know. Hire someone with a tat? They shudder. Yet half of America is under the age of 40.

These tech capabilities elected our President, with digital manipulation, disinformation and voter exclusion at their core. Still, these legislative white hairs do not fully comprehend, cannot fathom that our legal system lags decades behind the changes are now part of everyday life for most of us. Maybe they have watched their elementary-school aged grandchildren’s thumbs fly, text and extract images, information and danger from the ubiquitous Web, spreading memes, new vocabulary and graphic images into the “ether.” White hairs with their mouths agape. They hold hearings, suggest new laws, but gathering and controlling the smoke and gels slithering through every nook and cranny of our over-connected world defies simple regulation.

“The 115th Congress was already one of the oldest in history when it convened at the dawn of the Trump administration — average age 58 in the House, 62 in the Senate, 90 billion or so in the relativistic time scale of the online generation, in front of which Congress spent much of the year embarrassing itself. By the time the 115th hobbled into extinction at the end of 2018, artifacts from its attempts to engage the younger folk and their digital ways lay strewn across the internet like the fossil record of an obsolete species.

“There were the agonizing video clips from April’s Facebook hearing, in which 68-year-old Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) attempted to ask Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a question about data privacy, and revealed a conception of social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights: ‘Do you track devices that an individual who uses Facebook has that is connected to the device that they use for their Facebook connection, but not necessarily connected to Facebook?’

“‘I’m not — I’m not sure of the answer to that question,’ Zuckerberg replied, as if he could even be sure it was a question… Come December it was Google chief Sundar Pichai’s turn to visit the Capitol and watch Rep. Steve Cohen, the 69-year-old Democrat from Tennessee, wave his hands in the air and complain: ‘I use your apparatus often, or your search engine, and I don’t understand all of the different ways that you can turn off the locations. There’s so many different things!’” Los Angeles Times, January 11^th.

Donald Trump has usurped the Congressional GOP, who live in morbid fear of disconnecting with Trump’s populist, nationalist base without whom they know they cannot hold most red states or win a national election. Trumps owns them now, although fault lines appeared as the shutdown lingered way too long. The Dems, still searching for a sticky unifying national message, can simply look to the younger, mostly female freshmen in their Congressional ranks to understand white haired socially conservative politics is unsustainable.

Still the white hairs rule, chair the powerful congressional committees, representing a bygone era and shrinking minority of the citizenry. “‘There’s different eras where people come from. It’s hard to transcend that,’ said Daniel Schuman, a former Hill staffer who works for a tech-oriented lobbying group, Demand Progress. ‘It’s like ‘Mad Men.’ You’ve got the secretary who does the typing and the librarian who does the research. Lindsey Graham was bragging about having a flip phone!’” LA Times.

But those fading older voting conservatives are angry. They do not understand the changing world, cannot fathom why the promise of gainful employment in high-paying blue-collar jobs – the backbone of America since the Great Depression – is gone. They believe in God and Donald Trump and will do whatever it takes to return to what they know. They are also well-armed.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and we live in a political era where “compromise” is a bad word, where opponents are dismissed with vituperatives that would never have been tolerated in the 20^th century society and where politicians enhance their “electability” by exacerbating polarization and finding blame.