Six thousand years ago, there was a professional class of people that had a better relationship with information than everybody else. The professional scribe, armed with the ability to read and write, had a better ability to figure out the world than anybody else. Scribes became more than just stenographers for the courtrooms of power; they explored the sciences, becoming mathematicians, scientists, architects, and physicians. For millennia, the scribe wasn’t just a professional class, it was the backbone of civilization.

Through the development of the printing press, and a global push for basic literacy, the scribe class became obsolete. Knowing how to read and write wasn’t a trade secret for a professional class—it was a necessary asset for economic survival. Scribes went extinct, and were replaced in society by journalists, who had marginally better abilities to read and write, to preserve the link between the people and the truth.

But our romantic idea of the journalist speaking truth to power has now gone all but extinct. As our media companies have consolidated and sought shareholder returns over civic responsibility, there’s not much left for the investigative reporter; local newspapers just don’t have the budget for investigative reporting, and larger media companies are making too much money peddling affirmation over information.

The invention of the printing press brought with it the Protestant Reformation—a democratization of the people’s relationship with God. Once the Bible could be purchased by the middle class, every man, in the eyes of Martin Luther, could become his own priest. Today, the invention of the Internet has democratized information such that professional journalists alone cannot own the relationship with the facts anymore.

Today, programmers are the new scribes. Whether it is the developers at Google, determining which search results are accurate for a particular query; the developers at Microsoft, building the browser that most of us use; the developers at Apple, building the latest phones so that we can have a printing press in our pockets; or the developers at Facebook, figuring out which of our friends are the most relevant to us—the developers build the lenses that the rest of us look through to get our information.

This book’s agenda is to help people make more sense of the world around them by encouraging them to tune into the things that matter most and to tune out the things that make them sick. The ones who can link the public with the truth most effectively today aren’t journalists, they’re developers. As the digital divide continues to close, and as a generation of children grows up knowing how to use an iPad from the age of two, developers must take the mantle of scribe seriously and responsibly.

The opportunities for developers to make a difference are unparalleled. The self-driving cars being engineered at companies like Volkswagen and Google aren’t just novel inventions that allow us to watch movies on our way to work; they’re life-saving devices. The self-driving car promises a future in which drunk driving deaths no longer happen.

The World Bank has opened most of its data to the public, hoping that developers can find more effective ways for the organization to distribute financial and medicinal aid to developing nations.

Code for America is creating an army of developers to create technology that helps the government provide cheaper, more transparent, and more reliable services. In its first year, it managed to create new ways for civic leaders to work with one another in Philadelphia and Seattle, and provided more educational transparency to the city of Boston. Through its Civic Commons project, it’s helping municipalities work together to lower the costs of the software they procure by connecting the cities together to share.

Just after the devastating earthquakes in 2010, I hosted a “Hack for Haiti” event at the Sunlight Foundation. In just 48 hours, a small group of developers at a company in Washington called Intredia developed software that allowed relief workers on the ground to translate Creole into English without the need for an Internet connection.

Most developers haven’t taken this new responsibility to heart. A half-century ago, the brightest minds of the generation were working on putting a man on the moon. Today, the 20-something research scientist and data team lead for Facebook, Jeff Hammerbacher, put it best: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”^[94]

If you’re a developer, you can do more than this: you can solve problems. With the right data, and working with the right people, you can find efficient ways to connect vaccines with the people who need them the most, and prevent them from being wasted on the people who need them the least. You can find ways to close the gap between the reality-based community, and the folks stuck in epistemic loops, by linking them more closely to the levers of power in their community.

My plea to you is that you take your role in society seriously. Find an issue you care about: the environment, cancer, space exploration, education, rewiring communities, pet adoption—anything—and dedicate some portion of your time to finding new ways to put your skills to use in that community.

You needn’t ask for permission to do this. Do not wait for a nonprofit or advocacy group to ask you donate your time. While it’s useful to partner with organizations, it’s likely that they’re more interested in your skills to help them fundraise than they are to solve problems. Instead, find ways to interview and understand experts in the field, and then invent new ways to solve problems big and small. The best ideas do not rely on a government’s or organization’s permission or compliance for implementation. The best ideas provide irrefutable insight and solve problems.

The lean startup world that many technology-focused people find themselves in usually starts with a business-oriented cofounder, and a technology-oriented cofounder. To make an interesting social contribution, try partnering up with a journalist. Cynicism aside, there are still a few good reporters working in the world, who know how to ask the right questions and get the most out of the data that you can process.

There are networks of journalists looking for developers across the country. Check out the organization Hacks/Hackers, which is attempting to do just that: link great developers with great investigative reporters to combine the best of both worlds. Watch the work of the Knight Foundation, too. They’re investing millions of dollars in reinventing media for the digital age.

Keep in mind that this isn’t a call for you to build apps for your favorite nonprofit. Unless you’re willing to support and maintain each application, and help constantly ensure its usage and adoption, you’re wasting your time. Your nonprofit likely doesn’t have the kind of resources or knowledge it takes to ensure success. Rather, it’s a call for you to solve problems using your skills.

Doctors Without Borders works because doctors can triage the ill, and put them on a course to getting better. They’re solving immediate problems, and when they leave, the doctors know they made a difference. A programmer’s relationship to her product is different: it takes time and maintenance to have the desired effect.

My other plea to you is that you take your role in society responsibly. Just as responsible journalists have a code of ethics, so should you. It should never be your goal to analyze data to make a point, but rather to analyze it to tell the truth. As we’ve discovered in this book, we all come with our own biases—some we don’t even know we have. But you must try as hard as you can to not let your own agenda supersede the truth.

The CEO of my publisher, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, has a guiding principle that I think applies here: work on stuff that matters. Please, don’t let your entire career be about figuring out new ways to deliver advertisements. Even if it pays the bills, find an additional outlet to use your skills to make a difference.

The greatest scribes have always done so, whether it was Imhotep and the construction of the Pyramid of Djoser, Martin Luther and his 95 Theses, or Google’s self-driving car, our information technology is powerful stuff. You can do amazing things if you, as O’Reilly says, take the long view, and create more value than you capture.

You can even run for Congress. While many sneer at the idea of the nerdy caricatures of developers that they know, the fact is that software engineers are often great communicators. And while cynical developers may be repulsed at the idea of working for such an organization, there’s so much value they can add.

Developers are great at using technology to connect directly with people in ways that others cannot, and at helping constituents connect with one another. With a developer who understands the guts of the Web in a leadership spot inside Congress, Congress could start communicating more effectively online. And as this developer became more successful, the rest of Congress may very well follow suit.

The government’s problems are becoming increasingly technical—or the problems we’re facing have technology tied to them in some way. For instance, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 isn’t just a 1000+ page bill that’s now a law, it’s also a technical specification for Recovery.gov—and it’s written by people who don’t know how to write specifications. Worse, unlike a poorly informed client or boss, if you don’t adhere to this client’s wishes, you don’t just lose money—you may be breaking the law. Thus, Recovery.gov was built to spec, but hasn’t been particularly effective at bringing people into the process.

It’s every crooked consultant’s dream to have a client who views what they sell as a form of mysticism, and that’s precisely what’s happening around our muncipal, state, and federal governments. A few developers in Congress could reign in the spending and help their peer representatives appropriate taxpayer funds. Today, there is exactly one developer who has written software professionally who has also been elected to Congress: Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisana. If a revitalization of government technology is going to happen smartly and wisely, we need some developers inside Congress to help lead the way.

Of course, you don’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) start in federal politics. Join your local civic association first, and find new ways to help your local community. You’ll discover plenty of opportunity and many open arms there. But again, don’t wait for someone’s permission, unless it absolutely requires their adoption and sponsorship in order to work.

Finally, for those of you who aren’t engineers, know that the most vital thing after basic literacy for the education of yourself and your children is digital literacy and STEM education: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. History shows us that perhaps a century from now saying “I’m not an Internet person” may be much like saying “I don’t know how to read.” Organizations like CodeNow are helping transform our concepts of literacy by making sure computer science education is accessible to everyone who wants it, and is constantly looking for volunteer engineers who can help teach classes. While it’s not the key to solving all of our problems and differences, those skills, combined with the ability to communicate, give us the greatest ability to see the truth.