Debugging Our Democracy

A Modest Bugfix for a Broken Republic

Update 5.8.26: It took me a little bit, but I went ahead and created a website to help facilitate the thing this essay was actually arguing for. It’s called Declaration 2.0 — declaration2.us.

Each month there will be one corporate target, a specific list of demands, a 30-day coordinated boycott. You sign with your real name. Real names are the entire point.

This June’s target is Amazon. The demands and the full text are on the site.

Right now I’m signer #1. I’d like you to be #2. If the argument below moved you at all, the next step isn’t a like or a share. It’s putting your name on something.

The Morning I Didn't March

Sadly, I overslept last Saturday and missed my local No Kings March. I've attended others, but truthfully, I don't know if I would’ve gone to this version of the protest anyway. It's not that I don't see the value – the energy, camaraderie, and sense of empowerment (no matter how fleeting) are like a really joyful therapy session. And who couldn’t use that these days?

I’m not apathetic either. Much as I’d like to stop doom scrolling the news, I can’t turn away from it and say it’s just too much, let me turn out the lights and pull the covers over my head.

So what if this article is my protest? What if I did what I went to school for and wrote and spoke my mind for once? Granted, I'm a nobody in the media sphere, but I still have a lot to lose. I have a family who depends on me. I recognize (and honestly, fear) what the damage could be if I were whisked off in an unmarked van one night because something I wrote might not jibe with the powers that be. People have been getting death threats for far less.

I imagine I'm in the same boat as the majority of Americans (at least 60 percent and growing of them) who want to be of service, who want to fight for the ideals we grew up with, those same ideals espoused in that declaration written 250 years ago, the same document our current president so astutely called “a declaration of unity and love.” It’s that crazy notion that human beings shouldn't be held hostage to the whims of a madman. That we should all have equal access to opportunity and happiness regardless of the circumstances of our birth. That we should all be held equally accountable to the laws we the people agreed upon. Crazy talk, I know.

The Coder's Lesson

Let me be upfront about who I am. I've always been a registered Independent. Eleven or twelve years ago, I considered myself a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. Now I couldn’t tell you what the “conservative” part of that means. If it has anything to do with anti-authoritarianism then I’m on board. But, strangely, I don’t think that’s the case anymore. But I don’t like to be told what to do. I don’t trust people who claim to know better, whether that’s about God or Country. Lincoln is my historical hero and idol, not because he was a perfect human and made all the right choices, but because he had the courage to do what was morally right. Not only did he free the slaves, he pressed the reset button on the nation by asserting that the Declaration of Independence was our true founding document and not the Constitution, as Southern leaders had claimed for decades prior to and since the Civil War. It's this fundamental disagreement over our origin story that divides us to this day, perhaps more so now than at any point since the Civil Rights Era.

That said, I'm not trying to undermine the value of the Constitution. It's a flawed document that inherits the bias and prejudices of its authors, and in the hope for compromise, it enshrined the horrors of slavery into the nation's DNA. The genius of the Constitution, and of those who composed it, is that it doesn’t disguise its flawed and incomplete nature. It was meant to represent a moment in time, a starting point rather than an end, words of inspiration rather than divine edicts etched in stone on a mountaintop. It’s meant to be revised, refactored even, by the people it belongs to.

I know a bit about revision. In fact, for over a decade, I put a red pen to use as an editor of children’s books and such. But when the book publishing industry went belly up in 2008, I was laid off and forced to re-engineer my career. I started building websites for small local clients and taught myself to code.

There was something magical about it, something clarifying about the "if/then/else" conditional. If something didn't work, you knew it instantly, and you could go back to the code and refactor, revert, optimize. Unlike the published, physical books I'd made in the past, no code is truly finalized if you approach it right; there's almost always room for either improvement or new functionality. Code always allows room for continuous improvement.

Amendments, if you will.

Let's Stop Using Faulty Code

Okay, here's the real reason why I didn't attend the No Kings March, why I probably won’t attend another. They’re not working.

No Kings feels like broken code to me. We’re halfway through the week, and it’s already dropped out of the news, thanks to the crazy shit coming from Truth Social every thirty seconds. I live in Western North Carolina. I don't care if a hundred thousand people took to the streets here in Hendersonville: Chuck Edwards, our representative, isn't going to do a single thing differently on Monday morning.

The country has been running on dangerously broken and insecure code for some time now. Perhaps the bug was introduced in Citizens United, or it could go back further to the non-existent WMDs, Monica Lewinsky, Iran-Contra, Vietnam. Regardless, there's a bug, and so far, the only way we've tried to fix it is by copying and pasting the same old code.

Web developers in search of a fix often seek examples of what other coders did to solve the problem they’re troubleshooting. You examine the precedent code, extract what applies, and refactor it to the constraints of your application. That's all nerd-speak for: define the issue, look to history for what worked, and then adapt, apply, and refresh. If the approach doesn't work, don't keep hitting that refresh button, hoping that at some point it will; it won't.

From my perspective, laced as it is with my own intrinsic bias, the essential problem here is that Congress as a body (there are individual exceptions) doesn't listen to “We the People.” They heed the whispers of a few, the whispers of the same people who stood behind Trump on Inauguration Day, the ones with the giant bags of cash or crypto. It’s plain as day that a good number of them, including Trump, are listening to Moscow as well.

This is a bug that undermines the entire fabric of the republic. It’s been compromised. If our will is continually ignored by the representatives we elected, both old and new (mostly old), then we are in the same position as those men who signed their death warrants on that “unity and love” document back in July 1776.

The question is, are we going to be brave enough to put our own names on the line, put our own self-interests — and safety — at risk?

Hitting Elon, Jeff, Mark, Tim & Co Where It Hurts

Bugfixes should always start simple. What’s the most obvious solution?

We do have some examples of what works, even if Congress is rolling over on its belly, allowing Trump to have free rein to start foreign wars and break the law almost by the hour. The wins have certainly been few and far between, but I’m thinking specifically about what happened when Brendan Carr and Disney tried to cancel Jimmy Kimmel. The response was strong and highly effective. Cancellations of Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions doubled. And that’s all it took for that giant corporation to back down and put Jimmy back on the air.

I say let’s do more of that. Yes, I’m giving off serious Bernie vibes here, but these billionaires who get more attention from our leaders than us acquired their wealth and power directly from consumers — from us. Without our credit card numbers, they’d be stressing over the cost of eggs, too. They dangled convenience, pleasure, connection, and savings in front of our noses, and we took the bait. Now they're offering AI, promising us lives of ease and miracles, when the true intent is much more nefarious and frankly insane (but that's a topic for another diatribe).

I'm guilty of succumbing to the lure of their offerings. Social media makes me almost physically ill, but I still have Facebook and Instagram accounts because I subconsciously fear I might need them one day. I subscribe to so many streaming services I'd struggle to name all of them. I try to buy things online directly from the source, but sometimes I find it cost-prohibitive, or I just can't find the item from anywhere besides Amazon, or I need it quickly, just gotta have it tomorrow. I go to Marvel and Star Wars movies with my kids. I use AI non-stop for work and consult it and Google regularly on my phone every day.

But can I live without any of these things? Yes, absolutely. Leaving Amazon will hurt my wallet some, but everything else is fluff. Most of it means far less to me than the tea spilled into Boston Harbor to those 18th-century rabble-rousers. We know that when enough people get together and turn their dollars into ballots, it has an effect. Look no further than what happened when Disney tried to pull the plug on Jimmy.

To keep this coding metaphor going for as long as I can, I'm not saying we do a "select all/delete.” Asking everyone to quit everything is ludicrous and impractical. But the code needs a serious refactor, and that's going to take some effort, maybe a little pain — at the very least, a little less convenience and entertainment.

My proposal for a fix is this: Every month, we select a different billionaire-owned service or product that condones or supports one of the plethora of constitutional infractions committed by the current administration.

Then we shut down that service or product.

Stop our deliveries.

Quit our scrolling.

Cancel the subscriptions.

If the needle doesn’t move, if they don’t lobby Congress on behalf of the people and the law rather than themselves, we extend the boycott by another month. And another and another. And that’s not to say we can’t keep adding others to the party every month.

And we’ll have specific demands: pull political donations to spineless members of congreess, publicly oppose the Iran “excursion,” stop contracting with DHS. In short, do what’s right.

Month one: Amazon. The demand is simple — stop providing cloud infrastructure to DHS until they comply with court orders. If they don't, we extend. Month two, we add another.

Hell, I’ll even make AI build an app for this. Call it the Declaration of Independence 2.0, and each month we can sign our names to it proclaiming our withdrawal from their services. (Update: This is done!) They’ll know it's happening just by watching their quarterly earnings drop like a nuclear launch code into a golden toilet at Mar-a-lago. But seeing our names, counting them each week for our own verification and edification will be glorious.

The boycotts don’t have to be permanent if the billionaires come around and start doing the right thing for our country rather than themselves. But maybe we'll decide we're better off without these conveniences and frivolities. Maybe we'll actually be happier. Maybe our children will get to live in a country where their voices are heard, where “We the People” means something.

Otherwise, at some point, the only way to fix the bug is to pull the plug.