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July 10, 2005
Choice of Operating System and U.S. party affiliation
In my senior year of college, I took a class with Marvin Minsky, one of the undisputed fathers of artificial intelligence. He was so steeped in the Zen of AI that classes would deal more with questions of the mind than representations of knowledge and AI implementations. This was only some of the time, though. The rest of the time was solely for those who hung on to his every word. One day he made a remark about how Google provides a good platform on which to base a common sense knowledge base. All you needed to do was to take a pair of complementary phrases that couldn't both be true at the same time and compare their hit counts on Google. For example, 'The sky is blue' yields over 12 million results but 'The sky is green' yields 9 and a half million results. Because the sky can't be blue and green at the same time, the blue sky wins out.
I decided to use the Google 8-ball approach to determine a relationship between choice of operating systems and orientation towards the Democratic or Republican parties of the U.S. Warning bells must be going off in the mind of the alert reader by now with regard to both sides of such a relationship. First, partisan orientations in the American polity are fraught with gray areas and danger zones. There are pro-choice Republican voters as well as pro-life Democratic voters. Second, not everyone cares about the operating system they run. Twenty years ago, running an Apple operating system might have been a fashion statement, compared to Windows 1.0, which looked utterly clunky in comparison. These days, not only are computers more of a necessity, people care more about what they can get done on various operating systems rather than about the operating systems themselves. In other words, they don't give two hoots about which operating system they run if it can get your email, give you Web access and occasionally let you write letters or longer documents. Still, because Google seems to be the answer to all of the world's problems today, I decided to put it to this test as well.
Here are the results:
| Linux republicans | 149,000 hits |
| Linux democrats | 192,000 hits |
| Linux libertairan | 169,000 hits |
| Mac democrats | 519,000 hits |
| Mac republicans | 451,000 hits |
| Mac Green Party | 1,610,000 hits |
| BSD republicans | 16,100 hits |
| BSD democrats | 18,600 hits |
| BSD libertarian | 17,900 hits |
| Microsoft Windows democrats | 170,000 hits |
| Microsoft Windows republicans | 131,000 hits |
I think the results are quite in line with my as-yet unstated hypotheses. My first hypothesis is that people who run an open source operating system are highly likely to vote Democratic. Free-as-in-speech software operating systems emphasize a level playing field for software development and usage; their stated goals frequently resemble those of progressive social justice advocates. When the above hit counts are normalized by the number of users of each operating system, it should be clear in the case of Linux that it tends to attract Democrats rather than Republicans. I should note, however, that on another harsher plane, the open source model of software development represents a laissez faire of ideas in its purest form, similar to the dream of free-market fiscal conservatives. My second hypothesis is that only those who run an operating system other than Windows reflect marked partisan preferences. Microsoft Windows has become very highly entrenched in the computing world, for better or for worse. Many people run Windows these days not necessarily out of choice but as a default. This fact reduces the predictive power of someone's running Windows with respect to their political preferences. Windows users are thus likely to come from a broad spectrum of political orientations, including complete political apathy. On the other hand, people who make a choice not to run Windows and thus willingly deviate from the majority to make a statement are more likely to have the courage of their convictions to hold a political opinion and party affiliation of some sort.
I'll also mention some other interesting patterns, so long as we're eyeballing the results. Linux users seem to be more Democratic than BSD users. The BSD family of operating systems are governed by the BSD license, under which you can incorporate open source products into closed source products. You can pretty much do anything you want with BSD-licensed software so long as you preserve the original copyright notices and attributions. BSD-licensed software, which is considerably more non-interventionist that GPL-licensed software, is likely to appeal to libertarians, who are for as little interference in their lives as possible. People with a libertarian political philosophy have tended to vote for conservative parties in American polity because they espouse low governmental intervention in the market. Macintosh users seem overwhelmingly to be associated with the Green Party. From its very beginning, the Macintosh has brought computing to everyone with its friendly Macintosh smiley face. Contrast this to PCs, which initially excluded anyone who was unwilling to type long strings of computerese at the DOS prompt. The Green Party's principles emphasize grassroots democracy, decentralization and community based economics. Macintosh operating systems have also been focused on the future and have been a lot more innovative than PC operating systems, something the Green Party tends to agree with.
On a parting note, I apologize to all my non-U.S. readers for apparently making this post a bit too U.S.-centric. I realize there are probably more users of each operating system I've mentioned above outside the U.S. than inside. I'll let you in on a little secret though. Rarely do you find a with-us-or-against-us political system similar to the one in the U.S., over which conclusions from bogus science can be applied so easily. It's an operational matter rather than a gesture of political favoritism.
Oh, and one more thing. Google 8-ball -- thanks a lot. I love you.
Posted by Vishy at July 10, 2005 03:16 PM