A bit more on the new U.S. Digital Corps — the future of the library book — bears
A bit more on the new U.S. Digital Corps — the future of the library book — bears
It's about boosting the country’s long-term capacity to build and manage technology in the public interest.
Good Wednesday from Washington D.C., where I’m neck-deep in fact-checking a magazine piece. Celebrate the publications that spend the time and resources it takes to make sure everything’s as right as humanly possible. It’s a heavy lift; pour one out for the fact checkers.
Our look here Friday at the Biden administration’s new U.S. Digital Corps and how it fits alongside the longer-standing U.S. Digital Service raised a very good reader question: what about 18F? That corps of technologist, like the Digital Corps will be, operates under the auspices of the General Services Administration. So what’s the difference?
It’s worth reiterating that the Digital Corps is meant to create a path for people to head right from, say, college, into government technology work, while 18F is meant for people with some experience already working in tech. That means the Digital Corps gets people before they’re exposed to — and pegged their budgets off of — corporate compensation levels. But it also means that these hires are an easy-enough undertaking for agencies, which will pay for the fellows they bring in. (18F, on the other hand, is paid through project work with agencies.)
Another big distinction is that, at least in conception, the Digital Corps will reflect a somewhat broader skillset than gets deployed within 18F. That organization focuses on consulting with agencies on delivering digital services — often the public-facing online experiences that connect Americans to what’s available to them through government. The Digital Corps could, as it rolls out, also include fellows working on, say, data science projects or analytics. (The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a.k.a. CISA, is a launch partner.)
But perhaps the best way of thinking about the distinction is that 18F is about helping federal agencies build better digital stuff, right here right now. The U.S. Digital Corps is perhaps about that too, yes, but it’s also about boosting the country’s long-term capacity to build and manage technology in the public interest by cultivating a crop of Americans who did exactly that when they were just getting started in life.
With that, let’s take a look around at what’s going on in the world:
The future of the free book
The boost in popularity of e-books during the pandemic means that those digital versions are moving to the center of the library experience. Daniel A. Gross writes for the New Yorker that that’s pushing libraries into having to reconsider their relationship with companies like OverDrive:
The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books “a lot more expensive, in general, than print books,” Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver’s public-library system, told me.
One challenge is that in some reconceptions of that dynamic, libraries just become a sort of platform for books that remained owned by corporations, which changes what we mean when we even say “library.”
Automated hiring
That companies are struggling to find people who want to work for them is a big theme of this phase of pandemic life, but it’s also raising questions about what sort of friction exists in the process of matching humans with work to do. Kathryn Dill reports for the Wall Street Journal that one potential stumbling block is automated screening systems that overlook good possibilities:
Employers today rely on increasing levels of automation to fill vacancies efficiently, deploying software to do everything from sourcing candidates and managing the application process to scheduling interviews and performing background checks. These systems do the job they are supposed to do. They also exclude more than 10 million workers from hiring discussions, according to a new Harvard Business School study released Saturday.
“Hidden workers,” these researchers call them, but it seems like it’s more that the hirers just can’t see them. Options on the table include redefining the AI involved to better capture what hirers should — for their own benefit — be seeing, or to introduce more humans into the process.
The whiteness of private boards
Speaking of hiring, with all the scrutiny of diversity within public companies, there’s little attention paid to what’s going on inside private companies — some of which are enormously significant. A ton of capital is flowing to private companies whose boards are enormously homogenous, notes Andrew Ross Sorkin for DealBook:
There are far more of them than publicly traded firms: Of more than 30 million businesses in the United States, fewer than 1 percent are listed on a stock exchange. The most successful private companies often become tomorrow’s biggest public companies — and biggest employers.
What’s more striking about the lack of diversity among prominent private companies is what binds them: venture capital and private equity firms that ply them with money and influence their governance.
Sorkin notes that very, very few of the board seats with private companies are held by Black directors. By definition, those firms get less formal public attention, and in private people hire their friends or candidates who seem like they could be.
Biden’s appointments
Also on the hiring front, President Biden is taking a really long time naming people to fill roles with big technology implications. Eight months in, Biden still hasn’t picked anyone to head the FCC or the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, notes my old buddy Cristiano Lima for the Washington Post:
For the FCC, that’s slower than any president since Jimmy Carter in 1977 — just by a few days — and for NTIA, it’s the longest ever since the agency’s founding in 1978… Pivotally, Biden has yet to nominate a fifth commissioner at the FCC, a set that would give Democrats a 3-2 majority on the five-seat commission and enable them to advance more controversial items with a party-line vote.
In a way, it’s not hugely suspiring. COVID and Afghanistan alone mean Biden has a fair amount on his plate. And the FCC’s approach shifts a lot between administrations, making it a place through which it’s difficult for a president to make a lasting mark, so the return on investment isn’t all that attractive. But in the short term, it’s a stamp that Biden could, with a bit of effort, put on his administration.
Amazon in India
The systems through which farmers in India get their resources — from equipment to seeds to pesticides — have long shaped how successful that life will be for them. Now Amazon is stepping in, per a story in India Today:
Talking about the Kisan Store, Amit Agarwal, Global Senior VP and country head of Amazon India said “We are excited to partner with Government of India’s vision of empowering farmers with technology wherein the rapid penetration of smartphones & internet can help Indian agriculture experience a paradigm shift. The launch of Kisan Store marks our first step to create an ecosystem for farmers that will enable them to seamlessly place orders and get products of their choice delivered to their doorstep at the click of a button.”
Of course, the stakes are raised when there’s an entire sector of an economy dependent on a single vendor.
Privacy in the U.S.
The U.S. has a wide variety of privacy laws, without any real consensus yet on whether that’s the right model for it. Thorin Klosowski reports for Wirecutter that that has left a fairly messy patchwork:
Currently, privacy laws are a cluttered mess of different sectoral rules. “Historically, in the US we have a bunch of disparate federal [and state] laws,” said Amie Stepanovich, executive director at the Silicon Flatirons Center at Colorado Law. “[These] either look at specific types of data, like credit data or health information,” Stepanovich said, “or look at specific populations like children, and regulate within those realms.”
The data collected by the vast majority of products people use every day isn’t regulated. Since there are no federal privacy laws regulating many companies, they’re pretty much free to do what they want with the data, unless a state has its own data privacy law…
Congress has attempted to make progress on this in fits and starts, usually in response to a new flare-up of anger at Facebook. But it hasn’t gone much of anywhere yet and isn’t likely to in a body that’s so fraught.
Theranos goes on trial
Is Elizabeth Holmes a plain-old con artist, a bungling entrepreneur who got in over her head, or a misunderstood innovator who just flew too close to the sun? No story fully makes sense. But with the Theranos founder headed to court this week, Ankush Khardori writes for New York that prosecutors are going with the first option:
It is clear that prosecutors intend to prove that Theranos’s business model was essentially a fraud — that they had not revolutionized blood testing and were nowhere close to doing so, despite having rolled out their services to the public. But if, for instance, all that they manage to do is convince the jury that Holmes and Balwani misled investors about Theranos’s relationship with Walgreens — that it was supposedly “expanding,” when, in fact, it had “stalled,” as the indictment alleges — that could yield multiple guilty verdicts by itself.
There’s potentially a parallel here with the idea of criminalizing the practice of politics. But this is a jury trial, and it seems difficult to gain sympathy for the notion that Holmes just tried and came up short. Still, it’s taking place in San Jose, and there’s perhaps no part of the country (besides maybe Vegas?) more open to the idea.
‘No pay’ Whole Foods are coming
Contactless shopping got a boost during COVID. And soon, you’ll be able to “just walk out” of a couple of Whole Foods, one in California and one in D.C.’s own Glover Park, writes Annie Palmer for CNBC:
At the upcoming Whole Foods locations, shoppers who want to skip the checkout line enter the store by either scanning an app, inserting a credit or debit card linked to their Amazon account or placing their palm over the company’s palm-scanning payment system, called Amazon One.
Shoppers who opt out of using Amazon’s cashierless technology will only be able to ring up their items using self-checkout or at a customer service booth.
Cashlessness raises worries about privacy and accessibility — and the possibility that we end up with two hugely different tiers of shopping. (Paying with paper money? It’s going to be even more painful than it already is.) But it’s also worth looking at this from the debt angle: picking expensive indulgences at Whole Foods will get a little easier if you’re literally just walking out the door with them.
Plant-based fish
Meats made from plants are now mainstream enough that folks are poking around for the next big thing, and some people think that’s seafood. Mike Ives writes for the New York Times that it’s a market that’s just beginning to open up:
Now, as sophisticated fish alternatives begin to attract investment and land at restaurants in the United States and beyond, people who track the fishless fish sector say that it could be on the cusp of significant growth.
One reason, they say, is that consumers in rich countries are becoming more aware of the seafood industry’s environmental problems, including overfishing and the health risks of some seafood. Another is that today’s plant-based start-ups do a better job of approximating fish flavor and texture than earlier ones did — an important consideration for non-vegetarians.
I’ll tell you, as an enthusiastic vegan, I don’t yet love the alt-tuna options. (The mouthfeel is just not right.) But that’s the price paid for being an early adopter, and seafood alternatives could have a big impact on the planet, and our oceans in particular.
The bears came back
As humans move into bear territory, bears have a way of reminding us they’re still there. Matthias Gafni reports for the San Francisco Chronicle that as people are getting out of the Tahoe area because of wild fires, bears are filling in the open spaces:
As residents frantically evacuated a week ago from the approaching Caldor Fire, the last thing many South Lake Tahoe residents did was to pull their garbage cans to the curb. The problem: Garbage pickup wasn’t scheduled for four to five days, and refuse employees were also fleeing town.
So bears helped themselves to a rare feast.
“Bears are just having a heyday of it. It’s just a nightmare,” said John Tillman, owner of South Tahoe Refuse. “There’s so much garbage on the street because of the bears. Oh my God, they are making a mess.”
The concern here isn’t just that when bears and people occupy the same space, it can be bad for the people. We mentioned a recent trip to Wyoming where the park rangers tried to dissuade us from a backcountry camping spot because a bear there had gotten into human food. We swore we were fine, but it took us a bit to realize the real concern was that an animal that gets used to human food becomes a risk rangers have to mitigate.
In other words, they were worried about the bear.
By the way, for those of you following my attempt to get a passport in time for a work trip to Madrid later this month, it’s in hand. Thanks, State Department. I’m taking most of a day to explore the city. Send recommendations.