Programming note
Going weekly (again)! Plus, this week's good reads
Hey, all. This is Slow Build, a newsletter on technology and society and the like by me, Nancy Scola.
I’ve got a fairly major programming note for you: Starting next week, Slow Build is returning to its roots and going once-a-week again. We’ll publish Friday mornings, east coast U.S. time. That cadence will allow me to stuff a weekly digest full of reporting, Q&As, analysis, curated picks and more, without overwhelming your inboxes. Frankly, newsletters are a lot of work! And with other obligations, this is a way of keeping the quality worthy of your time.
Of course, if you’ve pre-paid for the year or even and are displeased with the change, by all means, for real, just give me a heads up and I’ll be happy to send over a refund. I know there’s incredible competition for your attention, so as always, thanks for reading.
Good reads
Twitter enters the post-Dorsey era
I’ve reported on Twitter off-and-on for years, and one huge takeaway is that Jack Dorsey is a remarkably delegatory leader. (Yes, “delegatory” is a real word. I looked it up.) He’s comfortable more or less ceding whole swaths of Twitter’s core mission to other figures in the company, in part because it gives him the space to run a whole other multi-billion dollar business in Square. To pick just one example, a Twitter insider told me when reporting on the executive who oversees policy for the company last year, “I can’t imagine a world where Jack looks at her and says, ‘No.’” That’s fairly extraordinary, and while some critics argue that it has imbued Twitter with a sense of directionless, it also means that there are others ready to step up who might be freed by Dorsey’s departure. Meet Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal.
A big-deal Democratic tech switch
The company NGP VAN has been at the forefront of Democratic data-driven organizing and digital infrastructure for decades, and Stu Trevelyan has long been its public face. He’s stepping down after 26.2 years at the company. The field isn’t what it once ways: there’s been a tremendous amount of consolidation in the space NGP VAN occupies, with its parent company EveryAction having this summer become part of a yet-to-be-named consolidated group of mission-driven firms put together — in a nearly impossible to follow series of purchases and mergers — over the last few years by the British private equity firm Apax Partners.
“Making the damn websites work…”
“…is the fundamental thing that people expect out of government these days,” GSA administrator Robin Carnahan tells the New York Times’ Shira Ovide.
“A Normie’s Guide to Becoming a Crypto Person”
Writes Sara Harrison for New York Magazine in a hugely useful piece of service journalism, “While some corners of the crypto world are still toxic and absurd, it’s also a fascinating and (strangely) optimistic place — where a global army of people with competing philosophies, living mostly on Twitter and Discord, all in some way believe crypto will fundamentally remake the world (and, in the process, everything we believe about value, money, and the internet). This is a guide to actually understanding that universe…”
Tech for democracy, take 27
The New Yorker’s Sue Halpern has a look at the Biden administration’s “Summit for Democracy” planned for next week, an event said to include a push to establish some sort of international pro-Internet coalition. But Halpern writes that the event comes at an awkward time, with the U.S.’s standing as a champion of democracy having taken a beating: “There is something deeply wishful about hosting a summit to bolster democracy around the world when our own is, at best, floundering.” On the agenda, per the State Department, will be the U.S. announcing commitments to “harnessing technology for democratic renewal.” (For what it’s worth, it’s been just about a dozen years since then-Secretary Clinton’s big “Internet freedom” speech.)
