To Sell a (Tech) War — UBI's moment — Cash App culture
To Sell a (Tech) War — UBI's moment — Cash App culture
Plus the lessons being learned from Amazon organizing in Alabama
Hey there, good people, and welcome to Slow Build, a new, work-in-progress newsletter by Nancy Scola that examines the impact we humans having on technology and vice versa — the good, bad, ugly, and just plain interesting. If you haven’t yet signed up for a free or paid subscription, I hope you’ll consider it. It’ll pop up in your inbox once a week, Friday mornings ET.
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To Sell a (Tech) War
As much as one might start an independent newsletter so as to write about anything but Washington’s great partisan rhetorical debate about tech, this week, one cannot help it. That’s because we’re witnessing the next generation of Republican leaders with eyes on the White House wrangle, in real time, with how to sell the anti-tech sentiment that has, amazingly enough, become perhaps the defining characteristic of what it means to be a full-throated conservative in 2021 — and more importantly, in 2022 and 2024. (Only 1,299 days away!)
On the one hand, to those of us who have been neck-deep in Washington’s tech debates, it is plain wild that tech has developed such enormous political salience on the right. I mean, Section 230, really? (Try pitching a story on Section 230 a half-dozen years ago. People did not care, I will tell you, no matter the metaphors you attempted.) There’s immigration, gender, LGBTQ+ issues — and Facebook is what gets the base going?
But take a step back, and as an issue it’s perfect. It’s not just standing up to the latest iteration of the United States’ powerful, unaccountable elites who control the means of communication — it’s elites who are publicly willing to say they stand in opposition to your cultural values and, to boot, they have as their geographic center of gravity San Francisco, of all places.
Says one D.C. conservative on the inside of these debates:
“It’s another form of ‘my tribe is the victim and your tribe is the enemy.’”
It’s developed such power that even those on the right who had hoped it would leave Washington with Donald Trump — and they do exist — live in fear, as another conservative policy person enmeshed in the situation recently put it to me, of being called out on Tucker Carlson’s show for being squishy on tech.
This is known in the business as getting the Heritage treatment.
The interesting bit, though, is that Republicans don’t know yet how exactly to go about selling this war. That’s the lesson this week, as we saw two White House hopefuls, Florida’s 42-year-old governor Ron DeSantis and 41-year-old Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, try out some approaches in public. DeSantis, in Tallahassee, went the content route — going after YouTube, which pulled a video of a coronavirus panel of his, by calling it a “big tech council of censors in service of the ruling elite.” Hawley, meanwhile, poked at the slightly fresher competition angle — rolling out a new antitrust bill while saying that the GOP “has got to become the party of trust-busting once again.” (I’ve a copy of Hawley’s Teddy Roosevelt biography, “Preacher of Righteousness,” should you like to borrow.) They’re clear on not liking the tech industry, but figuring out how to package it for public consumption is still in its workshopping phase.
Why it matters if you’re not a Republican and/or getting a paycheck from a tech company: The issue’s proven so politically potent that it’s going to be used to divide Americans across the country.
RELATED: Over on Lawfare, Abby Lemert and Klaudia Jaźwińska dissect Justice Clarence Thomas’s own messy grappling with an intellectual framework for thinking about Twitter — common carriage? public accommodation? — for the purposes of controlling it in some fashion.
SORTA RELATED: Republicans with higher aspirations have learned that being seen as boldly anti-tech is very good for digital fundraising and online reputation-building, part of a bigger trend of, Washington Post’s Phillip Bump put this week it, “politicians, porn stars, and writers” learning that using the Internet “individuals can create communities — at times lucrative communities — around themselves.” That’s one reason former FCC commissioners like Ajit Pai are hanging on to their official Twitter accounts with both hands.
OKAY THIS ONE’S A STRETCH: One the flip side, that public officials at every level are now symbolically important apart from their institutions — and thus worthy targets of sustained public attention — is contributing to the driving out of career election officials in California. Said one:
“I was called a liar more times over the two-month period around the election than in my entire life.”
WHAT WE HUMANS HAVE DONE:
The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells has a fascinating look at what IBM’s AI-powered Project Debater tells us about how people engage in political discussions. Short version: we often abstract the question to the point we’re just making stuff up. Watch a sample debate here.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink says it’s enabled a monkey named Pager to play a ping-pong style game just by thinking about it, by first mapping its brain activity while using a joystick. There’s video.
A small Albuquerque software company called Real Time Solutions built the state COVID-19 vaccine portal that’s getting some of the credit for New Mexico’s top ten vaccination rate. (Check the performance of your state — or should you happen to not live in a state but a federal district that lacks full representation in Congress, that — here.)
Here’s how exactly you go about flying drones 27,000 feet up Mount Everest in search of George Mallory’s old climbing partner — starring Renan Ozturk, who you might know from “Meru” or his delightful Instagram feed. (Try to tell me this is not the best frog.)
BASIC INCOME ADVOCATES SPOT THEIR OPENING — Natalie Foster is a former DNC digital official who has been working since 2016 to get traction for idea of universal basic income, in her role as co-founder of the Economic Security Project alongside Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, and she says she’s seeing technological disruption, the pandemic, and the evolution of Joe Biden conspire to create a moment ripe for UBI.
“I always wondered, and honestly worried a bit,” said Foster, a guest on this week’s Politics Club on Clubhouse, “if Trump was going to recognize that giving people money was excellent politics” — which he didn’t until quite late.
But Foster and other UBI advocates say, with some evidence, that they’re thrilled with the direction things are headed. Foster: “If you think of the stimulus checks as the beginnings of guaranteed income, and the child tax credit as the beginning of guaranteed income — now the fight is to make them permanent.”
Now, whether or not people understand that money in their pockets as basic income is irrelevant, said Foster: “Mitt Romney’s recent child tax credit proposal, where he laid out a way of doing a monthly credit to families with no strings attached is very much in the spirit of this.” (Here’s the Utah Republican’s two-pager on his Family Security Act.) When it comes to that sort of proposal, says Foster:
“It’s okay that it’s not called UBI. Honestly, it’s okay to me that it’s not universal. It makes the case for this as part of the new social contract.”
Can Biden, who has talked for literal decades about the dignity of the job, be won over? “Candidate Biden is very different from President Biden… What we’re seeing with the Biden-Harris administration is actually one of the most significant breaks from welfare policies of the past — more so than what we saw under Clinton or Obama. This could very well be a legacy defining feature for him.”
Looking ahead to when the tax credit checks start rolling out in July, and then the mid-term election: “Families have no idea that the tax credit is so expansive or meaningful. And I think it’s going to be a real boost for the parties who can take credit.”
SPEAKING OF THE ECONOMIC SECURITY PROJECT, they’re increasingly weaving an anti-monopoly push into their work, a la Hughes’s landmark “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook” op-ed. Why, I asked Foster: “We spent years thinking about how to put money back into people’s pockets. And then we started asking the question, ‘Well, what in fact takes money out of people’s pockets?’”
WE WERE ALSO JOINED ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT by Jayson Stewart, mayor of Cool Valley, Missouri, population about 1,200 or so, who said he’s experimenting with setting up a basic income via cryptocurrency in his St. Louis suburb, paid for by donations: “I’m going to put $500 in Bitcoin in a trust fund for every household.”
Part of it, said Stewart, was education: “I want to teach them how to self-custody their Bitcoin, like, ‘Look, we’ll give it to you let’s say on Cash App, but I’m going to teach you how to buy a cold wallet.”
RELATED, OKAY, SURE:
This look by Grant Rindner in GQ at how Cash App is everywhere in hip-hop lyrics right now — in part because unlike Venmo it’s not trying to know what you’re up to — is worth your time: “People f___ with it, and it makes the money feel less monetary and more like a utility.”
UBI champion Andrew Yang, now running to be mayor of New York City, has gotten a lot of mileage out of tweeting his takes — a sample: “In Person > Zoom.” — but he stepped in it this week with his quick thoughts on unlicensed street vendors. Part of the problem, said Yang, was Twitter, with his reductive thinking on a complicated topic “a product of that medium.”
AROUND THE COUNTRY: Lessons are being extracted this week from union organizers coming up short in their bid to form a union in Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, 738 to 1,798:
The New York Times’ Noam Scheiber cites labor experts questioning whether the “relatively small, scrappy” Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, or RWDSU, should have gone head with the vote, given, among other things, workers’ reluctance to be the public face of the push. And some are advocating focusing on the short term on a so-called air and ground war instead of site-by-site organizing — a major challenge given how distributed a company Amazon is — with that strategy emphasizing “enlist[ing] the support of public figures.”
But that The Nation’s Jane McAlevey warns, “When there are more outside supporters and staff being quoted and featured in a campaign than there are workers from the facility, that’s a clear sign that defeat is looming.”
“There are a lot of armchair quarterbacks who were nowhere to be found in providing advice during the campaign,” says RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum in Alec McGillis’s look in ProPublica at what went down.
AROUND WASHINGTON: Matt Cutts is stepping down as administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, the branch of the White House meant to help fix how the federal government buys and builds technology. His departure leaves Biden with vacancies (or, at least, the absence of permanent appointments) in many of the top tech spots in his administration: USDS administrator, U.S. CTO, FTC chair, FCC chair, and head of DOJ antitrust division; meanwhile, Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow has praise for acting FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, particularly for her attempts to assess the state of U.S. broadband…I wrote last year about why Congress balks at going remote, and here PopVox’s Marci Harris and Demand Progress’s Daniel Schuman look at where it has anyway.
Of interest
Twitter has started hiring engineers, marketers, and other in Ghana. They’ll work for home for now. Twitter says it picked Ghana because the country is both a “champion for democracy” and the new host to the Secretariat of the African Continental Free Trade Area (Bonus: here’s me making the most of Ghana’s stability by taking the train from Cape Coast to Kumasi many, many years ago. Miss those socks.)
China’s fining of Alibaba $2.8 for antitrust violations — under rules it passed in only three months (!) — seems to be motivated in part by the Communist Party’s growing works that they lack control over digital platforms.
With all the talk of the tech industry moving to a more dispersed workforce, Coinbase just did it. The cryptocurrency platform, which IPO’d at about $86 billion this week — claims to have no headquarters.
The global chip shortage is rattling just about everyone in manufacturing, and Taiwan’s water shortage isn’t helping.
The Internet Engineering Task Force’s hasn’t yet built up consensus around changing race-based computing terms.
Facebook’s Oversight Board is now letting users appeal leaving content up, not just taking it down — and will double in size to handle the influx.
For New York, Benjamin Wallace looks at “the tech elite’s favorite pop intellectual,” a.k.a. the rationalist thinker Julia Galef.
Over in the Atlantic, Eric Scigliano looks at what aspects of pandemic-era “virtual justice” are worth preserving — and could, in the words of Michigan Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack, make the country’s courts “more transparent, more accessible, and more convenient.”
Finally, one pandemic innovation this germaphobe becomes a real thing: foot-activated doors. I’ve actually long fantasized about creating a small non-profit that exists only to distribute these to my favorite bars and restaurants.
Thanks for reading Slow Build, really, and see you next week.