Welcome to Slow Build
What we're up to here, plus the theory of change behind the "Chamber of Progress," the Census's differential privacy debate, and redesigning Crazytown
Welcome to Slow Build, a new newsletter by Nancy Scola on the intersections of tech and society. Slow Build is currently in soft-launch stage, with what exactly we’ll cover and how we’ll cover it TBD. But Slow Build is for you if you like thinking hard about all sorts of technologies and why they matter to humans.
What you can expect to receive once a week on Friday mornings ET is original reporting, fresh analysis, and pointers to stories, podcasts, books, and beyond that illuminate what’s going on with tech. (Not sure who I, Nancy Scola, am? More here.)
It’s an honor to have a spot in your inbox. If you like Slow Build, please consider sharing it with a friend or, if you haven’t yet, signing up for a paid subscription. Reach out with your tips, leads, praise, critiques, via email at nancyscola@gmail.com or on Twitter at @nancyscola.
And this is meant to be a conversation. So by all means, jump into the comments.
Silicon Valley, force for…good?
Launching an advocacy group in Washington in the year 2021 premised on the idea that the American tech industry is a champion of positive progress is what one calls, with one eyebrow raised, a bold move. There’s a visceral anger pulsing through the city, over everything from competition to content to a general sense that Silicon Valley has corrupted the country. So starting an outfit like that — backed by companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter — about the least popular thing you can do.
And calling it the “Chamber of Progress” is the cherry on top. Some found Orwellian, others a John Oliver joke. (One point of sympathy: I recently had to name this newsletter. It ain’t easy.)
Witness the reaction on Twitter this week in D.C. circles. Sen. Josh Hawley gave it the Josh Hawley treatment, calling it a “full woke” effort to “distract from its oligarchy and censorship.” But somewhat more importantly given that Democrats run the House, Senate, and White House, progressives were also largely appalled. Public Citizen called it “a Big Tech-funded nightmare.”
So I got curious: what exactly is the theory of change here? The group is run by Adam Kovacevich, a Washington veteran who has spent time on Capitol Hill and as a policy executive at Google and Lime. Say what you will about the tech industry, but someone like Kovacevich isn’t going to start a group like this without a plan for success. So I called him up.
To Kovacevich, the horrified reaction in Washington was hardly surprising, and pretty much the point. “That’s a stark view of tech’s benefits versus downsides that I think it not aligned with most people’s,” said Kovacevich. Simply put, the political class has lined up in opposition to Silicon Valley, but that’s not, the thinking goes, where Americans are. They might spit sideways at the thought of Mark Zuckerberg, but they still get a kick out of Instagram.
The Chamber of Progress thinks that gap is its opening. It can wedge itself in there and make the case that lawmakers are far out ahead of their constituents on this, a place politicians do not like to be. And from that space, goes the plan, they can advocate for technical regulatory changes that address what it is about tech that does unsettle the public.
“My formative experience in politics was coming to Washington and working for the founders of the New Democrat Coalition, and Cal Dooley,” says Kovacevich. “The way they differentiated themselves was being seen as really pro-tech, pro-growth Democrats. They were really very much in the Clinton-Gore, DLC mode. And they were some of the first Democrats to truck out to Silicon Valley, who wanted to be associated with Silicon Valley…because they believed that technology would be a net positive for consumers.”
Kovacevich is betting he can revive some of that vibe among Democrats, but it’s an uphill climb. The DLC hasn’t been heard from in a decade. Its one-time president Bruce Reed’s now Biden’s deputy chief of staff — and a tech critic.
And about that name: Kovacevich says too many corporate groups in Washington try to hide behind fuzzy names. (Fact check: true.) “I just wanted to be explicit,” by riffing off chambers of commerce, said Kovacevich, adding, “I thought it was valuable to put a center-left twist on a concept many people already know.”
“New machine to speed up statistics of census of 1940.” Washington, D.C.; Library of Congress
“The technopolitics of the U.S. Census”: Data & Society’s Dan Bouk and danah boyd are out with a thoughtful deep dive into a “gnarly problem” over at the Census Bureau, where one official has struggled to rework its so-called disclosure avoidance system out a stated desire to minimize the odds of IDing Americans in the data. Some worry, though, that it’ll harm the public’s access to clean information.
“The reputation of the Census Bureau has been sullied by the chaos of the pandemic and the spectacle of partisan interventions,” Bouk and boyd write. “The fight over differential privacy threatens to leave it in shambles.”
The situation’s contributing to delays in releasing redistricting data, which had been scheduled for his week but is now scheduled for August. Some starts are considering pushing back their primaries. Alabama is suing.
Joe Biden is “into it”: For the last three weeks, I’ve been co-hosting Wednesday night sessions with the 50,000-follower Politics Club on Clubhouse, in part as a sort of forced immersion designed to help me figure out what exactly Clubhouse is and what it’s good for. (My learnings so far: It’s great when it acts as a forum for real conversation, but keeping it a conversation takes some effort — and maybe some cultural norms and practices that are works in progress.)
Our guest this week: Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir.
Candidate Joe Biden said repeatedly that the tech industry needs to be checked by government. But his first 72 days in office have been occupied with, you know, COVID-19, immigration, and quickly shoring up a shaky economy. So I asked Shakir, is his sense that Joe Biden is serious? That he’ll convert his critiques into action? “I don’t know his personal philosophy on this,” said Shakir, but said he’s heartened by two things.
One: the appointments of Lina Khan and Tim Wu to antitrust roles.
And two, the approach that Biden has, to the surprise of many, thus far taken to the political left. Let’s call it “there go the people — I must follow them, for I am their leader.” Shakir, who is hard at work attempting to influence the Biden administration through his new progressive media startup called More Perfect Union, summed up the Biden White House style of governing so far like this: “We just want a clear plan based on facts...and if you can provide it to us, we’re into it.”
And Biden’s already proven, said Shakir, that he’s not intimidated by Amazon.
BONUS: What the audio-only Clubhouse could mean for those who struggle with speech.
“Under the new rules of Crazytown, I may have been Speaker, but I didn’t hold all the power.” John Boehner’s new book is out! Here’s an excerpt over in POLITICO Magazine. One thing to note: His dissection of what went haywire with his party during the Obama years is all about cable news. Not a peep about Twitter.
That came later.
“How mRNA Technology Could Change the World”: The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson digs into the fascinating, fraught history behind today’s wonder vaccines, and what happens next.
“More than 40 years had passed between the 1970s, when a Hungarian scientist pioneered early mRNA research, and the day the first authorized mRNA vaccine was administered in the United States, on December 14, 2020. In the interim, the idea’s long road to viability nearly destroyed several careers and almost bankrupted several companies.”
“But mRNA’s story likely will not end with COVID-19: Its potential stretches far beyond this pandemic.”
BONUS: More on DARPA’s role in making mRNA a thing.
“Community by design” meets Crazytown: The House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress is the most interesting thing happening on Capitol Hill that no one cares about. It was created in 2019 by Nancy Pelosi in a bid to shore up her own base on her way to becoming speaker again.
The impetus: rank-and-file members were finding Congress a miserable place to work, in large part because of the very design of the place. They are expected to be in two hearings at once. They got yanked back to Washington at the last minute for procedural votes. They didn’t know other members, particularly of the other party — and there were few private places to meet.
The committee just held a closed-door retreat that, I’m told, kicked off with a sensitive discussion of January 6th, and then turn to what’s next for it. One idea floating around there: how to achieve “community by design,” or reconfiguring the Hill, physically or virtually, to foster people getting to know one each other.
The friction, though, is that Capitol Hill works pretty well for leadership and committee chairs. They’re not especially incentivized to change things.
BONUS: Paul Ford on the “secret, essential geography of the office.”
Speaking of tech things on hold in the early days of the Biden administration, no one’s yet been named U.S. Chief Technology Officer. Even some Biden allies are starting to get a bit tetchy about it. With debates over everything from Section 230 to encryption afoot, and a CTO could, at least in theory, be weighing on on behalf of no other interests beyond Biden, technology, and those of us who use tech.
She or he isn’t at the FTC, attempting to navigate the demands of industry, or even on the National Economic Council, competing with colleagues who sometimes think a focus on broadband is a distraction from the country’s real economic issues.
While the CTO role isn’t necessarily one of Washington’s heavy hitters, that’s in part because each of the four people who’ve done it have done it quite differently. The most policy focused has arguably been Trump’s Michael Kratsios, centered his portfolio on topics like AI and quantum computing. But he struggled bridging the gulf between people in tech and Washington because well, he worked for Donald Trump.
The clock ticks on. My long-shot pick? Steve Case. One point in his favor: he goes back with White House chief of staff Ron Klain. If I’m right, I’ll look genius. If not, kidding!
Andrew Yang isn’t backing away from the idea of vaccination passports for New Yorkers. When it comes to access, he’s said before that some people can stick to paper. And as he put it on Scott Galloway’s podcast, as he put it, “I'm happy to say that at this point, even folks with limited means tend to have smartphones as their primary means of communication.”
Access aside, there are questions of privacy, which, like most things privacy, are much farther along in Europe. I recently moderated a panel that featured Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch. She’s really not a fan, on civil liberties grounds, and on utility: if vaccines don’t reduce transmissibility, what’s the point? And if they do, “even better. Even less reason for us to have onerous controls.”
As it starts to look like Yang might indeed be mayor of New York, is whether this is one of the idea he champions that goes from what?! to hmm, okay, maybe in short order, like universal basic income, or if it’s more like data dividends.
BONUS: Spend some time with the concept of “digital poverty.”
BONUS BONUS: Biden’s infrastructure plan includes $100 billion for broadband, in a bid to get more Americans more reliably online.
Facebook executive and former UK Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is out with a detailed essay on Medium making the case that Facebook’s news feeds reflect the polarization that users create through their clicks: “You are an active participant in the experience.” (It’s a 21-minute read. Politicians love Medium, in part because it allows them 21-minute reads)
One line on Clegg is that he’s willing to do what it takes to work for Facebook, and this is what it takes. I’ve interviewed Clegg multiple times, and I think it’s something different. While he’s chummy on the surface, he has a somewhat dark view of humanity, in part because of how he was treated by the famously cuddly British press.
And that’s the key. Does Facebook pervert society or does it just reflect all that’s already messed up about us?
Critics, including fellow Brit Prince Harry — or the Duke of Hastings, or whatever it is we’re calling him now — thinks it’s the latter, that Facebook is taking the worst impulses that admittedly already exist among human beings (after all, the death of his mother after years of paparazzi hounding happened when Mark Zuckerberg was only 13), amplifying them, and making them borderless, and thus inescapable, even if you move to southern California.
Clegg thinks it’s the latter — that society was badly damaged before Facebook got around, so get your own house in order, humans — and he’s more than willing to make that case in public. To borrow a line from Amy Pohler, he doesn’t care if you like it.
Lagniappe
These skills are transferable: Blue State Digital co-founder and one-time Kentucky Democratic Party chair Ben Self talks about what online organizing taught him about starting a brewery rooted in the local community.
The Washington-area entrepreneur who started the ‘Uber for PIs’ is going away for eight years. PIs have said for years that Trustify’s business model was suspect. Yes, suspect.
The gripping 125-year history of innovation on the vegan cheese front, and what’s left to be done.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
(Also, a big thank you to the newsletter pioneers who were extraordinarily generous with their time in getting Slow Build up and running. If you’re not subscribed to them, you should be.)