Slouching Toward the Apocalypse

Digital divides: “I could go home on a shorter bus route, but I want to get A’s,” high school junior Perla Castro says. That’s because her town’s internet service provider won’t bring broadband to her street, and thus she relies on free service being supplied on her three-hour daily school bus ride. Sixth-graders Isabella and Tony Ruiz linger for hours outside their school to download homework materials because their family has had to cut back on everything including their cellphone data plan. The digital divide cuts hard on what FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel calls the “homework gap,” and this vivid story in the New York Times by Cecilia Kang makes clear why the agency is trying to upgrade its Lifeline program to include subsidies for internet service.

Republican pollster and spinmeister Frank Luntz is out with a new survey of the “Snapchat Generation,” and while we hope to God that that moniker doesn’t stick, there’s a lot of interesting data in his report. The kids (first and second time voters ages 18-26) love Bernie, say they’re extremely likely to vote in 2016 (we shall see), declare that they respect health professionals, teachers, soldiers, scientists and tech innovators far more than bankers, elected officials, business leaders, entertainers, journalists or lawyers; and hate corruption and greed more than anything else about America. 66 percent think corporate America “embodies everything that is wrong with America” and 58 percent say socialism is more “compassionate” than capitalism.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates supports the FBI’s push to get Apple to crack its iPhone security, likening the request to accessing bank and telephone records, while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he’s with Apple.

This is civic tech: Accela’s Mark Headd offers a blizzard of facts about a flurry of civic tech projects in various cities that have struggled to tap the potential of local volunteers to tackle snowstorms and unshoveled sidewalks. Part of the adoption problem, he argues, comes from a lack of support and promotion by local government.

Microsoft civic tech lead Matt Stempeck talks to Civic Hall member and longtime Personal Democracy Media friend Dawn Barber, co-founder of the NY Tech Meetup, about the origins of the CUNY Tech Meetup.

Until it was blocked by the government, Iranians briefly had access to a useful app enabling them to crowdsource the location of the Ershad, or morality police, Naila Kelani reports for Good.is.

Concerned about the rise of tech-driven unemployment, Tom Steinberg floats a proposal for an “Association of Concerned Technologists” to raise awareness about the “impending robo-job-pocalypse.”

Related: Catherine Bracy, until recently Code for America’s director of community organizing (and longtime friend of Personal Democracy Media) is stepping into leadership of Oakland’s TechEquity Collaborative, a grassroots group of locals most of whom work in the tech industry and want it to be more inclusive, representative and community-driven. With Uber opening new headquarters in Oakland, her timing couldn’t be better.

DemocracyOS co-founder Pia Mancini gets a nice, glowing write-up in The Guardian. (Though, pet peeve alert—until we see mass adoption of a new app or practice, I wish headline writers would stop writing “How X is changing politics in the digital age” until politics has measurably changed.)

DIY Science: It started with people hacking their kids glucose monitors, and now some diabetes patients and their families are figuring out how to make generic insulin, Peter Andrey Smith reports for the New York Times.

Life in Facebookistan: Those Facebook ads targeting you by your voting information? There’s a decent chance they’re being placed with the help of TargetSmart, which is now plugging the fact that they’ve “matched the entire voter file to over 191 million Facebook users.”

Speaking at the University of Michigan, Facebook co-founder and New Republic owner Chris Hughes said he wanted Facebook to buy Yahoo in 2006 but Mark Zuckerberg disagreed. “Boy am I glad I lost that one,” Hughes remarked, according to writer Steve Friess, who was in the audience.

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen: “Get those kids off my lawn!” Actually, he has a point, but it’s a bit much how he wrings his hands.

Faschismo Watch: “Waterboarding now one of biggest applause lines of Trump’s rallies,” tweets Washington Post national political correspondent Philip Rucker. “‘We don’t go far enough,’ Trump says. Crowd chants, ‘USA! USA!'”

Your moment of zen: Media critic Ian Bogost skewers the picture, now widely circulating online, of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg walking barefaced among a see of seated men wearing the Oculus Rift virtual reality viewer his company is developing.