Tribes

This is civic tech: Inspired by a talk by Magdelin Vargas and Chanda Fruchter of NYC 311 that she heard at last Saturday’s School of Data, programmer Aliza Aufrichtig built a Chrome extension that shows would-be renters every 311 complaint lodged against the address they are exploring.

Programmer Carlos Pena explains how a data scraping project he build to pull together government information in Peru pertaining to the visitors to government offices is being used by journalists to connect the dots and reveal hidden lobbying and corruption.

Starbucks is partnering with Turbovote in an effort to encourage all of its 150,000 U.S. employees to register to vote, Daniel Lippman reports for Politico. (Kudos to Seth Flaxman, Turbovote co-founder and Civic Hall member!)

Google.org, the company’s charitable arm, gives away $100 million a year. Jacquelline Fuller, its director, tells Davey Alba of Wired that it’s focused on an “evidence-based” approach to taking bigger risks aimed at bigger impact. She says, “There’s big thinking, [while] there’s so much incremental thinking in the nonprofit and foundation world. [The foundation world] is so focused on, ‘Fed X number of people today. Can we feed X+1 tomorrow?’ As opposed to asking: ‘Where’s the path that can get us to X squared?’”

Big thinks: Odds are, this morning, that your Twitter feed is telling you to hurry up and read Jeffrey Goldberg’s new Atlantic cover story on “The Obama Doctrine,” the president’s approach to foreign affairs. I’ll save you some time, because it’s almost 20,000 words long: Obama has a nuanced view of America’s power to bring order to the world, and he’s less of an interventionist than Hillary Clinton.

Obama also has a very interesting observation about the march of human progress, which he applies to the current breakdown in the Middle East, but which could be also read through the lens of current events here in the United States:

“I believe that overall, humanity has become less violent, more tolerant, healthier, better fed, more empathetic, more able to manage difference. But it’s hugely uneven. And what has been clear throughout the 20th and 21st centuries is that the progress we make in social order and taming our baser impulses and steadying our fears can be reversed very quickly. Social order starts breaking down if people are under profound stress. Then the default position is tribe—us/them, a hostility toward the unfamiliar or the unknown. Right now, across the globe, you’re seeing places that are undergoing severe stress because of globalization, because of the collision of cultures brought about by the Internet and social media, because of scarcities—some of which will be attributable to climate change over the next several decades—because of population growth. And in those places, the Middle East being Exhibit A, the default position for a lot of folks is to organize tightly in the tribe and to push back or strike out against those who are different.”

Obama also understands very well the value that civil society brings: “Right now, I don’t think that anybody can be feeling good about the situation in the Middle East,” he said. “You have countries that are failing to provide prosperity and opportunity for their people. You’ve got a violent, extremist ideology, or ideologies, that are turbocharged through social media. You’ve got countries that have very few civic traditions, so that as autocratic regimes start fraying, the only organizing principles are sectarian. Contrast that with Southeast Asia, which still has huge problems—enormous poverty, corruption—but is filled with striving, ambitious, energetic people who are every single day scratching and clawing to build businesses and get education and find jobs and build infrastructure. The contrast is pretty stark.”

Notably: the phrase “internet freedom” never gets mentioned. Remember when that was a thing the Obama administration cared about? Now, not so much. (Somewhere between the souring of the Arab Spring and the disclosures by Edward Snowden, it got dropped.)

Speaking of big interviews: Nilay Patel has a must-read interview with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in The Verge. “My heart has always been with the insurgents, not the incumbents,” he says. He also talks about how he is wrestling with the issue of zero rating, the privacy battle, and able box unlocking. (h/t David Isenberg)

Tech and politics: Internet prankster Dan Sinker wrote a Chrome extension that replaces Donald Trump’s name with the words “Someone With Tiny Hands.” That managed to get onto a computer at Wired magazine and the next thing you know it prompted this hilarious correction (which went viral), plus an explanation from Jason Tanz of Wired.

The National Republican Senate Committee wants its candidates to get on Snapchat, arguing in an internal memo that it is now in the “same league as Facebook, Twitter, and Google,” Biz Carson reports for TechInsider.

The content posted on Cloakroom, an anonymous mobile chat app made only to be used by people with a senate.gov or house.gov email address, sometimes gets kind of kinky, reports Noah Kulwin for Re/Code. Ted Henderson, its maker (who also is behind Capitol Bells), says he and his team filter out inappropriate posts.

Our brave new world: In the New Republic, Suzy Khimm reports on the unintended and perhaps out-of-control consequences of using public shaming to combat men who solicit prostitutes in the age of the internet.