Peter Principle

Silicon Valley billionaire Trump supporter and libertarian big-thinker Peter Thiel has been secretly paying fake-wrestler Hulk Hogan‘s legal expenses in his battle against Gawker Media, Ryan Mac and Matt Drange report for Forbes.

Read Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall on why this is a big, and terrible, deal.

This is civic tech: In a nice piece titled “Turn Your Democracy Up To Eleven,” the OpenGov Foundation’s Seamus Kraft says the problem with American democracy isn’t that we have too much of it, we just don’t have systems that make it possible “for citizens to better see, shape and understand their government.”

Meet Candace Faber, Seattle’s new official civic technology advocate.

What open government? Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post’s new media columnist, zings President Obama for his hypocrisy on government transparency. While the president lectures students at Rutgers University’s commencement address that “It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about,” she points out that his administration keeps the public totally in the dark about deaths from his drone strikes, while setting new records for “stonewalling or rejecting FOIA requests” and not providing the Post’s reporters with any in-depth, on-the-record access to him since late 2009.

The future of work? The proposed new French labor law is highly controversial, but one section, “the right to disconnect,” strikes this writer as a hugely good idea. As Lauren Collins explains for The New Yorker, “The law suggests that companies—following the lead of Volkswagen, which turns off its servers after hours, and Daimler, which allows employees to automatically delete e-mails they receive while on vacation—negotiate formal policies to limit the encroachment of work into people’s homes.” France’s workers, she notes, are as productive as those of the U.S. and work more hours per year than in Germany.

Life after Facebookistan: Randy Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, takes to the pages of Vogue to explain why the tech scene in New York City, her home town, is better than the one she left in Silicon Valley. Here’s a smidge:

In New York, almost everyone I’ve met on the tech scene will talk to you, without a hint of embarrassment, about their daily SoulCycle class, their screenplay, book club, or music group. This multiplicity of interests also means that “content” is more highly valued; it is not merely a “platform,” whose success is measured in number of users, minutes of engagement, and daily actives. In New York, quality is more important than sheer volume; having your own voice is prized over letting just anybody upload their creations.