Swarming

This literally is giving me goose-bumps: In the last day, China’s Baidu.com search engine has unblocked results for “tank man,” our man in Shanghai, Clay Shirky, shares via Twitter. “Many people don’t get how successful the Party has been in putting the Tiananmen massacre in a memory hole. Showing the image is amazing,” he adds. He estimates, “at a conservative guess, there’ve been a billion screenshots taken of various banned images, jokes and memes during the last day.” As he explains, the government has been drastically tightening up its media control and for some reason Baidu executives are fighting back. “This will not end well,” Shirky notes.

Tech and politics: With Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ campaign starting to run out of steam, Jonathan Mahler and Nick Corasaniti report for the New York Times on where his online “foot soldiers” will turn. They quote some dude named Sifry who points out that “it’s not an army, it’s a swarm,” and warns that Hillary Clinton will have to win their support “with honey, but if she tries to command them, they’ll just sting her. As swarms may do.”

Tucked deftly inside David Samuels’ long profile in the New York Times Magazine of Obama speechwriter and “foreign policy guru” Ben Rhodes is a valuable analysis of how the White House gets its message out in the age of digital media (and the collapse of foreign news bureaus). With the old-fashioned bully pulpit gone, David Axelrod, a longtime Obama confidant, tells Samuels: “…more and more, over the last couple of years, there’s been an investment in alternative means of communication: using digital more effectively, going to nontraditional sources, understanding where on each issue your constituencies are going to be found. I think they’ve approached these major foreign-policy challenges as campaign challenges, and they’ve run campaigns, and those campaigns have been very sophisticated.”

As a case in point, Samuels details the work that went into the digital campaign to sell the Iran deal, which literally included a Twitter account called @TheIranDeal. He writes, “By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online—and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet.”

“What if chat conversations become the new media?” That’s the essence of this almost classically overheated profile of Silicon Valley start-up Sidewire, which managed to snag a long profile by David Lidsky in Fast Company. Sidewise’s founders are currently pegging their hopes on being the hot new political app of 2016 (nope, that was Meerkat), and the company has the requisite mix of former DC insiders hoping to get rich off that tech-politics thing and a 21-year-old co-founder who dropped out of Stanford and namedrops books like Godel, Escher, Bach. The funny thing about Sidewire’s main product—the ability to share 250-character comments in real-time—is that it’s tuned to meeting the needs of the same self-referential inside-the-Beltway group of DC villagers who now obsess over Twitter. But they get an extra 110 characters! That’s clearly something millions of Americans are begging for, since they can’t chat with their friends at length anywhere else, right?

Why you should use encryption: Buried deep inside this mind-blowing expose by Troy LaRaviere, a Chicago elementary school principal, detailing yet more corruption in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, is this nugget: Chicago Public Schools’ bureaucrats apparently were monitoring his official school Gmail account to spot references to sensitive matters like a massive privatization contract with Aramark/Sodexo, companies making hundreds of millions of dollars handling what used to be public sector janitorial jobs in school. LaRaviere has been described as Emanuel’s “biggest critic,” and after you read his post, you’ll understand why.

This is civic tech: Our Jessica McKenzie reports on Zooniverse’s Project Builder, which she calls a “WordPress for Plug-and-Play Citizen Science.” (And I think of it as a virtual analog to that 3-D printer that can print more 3-D printers, only for crowdsourcing projects.)

The neighborhood-centric private social network NextDoor.com continues to stir up concerns that it intensifies the paranoia of affluent white communities about crime, as Kafeh Waddell reports for The Atlantic. This time the locus of controversy is Seattle, where the city police department is trying a variety of ways of improving public engagement, including social media.

Brave new world: Top White House officials Megan Smith, D.J. Patel, and Cecilia Munoz sum up a new Obama administration report on big data and civil rights, warning that “The algorithmic systems that turn data into information are not infallible—they rely on the imperfect inputs, logic, probability, and people who design them. Predictors of success can become barriers to entry; careful marketing can be rooted in stereotype. Without deliberate care, these innovations can easily hardwire discrimination, reinforce bias, and mask opportunity.”

Trump watch: Writing for Vox, David Roberts makes a very smart and sobering point about the coming general election battle: the political industrial complex, and the media in particular, needs the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to seem close, even if it is destined to be a blowout, because “The machine is simply not built to handle a race that’s over before it’s begun.”

New America DC is looking to hire two research associates. Bonus: you get to work with (not for) Laurenellen McCann.