Soul-Searching

Whither civic tech? “This idea, that we can remake government in the image of the people, to work for people, and have government we can all feel good about, doesn’t belong to any political party or any administration. No matter how you feel about who sits in the Oval Office now, what last night told us is that this movement matters more than we even knew. And that movement must grow.” That’s Code for America founder Jen Pahlka on public service under Trump.

Read the whole thing, but consider this problem: how do public servants “serve” the public if their master asks them to harm people and his constituents hate government?

Another Code for America and open-government star (and old friend of Civic Hall), David Eaves weighs in with a judicious look at the future of the U.S. Digital Service and 18F. His optimistic view is that nothing happens to these programs in the short run; pessimistically he thinks they could implode if lots of key staff abandon ship. Good strategic thinking here; read the whole thing.

18F’s Noah Kunin says he’s staying because he swore an oath to the Constitution, not to any party. Kudos.

And if you are interested in serving in the Trump Administration, or just want to share your story with the transition team, led by so-far-unindicted-co-conspirator in the Washington Bridge-closing-scandal New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, you can go to GreatAgain.gov.

Whither data analytics? I guess Obama 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina’s confidence about the Clinton campaign’s voter data and analytics wasn’t so smart. As he wrote a week ago in The New York Times, “As we move into the final days of the 2016 election cycle, the smart money is on the campaigns—like Mrs. Clinton’s—that are leveraging the power of data to find every last vote they can.”

Sasha Issenberg reports for Bloomberg on how Trump’s data team had hints of what was coming and pivoted towards it: “In the last week before the election, we undertook a big exercise to reweight all of our polling, because we thought that who [pollsters] were sampling from was the wrong idea of who the electorate was going to turn out to be this cycle,” says Matt Oczkowski, the head of product at London firm Cambridge Analytica and team leader on Trump’s campaign. “If he was going to win this election, it was going to be because of a Brexit-style mentality and a different demographic trend than other people were seeing. Trump’s team chose to focus on this electorate, partly because it was the only possible path for them. But after Comey, that movement of older, whiter voters became newly evident. It’s what led Trump’s campaign to broaden the electoral map in the final two weeks and send the candidate into states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan that no one else believed he could win (with the exception of liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, who deemed them “Brexit states”). Even on the eve of the election Trump’s models predicted only a 30 percent likelihood of victory.

Was it social media’s fault? “If you’re blaming Facebook for the results of this election, you’re an idiot,” writes Mike Masnick of TechDirt.

On the other hand, as Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of the co-founders of what became Twitter says, “Our concept of a neutral social media platform promotes trolling & abuse. These systems deserve significant credit for Trump’s election.”

“If false news is spreading in communities that want to believe it, few will mark it as false,” writes Sarah Frier for Bloomberg Technology. That in essence sums up how Facebook’s News Feed isn’t working.

Is Silicon Valley really this dumb? Farhad Manjoo captures the dismay among Silicon Valley elites.

#Calexit? Among the stupider responses, Shervin Pishevar—a co-founder of HyperLoop One and top investor in companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Slack—announced that he would fund a campaign for California to secede from the union and become an independent country. Other tech “leaders” joined him, like Dave Morin, the founder of Path, as Kristen Brown of Fusion reports.

Compared to the selfish, narrow-minded and counterproductive response of these tech elites, who ought to just get on an ice floe and leave if they feel so alienated from our country, here’s what the incoming leadership of the California legislature had to say about the election: “While Donald Trump may have won the presidency, he hasn’t changed our values. America is greater than any one man or party. We will not be dragged back into the past. We will lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our Constitution. California was not a part of this nation when its history began, but we are clearly now the keeper of its future.”

And here’s one voice from Hollywood, noted writer Aaron Sorkin, reassuring his daughters that he’s going to stay and fight: “We do what we can to fight injustice anywhere we see it—whether it’s writing a check or rolling up our sleeves. Our family is fairly insulated from the effects of a Trump presidency so we fight for the families that aren’t.”

Maybe all those people who said they have “nothing to hide” will take encryption more seriously? Ethan Chiel’s story on what Trump’s approach to the national surveillance state could look like should help clarify matters.

Speaking of really bad ideas, here’s one that is getting spread around via Tumblr and the #NotMyPresident hashtag: to somehow convince 38 electors to vote their consciences and deny Trump an Electoral College victory.

Must read: The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald explains the parallels between the U.K.’s Brexit vote and Trump’s election.

Inside Philanthropy’s David Callahan offers five predictions about the impact of Trump’s victory on that field.

Planned Parenthood is looking to hire a Director of Information Security.

The problem with winner-take-all systems: If just one vote in 100 had switched from Trump to Clinton, we’d be talking about how much Americans were ready for more social liberalism and how much existing political norms and standards of decency mattered to the electorate, Nate Silver points out. Instead we are talking about how much we are still a racist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic country. Actually, we are both.

Your moment of zen: ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos laughs at Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison back in July 2015 for suggesting that Donald Trump could be the Republican nominee.