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Valley guiles: The New York Times’ Katie Benner reports on the ongoing turmoil in the tech industry as more women speak out against sexual harassment and some top industry icons topple.
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Responding to a mea culpa from Dave McClure, the founder of 500 Startups (and the many comments of his friends trying to excuse his behavior), Cheryl Yeoh, an entrepreneur, posted this personal story of being sexually assaulted by him three years ago.
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Freida Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor issued a statement responding to the McClure’s resignation from 500 Startups, arguing that the problem of sexual harassment in tech is “not just a case of a few bad actors” but is rooted in “a culture that has been allowed to fester and to rot by enablers who refused to intervene when they witnessed inexcusable behavior or went to great lengths to avoid seeing it.”
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Micah Baldwin argues in Medium that what’s also ailing Silicon Valley is that it’s gone from be a place where people innovated in order to give something to the world to a place filled with takers trying to extract money from others in order to enrich themselves further.
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Tech and politics: Democratic tech moguls Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman’s new Win the Future (WTF) effort gets profiled by Tony Romm for Recode. He reports that they are trying to build a “virtual party,” in Pincus’ words, using the web to crowdsource innovative platform planks and then raising money to turn the most popular policy positions thus created into billboard ads near airports serving Washington, DC, to ensure that “members of Congress see [them].”
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Like many other techies who think their success in business can be translated to wins in politics, Pincus told Romm that his insight in building Zynga (to make gaming more accessible to non-hardcore gamers) has convinced him that politics too is a game that can be re-simplified. “It just feels like the bar is so high for any of us to have a voice and choice.” Romm notes that Pincus has contributed close to $2.5 million to Democratic candidates over the years. “I’m fearful the Democratic Party is already moving too far to the left,” he told Romm, and he wants WTF to be “pro-social [and] pro-planet, but also pro-business and pro-economy.” WTF is being backed by $500,000 from its co-founders, and they’re being aided by Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg as well as VCs Fred Wilson and Sunil Paul.
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Umair Haque argues that resistance alone can’t defeat authoritarianism; only a political opposition devoted to (re)building a real social contract can do that.
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This is civic tech: Former NYC deputy mayor Stephen Goldsmith, now at Harvard, writes for GovTech about how the city’s BigApps competition was reframed by the Economic Development Corporation and our own Civic Hall Labs to embrace community wide engagement, design thinking and usability testing throughout the competition.
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Writing in the New York Times, David Bornstein profiles the work of the Results network and Civic Hall member Sam Daley-Harris, who trains ordinary citizens in “deep advocacy” and has consistently been getting bipartisan results from Congress despite today’s polarized times.
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Across the pond at London’s Newspeak House (a “community space for political technologists” not unlike Civic Hall), they’re holding a series on redesigning democracy, with the first event recapped here by Ben Whitnall.
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Trump watch: At least 44 states are refusing to hand over voter data to President Trump’s so-called “election integrity commission,” CNN’s Liz Stark and Grace Hauck report. In most cases, they are rejecting the request, drafted by the commission’s director, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, because it is seeking normally private information like voters’ social security numbers, party identifications and birth dates.
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ICYMI: Not only was President Trump’s retweet of a video of man looking like him beating up a CNN avatar bizarre, as Slate’s Daniel Politi reported, the maker of the video was a registered Reddit user “fond of posts denigrating blacks, Muslims, women, and, of course, liberals.” That redactor, “HanAssholeSolo,” has apparently now apologized for seeming to condone violence against the press.
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What sharing economy? Taking astroturfing to a new level, Airbnb has been sending robe-emails from users, in some cases without their permission, to lobby against legislation in San Francisco that doesn’t even yet exist, Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez reports for the SF Examiner.
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Apply: Civic Hall’s new “Organizers-in-Residence” program is still taking applications, due July 10. Details here.
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By the way, if you haven’t read Kate Losse’s very fine memoir of her days working at the early Facebook, The Boy Kings (the inspiration for today’s post title), go out and get it.
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