Precious

This is civic tech: It’s National Voter Registration Day today; update your voter registration here.

Speaking of voting, an important new study of registered voters in Dane and Milwaukee Counties of Wisconsin finds that 11.2 percent of the eligible non-voting registrants were deterred from voting in 2016 by the state’s onerous voter ID law.

Davar Ardalan offers a round-up of last weekend’s National Day of Civic Hacking for the Huffington Post.

The good folks at the Design Studio for Social Intervention have put out an RFP for new social emergency procedures, building on their experimental “social emergency response centers,” which seek to convert activist energy into meaningful community engagement. They “invite procedures from poets and policy wonks, coders and cooks, street medics and nosy neighbors, dancers and philosophers, comedians and acupuncturists, farmers and librarians, activists and foodies, tricksters and sneakerheads.”

In Poland, coders and democracy activists are banding together to defend civil society, Zosia Wasik reports for The Financial Times.

In Puerto Rico, residents trying to recover from Hurricane Maria’s devastation hunt everywhere for necessities, including “precious Wi-Fi and cell phone signals,” Danico Coto reports for the Associated Press.

Trump watch: But her emails! At least six of President Trump’s top advisers have used private email accounts to sometimes handle official business, Matt Apuzzo and Maggie Haberman report for The New York Times.

The Department of Homeland Security is planning to start collecting the “social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information and search results” of all immigrants in the United States, including permanent residents and naturalized citizens, Adolfo Flores reports for BuzzFeed.

President Trump is calling for the Department of Education to devote at least $200 million a year to STEM education, Recode’s Tony Romm reports. Today in Detroit, his daughter Ivanka Trump will unveil a concurrent series of private sector promises from companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, GM, Quicken Loans and Salesforce. President Obama had sought $4 billion a year for his “Computer Science for All” program.

Future of work: While there’s much handwriting about robots taking people’s jobs, what if the more serious challenge presented by automation is that we are turning workers into something resembling robots? That’s the provocative argument made by Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger in The Guardian. Exhibit A: the deskilling of taxi drivers by Uber.

They promised us flying cars! Remember Google’s promise to bring high-speed broadband to Kansas City? The company is almost finished wiring hundreds of local nonprofit organizations for free, but the Kansas City Star’s editorial board says in an editorial that it hasn’t really transformed much in town, other than forcing other internet service providers to lower their prices.

The New Yorker’s Jessica Winter wants to know why VCs aren’t racing to fund Naya Health, a start-up that makes an elegant and more efficient breast pump than currently available products. (h/t Genevieve Marcy)

Life in Facebookistan: Julia Carrie Wong reports for The Guardian on the plight of Facebook’s service workers, some of whom are homeless.

Crypto-wars, continued: China has blocked the WhatsApp messaging app, Keith Bradsher reports for The New York Times.

Attend: This Saturday, the second annual Data for Democracy NYC hackathon.

Attend: The third annual Platform Cooperativism conference is taking place November 10-11 at the New School; register here.