Plutocracy

Top Hillary Clinton digital advisor Teddy Goff took severe umbrage at yesterday’s suggestion by TechCrunch that she was “attacking” Uber, as this tweet from him shows. Plus he made sure to retweet Silicon Valley investor and Clinton backer Shervin Pishevar, who did his own pushback late yesterday.

By the way, all Clinton actually said in her economic speech, with reference to the sharing economy, was, as Josh Constine of Techcrunch notes, “Meanwhile, many Americans are making extra money renting out a spare room, designing websites, selling products they design themselves at home, or even driving their own car. This ‘on demand’ or so-called ‘gig economy’ is creating exciting opportunities and unleashing innovation but it’s also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.”

Kevin Roose of Fusion says, “Welcome to the Uber election,” now that the candidates’ positions on that seminal company and the larger sharing economy appear to be surfacing as a possible issue in the race. Apparently Jeb Bush hailed an Uber yesterday in San Francisco.

Clinton’s campaign has promised to begin disclosing the names of her money bundlers, Nicholas Confessore reports for the New York Times, making her the only presidential candidate to do so.

According to Brian Beutler of The New Republic, newly declared presidential candidate Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin writes “incredibly boring tweets.” I don’t agree—they just look like tweets someone from Wisconsin might actually write.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s presidential campaign bought the JohnKasich.us url from a lefty Ohio blogger named Joseph Mismas who is using the proceeds to pay his bloggers to keep tracking Kasich as he runs, Ilan Ben-Meier reports for BuzzFeed.

Veteran political journalist Jeff Greenfield surveys the ups-and-downs of past presidential primaries to remind us that “Caution: What You Are Reading Will Likely Have No Impact On What Happens In 2016.”

NASA gave Facebook-owned Instagram an hour-long head start on the first surface image of Pluto beamed back from its New Horizons spacecraft, which is flying by the distant nonplanet today, Davey Alba reports for Wired. “We made an editorial decision to give the world a sneak peek of the image on Instagram,” NASA social media manager John Yembrick told him. This act of favoritism is a first for NASA, which has traditionally just made all of its content freely available via its public website, Alba notes, asking: “Is it problematic that a public agency is giving preference to a specific private media outlet?”

Related: Alex Howard reports on the fascinating clash breaking out over a new government pilot project that will make public all responses to FOIA requests to six government agencies. While open government advocates are hailing the experiment, many journalists are attacking it because they fear they will lose their ability to generate scoops.

This is civic tech: NYC’s Alleywatch profiles Kathryn Hurley, the co-founder of Intellibins, a smartphone app that takes open public data and tells users how to find the nearest public recycling location.

Remember the Provo People’s Lobby, which is using Loomio and NationBuilder to involve a representative group of local residents to generate legislative proposals online? Genelle Pubmire of the Provo Daily Herald reports the lobby’s first round produced recommendations to the city council on improving local agriculture. A second round of the lobby will start in September.

If you give trees email addresses, it turns out people won’t use them just to report issues with dead branches. As Adrienne LaFrance reports for CityLab, in the city of Melbourne, thousands of love letters to favorite trees were written. (h/t Philip Djwa)

Rohan Silva connects today’s civic crowdfunding campaigns with the older history of “public subscriptions” under which Londoners of the Victorian era funded public monuments.

Access is holding a “Crypto Summit” in Washington this Wednesday and the speaker line-up looks terrific. You can register here to attend or watch the webcast.

Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras is suing the U.S. government for any and all documentation pertaining all the times she has been searched, interrogated and detained while traveling, Jenna McLaughlin reports for The Intercept.

As Mike Isaac of the New York Times reports, former Reddit CEO Yishan Wongsays that the reason for Victoria Taylor’s firing was that Alexis Ohanian, a Reddit cofounder and chairman of its board, wanted to take over control of the IamA page and decided to fire her. Wong posted on Reddit, “When the hate-train started up against [Ellen] Pao, Alexis should have been out front and center saying very clearly ‘Ellen Pao did not make this decision, I did.’ Instead, he just sat back and let her take the heat.”