Springtime

Tech and politics: Today’s must-read is by Bloomberg Politics’ Sasha Isenberg, who profiles Zack Exley and Becky Bond, the savvy digital organizers helping running Bernie Sanders’ grassroots operation. “We’ve seen the limitations of a model that says if you just get a whole lot of people to do something—you just flood the streets,” says Exley. “Without actually building an organization that can provide leadership, what do you get after you topple Mubarak?” Isenberg does an excellent job of teasing how the model Exley and Bond have been nurturing insider the Sanders movement is qualitatively different from the “top-down manages the bottom-up” philosophy prevalent among most of the Democratic/progressive organizers trained in the Marshall Ganz-Jeremy Bird school of political organizing, and building a capacity for a massive voter contact operation.

Top aides to Hillary Clinton may be forced to testify under oath about her private email server if a ruling from U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is overseeing a lawsuit from the conservative group Judicial Watch, stands, Spencer Hsu and Rosalind Helderman report for the Washington Post.

President Obama tries out a new gig, blogging for SCOTUS blog. Well, kind of.

This is civic tech: In the latest installment of our Rethinking Debates coverage, Ben Tarnoff reports on how viewer-response apps called “worms” have been embraced, and critiqued, in places like New Zealand.

Here’s a report on Houston’s civic tech scene by Angela Shah of Xconomy Texas.

Pia Mancini announces the launch of the Partido Digital in Uruguay, rooting it in the experience her Net Party faced in trying to get going in Argentina.

Phandeeyar, Myanmar’s civic tech hub, is expanding this year and looking to hire loads of people.

Robot overlords welcome: A gaggle of writers led by Samuel Woolley of the Data & Society Institute have co-authored a “botifesto” on how we should think about bots, especially the more social ones that interact with us in places like Twitter.

Speaking of bots, this video of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robot should either amaze you or freak you out (especially around 1:25 in). Perhaps we can use them to walk our dogs?

Faschismo watch: The single best indicator of support for Donald Trump, at least among South Carolina Republicans who were surveyed by political scientist Matthew MacWilliams, isn’t gender, education, ideology, income, race, or religion. It’s whether someone scores high on the authoritarian scale, meaning they value conformity and order and are wary of outsiders. And as he writes for Vox, people who are lower on the authoritarian scale get more authoritarian when they feel threatened—such as by the threat of terrorism. “These results should be a big red flag to those who argue Trump’s support is capped. It is not.” He adds, “America’s Authoritarian Spring…is now upon us.”

And if you don’t think Trump has an electoral path to the White House, read Zach Carter and Ryan Grim in the Huffington Post, who point out that he just has to flip the Rust Belt states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin into his column to undo Barack Obama’s electoral majority of 2012. And survey data of working-class households in Cleveland and Pittsburgh suggest that Trump already has a strong base among Democrats there, they note.

Speaking of authoritarian leaders, five years ago, the political-literary parody account @MayorEmanuel ended its run, and its author Dan Sinker (head of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Project) now shares some reminiscences on its deeper meaning. He writes, “…the Twitter of @MayorEmanuel — a Twitter that was still so rife with experimentation, so full of people pushing against the edges of the platform to see what was possible—is pretty much gone now….[And] The Chicago of @MayorEmanuel is largely gone too.”

Love, Sad, Wow, Happy, Angry. Wasn’t that the title of Gary Shteyngart’s parody of the digital future? Actually those are the new “reactions” you can add when you don’t want to just “like” something on Facebook.