Choices

WikiSpeaks: Robert Mackey of the Intercept takes a close look at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s political vendetta against Hillary Clinton (which included him speaking to the U.S. Green Party convention this past Saturday, where he earned a standing ovation after saying that the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was like “cholera or gonorrhea.”).

Filmmaker Alex Gibney opines in the New York Times oped page that “Assange is afflicted by what the police call ‘noble cause corruption,’ a belief that noble ends justify reckless or immoral means.”

This is civic tech: Applications are now open for Blue Ridge Labs’ Catalyst incubator, a six-month program aimed at helping young social ventures aiming to improve the lives of low-income New Yorkers.

mySociety is looking to hire a six-month research associate.

Civic Hall Labs is looking to hire a director of technology and several other positions.

New platforms: “This is the new New Deal.” That’s the manager of the Northeast Oklahoma Electric Cooperative, talking to Cecilia Kang of the New York Times, for her article about how rural power coops are closing the broadband gap. “Now we’re doing what cable and telecom companies don’t want to do, just like we did for electricity when the big private power companies didn’t want to come here either.”

Backchannel’s Jessi Lempel explains why Twitter is “running out of time to figure out how to maintain its open platform, while keeping abusers from unleashing their plague of hate.”

Playing off the news of a big deal between Google and GlaxoSmithKline, technology critic Evgeny Morozov argues in The Guardian that “rather than ushering in a new type of flexible capitalism that would rid us of giant, wasteful and hierarchical firms, it may be making the kind of capitalism it claims to despise far more resilient, dynamic and – the ultimate irony – difficult to disrupt.”

A Swedish-born internet native, Nils Pihl, the CEO of Traintracks.io, explains why he abandoned Silicon Valley for its lack of a moral compass and instead calls Beijing “the best incubator we could have asked for.” (h/t Kim-Mai Cutler)