Messiness

This is civic tech: After a Republican campaign office in North Carolina was mysteriously firebombed yesterday—with a spray-painted threat demanding that “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else,” longtime tech writer, Civic Hall friend, and sometime Democratic activist David Weinberger quickly organized a GoFundMe asking his fellow Democrats to pitch in for its rebuilding. He wrote, “Until an investigation is undertaken, we cannot know who did this or why. No matter the result, this is not how Americans resolve their differences. We talk, we argue, sometimes we march, and most of all we vote. We do not resort to violence by individuals or by mobs. So, let’s all pitch in, no matter what your party affiliation, in and get that office open again quickly.” He had the help of technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who tweeted, “Point obviously isn’t whether you agree or disagree with the ‪@NCGOP. It’s simple: let’s respond collectively to burning down of a party HQ.” It took less than an hour to raise the $10,000 goal.

Lacking evidence, Donald Trump tweeted that “Animals representing Hillary Clinton and Dems in North Carolina just firebombed our office.”

Speaking of Trump: In an unprecedented step, the normally non-political Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement Friday declaring that a Trump presidency “would represent a threat to press freedom in the United States” and would also embolden dictators around the world.

We’ve noticed that President Obama—who is a bit of a geek—spends a lot of time with the gods of Silicon Valley. So it was very refreshing to see these remarks from him from last Friday’s White House Frontiers conference in Pittsburgh. He said:

…government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with. So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences—setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio—then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and applause.) That’s not, by the way, to say that there aren’t huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made. But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it’s not inherently wrecked; it’s just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That’s not on your balance sheet, that’s on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that’s hard and it’s messy, and we’re building up legacy systems that we can’t just blow up.

Speaking of Silicon Valley getting involved in politics, the New York Times’ David Streitfeld reports on how various tech moguls are getting more political active this year.

Speaking of geeks in the White House, here’s chief digital officer Jason Goldman announcing that they’re open-sourcing the White House’s Facebook messenger bot.

Between the giant hack of Yahoo’s user base and the mass leaking of emails by top Democratic operatives, and the Obama administration’s not-so-veiled threat to retaliate against Russia, Shelly Palmer asks, “Are we on the brink of the first cyber world war?” and offers some suggestions for how to respond.

Reporting from the National Conference on Citizenship, Tufts professor Peter Levine offers a “model of civic life” in America focused on all the elements of civic health, and looking at how they might be renewed.