Progressive Tech Trends After Trump

A report from the 2021 New Media Ventures annual summit; how the internet organizes the unemployed; what tech VCs don't get about journalism; and much more.

Last week, I virtually attended New Media Ventures’ three-day annual summit, which showcased fourteen early-stage progressive entrepreneurs and organizers who are focusing on “building movements, changing narratives, sparking civic engagement, and shifting power.” Since its founding eleven years ago, NMV has played a key role in supporting the progressive use of technology in politics and civic engagement, often taking risky bets that traditional donors and investors would avoid. It was an early supporter of Swing Left, one of the post-2016 generation of resistance start-ups that went on to raise $27 million for candidates in 2020; it funded ActBlue’s decision to launch ActBlue Civics (its service for c4s) in 2012; and it bet early on Blavity, a Black media start-up, in 2015—now Blavity is one of the fastest growing digital media outlets online, reaching more than seven millennials a month. Other beneficiaries of its early support include Mobilize America (now called Mobilize, the Democratic volunteer management platform), the Movement Cooperative (a data- and tool-sharing network of progressive organizations), the Sunrise Movement (a youth-led movement against climate change) and Sister District (which organizes teams from blue areas working to help folks in purple and red states elect more progressive state legislators).

NMV also has a hybrid model—it is both a funder as well as a fundraiser, acting as a scouting network for a loose group of angel investors, and using its modest platform (it has mobilized $50 million over ten years, but only about 20% of that has been direct funding) to spotlight rising talent and help progressive founders connect to other sources of backing. Shannon Baker, its managing director, notes “we have a network of hundreds of angel investors and donors (that has grown considerably steadily over the years), and we circulate all of our investments and grantees around to them, asking them to consider funding alongside us. This looks different depending on the size of the raise, for-profit vs nonprofit, etc. We work with peer investors to help founders close their for-profit rounds, and we introduce nonprofit funders to HNW individual donors, family offices, and foundation program officers.”

NMV has a c4 fund that supports political action start-ups, a c3 fund that both makes grants to c3 nonprofits and that invests in mission-driven for-profits where returns on investment help sustain its work, and a c3 that provides support, engagement and research to its community of entrepreneurs. (I should note here that I’m not a disinterested party; a lot of the people involved with NMV are friends and fellow travelers, including its new president Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and they’ve got a glowing quote from me on their network page. So don’t expect much trademark Sifry snark in what follows.)

NMV’s 2020 round was its most competitive; the fourteen organizations it’s betting on this time came from a pool of 1400 applicants. In 2017, about 500 applied; in 2018, nearly 740 did. Over the years, it’s been interesting to see how NMV’s choices reflect or anticipate trends in the progressive tech and organizing sectors. In 2017, they bet heavily on “resistance” start-ups, several of which were completely new, like Daily Action, Flippable, Indivisible, Ragtag, Sister District, Swing Left and the Townhall Project. In 2018, as I noted in a write-up then, they continued to focus on strengthening progressive movement infrastructure related to election mobilization, but also supported a few groups focused on economic inclusion, like EARN.org, Pay Your Tuition and mRelief. And in 2019, they spread funds among 17 groups across six categories. Some were familiar verticals, such as data-driven tools (like Avalanche and Survey 160), electoral mobilizers (Contest Every Race, Swing Left/Flippable and Pulso), and economic inclusion accelerators (Upsolve, Community Connect Labs). And some were new or expanding areas of interest, like groups working to shift narratives like the Luz Collective, Prism and PeoplesHub, new movements like Sunrise, and strategic engagement shops that serve many types of progressive partners, like New/Mode.

With that in mind, here’s what stood to me about the 14 organizations selected by NMV in its latest cohort.

First, that “media and narrative” is becoming a higher priority for progressives, and in particular with a focus on constituencies that haven’t been centered by what you might call general progressive media. That’s how I see start-ups like The Juggernaut, SmokeSygnals, TILA Studios, Indiegraf, RAHEEM and A/B Partners, which were highlighted together on the second day of the summit. The Juggernaut is uplifting media focused on the South Asian diaspora; SmokeSygnals is a creative agency focused on Native Americans; TILA Studios is working to increase the representation of Black women artists; and RAHEEM is a reporting platform focused on fighting police violence. Indiegraf is an independent publishing platform; A/B Partners is a narrative studio led by Andre Banks.

Second, that the progressive love affair with data and analytics and tools built on top of them shows no sign of abating. That’s where Open Field, a platform for building distributed phone-banks, canvasses and the like; Deck, a predictive targeting tool for campaigns; and Rapid Response, a package of tools for nonprofits who need to quickly create hotlines, mass notifications and the like, all fit in.

Third, and most intriguing to me, were NMV’s bets on movement-makers and advocacy organizations, which I think is somewhat of a new move. Their investment in Momentum, a training network that has incubated several new organizations in the last few years, most notably the Sunrise Movement but also IfNotNow (a Jewish anti-occupation group), COSECHA (which is building a movement of the undocumented), and #NeverAgainAction (an effort to resist family separation), was very much in NMV’s sweet spot of lifting up capacity builders. Likewise their investment in Three Point Strategies, an electoral strategy consultancy founded by three Black women, and their support for Climate Cabinet, a service agency providing climate policy advice to campaigns. But they also threw down for a group that you’ve probably never heard of up til now, and whose name is still provisional: Project Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparations. That’s the brain-child of Nicole Carty, a longtime Momentum trainer who got involved in movement organizing with Occupy a decade ago, and then the Movement for Black Lives. She and her co-founders are a BIPOC-led collective laying the groundwork for an intersectional mass movement to deal with the legacy of white supremacy once and for all.

NMV also made one other move in the advocacy arena worth noting, an investment in the Algorithmic Justice League, which is fighting for equitable and accountable Artificial Intelligence and against its harmful and biased use. Founded by MIT scholar Joy Buolamwini (and joined by my friend and colleague Sasha Costanza-Schock among others), AJL is at the cutting edge of the drive against facial recognition tech, and making waves across the whole spectrum of AI boosterism. As far as I know, this is the first time NMV has supported an organization that is critical of the ways data and tech can be used to discriminate against or manipulate others.

What I didn’t see were start-ups directly serving activists as individual consumers. Everything in the NMV universe is some form of a business-to-business project (even if the business in question is an activist organization or candidate campaign). Even though there are now 15 million individual donors in ActBlue’s donor file, for example, we’re not yet seeing robust start-ups trying to serve them as individual consumers of a service of interest to progressives. So, for example, while there may be intense dissatisfaction with ubiquitous social network platforms like Facebook, an upstart like Planetary, which was launched recently to be a Facebook-killer that fully respects users’ privacy and enables the easy formation of decentralized networks, didn’t make the NMV cut. I understand that—the chances of Planetary’s success against a behemoth like Facebook are slim. It may be that it’s still early days, and in the next year some of the existing progressive tech providers like Mobilize or Action Network will venture into direct services for individual activists. Or this may be a field that is just too risky for the folks attracted to NMV’s vision.

Feet of Clay

The wheels are coming off New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s carefully coiffed image as the Guy Who Gets It Done, if the series of jokes unleashed by The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah last night are any indication (jump to 1:30 to get right to them):

If you need a refresher on the problems with Cuomo’s COVID narrative, this piece by Judd Legum from his Popular Information newsletter today should do the trick. If you don’t live in New York, you can be excused for not knowing why we New Yorkers are sick of our Democratic Trump. But we are.

Unemployed But Not Alone

This piece in the New York Times by Ella Koeze detailing how people on the subreddit r/Unemployment have been helping each other navigate the frustrating patchwork of federal and state assistance reminded me of an article I wrote years ago, called “How the Internet Organizes the Unemployed.” This was ten years ago, when Congress was dithering about extending unemployment benefits in the wake of the Great Recession, and tens of thousands of people were going online searching for help. We discovered that two websites that each were independent hubs for tracking bills in Congress, WashingtonWatch.com and OpenCongress.org, had each accumulated more than 100,000 comments on a pending bill to extend benefits. Not only were commenters trying to implore their representatives to pass the legislation; once it passed, these gigantic comment threads turned into a running self-help forum where people shared advice on how they had accessed benefits in their own state.

The unemployed are largely an unorganized group—back in 2010 there was an effort called UCubed that was launched by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and sought to be a “union of the unemployed” but it appears to have gone dark a few years later. There’s a new effort now called Unemployed Action, which is a project of the Center for Popular Democracy. Maybe they’ll have more success knitting these folks together; unfortunately while being unemployed is an identity that millions of people may experience at the same time, so far I haven’t seen anyone figure out how to organize that identity into a community.

Facebookization, Continued

There’s a lot to learn from Kate Klonick’s report  in the New York on the development of Facebook’s Oversight Board (mostly about basic uselessness), but here’s my biggest takeaway. The board exists because it solves one key problem for CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “a huge proportion of his time [is] devoted to deliberating on whether individual, high-profile posts should be taken down,” as she writes. Facebook’s corporate board was initially opposed to a pitch from NYU law professor Noah Feldman to start the so-called Supreme Court, fearing that it wouldn’t help improve the company’s legitimacy or that it would clash with its business needs, until Zuckerberg chimed in with that argument about his time-suck, noting that experts would be better at making those decisions. But I think it’s plain that in fact, the board’s existence is a business decision. Freeing up the time of the King to think about more important forms of global domination is a smart use of the $130 million Facebook has given to its Oversight Board to function.

Deep Thoughts

Don’t miss Elizabeth Spiers’ long take on the culture dust-up over a somewhat obscure blog called Slate Star Codex, which was itself the subject of a New York Times profile a week ago. Spiers, who helped start and run Gawker and who is now more of a progressive activist, knows a lot about the twisted relationship between the worlds of tech and journalism, and I’m not going to try to summarize her whole 4000-word piece. But her rebuttal of the belief among many VCs that tech journalists are biased against them is just too delicious: “If tech journalism were overwhelmingly negative, tech culture would be very different. Entrepreneurs with mediocre ideas would not be hailed as innovators. The tech industry itself would not be able to claim repeatedly, with a straight face, that everything it does is ‘changing the world.’ People would not aspire to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, even though Zuckerberg has many disturbing qualities that should not be replicated outside of computer simulations.”

RIP James Ridgeway (1936-2021)

A generation of great independent journalists are leaving us, and this New York Times obituary for Jim Ridgeway, who worked the trenches of politics and corruption for six decades, digging out the dirt and fighting for the least among us, captures some of what will be missed. I knew Ridgeway slightly, because he and one of my mentors, Andy Kopkind, were longtime journalistic partners. Andy told of how in the early 1960s, when he and Ridgeway were both at The New Republic, a young Ralph Nader came in with a proposed story on defective high heels on women’s shoes. Apparently, Ridgeway didn’t think much of Nader’s pitch, but then said, “What else you got?” Nader said something about safety problems with cars like the Corvair. That led to an article Ridgeway wrote about “Car Design and Public Safety” in 1964, which led to Nader’s book “Unsafe at Any Speed.” Then GM hired detectives to tail Nader and try to discredit him, which Ridgeway exposed in another New Republic article. That led to Senate hearings (yes, those were the days), propelling Nader to national stardom and eventually earning him a hefty settlement from GM, which seeded the first of his many consumer organizations, saving literally millions of lives. If you’re wearing a seat belt or saved by an air bag, don’t just thank Ralph Nader. Thank Jim Ridgeway.

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