Promised Lands

So my review of Barack Obama’s memoir A Promised Land came out yesterday on The American Prospect’s website and it’s been fun to follow the resulting conversation. If you haven’t read it yet, the next few paragraphs won’t make sense, so either skip ahead or read it first and come back.

Could things have been different? Only if one of two things (at least) had happened. Either Obama had to have had different political instincts, or his base had to. Obviously, his instincts were fundamentally at odds with organizing. After a stint as a community organizer in Chicago, he abandoned it to go to Harvard, because he imagined that change could somehow come quicker. And once back in Chicago, he began to move in what Anand Giriharadas more recently dubbed “Marketworld”—the rarified world of do-gooding philanthropy and socially-minded entrepreneurism. So while his 2008 developed a powerful organizing arm, Obama wasn’t changed by that experience; he was carried by it but floated above it.

As for Obama’s base behaving differently, the truth is some people wanted to keep the movement going but they couldn’t gain traction. I covered the tendrils of this work at the time at techPresident.com (see here here and here) and many of those people are still dedicated organizers. But the people in the middle tier of Obama’s political operation who could have shifted the conversation in real-time were not ready to do so. YesWeStillCan.org, an effort led by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee that featured a petition from 400 former Obama campaign staffers supporting a public health care option, didn’t appear until November of 2009. It wasn’t until December 2010 that recognized figures from the Obama campaign like Sam Graham-Felsen, the campaign’s lead blogger, spoke out in public about the failures of Organizing for America.

Only when the Occupy movement burst onto the scene in September 2011 did the pent-up potential of bottom-up organizing that the Obama campaign had galvanized, organized and then smothered find a new form of expression, one that was leaderfull, rather than centered on one charismatic leader. And I think it’s important that since then, there’s been a shift in how grassroots activists think about their role in the political ecosystem. If that consciousness had somehow been in the hearts and minds of Obama’s base in 2008, perhaps history would have been different.

Odds and Ends

–It’s been quite a year for Color of Change, the nation’s biggest online organization centered on African-Americans and racial justice. As I finish today’s Connector, I’ve been listening to Rashad Robinson, its president, talk about the year past and the year ahead on an online briefing, and COC is at a major new plateau. In 2019, he said, it had 1.7 million members; now it has 7.2 million, which he defined as people they have reached and engaged in action in the last eight months. COC’s SMS list has grown from 150,000 to 6.2 million in the past year. “What does it mean to translate this expanded presence into power,” Robinson asks. That is their work going ahead. And it was music to my ears to hear Robinson say that one of his regrets about the Obama years is that “movements were not engaged,” and that he is hard at work making sure the Biden administration is aware of the potential to engage with grassroots leaders in its first 100 days.

–This essay by tech worker Carmen Molinari in Organizing.work is worth a close read. She argues that most of the high-profile campaigns by workers at places like Amazon and Google to get their employers to take more progressive positions on issues like climate change or working with ICE has gone nowhere because organizers have the wrong theory of change. Instead of feeling guilty about their own privilege and appealing to their bosses’ guilt to try to get them to do the right thing, tech worker organizers should pursue their own actual workplace grievances as a way to build up their own base, she argues.

–Does the Biden White House need a Chief Technology Officer? danah boyd of Data & Society has new post up arguing that instead it needs a VP of engineering. She writes: “The issue at play isn’t the lack of tech-forward vision. It’s the lack of organizational, human capital, and communications infrastructure that’s necessary for a complex must-reach-everyone’ organization to transform. Rather than coming in with hubris and focusing on grand vision, we need a new administration who is willing to dive deep and understand the cracks in the infrastructure that make a tech-forward agenda impossible.

–Did $400 million in private money from Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg “save” the 2020 election? That’s the headline NPR gave to this story by a team of reporters from American Public Media. It sure looks like the money, which was funneled mainly through the Center for Tech and Civic Life, helped a lot of local election administrators. And kudos to CTCL, which managed to move 2,500 grants out the door in just 8 weeks. But “saved”? (Oh, and don’t miss the delightful editor’s note at the end of the story, about Facebook being one of NPR’s funders.)

–Noel Hidalgo, the beating heart of NYC’s civic tech organization BetaNYC, has written a powerful personal essay about his twelve years in the field, starting with Twitter Vote Report (which we worked on together!). He recalls some really hard times and it’s a tribute to his resilience and perseverance to see where BetaNYC is now.

–And Dominic Campbell, the founder of the UK’s FutureGov, a critical behind-the-scenes civic tech company there that works with local towns and councils on public engagement tools, has decided to step down after 13 years leading its growth. He’s taking the Institute for Impossible Ideas with him, and I for one am looking forward to what he comes up with next.

What I’m Reading

I finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s new book The Ministry of the Future a few days ago, and I wish I could recommend it as enthusiastically as Ezra Klein did when he called it “the most important book I’ve read this year.” Alas, after a powerful narrative opening, imagining a near future where a massive climate catastrophe propels the world into a massive shift in how we consume and use energy, Robinson’s writing becomes overly didactic. Big chunks of the book read like hastily written policy papers sketching out how the world’s central bankers could create a “carbon coin” currency that would reward people and businesses for not burning carbon. By the last third of the book, I found myself swiping ahead on my Kindle rather than soaking in each page. The ideas are intriguing, but in my humble opinion good science fiction carries you along with a story, not a treatise. Show, not tell, as they say.