Quick Links to Some Essential Reading

From Casey Newton, David Sasaki, Lee Drutman, David Dayen, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Perry Bacon--plus one government website we all should bookmark.

I’m taking a short breather this week, so in lieu of original content, here are a few reading recommendations:

-Casey Newton’s post, “The platforms give up on 2020 lies,” tells you what you need to know about the state of Big Tech’s social responsibility now that Elon Musk is running Twitter, Meta has dissolved its civic responsibility team, and YouTube is once again ignoring its critics. I don’t know if anyone is working on a book about the rise and fall of the post-2016 anti-disinformation wave, but it sure likes like we huffed, and puffed, and failed to blow the house down.

-“This is the year that science fiction became non-fiction.” That’s my friend David Sasaki on his delightful Substack ruminating about the mainstreaming of AI chatbots, like Character.ai, which he predicts are soon going to transform our social lives. He extrapolates ahead twenty years, which is almost by definition an impossible task. But these days it makes sense to listen more widely to people playing with the new stuff—unlike blockchain this is not hype or a Ponzi scheme.

-Political scientist Lee Drutman on why fusion voting offers a new horizon for US politics, responding to Steven Hill’s critique of same, is both the kind of reasoned debate about options that any good politics junkie will enjoy, but also a concise summary of why political reformers need to shift their sights towards breaking the two-party stranglehold on our electoral system while strengthening the role of parties in organizing our politics, not imagining that we can get rid of them.

-David Dayen on “The oncoming train wreck of restarting student loan payments,” in the American Prospect, suggests that the Biden administration is about to have its Healthcare.gov moment.

-The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Cassie Miller and Caleb Kieffer tie together all the disparate news of 2022 into this one critical summary: “In 2022, the hard-right movement succeeded in burrowing deeper into people’s lives in visible and material ways, even if it did not have widespread electoral success. Its fingerprints are everywhere: people’s homes, schools, doctors’ offices, libraries, bars, restaurants, churches and other community spaces. The fear and pain experienced by Black, brown, and LGBTQ communities went far beyond any individual incident, deeply disrupting their ability to participate in an inclusive democracy.” Read the rest.

-Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon uses the firing of CNN executive Chris Licht to explain why “anti-woke centrism” is deeply flawed (gift link) and pushing major US institutions to make bad decisions.

End Times

This [corrected link] is now my new favorite government website. And I don’t mean that in a good way.