Short Links and Long Reads

Some of the latest on tech, politics, organizing and the future of work.

It’s a gorgeous spring day and time to get away from screens for a bit, so today’s post is a light one. Here are some pointers to short and long reads to tuck away when you have time. Enjoy!

Tech and Politics:

-Jonathan Zittrain and John Bowers in the Washington Post: “Clearview AI is exploiting a long-standing vulnerability in the architecture of the platform economy: Data that we might comfortably make public individually can, in aggregate, lead to the equivalent of a police state.”

-Toby Jaffe in The American Prospect on Andrew Yang’s technopopulism, which is rooted in a magical faith in scientific progress “unmoored by conventional politics, coalition-building, or movements,” and magical faith in being able to solve the city’s problems while promising to not raise taxes on the wealthy.

-Annie McDonough in City & State New York on why Yang isn’t a “tech candidate.”

-Martha Ramirez for Inside Philanthropy on Change.org’s announcement that it is giving $5.5 million to Black-led groups in the wake of record-breaking petitions on the site seeking justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

-Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac and Jane Lytvynenko for BuzzFeed on an internal task force at Facebook that found that the company actually did a terrible job trying to stop the Stop the Steal movement from using the platform to delegitimize the election.

Organizing and the Future of Work:

-Sarah Jaffe in The American Prospect on worker centers and their role in challenging behemoths like Amazon: “Worker centers are not unions; they are something else. And that “something else” has allowed them to connect dots that unions that engage in collective bargaining often miss. They root themselves in a community rather than a given workplace, though often they run campaigns pressing for change at a specific company, like CTUL at Target and Awood at Amazon.”

-Charlie Warzel in his new newsletter Galaxy Brain on how the future of work is not working: “American work/office culture feels unsustainable. It’s not sustainable for the individuals who are burning out. As our pandemic workdays grow longer, it’s clear that this is not sustainable for our families. Profits might be steady, even soaring, but the workforce, like the communities and our lived environments, are collapsing.”

-Paul Ford in Wired on office culture: “An office is basically a big clock with humans for hands. And I find that the people who don’t want to go back to pre-pandemic office culture are the people who are the most concerned about their time.”

Deep Thoughts

-Nina Burleigh on The Pandemic Memory Hole and why, “Under the circumstances, it’s important that we not drop this pandemic from memory as we did the 1918 one.”

-Victor Pickard in The Hill on why local journalism should be considered infrastructure.

-On my night table: Cities of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures, from Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, sci-fi writers Paolo Bacigalupi, S.B. Divya, Andrew Dana Hudson, and Deji Bryce Olukotun on climate and the role that cities might play in developing some solutions envisioning the post-carbon city. It’s free for download here.