Slouching Towards Bedlam

The big picture as Trump returns to power, plus some silver linings from the world of civic tech, and first thoughts on the Israel-Gaza ceasefire deal. And much more!

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” --President Joe Biden, in his farewell address to the nation last night.

Back in 2016, 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl was the first television journalist to interview Donald Trump after his election victory. Later Stahl revealed that off-camera, he had made a very revealing remark to her about his approach to the press. She said she had pushed him to explain why he was constantly insulting journalists, telling him it was “getting tired.” According to Stahl, Trump replied, “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

Two years later, onetime Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon made an equally revealing comment to the writer Michael Lewis. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon declared. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

The floodgates are now open. Part of what is so depressingly hard about this moment is that there are so many bad things coming on so many fronts that any attempt to keep track is exhausting, and the lies and distortions are so voluminous people just give up. It will be challenging to keep your bearings over the next few weeks.

The big picture for me can be summed up this way: Monday, when Trump is sworn in, among the dignitaries witnessing the spectacle of a man who is manifestly not concerned with defending the Constitution swear on a Bible that he will protect and defend it will be three of the world’s richest men: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. The “tech-industrial complex” President Biden is warning about is already here. We will have to wait for the megapixel photo of the dais and crowd to see if the total net worth of the assembled plutocracy will top $1 trillion, but those three alone are worth roughly $880 billion, an obscene number. Whether they are personally committed to flooding the zone with more bullshit, like Musk, or just weakening the ability of the media platforms they own to hold some of it back, like Bezos and Zuckerberg, hardly matters. We are going to be living in a world these men are collectively creating, where at least half the country and one major political party believes in a different reality, one where America is about to be made Great Again.

In my more optimistic moments, I think that the thermostatic principle of American politics will eventually exert itself. That is, Trump and his minions will push too far, too fast over the next days and weeks, and public opinion will shift against them. This after all is what happened in 2017, when the GOP’s attempt to repeal Obamacare was stopped in its tracks. Trump’s deliberate nomination of people who are clearly not qualified for their jobs, like Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. portend some real problems, but obviously Trump values loyalty over competence. Though if we apply the pro-wrestling neo-kayfabe frame to his choices, these people all look like they can act their parts and even better for Trump, will follow his orders and focus on making him look good. But things feel different right now: grassroots opposition to Trump II is much weaker than in early 2017, many Democrats are dithering (or capitulating), and we haven’t even seen all the executive orders that Trump will unleash on January 20.

Scenario planners don’t predict the future; they describe plausible scenarios that might occur and give planners guidelines to help them understand, as events play out, which scenario they are living in. Over the next few months, we could enter a scenario similar to that of early 2017, when Trump and the Republicans rode high but also generated strong pushback against their biggest initiatives. Or, we could be entering a darker one, where a lack of opposition emboldens them to go further.

For me, the first test of next week will come if Trump, as he has said many times, pardons the hundreds of people charged or imprisoned for their actions on January 6, 2021—especially the 600-plus who have been accused of assaulting, resisting or preventing the police from doing their jobs that day. (Politico’s Kyle Cheney has a good story parsing the details here.) Such mass pardons of MAGA insurrectionists can’t go unanswered. If there is no meaningful and visible expression of dissent, it will be a very bad sign for things to come.

Department of Silver Linings, Civic Tech Division

On a more positive note, I want to stand up and applaud Free Our Feeds, a new initiative led by a group of veteran public technologists that has launched an ambitious crowd-funding campaign to “save social media from billionaire capture.” Free Our Feeds is being led by nine custodians, including Deepti Doshi and Eli Pariser, the co-directors of New_ Public; and Mark Surman and Nabiha Syed, respectively the president and executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. Its call to action is co-signed by some of our most public-spirited global netizens, including Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia; Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism; Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former minister of digital affairs; Roger McNamee, the former Facebook investor who wrote Zucked; and Cory Doctorow, internet freedom fighter and journalist extraordinaire.

Their idea, which seems eminently feasible, is to create a public foundation that will build on the technical infrastructure already established by Bluesky to ensure that its users, developers and researchers will always have an independent resource hosting their content and data. Right now Bluesky, which was seeded with money from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is run by an investor-backed company that has promised to never take advertising, but has yet to roll out a revenue model. So there is a real risk that the company could sell out or be bought out. (Those of you who have followed what has happened to Democratic political technology with NGP VAN* should immediately understand.)

The Free Our Feeds project isn’t the first time anyone has tried to figure out how to make social media serve the public interest; a few years ago when Twitter was struggling, a group of activists tried to build a shareholder movement to buy it. Unfortunately Musk was in a position to pay $44 billion for the company, something the Twitter board couldn’t resist. But Free Our Feeds has better timing, I think. That’s in part because since coming out of private beta, Bluesky has become a genuine social media platform, now hosting more than 27 millions users and growing at a rate of perhaps 5 million a month. Zuckerberg’s decision to abandon Meta’s commitment to fact-checking and protecting its users from most hate speech also gives the project more impetus.

Free Our Feeds is hoping to raise an initial $4 million towards a $30 million three-year budget; so far it’s barely past one percent of that goal. Either some big donors will have to step in, or other platforms with big user bases will have to signal their support. But at a moment of increasing darkness, Free Our Feeds is a point of light. If you can, give them some dough.

Bonus link: Cory Doctorow does a deep dive on his blog into the challenges facing the Free Our Feeds effort. One is getting people to accept the “switching costs” of leaving walled gardens like Twitter or Meta where they’ve built real social networks. And the other is convincing netizens who are already committed to the smaller but more virtuous “fedisphere” built by Mastodon users that choosing to upgrade BlueSky’s technical infrastructure so that its user base will be “billionaire proof” is a better strategy.

*I am hearing rumors that Bonterra, the company that now owns and runs NGP-VAN, has begun a new round of layoffs. DM me if you know more!

Civic Tech and the LA Fires

Ever since the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the deadliest disaster of this century, people across the globe have been using the Internet to crowdsource vital information for crisis relief. Today, nonprofit wildfire alert app Watch Duty is showing, yet again, that civic tech can be more nimble, responsive and inclusive than big government or the private sector. As Nicole Fell reports for The Hollywood Reporter, Watch Duty has been flooded with new users since the fires broke out over a week ago. Its cofounder, John Clarke Mills, lives off the grid in Sonoma County, and said he himself needed Watch Duty because of all the “nonsense alerts, alerts that don’t anything or no alerts at all,” that he used to experience.

The app currently offers coverage in 22 states, all west of the Mississippi. The free version offers information on fire perimeters, hot spots, red flag warnings, surface wind directions and power outages; one subscription version up offers more alerts and a premium version designed for first responders offers details like pre-planned evacuation zone maps, electric and gas transmission line maps and history on past fires. It is powered by active and retired firefighters, dispatchers, and first responders who monitor radio scanners and collaborate closely, making it much more reliable than a simple crowdsourcing tool. In 2022, it started with 7 reporters covering 4 California counties; as of December 2024 it boasted 15 full-time staff; 65,000 paying members; and $5.6 million in funding.

Mills’ origin story for WatchDuty is fascinating. After realizing that existing alert systems weren’t very helpful, he told the Hollywood Report he “started to ‘dig into my community,’ riding around in fire trucks, doing wildland fire training courses and attempting to work with politicians who, as he puts it, ‘had no interest in working with’ him. ‘I just realized that no one was going to fix this, no one was going to figure it out, and there’s lots of people like me who were trying to figure out what is going on,’ he added.

Many of Watch Duty’s staff and volunteers were already updating the public as individuals on the internet and had built their own followings. “Many of them have lost everything,” Mills said. “Many of them have just done this out of the goodness of their heart.” They are all connected by Slack, he noted, so the app isn’t like Twitter or Next Door with lone actors putting out random information. Because so many of its team have firefighting experience themselves, they are also sensitive to topics that others might not be aware of, like reports of injuries or deaths to firefighters, which they may learn of but don’t share before next of kin are notified. “What we don’t publish is also just as important, and that is what’s gained the trust of the fire service,” he said.

Asked if he wants to sell Watch Duty given its recent growth in popularity, Mills responded, “I don’t want to sell this. To who? No one should own this. The fact that I have to do this with my team is not OK. Part of this is out of spite. I’m angry that I’m here having to do this, and the government hasn’t spent the money to do this themselves,” Mills said. “So, no, it’s not for sale. No, I’m not open to change all of a sudden, and I just don’t give a shit.”

According to a 2024 end-of-the-year post, Mills has some smart plans ahead. “This will be the year when our community discovers why our organization is not called ‘Fire Duty’. We will be expanding our services to include river flooding alerts and weather events that exacerbate wildfires, such as threshold-based wind alerts. By integrating real-time monitoring and predictive analytics, Watch Duty will provide timely information and situational awareness for floods and weather-driven wildfire risks. This expansion ensures that residents and first responders are equipped with the necessary tools to stay safe during a broader range of natural disasters, reinforcing our mission to protect and safeguard communities effectively. From day one, we knew that wildfire was just our beachhead and our name represents just who we are – seemingly ordinary residents who stay up late on “watch duty” during a disaster. What we have created has become something extraordinary and now we have the opportunity to help during other natural disasters that we face.”

Bonus link: In a similar vein, rich with more hints about how to build and sustain emergent local civic journalism, see this story on Edgar McGregor, an 24-year-old climate scientist who has been posting hyper-local weather updates on his Facebook page Altadena Weather and Climate for the last three years. On January 7 he warned his readers not to go to sleep and instead to prepare to evacuate; he’s now being hailed for saving hundreds of lives. He told People magazine, "I knew on Dec. 30th that when this windstorm hit, the conditions would be carbon copies of the conditions that were on the ground in Lahaina, Hawaii, and in Paradise, which both were completely leveled and lost around a hundred people each. I told people, if a wildfire breaks out, there'll be a thousand homes burned down. This would be cataclysmic.”

Asked on NPR how he balanced wanting to warn people of incoming danger without causing a mass panic, he said, “The difficult job here was not standing in the middle of the street at 6:30 p.m. that night telling everybody to get out as the mountains behind me were on fire. The difficult task was spending three years building trust in my community, whereby that when I made a forecast, people could be confident that that would come true. And I would never use the word extreme or cataclysmic or generational or anything like that because when the conditions were right, I needed people to hear my words when I said run and I needed it them to run.” McGregor’s Patreon account is here. If his 419 members all pay an average of $10/month, he’s making about $50,000 a year.

Good News from Israel/Palestine?

The news of a potential ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas broke as I was putting the finishing touches on this week’s newsletter, and I’m kind of glad I’m not in the “fast take” business. The first draft of history coming from journalists and analysts alike suggests that the deal, which essentially tracks a proposal first elaborated by President Biden last May, finally came together because of pressure from incoming President-elect Trump. But count me as skeptical of this narrative. Much as everyone, especially Israelis and Palestinians themselves, wants an end to the Gaza conflict, it’s far from clear that a) there is a settled deal; b) that Trump somehow pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting it; and c) that it will result in an end to the war and suffering on both sides.

As of midday today, Netanyahu had delayed a necessary Cabinet vote on approving the deal. And while lots of observers are crediting Trump envoy Steven Witkoff with injecting new muscle into the ongoing effort by Biden administration officials to get Israel to accept a deal, there have been no details on the nature of the “pressure” exerted beyond “salty language” used by him to get Netanyahu to show up for a “stern” meeting on the Jewish Sabbath last Saturday. Well, maybe? Or perhaps Witkoff also promised Netanyahu carrots that Biden wouldn’t consider, like allowing his far-right government to complete its annexation of the West Bank or endorsing a complete cut-off of food aid to Gaza? Both Trump and Netanyahu have been in an evident alliance for the last year as neither wanted to give Biden a foreign policy victory; why should we take at face value anything they claim now?

I get that critics of Biden’s too-strong embrace of Netanyahu for the past 15 months say that there was more he could have done to pressure Israel to stop the war, and now that some as-yet undefined “pressure” from Trump seems to have led to a breakthrough, they want to say, you see, Biden could have done this months ago. But we just don’t know enough yet. When the history of this period is written, I suspect we will learn that Biden’s unwillingness to do things like condition military aid to Israel or stop more arms shipments than one load of 2000-pound bombs stemmed less from his supposed Zionism and more from his misguided but deeply held belief that October 7 was caused by Iran and that everything the US did in response had to be viewed through a great-power lens of countering Iran.

All that said, the fact that ordinary people in both Israel and Palestine are already celebrating the tentative deal, with Gazans cheering in the streets and polls suggesting 80% of Israelis approve, the compromise has its own momentum and may be hard to undo. Considering that the actual details are very similar to what Biden announced back in May, it’s hard not to feel tremendous and sadness at all the lives wasted since then on both sides. Speaking today on the Unholy podcast, Ha’aretz’s military correspondent Amos Harel said neither side can really claim victory (though both will try) for what is at best a ”miserable draw.” Such is progress in the Middle East.

Unfinished Business

--We still have yet to hear from Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign about why its vaunted ground operation under-performed so badly in Pennsylvania. Brent Giannotta, a volunteer from California who worked for the state coordinated campaign in a suburb north of Pittsburgh, wrote a damning account on his Substack describing a field office where people were pushed to make hundreds of calls a day and scored not on how many voters they reached but how many calls they made. “It felt inefficient,” he wrote. “We’d make 100 calls and talk to six people. Most of those six did not sound happy to hear from us. I couldn’t bear to read the pro-Harris spiel to anyone. We all invented our own pitches. Our call logs often showed me the next person on my list had been called over ten times. I called anyway. My coworker once mused, ‘What we’re doing to these people is a form of terrorism.’”

--On Medium, Zel McCarthy offers a similar overview, this time from the perspective of the PA coordinated campaign’s Philly-area offices inside a union hall. “Given that in 2024, the number of people who answer calls from unknown numbers is ever-shrinking and largely limited to older folks, the reality of ‘call time”’means phoning the same list of senior citizens to badger them into volunteering as door-to-door canvassers, then calling them a minimum of two additional times before their shift to confirm their attendance,” he wrote. The metrics that mattered were phone calls placed (not conversations conducted) and volunteer shifts scheduled (not completed). He also accuses the state’s Democratic party of not leading any voter registration efforts, and worse, that the Harris data team for the state did not adjust its universe of targeted voters to include less reliable Democrats and independents who were potentially persuadable. He also charges that one statewide Democratic candidate, Malcolm Kenyatta, was unable to get access to the coordinated campaign’s Votebuilder account until a colleague in the state house gave him a backdoor entry.

--"Imagine that tire shop texts you every single week telling you that you need to change your tires NOW or your car will blow up. You would block their number and never bring your business there again right? We do that with all of our key supporters — year round and many times over.” That’s Andy Barr of Uplift Campaigns in Campaigns & Elections magazine, concisely describing Democratic political fundraising today (and probably Republican too).

--I’m going to keep updating the list of 448 Democratic National Committee members at least until the vote at the end of the month picking new officers. Sources are sending me updates—Alabama has two new DNC representatives, Florida will be voting soon on a new slate that will cause some turnover prior to the DNC national meeting, and a few other states may have changes as well. The list is here.

Deep Thoughts

—Start with this fantastic visualization in The New York Times of how a system of proportional representation via multimember congressional districts could set American democracy on a much healthier, less polarized course, and then go deeper with one of its two authors, Lee Drutman.