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Inside a Failed Silicon Valley Attempt to Reinvent Politics
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y agoSeems like a small example of Silicon Valley's more general failure to get deep engagement at all. Twitter, Facebook, etc. are great at generating lots and lots of shallow browsing, liking and quipping but motivating someone on them to go out into the real world and do a thing requires much more than that.
- unstuckdev 8y agoThey say what the app does five paragraphs in: >> "The app, intended to be a kind of social network to spark political activity," Most of the big change in politics in the last decade has come from apps that make it easier to do good old-fashioned grassroots organizing. It's why the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) is making waves now. They usually just use Twitter for the social network part. The rest of the article talks about other attempts at apps for political organizing, and the politics of political apps. Not a bad read if you're into the subject, but I expected a look at the technical failure it opens with given the title.
- jdpedrie 8y agoIn the wake of Obama's 2008 and 2012 elections, there was a ton of angst in Republican circles as they woke up to the seemingly insurmountable gap between the innovation of the Obama campaign and the pre-internet tactics of the GOP. Added to the early rumblings against the perceived unfriendliness of the large social networks, this resulted in a huge scattershot investment in a lot of poorly conceived and equally poorly executed projects run by PACs and by the party organization. Romney's election-day tech disasters come to mind as an obvious example. Some sort of oral history from the people involved at the time would be really fascinating. Anyways, the shoe seems to be on the other foot today, as the Democrats appear to have convinced themselves that they're behind the eight ball on tech matters (a position I find silly, considering the massive advantage they have in potential recruits and sympathetic developers). Despite all the changes wrought by technology, politics is still played more or less as it has always been. Charismatic politicians (Obama, Trump) carry their party, hiding its weaknesses and exposing the weaknesses of their opponents. "Social networking" is an extremely poor avenue for political organizing (as distinguished perhaps from political rabble-rousing). Politics is still a game of people and personality, and investments in internet technology can only perhaps have an impact at the margins.
- maxxxxx 8y agoInstead of tech maybe they should have a real message that appeals not only to upper middle class or tech millionaires. The 2016 campaign showed to me how out of touch the Democrats are with most of the country. Silicon Valley has even less of an idea what's going on outside their bubble. As long as they have such disdain for the working class they will keep losing. At least Obama had a message. That's something I don't see today.
- gaius 8y agoAt least Obama had a message. That's something I don't see today. My man Bernie had a simple message: free healthcare and college education. And love him or loathe him so did Trump: build the wall. Clear, to the point, and instantly everyone knew what they were promising.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoA “disdain for the working class”? What, pray tell, might that be? If the Democrats can gain 20+ seats in congress without a “message” I’ll count that as a success.
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago>disdain for the working class”? What, pray tell, might that be? Implicit support for corporate globalization which vastly diminishes the bargaining power of the working class.
- maxxxxx 8y agoA “disdain for the working class”? What, pray tell, might that be? Calling people racist and bigots?
- akhilcacharya 8y agoThere are lots of working class people that aren’t racists and bigots (and in terms of bigotry against people of color, many working class people are people of color) and everyone accepts that there are many elites that are racist and bigoted. I’m not sure where the “working class” comes into the equation here.
- temp-dude-87844 8y agoThis is pretty shallow for an "inside" look, rattling off one-liners about various big money actors feverishly scrambling to hinder Trump or help progressives or Democrats, and how none of them seemed to have a lasting impact, but the bulk of the focus is on some plausibly-satire yet actually submarine app for a comedian, presumably laced with the sort of absurdist humour that people on the cusp of Millennials and Gen Z appreciate. In doing so, it succeeds in being a more half-hearted attempt at journalism than the political swaying of the businessmen it tried to cover. The only true insight is the throwaway comment by the Virginia candidate for Delegate, where he lost by a handful of votes, and laments the Democratic party's increasingly obsolete and wasteful rules for advertising. Ironically, that has little to do with Silicon Valley, but there's real meat there that's worth exploring.
- JackFr 8y agoThere seems to be an assumption that low voter turnout is driven by something other than the poor quality of the candidates offered and a rational assessment of the value of voter time versus the marginal value of a single vote. It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance.
- splintercell 8y ago> It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance. And that has never been the intent. High voter turnout leads to Democratic victories and rain on the election day leads to Republican ones. If someone is building an app to create technology to make it rain on the election day for whatever reason, you can probably guess the real reason behind it.
- drb91 8y ago> It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance. Higher than what? Anyway, I think you’re projecting a lot of rationality where there’s just apathy. In any case, low voter turnout tends to harm the democrats, as demonstrated by the ludicrous variety of ways various state republican parties have made voting difficult for working people, poor people, non-english speakers, felons, etc etc.
- mc32 8y agoA few authoritarian regimes have been known have high voter turnout. Russia recently had 67% turnout, Cuba 90%, Turkey had 85% though turkey is compulsory. So, turnout is kind of an independent index. Also, statistically speaking, if the turnout is “representative” then high or low makes no difference with regard to what would occur with full turnout. When people say we want high turnout, I think they really mean I want my side to have full turnout and the opposition very low turnout —as this is the only situation where this quest makes sense.
- drb91 8y agoYes, turnout by itself is not a good index. But that seems like a strawman.
- claydavisss 8y agoThe Democratic Party continues to fawn over tech barons despite the fact that the general public has a negative view of the Silicon Valley elite. edit: you would think 2016 would have taught the tech elite that they can't just downvote their way to an outcome...this is so typical of HN
- tomhoward 8y agoSentiment towards "Silicon Valley elites" on HN tends to be highly critical and negative. Downvotes for comments like this are most likely due to lack of substance.
- da02 8y agoJust out of curiosity, how did Trump win? (From what little I know, I've read his team focused on getting electoral votes while Hillary's team focused on some fancy data science strategy that ignored important districts. But, everyone else keeps saying it was fake news and Russian covert ops.)
- rm_-rf_slash 8y agoSpecifically, he won the election by edging a thin margin of electoral votes in key swing states, while losing the popular vote by millions. How exactly that came to be is stil a matter of debate.
- claydavisss 8y agoThere is no debate - we do not elect the President by a popular vote.
- uxp100 8y agoWell, there is debate on the tactical decisions that lead to that. I've heard that Clinton's campaign chose to make non-optimal decisions for winning the presidency to try and help downticket races, because they assumed presidential victory was assured. Whether that was the right strategy is up for debate, kinda I guess, I mean, we know who won.
- claydavisss 8y ago> Whether that was the right strategy is up for debate Given that she lost, not really.
- jki275 8y agoThat's not precisely correct -- it's very well understood. Many, if not most, of those millions of votes came from states he could not win no matter what he did (CA, NY) -- as a result there was no reason or incentive to spend time or money campaigning there.
- 8y ago
- tammer 8y agoTake it from a political organizer (who has a day job in tech): there is in fact a large opportunity for tech to play a role in affecting voter & civic engagement. But knowing what those opportunities are isn’t going to come from a tech vacuum. It will come from working closely with organizers and recognizing their pain points, vs. treating voters like customers & assuming there is a universal solution.
- liveoneggs 8y agoa calendar event in the morning with a location and the entire ballot's answers in a single place on your phone would help.
- mbostleman 8y agoExactly. Or maybe the day before, but the key being an extremely simple solution to a core piece of the problem. Even if apathy were low and engagement was high, it seems like a lot of effort for any given person to know when and where they are up to bat for voting and what they're voting on.
- sulam 8y agoMark Pincus decides game design is the unique value he can bring to politics — and then promptly ships a clone of another game. Too real man, too real.
- augustocallejas 8y agoIn 2011-2012, I built my first iPhone app, called SuperVote [1], a social ballot app that showed your Facebook friends' endorsements for upcoming elections. I was motivated to build the app for state ballot measures more so than political office elections, because in California you could have 10+ ballot measures to vote on, and I wanted a crowdsourced way to see where my friend's sat on the different measures. I built the backend model to accept a ZIP code and return back a custom ballot for each user, since your Facebook friends may live in other states, so at most you would share the national portion of the ballot. I worked with a small core of friends to refine the app's features. I spent much more time than I should have building the website using some software called Freeway Express. I blogged regularly [2] and shared those links on various state/city subreddits. In the end, I spent about $100 on Reddit ads to get a total of 100 registered users and few endorsements. As not a designer, I recognized the app was not flashy, so it may not have been appealing to download. I also realize that the website doesn't do a good job in selling the app, and that I focused more on the ideas rather than the app itself. I wonder now how well a more polished version of this app would have played out in 2016 elections, although I recognize that the mix of politics and social media has gone downhill since 2016. [1] - http://www.supervote.org http://www.supervote.org [2] - http://blog.supervote.org http://blog.supervote.org
- mannanj 8y agoThis looks interesting and something I have thought about for some time. What code base did you develop the web app in? And do you have an android version? I'd like if there were a slicker web app and possibly android app that I could play with. Maybe even I would help refactor this one day in the future.
- mannanj 8y agoOh I just saw you shut down the app. What was the reasoning? Were you not getting enough use and participation? No downloads? Did you fail to execute the concept in some way?
- augustocallejas 8y ago
- i_am_nomad 8y agoPeople elected Trump, and that is indeed a serious problem. But Silicon Valley thinks the right way to solve that problem is not to address the root grievances and problems of Trump’s supporters, but to outmaneuver them via technology. And of course, you have the profoundly amoral Mark Pincus and the hateful Samantha Bee spearheading this.
- nostrademons 8y agoIt seems ironic that the current press cycle is that tech both has too much influence in politics (Russia, the alt-right, Infowars/QAnon conspiracy theories, Google's supposed left-wing bias) and is totally ineffective at politics (this article, various articles about how big tech is now under fire from both left and right). I think a more accurate narrative is that the Internet largely succeeded at what it set out to do: democratize information flow, communication, and social organization. And the consequence of that has been a shift in power from groups that previously had hegemony to new upstarts that previously never had a voice. If you aligned yourself with either one of the establishment parties (as most people writing the traditional news do), then the situation today sucks, because your star is clearly on the decline. If, however, you found that both parties of 1980s-America left you excluded and unrepresented, the Internet has been a godsend for finding like-minded people. Unfortunately that sometimes includes groups that we wish would stay excluded, like white supremacists. Unlike areas like information, economic activity, or personal liberty, control of existing institutions is zero-sum. If your party controls Congress, that means the opposing party doesn't control it, and their agenda gets short shrift. If a new group (or 20) arises to challenge your control, that's a threat. That's the situation we're in now: there are dozens of different new tribes organizing for political power, and all of them are a threat to establishment institutions like existing political parties or the news media - hence the sense that the sky is falling.