Organizing Theory
It’s always good to have something that you know from experience verified by academics. Protest waves do influence elections.
Reputation, reputation, reputation
“In a recent experiment, the Harvard senior Max Weiss used a text-generation program to create 1,000 comments in response to a government call on a Medicaid issue. These comments were all unique, and sounded like real people advocating for a specific policy position. They fooled the Medicaid.gov administrators, who accepted them as genuine concerns from actual human beings. This being research, Weiss subsequently identified the comments and asked for them to be removed, so that no actual policy debate would be unfairly biased. The next group to try this won’t be so honorable.” Chatbots and AI could ruin our political discourse in new ways, soon.
Sharing, Solidarity & Sustainability
An alt-weekly in Akron, OH is becoming a community-owned paper, in order to survive.
From Partners
Shout out to Micah Sifry from New York’s Civic Hall, for creating this civic health tracker for activists to use, to make sure that they’re not just armchairing it in 2020.
What’s Going on in the Workforce
Amazon has threatened to fire employees for speaking out about the company’s impact on climate.
Uber & Postmates have sued to overturn California’s new AB 5, which protects gig workers from misclassification.
Geeking Out
Already stressed out by 2020? Watch some automatic harvesting of unidentified crops to unwind.