Why subscribe?

I’m a huge politics and news junkie. But I also work in technology.

In my experience, participants in both arenas often get each other wrong. Some (although not all) technologists view the core tenets of politics as a broken system in need of bug fixes or maybe an entire stack rewrite. Regulation and antitrust are anti-innovation.

Conversely, some corners of the political universe (does a universe have corners? this is not a science newsletter, so yes) — and, to some extent, news organizations — view the tech industry as a monolithic fleet of ‘tech bros’ hellbent on using computer wizardry to break everything worth keeping in society.

All too often, the confluence of these two factors results in moments like this:

Mark Zuckerberg ‘won’ this exchange, in the sense that a confused octogenarian with a tenuous grasp on reality and technology inadvertently revealed the farcical nature of the entire hearing.

But in a larger sense, we all lose when unaccountable tech billionaires are allowed to run circles around their ostensible overseers — that is, the public’s elected representatives — instead of being held to account for the implications of their decisions.

The interplay between these dual — and, at times, duelling — spheres of society is what I like to explore in my newsletter.

To the extent that both the news media and what I do in my day job — I’m a product manager focused on brand safety and pre-bid context targeting within online advertising — intersect with politics and/or technology, I’ll be covering those topics as well.

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