NewFounders
Sep 5, 2018 · 13 min read

Why we Need Tech more than Ever, Despite Recent Screwups. (A NewFounders talk transcript)

Gen was recently asked to give a talk to the Rust Belt Rising cohort of candidates about why we need tech more than ever right now, despite the fact that it appears to have failed us in multiple ways. This was a tall order, but as a tech founder that has moved into politics, she had a LOT of thoughts on this area. Her session also included Lauren Underwood, who is running in the IL 14th, and political expert Caitlin Frazer.

RUST BELT RISING TALK SCRIPT

Hi! It’s wonderful to talk to you today.

My name is Genevieve Thiers and I am both a feminist fighter and a tech builder, and this gives the unenviable task of having to explain why we NEED tech and design in our politics during a time when tech has really screwed a lot of things up. It’s a dark time, but I think that some of us are beginning to see a way forward in tech towards a future where it governs a lot of our tech and design in the political space for good, and this is a future I think we can get excited about.

I came to tech as a babysitter. I am one of seven kids. My parents taught me and my six brothers and sisters to CARE and to FIGHT in the world. They taught us that money was really a somewhat small part of things once you could care for your basic needs, and to try to fight for balance if we saw areas where things were out of whack. Back in 2001, the childcare world was very, very badly out of whack. Moms that needed sitters could either pay $2000 to a nanny agency, or flyer a college campus on foot (often while pregnant.). By using the match.com model, we were able to collect millions of sitters around the nation into one place and make it easy for mom to find and screen care. We made something that was $2000 turn into a $40 transaction. (And we have not stopped building — today, Chime, Sittercity’s new on-demand product in five cities, is free for mom. FREE.) That is what rebalancing an industry looks like, and companies require a lot of activism when you start them. I am proud of the fact that we always fought for moms at Sittercity, and never tried to overcharge them or make their lives harder. I AM a mom. It’s brutal. We were always on her side. We made it easy and cheap for mom to find good, safe nannies and sitters. We saved marriages, kept sitters from having to move back in with their parents during hard time, and given moms back their sanity — her happiness affects her kids. But a lot of other people have become very disconnected with using tech for the best of anything but their own personal portfolio. And this is where the issue is.

Tech can be used either build ivory towers, and enlighten/enrich just a few, or to flatten towers, and put a lot of people in the driver’s seat. I focus on flattening towers, to put the end-user in the driver’s seat. I have termed this, in my head, “emancipation tech.” In my world, childcare, we spread out the pie so that everyone in the industry could eat, but mom became the person that was fully equipped with our systems to hire who came into her home. I think that’s good, clean, healthy usage of tech and design. I don’t see this kind of building, however, in some areas. I see a lot of “how can I get like 90% of the pie and leave 10% of it as scraps for everyone else.” A thing I hate about some tech companies (who will remain unnamed here) is that they preach ease and happiness, but that message does not seem to really include the happiness of everyone. Just a few.

Here’s just a few of the issues that tech has slapped on us in the past decade:

  1. The rise of the sharing economy, and the loss of jobs/erosion of wages. For every Uber driver that’s out driving right now, there’s one less taxi driver who paid his or her dues that is working. Tech removes all the friction out of systems, and strips away the padding. It hyper-optimizes things. But in most systems, we have begun to depend on friction and the padding to make the gears work. When these are removed, tons of people are affected. I am right there with you in saying that my travels in Silicon Valley have made me disgusted. In tech, we approach VCs for funding for our enterprises. The entire system revolves around a VC making money for his LPs so that one of them can get buy some crazy toy. I understand that investors take a gamble to win big, but what a lot of these leaders do with their money is hard to justify when the rest of the country is really badly hurting. It’s a system where hundreds lose their job while one investor gets his fifth yacht. Where unions are tossed aside as workers scramble just to get one more job to try and buy food, and where disruptions are lobbed out left and right by people in Silicon Valley who have never met someone real. Something has to give.
  2. The rise of fake news. It seems like there is another hacking story a day, and most of that is focused on hqcking our news and social networks to influence our thought. Around 2pm today several on the right are convening around a donut shop in Portland OR that they believe is sponsoring a child abuse ring. I think the only rings that this shop ever has been involved with are ones covered with sprinkles, but that’s beside the point. There’s been a great change in our news over the past decade, and that’s due to more flattening. In this case, throwing news open for free back in 2010 really hurt us in the long term, as it created a trend in media where everyone had to fight to complete on the free news scale, and that eroded their revenues to the point where they now have to resort to ”click bait” to get their eyeballs. You’ve seen click bait before. It’s anything about the Kardashians, or stories like “my dog grew six eyeballs” or anything blinking at you — those things are signs of an industry in real peril, unable to control it’s narrative while it works to find narratives — any narrative — that people will click on to stay barely alive. More on this later, but this is an area where tech was not used correctly…we need a self-correction and fast. This situation LET in hackers, that had a field day, because we were not watching out for attacks. And we should have been.
  3. Looming changes from AI and automation. Anyone worried about the flattening of systems and the sharing economy’s erosion of both worker salaries and union workers jobs is likely also watching the situation with a wary eye right now. About 10mm to 12mm jobs are going to be removed in the next 10 years. This will be to self-driving cars, trucks, self-cleaning dishwashers…it’s happening now. Anyone walk through an amazon automated checkout yet? I have. Every time I walk through it I know that 12 jobs were lost for it, at least. We have a chance, still, with AI and automation to get it right. We have a chance to get ahead of the pain of this next industrial revolution before it hits. But we have to reframe our view of tech first, and of what it can do and how it needs to do it. It’s not six years ahead so I can’t yet tell what level of pain that the future is going to bring, but there is a reason that our party is split right now. Most people are pretty smart. We sense something seismic is coming. The crusade I am on…with a number of other leaders…is to make sure that we do things right.

So tech is a bear right now. But here’s the think about it. It’s also our best weapon. Used right, tech is a slingshot from David to Goliath. It’s just the principles behind that slingshot. Is this slingshot being used to get our leadership to greater reflect who we really are as a people, or is it being used to get someone another boat? Is it being used to propel candidates forward with new and better ways to influence people fast, or is it being used to undermine people’s faith in our system overall? Is tech being used to break silos that are holding us back, or make them worse? It’s our choice to make.

And we need to make that choice fast. The new generation is here. Somewhere in between when Trump won and our media was hacked, they arrived. The top end of them are 36 now. They are mainstream. They are trying to pay off school loans, work, and live in an uncertain time. And they were taught that tech comes to them. That it knows who THEY are, and does not lump them into a group. Millennials have arrived, and their world is tech. So tech is HERE. That’s not a question. The question is not will it stay or now, but HOW we use it. And the future needs leaders who are going to fight, nonstop, that tech be used for empowering the America working class, vs. stripping them to the bone so a few investors can buy more boats.

The very best things we can be doing right now on the left is not fighting for tech to go away. It’s to fight for tech to be used and built RIGHT. At an organization I have created, here in Chicago, the heartland, called the NewFounders, we are working hard on this issue. There are silos in our country, a lot of which are formed from our for-profit mentality, both in tech and politics. There’s a massive silo in Silicon Valley. They hold all the money, but have no idea how to use it to properly influence or distribute power. So they sling it around, and it goes into more increasingly improbably areas in the name of “moonshots” and “change.” In DC, there’s a second silo, but this one is around power. And this group has power, but systems that are crumbling around them, and no way to really properly monetize systems using that power. They never used tech and design at all (and one would argue that for some of them “emancipation tech” is their biggest nightmare) and so our biggest and most basic systems for voter — -giving, running, voting — are a shambles. Neither silo — SF or DC — thinks that anyone outside their bubble has real ideas or can make real change. It’s a real problem. Add to this a culture of consultants holding all the information anyone needs to run, build or otherwise, and slap a pure for-profit mentality over everything, and it becomes kind of clear why we are in the situation we are.

On top of this, our current political systems are not friendly to millennials — they are not friendly to ANYONE. They are out of date, as is our bench and our policy and our leaders. And the surge of leaders that is forming right now in and around NewFounders — many of them millennial and Gen Y leaders of new groups like Digidems and Higher Ground Labs and Swingleft and Flippable and Indivisible and similar — are determined that we use tech and design RIGHT.

As a leader that is on this crusade, I urge you to use tech and tell others to use it too, but in the following ways:

  1. Use tech in your campaigns, and then teach others. We need you in office. So fight right and make sure you win. There are revolutionary tools right now that might not resonate with boomers, but that are literally everything with millennials. Millennials don’t answer the phone. (Or maybe even the door.) So use texting tool Hustle. Text them. That is what millennials are used to, and if your invite is compelling, they will show up in person and support and promote you. Amplify your reach using VoterCircle or Team App by Tuesday company. That allows people in your district to literally open their entire social networks to you — your supporters can dump their social networks together, overlaid, over a map for you to see — and forward messages to family without you having to chase knocking on those doors. Those of you supported by the DCCC have already seen Team App and also Mobilize America. Mobilize America is a third tool to use, that’s making huge waves right now. They allow you to instantly connect with volunteers via a back end integration with VAN. Your campaign managers need to just google this and watch the video, or give their team a call. They will walk you through it. If you run into issues, Ragtag, a tech support hub, is standing by to take your call or support ticket and help you through how to use these things. Tech UP your campaigns, and once you have learned how, give the learnings straight over to others. We are behind, and this is an area where the RNC has been outrunning us. Their tech is amazing, and ours is a mess. The Kpch brothers have spent a ton on the most cutting edge data hub and tools for the party over there and you can tell. The recent schism between the Kochs and the Republicans is interesting…and might I say heartening…but it does not affect what they did to get where they are now, which is what we have to contend with. They are very savvy.
  2. Support and amplify the new trend of emancipation tech. This is work done by the NewFounders right now to take our most broken systems on the left and re-platform them using the very best of tech and design. For example, our bench of candidates. It’s a mess. We have over 20 training orgs, state parties or otherwise, training candidates, each with their own lists, and no sense of where those candidates are in their readiness or preparation at any given time. No one is talking, so state parties often have no idea that there are, say, 400 candidates in Runforsomething’s system in their exact area, so they go in circles trying to find anyone to endorse, while the candidates are literally right there, just in another system. In areas where we don’t or can’t see into these 20 lists, we just do random call trees. Someone knows someone knows someone that might be good. That might run. We need to reverse this system. What if candidates that wanted to run could just enter their address and zip code into a quick form online and see all the seats to run for around them. What if that system then asked them some basic questions like what trainings have you done. What is your social media reach? How long have you lived in your area? What if that system could then use that data to generate a profile for them, tell them who else if on the bench in their area, which seats THOSE candidates had in mind to target, and give them a SWOT analysis of where they were strong and weak. This tool is IN DEVELOPMENT right now. Join the NewFounders list for all our action papers to see exactly what we are doing and how.
  3. Talk about AI and automation NOW in your speeches and platforms, not later. The wave for AI and automation to really hit is already here, but it’s just the little wavelets right now. The real surge is 6 years away. We have a change to, for the first time, get ahead of the pain that this new Industrial revolution is going to cause and solve it BEFORE it hits. We’re not great at looking long term on the left. NewFounders is trying NOW to get unions at the table with the makers of self-driving cars and trucks in Silicon Valley. We need a retraining system to handle what’s coming? Great! They can aid in funding it. It’s our goal to stop anyone in SF that wants to just drop a bomb and walk off to not be able to do that. We’re going to make them help turn that bomb into a gentle ripple, so that we walk into what’s coming prepared, and not enter a world of pain due to lack of planning.

I think that I can sum it up in the idea that while tech is having a bad spot right now, we need to embrace it and control it, and let the best of it out, and not the worst. And the new left — the surge of leaders forming in and around NewFounders, is collaborative beyond what anyone imagines right now. Silos are breaking down. These groups are setting ego aside and sharing lists, regardless of their own fundraising needs or egos. It’s exciting. It’s a new day. We are a hive brain outside of red tape and powerful money, and that makes us truly a force to contend with. We CAN and WILL bring real change. In the future we see, the left has a permanent startup alongside our existing systems that never goes away, and spends all its time focusing on how we can use tech and design for the best of our initiatives, without letting it RUN US and our initiatives.

I was part of the original disruptor core that taught everyone that tech was going to come to them. To know them. To tailor itself to them. But that does not mean that we need to place ourselves above all others. That’s just selfish. It’s about priorities. I wanted to try and frame this by using two quotes. I actually found this quote from Mark Zuckerburg the other day in a Google search where he said that “A squirrel dying in front of your house right now might be more relevant than people dying in Africa.” This was part of the original optimization vision we had as the re-designers of systems. Ten years ago, it was all about customizing information for each user, and making sure that we understood who they were, and their needs.

But that said, shouldn’t we be focused on helping Africa? We zoomed the lens in too far. The pendulum needs to swing back into a healthier area. And it can, and it will.

Please know that my work in future and that of the NewFounders will be dedicated to getting the BEST out of tech, and not letting it run to serve the WORST of our base instincts. See more at the web sites below, and join our email list to follow our leaders and their work.

www.newfounders.us

www.newfoundersconference.com

NewFounders

Written by

A coalition of leaders seeking to unite and move America forward. www.newfounders.us

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade