Technology

Norwalk, ConnecticutUnprecedented times call for unprecedented archetypes, and 2020 has been full of ’em. There’s the Social Distance Warrior, shaming everyone who dares to leave their house for non-essential reasons. There's his antagonist, the Aggressively Maskless Shopper, who lets his naked face hang all the way out while he vehemently defends his freedom to cough all over the local Costco. There are Guilty Vacationers, Worried Parents and Karens of all shapes and sizes.But of all the exciting new species of human to emerge in our COVID summer, none captures the moment quite so perfectly as the urban expat, sitting at a keyboard in a Florida rental home, writing an all-caps LinkedIn polemic-cum-obituary for the city he no longer lives in.

The real venue for the Democratic National Convention will not be Milwaukee, but the online platforms that will facilitate and stream it: Zoom, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and so on. Necessity is the mother of symbolic invention: Democratic politics and Big Tech have been merging for some time. Now COVID has rendered a political party indistinguishable from the Silicon Valley shadow state. Barack Obama, who will speak to the convention on Wednesday, made a sustained effort to connect Washington DC to Silicon Valley throughout his time as president. One measure of his success is that many former members of his administration have migrated to the tech industry. David Plouffe, a key campaign adviser, went on to work for Uber and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Americans’ increasing focus on this fall’s elections has awakened in me a tinge of nostalgia for the good old days of campaigning — before the internet changed everything. As a conservative running for the US Senate in 1994, I remember being able to connect with thousands of voters to respond to my opponents’ dishonest attacks, the press’s deceitful characterizations of my positions, local television refusing to cover my campaign events, and the character assassinations by the newspaper editorial boards. Actually, I don’t remember that, because I had no way to reach thousands of voters except by paying those same media outlets millions of dollars to buy ads.

Here’s a terrifying thought: Mark Zuckerberg is the only person in Silicon Valley that the political and intellectual right can trust when it comes to ‘Big Tech’. Wednesday’s ‘Antitrust’ House hearing resembled a group of Neanderthals trying to reason with Data from Star Trek. The worst of both sides was on show as Democrats and Republicans jockeyed for the news cameras, rather than getting real answers on antitrust practices or how Silicon Valley bows to the authoritarian regime in China. I watched the grueling insurance seminar so you don’t have to: here are the four big lessons.1.