Allum Bokhari

Sometime after midnight on a Monday in April, a man in Indianapolis emptied 13 rounds into the front door of city-county councilman Ron Gibson. His eight-year-old son was asleep in the house. Tucked under the doormat was a handwritten note. It read: “No Data Centers.” One hesitates to draw grand conclusions from a single individual with a grievance and a firearm. But the note is the thing. The shooter did not want money, or revenge for some private wrong. He wanted, apparently, to register a policy preference about server infrastructure. And he is not, it turns out, alone. US law-enforcement officials have lately begun reaching for a new phrase to describe what is bubbling up: “anti-tech extremism.

In 2017, Zoom finally achieved what Skype never could: hosting video calls that didn’t freeze. It was a golden moment to take education online. Enter Lambda School, a Silicon Valley startup founded by Austen Allred with the aim of disrupting higher education. Allred’s idea was simple: people wanted to learn to code but often couldn’t pay $20,000 upfront. His solution? You’d pay nothing until you landed a job earning more than $50,000 a year. At that point, a share of your income would go back to Lambda. But never more than $30,000, and never with interest. The technical term for this is an income share agreement, or ISA, an equity-like stake in a few years of a person’s future income. If you got a good job, the school was repaid. If you didn’t, the school took the loss.