how it all works – Sahar Massachi

I guess it’s time to reveal one of my secret projects this election.

Elise, Shug and I have been working together lately on a project. We’re launching it … this week! Now, even.

This post is trying to do three things:

Persuade you to use the thing we built (and the other thing we built)
Ask you to help us find people who would love it and use it.
Give you a bit of behind-the-scenes context

Before I get into it, I want to say that our projected user might very well not be you! But I still need your help. I bet there are people (or organizations) in your life that would love it. Please help us get it to them.

I remember reading once that Aaron Swartz independently invented wikipedia when he was a literal child. Years before Jimmy Wales. But Aaron was a kid! So his version had articles about magic cards written by his 10-year-old friends. He had great vision for a product, then built it, but his userbase never left his immediate friends. I don’t want to fall into that trap.

And now, drumroll……
—-

INTRODUCING: the Keyboard Warrior’s Guide to Electing Kamala Harris.

https://playbook.forkamala.fyi

Here’s our motivation:

Most voters get their news via social media, specifically video, and often first directed by chat threads
Those platforms select content based on engagement, not on quality, and definitely not on what will help persuade voters to vote for democrats
Normal people can make a big difference in the election by elevating the most persuasive content and arguments

Or, to put it another way: I, like many other americans, spend much of my life online. I bet you do too. It’s where I talk to strangers, family, and friends. It makes sense that online is a place where persuasion has impact, for good or ill.

So we made a playbook for how exactly to do it smarter than “post everything that makes you angry to Facebook/twitter and hope for the best”. It’s a combination of our expertise in integrity work, plus my time in 2020, campaigns, and so on. I think it’s quite goo!

ALSO INTRODUCING: Posting for Kamala — the webapp

Aka the spiritual successor to what the fuck has Obama done so far?

We built a (fun?) companion app full of tiktoks/tweets/articles/content that IS persuasive with swing voters —

For sharing
For inspiration
For specifically inspiring people to make similar videos/tiktoks/tweets/posts

(And there’s more coming!)

Enjoy! But also — please spread

I hope you’ll do two things, please:

If you find this useful yourself — dope! Great! Dive in.

This may not be for you — but I BET you know some people who would love this. Organizations? Resistance facebook groups? Very online moms and dads? Please help me find the people who would love this

…But you don’t have to take my word for it

In the time it took me to write this — we got the Matthew Yglesias endorsement.

We’ve also got big orgs reach out and want to talk about partnering. And smaller grassroots groups telling me they’re already using it. Hooray!

So, uh, things are good!

I can say more about the theoretical underpinnings of all this, if you want. But then again, the guide is pretty long, maybe just read it! And if you have any questions, let me know.

Edit: Now endorsed by Micah Sifry!

What to expect when you’re expecting a crisis

Imagine a city, on a beach. Relatively bustling. Prosperous — more or less. At least, the parties are really fun (for those allowed in). And the art and food is really good (for those who can afford the best food and have the money for art). Sure, sometimes people disappear, never to be heard from again. Sometimes strange ritual chanting rings out at night. But the chanting never hurt anyone — at least, not one of our people. And the disappearances, well, they’re not of anyone important. Or at least, anyone disappeared is no longer important. The city endures. The city thrives.

Then, one day, a tsunami hits. Trees are uprooted. Sand and dirt are blasted away. The city comes together to save itself. Heroes reveal themselves.

But, so, too, does something horrible. In the midst of heartwarming cooperation, the citizens realize a truth. The entire city was built on the site of an old temple to the mad god Bel-Shamharoth. The mayor was a vampire the whole time. Those parties were also recruiting sites of the more refined cults.

There’s a crisis to deal with, sure. But, in the apocalypse, the veil has finally lifted. No one will quite look at each other the same way again.

What foundations have been exposed by the tsunami we are now facing? Now that the dirt and cobblestones of “normal times” are being ripped away, what truths stand stark, bold, and naked?

It might be too early to be certain. But I have some hunches. Keep an eye on these storylines in the times ahead:

We’re going to learn a lot more about leveraged buyouts and private equity.
We will learn about other ways of selling assets of healthy businesses that have been “milking the plant”, only done on an even larger scale.
Monopolies everywhere.
Intellectual property abuse (or is the whole concept an abuse?)
Flagrant, straightforward abuse of public trust by some key public officials.
Contrastingly: the widespread, regularized, “just how it works” corruption embedded in the system.
Supply lines are too lean and concentrated.
Bailouts are more common than you think.
The Republican Party is so cartoonishly bad that you sound like a wild-eyed teenager if you describe it accurately.

I’m also watching some other things:

China. It’s authoritarian, it’s scary, and it’s exporting its model. We haven’t been taking it seriously enough.
Fights between the white-supremacy-curious faction of the conservative movement and the “let’s loot the country” faction of the movement.
We’re going to see a lot more strange bedfellows and left-right alliances between people of different parties.

What stories are you tracking and predicting?