What happens when kids grow up with powerful technology they’re not allowed to understand? We risk creating a digital world with few true digital natives. How public terminals, old Macs, and a programming teacher shaped my political imagination and tech skills.
I sometimes think back to the fact that few people my age or younger experienced the pre-web Internet or remember the transition to our current corporate model. I only remember it because I was a geeky kid without a computer at home, so I spent a lot of time at Vanderbilt University, where my dad was a grad student. That would’ve been late 1990 or early 1991, soon after my family moved from Canada to Nashville. I was about to start middle school.
The insurance industry markets automation as a force for efficiency. But when said automation introduces an error, that error can propagate silently across systems, damaging consumers without warning, accountability, or remedy. This is my experience.
In 2020, after a catalytic converter theft here in San Francisco, my insurer (Metromile, now part of Lemonade) incorrectly flagged my car internally as a total loss—despite paying for repairs and leaving my DMV title clean, without ever informing me.
Last night’s meeting of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) was a procedural train wreck—a proverbial circus that would be amusing if it didn’t undermine trust in how San Francisco’s Democratic Party operates.
Rules of order were nowhere to be found.
I was there to support a resolution I helped develop: The Resolution Calling for Accountability and Budget Responsibility in Corporate Tax Disputes. It’s a straightforward proposal. In a city facing an $817.5 million budget shortfall, the least we can do is call out corporations like Airbnb and Uber for suing the City to avoid paying taxes that fund basic services like mental health care, homelessness programs, and public hospitals. Simple enough.
