You don’t negotiate with a terrorist
Uber C.E.O. to Leave Trump Advisory Council After Criticism:
“What would it take for you to quit the economic council?” at least two employees asked at the Tuesday meeting.
On Thursday, Mr. Kalanick gave his answer, stepping down from Mr. Trump’s economic advisory council. “There are many ways we will continue to advocate for just change on immigration, but staying on the council was going to get in the way of that,” Mr. Kalanick wrote in an email to employees obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Kalanick’s exit from the advisory council underscores the tricky calculus facing many Silicon Valley corporate chieftains who try to work with the new administration. On one hand, many tech executives have openly tried to engage with the president, a path that is typically good for business. Yet Mr. Trump’s immigration order has been so unpopular with so many tech workers — many of whom are immigrants themselves and who advocate globalization — that they are now exerting pressure on their chief executives to push back forcefully against the administration.
I feel like trying to negotiate with Donald Trump is like trying to negotiate with a terrorist: you don’t do it.
Trump cares about himself. He is not a man of the people, looking out for our best interests. This is becoming clearer and clearer as each day that passes with him as president.
Tech companies criticize travel ban
Tech companies criticize travel ban but not their investor Peter Thiel:
The ride-hailing service earned praise from customers for condemning President Trump’s travel ban and pledging to donate $1 million to the ACLU over the next four years. Many on social media urged followers to #DeleteUber for appearing to break up a driver strike about the ban. On Monday, Lyft cracked the top 10 free apps on Apple’s App Store.
Less noted, however, is the fact that Peter Thiel is one of Lyft’s investors. Thiel, the billionaire investor and PayPal (PYPL, Tech30) cofounder, is Trump’s top tech advocate and an adviser on his transition team. He also recently appeared to defend the travel ban, despite the many concerns about it in Silicon Valley.
I hate to make it all about business, but sometimes things don’t change unless it affects businesses and Trump’s decisions are clearly hitting a nerve not just with individuals around the country but will companies too.
White House Inc.
We’re living in a weird, fucked up, and disturbing alternate reality where Donald Trump is president of the United States and Teen Vogue is killing it with their reporting on Trump.
Here’s their handy tip for the average man and woman to connect to Trump through his businesses:
So, to solve the problem, White House Inc. — created by Revolution Messaging, the same company that worked on Bernie Sanders’ digital presidential campaign — connects you to Trump in a different way: by calling his businesses, the same ones the president isn’t divesting from, despite the fact that it may be illegal and unconstitutional for him to hold on to them. The idea is that, since Trump is still very much intertwined with his businesses, American citizens should be able to share their thoughts and concerns with anyone at any of those businesses and have that message communicated back to the President.
Thank you, Teen Vogue.
There’s something I never thought I’d say.
There’s not an app for everything
The Women’s March proves that 21st century protest is still about bodies, not tweets:
Headed to DC on Friday, I was asked by my editor to pay attention to the ways that people were communicating and dealing with logistical issues on the spot. Would the Women’s March app be used to ping people with changes in plan, or would the massive crowds inspire an official recommendation of using peer-to-peer communications like FireChat? Would organizers encourage participants to use encrypted messaging services to protect themselves? Would there be clashes with police or anti-protest groups that warranted live video streams? In reality the only mass communication I witnessed was organizers asking participants to text a no-reply number to obtain an official tally for the march — seemingly unaware that 500,000 people sending a text in synchronization in a small space is probably impossible, and that many people had been warned not to help create records of their location and ID on protest day. For all the reasoned and confident organization the Women’s March team did before the event, they were unprepared to direct the crowd that eventually materialized before them on Saturday morning, and they didn’t use any of the tools we imagined.
One of the reasons people didn’t use their mobile devices was because the Internet tubes got clogged:
At one point, a rally speaker acknowledged that the crowd “may have seen” a news article saying the march was no longer happening because there were too many people. But there was no way to get Twitter to load in the thick of things, so most of us had not. Apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram were useful only on the outskirts of the protest and afterwards, to digest dispatches that had been sent whenever a signal could be ferreted out.
To get things done in life sometimes you have to put down your iPhone and get your hands dirty. Talk to people face-to-face, not through a text message with emoji characters.
