Month: February 2020

While it’s hard to forget in the age of Fox News ubiquity, a couple of decades ago most of the truly powerful media outlets were centrist (or slightly left of center), and mass-media broadcast technology was not readily available to the emerging conservative movement.

Right now that’s people like Mr. Parscale, whose tactic is to use the entire arsenal of weapons that companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have provided in the most creative and sometimes nefarious of ways. And, as loath as I am to say this, why shouldn’t he create a raging digital fire of confusion and propaganda and microtargeted lies and truths if no one is making rules to stop him? It is not meant as a compliment, but right now being the best tech arsonist is what rates.

Meanwhile, as it all burns, the Democrats in Iowa are fiddling away on an app that can’t tally what is a relatively simple set of data. Long ago, during a debate about the Obamacare site mess and what it meant for eventual online voting, I suggested to a panel of Washington power players that maybe we get a start-up like Tinder to run the voting system, since it did complex matching calculations in real time.

My comment was greeted by looks of horror, with one panel member asking me why our democracy should rely on dating app technology.

The answer was simple: because it works.