Sharing my Twitter thread on my 2020 writings. This has been my first year putting out analysis — all in the context of COVID, finishing school, zoom organizing, generally trying to figure my life out. Thanks to friends, family, comrades who supported me and this work :) Feedback welcome!
Timeline: How DNC Manipulated 2016 Presidential Race: My timeline of how the DNC manipulated the 2016 primary for the Institute for Public Accuracy. This came out as Sanders was ascendant and the 2020 sequel was unfolding — Iowa, Bloomberg, South Carolina, holding voters hostage by not postponing primaries, etc. Need to write a follow up!
Maryland can prevent a year-long health crisis from becoming a decade-long economic crisis: For this Washington Post op-ed, I outlined the anti-austerity economic policies state and local governments could pursue to address budget crises, most notably public banking. Just as relevant today (although the Fed’s MLF is up in the air).
Democracy Policy Network’s Public Banks policy kit: I’ve been working with DPN for over a year and I published our very first policy kit on public banks. This got a lot of great feedback on how this helped legislators and organizers strategize their efforts. Much more to come!
In the wake of crisis, two paths: more austerity or democratic reconstruction?: For DPN, Pete Davis and I put out a suite of 25 policies to address the crises of COVID, structural racism, climate change, and economic depression. (I also just got W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, which I’m very excited to dive into.)
collective action: I started this blog (with an immediate burst of writing then dropped off for other projects) with a post on collective action, which undergirds a lot of the way I think about the world.
anti-concepts: The evergreen problem for twitter dot com and discourse more broadly (the language games!).
structurelessness: I unpacked some of my own experiences of accountability using the tyranny of structurelessness framework, which led to a lot of productive conversations with friends.
A Common Platform: I helped write an ambitious paper for The Democracy Collaborative and Common Wealth UK on the future of the platform economy, which aims to shape the left flank of this debate as a consensus is emerging that policy action is needed on these questions.
There’s No Solution to Big Tech Without Public Ownership of Tech Companies: Following up on the paper, Thomas Hanna and I put forward our main argument for democratic public ownership of the core platform utilities. Thomas and Mat Lawrence appeared on the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us outlining the arguments from the paper too. Check it out here.
With all this in mind, my feeling looking forward is that these next 2 years are truly going to be do or die. The climate window is all but closed, and Democrats have to maintain trifecta control of the federal government if we want to have any hope at all of pulling off a decarbonization industrial policy. These writings get at my own strategies and ways to get there, but as of now I’m pessimistically hoping for the best and expecting the worst. Onward!