Good morning, The New York Post has been locked out of Twitter for fourteen days. In our current wildfire media environment, news cycles eliciting rage, terror, and shock feel momentous on every flare-up, but only last between a few hours and a few days. After that, we mostly all assume there’s been some kind of resolution, and promptly forget the story ever happened. However, while few people seem to care, last week’s historical censorship of The New York Post is ongoing. Twitter has refused to let the 200-year-old legacy media institution back on its platform until Post editors delete a series of tweets that were, two weeks ago at the time of the Post’s censorship, in violation of the “journalism is illegal” rule no one knew existed before Jack Dorsey locked the Post’s account, and which had certainly never been followed for a story of any significance until this month. In any case, that rule was lifted after it was roundly condemned by Blue Checks, Twitter’s chosen people (a mysterious mix of journalists, celebrities, activists, and ambiguously well-connected rich people granted special privilege on the platform). Even still, Dorsey wants the Post to publicly submit. The editors are thus presented with a choice: delete a series of tweets that are no longer in violation of Dorsey’s rules, or remain blocked from the public square seven days outside of a major presidential election. From the man who runs what used to be “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” it’s a message for every publisher in America: “There is only one rule,” Dorsey seems to be saying, “piss me off, and I’ll erase you from the internet.”

Not at all alarming behavior from one of the most powerful men alive.

Facebook has taken a more reasonable, and frankly smarter approach to their ongoing censorship — or, are they even still censoring the original, offending Post piece? No one really knows. This is a murkiness by design. It’s been a full two weeks, now, and we’ve not been updated on the perfectly standard, perfectly normal, literally we always do this I swear!, third party fact-checking process the media insists is normal.

That decision? Still pending I presume.

Promising a fact-check and limiting a mild censorship to a single piece from the Post was a far more measured and responsible handling of the situation than Dorsey’s unhinged clown show. But the fact-check also set Facebook up for a messaging catastrophe. In the first place, it was never clear how Facebook fact-checkers were going to corroborate or refute the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s emails, the original red flag in The New York Post’s story. This isn’t even something long-standing professional reporters with entire teams dedicated to this sort of thing were able to do, as observed by The Washington Post’s analysis of the original, offending piece, because The New York Post has — allegedly — unique access to a cloned hard drive that once belonged to the former Vice President’s son. In the world of “breaking news,” this is not an unusual dynamic, so it’s worth thinking through another likely scenario. For years, we’ve watched every mainstream publication and network from The New York Times and CNN to Fox break stories sourced by anonymous whistleblowers. How will a third party fact-check something like that without a journalist blowing a source, which in the case of political whistleblowing could destroy the whistleblower’s life? As political stories are obviously the kind of story most likely to catch fire, there will now be calls from Washington partisans on both sides of the political aisle for Facebook to censor stories “until we can get to the bottom of this,” which will be never.

Then, what would happen if Facebook did successfully fact-check a heated story, in the middle of an election, after a major censorship controversy, and it turned out to be… true? Admitting as much would stamp the hated story with more credibility than any other story on the internet, and turn half the country on the messenger, if not the message. It would be an amplifying event for a story that, in another world where the sober heads of our self-appointed censors prevailed, might already have been forgotten. On the other hand, if Facebook’s fact-checkers claim to have discredited a story sourced anonymously, or by, for example, a hard drive they don’t have access to? Screaming accusations of lying, and outright — now obvious — partisan censorship.

It’s culture war shit, and social media execs are the gatekeepers. The only winning move was not to play, and Silicon Valley played itself.

Civilization still rotting btw. The challenge of our times is multi-dimensional, spanning the virtual, and the internet we live inside, to the physical, and the outward world of stone and steel that crumbles — has crumbled now for decades — while we look away. I write as often as I do about San Francisco, and California a little more broadly, because I care about it, and I want it to work. I want to see our businesses open. I want to see cranes, everywhere, lifting the city a few stories higher, and lowering the cost of living. I want functioning public transportation, and better public education. I want criminals to be prosecuted, and for people living in this city to once again feel safe in their homes. Still, every time I write about these issues — every time I share one of these fundamentally vanilla opinions — I’m accused of hating the city. I’m accused of being too conservative, as if public transit and education were famously right wing positions, or open air meth markets and government-run tent encampments were famously left wing positions. I’m also asked, again and again, why I don’t just leave.

I don’t “just leave” because this is my home, and I love it. But there’s no denying it has problems. Last week alone would have stunned a man from out of town to silence. The city, which has already long-since legalized street camping in lieu of allowing people to build housing, is now planning to expand its disastrous, government-run tent encampments. Within the last six or eight months the local homeless population has exploded, which, given the context of our city’s nine month-long moratorium on eviction, means our local strategy (are we calling it that?) has obviously exacerbated a problem our local politicians already couldn’t solve before pandemic-era policy turbo-charged the crisis. Trisha Thadani reported on the related mental illness crisis this week, and noted the gaslighting endemic of our leaders (she used kinder words), who insist this problem is getting better, even while we all see it getting worse. And education? Lowell, the city’s premier merit-based high school, was effectively destroyed by the Board of Education.

Another reason I find myself increasingly focused on the failures of San Francisco’s local government is San Francisco does seem to be failing ahead of the nation. I think at the absolute minimum, our city is a canary in the coal mine, and there’s opportunity here to warn the rest of the country not to do what we’ve done. But I also have a sense, or maybe it’s belief, that if we do manage to fix this city, as broken as it is, we’ll have a model for fixing the rest of the country, which increasingly it seems we need.

I just spent six weeks driving through the country, from Reno and Salt Lake City to Denver, Kansas City, Nashville, and Washington D.C. I’ve spent time in Portland, and Seattle. I’ve spent time all throughout the state of California, and out to Florida, from Los Angeles and San Diego to Dallas, Austin, my beloved New Orleans, and Tampa. I went to school in Boston. I’ve lived in New York City. The American metropolis is decaying — broadly. It is not just San Francisco, and it is not entirely a question of politics. Apathy and learned helplessness are plaguing young people in every corner of this country, while a handful of power-hungry fools from the American B-team run every public institution, and every piece of critical public infrastructure. We can’t just ignore this anymore and hope it goes away. If we don’t get involved in the sclerotic, exhausting, incredibly unsexy world of local politics, America is over.

Unfortunately (for me — I never wanted to be this person), that means you have to vote.

This election cycle we’re coming in a little late, but there’s a very slim chance we can tie the tourniquet and stem some of this bleeding. If you’re living in San Francisco, check out my voter guide, written as a kind of wish list for slowing down disaster until reasonable people mobilize and run a full ballot of competent candidates.

This cycle, I did however have the chance to sit down with David Young, candidate for D9 BART Director, and I’ll be voting for him Tuesday. Follow that link for an interesting chat on local government and transit.

VOTE YES ON 22. Now that journalists are getting their carve out, much of the tech press has predictably changed position and gone to bat supporting Lorena Gonzalez’ disastrous AB-5, a bill framed as worker protection that would have in practice killed literally millions of California jobs. The legislation has since been tweaked to more or less only target the technology industry, Gonzalez’ favorite punching bag. This election cycle, a “YES” on Proposition 22 for California voters will exempt app-based companies from AB-5 and allow drivers in the state to maintain their status as “independent contractors,” which an overwhelming majority of drivers want, guaranteeing both that they can keep their jobs, and that most riders can maintain critical mobility in the middle of — and I cannot believe this begs repeating — a plague-induced economic crisis. The press’s support for AB-5, and its endemic contempt for the industry it is meant to be soberly covering, has manifested clearly as a wave of op-eds and thinly-veiled advertisements for the “No on 22” campaign from Wired, TechCrunch, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. This kind of low-flame antagonism from the media is not unusual. What I did not expect to see was this kind of thing, framed as human kindness, from anyone in tech — let alone on behalf of the industry.

“Uber and Instacart don’t represent Silicon Valley.”

Ok.

In terms of goal alignment, we can probably all agree that any piece of legislation written in such a way as it would put out of work literally millions of people would not be of benefit to the people put out of work, no matter how well-meaning the intentions of the legislation. AB-5 was this bill. A YES on 22 exempts app-based companies from AB-5, as 50+ other professions have already been exempted, while also providing a handful of new worker benefits and protections. The fairness here alone should be enough to get everyone “in Silicon Valley” on board. After all, how could anyone writing on behalf of tech want a separate set of laws governing the industry? But the central issue is broader, and moral. Should independent contracting, now threatened along the tech dimension only, be allowed to exist? Should workers be allowed to choose this kind of work? Questions worth asking: first, will companies impacted be able to meaningfully persist under AB-5 without a YES on Proposition 22? It doesn’t seem likely. Second, are workers supportive of AB-5? They are not. So an argument against Proposition 22, even so kindly framed as the one above, cannot possibly be about workers. It can only be about the authors of the argument — what the authors believe, ideologically, and what the authors are themselves working on. That would be a company called Dumpling.

It’s no surprise the founder of a company in the delivery space selling a model of work at odds with the companies targeted by AB-5, along with an investor in the space, would be against Proposition 22. Nate and Li believe the Dumpling model is better for workers, which is presumably why the company — which does seem cool, for what it’s worth — exists. That they both have skin in the game, and especially Nate, is commendable. But my dad is an Uber driver, and he loves it. Throughout most of my later childhood he taught special education, but before that he did drywall. A “worker.” My mom runs a school for autism where she started as a teacher’s aide. Years ago, when she was pressed for cash at Christmastime, she took extra hours selling jewelry at the mall, and before that she waited tables while she worked her way through college with two babies. I’m from Jersey, from a family of “workers,” with many friends, and many members of my extended family, still “working,” and one thing I cannot stand is when Harvard educated Silicon Valley elitists deign to tell the working class what poverty looks like, in this case endorsing legislation that restricts the behavior of working people “for their own good.” Tech executives are not the feudal lords of America, and gig workers are not our vassals. Legal prescriptions of this kind are incredibly patronizing. They’re also generally wrong, which of course never seems to matter to our would-be worker cops because they are ultimately never impacted, personally, by these policies.

Build and fund the company of your dreams. Experiment with any model you think might make this world a better place. That’s the industry at its best: the application of technology and business in such a way as value is created, and captured, and freedom and prosperity are maximized. This industry provides new things — new products, new services, new ways of working and learning and sharing — it doesn’t take them away. So if you happen to find yourself pushing for legislation that would outlaw entire classes of work that don’t impact you, that is certainly your right. But you aren’t speaking for an industry, you’re only speaking for yourself. And your position is wrong — morally. Let’s lose the hall monitor energy.

The technology industry, at its best, has never been about reducing choice. We’re here to grow the world.

YES ON 22.

-SOLANA