Jenna Wortham

In many ways, President Barack Obama is America’s first truly digital president. His 2008 campaign relied heavily on social media to lift him out of obscurity. Those efforts were in part led by a founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes, who believed in the Illinois senator’s campaign so much that he left the start-up to join Obama’s strategy team. After he was elected, he created a trifecta of executive positions in his administration modeled on corporate best practices: chief technology officer, chief data scientist, chief performance officer. He sat for question-and-answer sessions on Reddit, released playlists of his favorite songs on Spotify and used Twitter frequently, even once making dad jokes with Bill Clinton. He stoked deep and meaningful connections with scores of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.

President Obama routinely pushed policy that pleased the tech-savvy, including his successful effort to keep broadband suppliers from giving preferential treatment to bigger web companies over individuals. Even his tech-specific fumbles seem unlikely to mar his permanent record: The rocky debut of HealthCare.gov, the online insurance marketplace that cost more than $600 million to build and crashed almost immediately after it went live, was later brushed off as a technical difficulty. And his administration’s pressure on Silicon Valley companies to aid its cybersecurity efforts hasn’t seemed to dampen their enthusiasm for him. Obama used his ties to the tech sector to foster diplomacy: Last year, he took Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, with him to Cuba as an economic endorsement of the revolutionary powers of start-ups to change the world.

[Commentary] Many critics of Silicon Valley question whether the industry is really doing all it can to influence policy on this issue of [police violence]. “We know what it looks like when tech cares, and it doesn’t look like peace signs in the Uber app,” said Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and activist. Dash cited the example of FWD.us, the initiative for immigration reform led by tech executives like Zuckerberg. He also cited a colossal joint effort among websites like Tumblr and YouTube to stop two anti­piracy bills in 2011. The latter effort was able to persuade 10 million people to ask their representatives to protest the bills, which were ultimately killed. The tech industry knows how to lobby Washington on issues that affect its bottom line, but it limits its engagement with other issues to grandstanding. Or as Dash puts it, more bluntly: “Tech only cares about black people as consumers.”

Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress. And perhaps all of us have come to rely too deeply on machinery and software to be our allies without wondering about the cost, the way technology doesn’t fix problems without creating new ones.

[Commentary] All of my conversational habits have matured beyond the static phone dates of yore. We are now in constant and continuous communication with our friends, co-workers and family over the course of a day.

These interactions can help us feel physically close, even if they happen through a screen. And because this kind of communication is less formal than a phone call or an email, it feels more like the kind of casual conversation you might have over a meal or while watching television together. These conversations can also be infused with a lot more fun than a regular text message, because they often include cutesy features that let you add digital doodles to video messages, or send virtual kisses or cartoon characters. The downside is that it can be hard to juggle all the various ways to communicate.

But a modern kind of application, including one that we were experimenting with on that lazy Sunday, combines all those interactions -- and is designed with couples in mind. This focus on couples is relatively new. The online and mobile dating industry has built many tools and services for single people who are looking for romantic partners and new friends. They’ve evolved from websites like Match.com and OKCupid to mobile apps like Tinder that let people swipe through potential dates and select the ones that pique their interest. But in recent months, several entrepreneurs have been shifting their attention to people after they meet a mate.

“Tech entrepreneurs, long obsessed with making apps to help you find a relationship, have now begun trying to solve the problem of staying happy in one,” wrote Ann Friedman on The Cut, a blog of New York magazine. Friedman points to apps like Avocado, Couple and Between as smartphone apps that “keep you close with your partner through the power of a smartphone alone.”

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents that revealed a vast network of surveillance by American government agencies, wants the technology industry to become serious about protecting the privacy of its customers. Snowden, speaking at the South by Southwest festival via videoconference, said the early technology adopters and entrepreneurs who travel to Austin every year for the event are “the folks who can fix this and enforce our rights.”

The Washington Post cited Snowden’s appraisal of the NSA: “They’re setting fire to the future of the Internet,” Snowden said. “We need public advocates. We need public oversight. Some way [to have] trusted figures, sort of civil rights champions to advocate for us, to protect the structure. How do we fix our oversight? How do we structure an oversight model that works? The key factor is accountability.”

On stage while Snowden spoke were Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project and Snowden’s legal adviser. All three men said that they wanted to raise a call to arms to developers and activists to build better tools to protect the privacy of technology users. Snowden said that even the companies whose business models rely on collecting data about their users “can still do this in a responsible way.”

“It’s not that you shouldn’t collect the data,” he said. “But you should only collect the data and hold it as long as necessary.” Hundreds of people sat quietly as Snowden spoke.

The technology community should pressure those companies to introduce security measures that are stronger and easier to use, Soghoian said. “We need services to include security by default,” he added.

[March 10]