My network of colleagues, friends, and family has been indispensable throughout the creation of this book: Jen Pahlka, Carl Malamud, Howard Rheingold, Anil Dash, Andy Baio, Noreen Neilsen, Karl Frisch, Eric Burns, Jake Brewer, Mary Katharine Ham, Michael Bassik, Tom Hughes-Croucher, Pete Skomoroch, Jane McGonigal, Jim Gilliam, Josh Hendler, Cammie Croft, Steve Geer, Tom Steinberg, Mario Flores, Cindy Mottershead, Maggie McEnerny, Todd Kamin, and Cheryl Contee—thank you so much for sitting and listening to me describe my book and pushing me when I needed it. Without you all, this book would not have happened.
The countless people I interviewed on and off the record—thank you. You know who you are. Linda Stone, you are a national treasure. Anybody who has read anything in this book and gotten anything out of it ought to listen to what she has to say.
The people who helped me edit this book were saviors. Eric Newton took the time to send me amazing feedback and provide me more historical context than I could ever ask for. Quinn Norton’s brutal honesty helped sharpen my focus and my argument, and without Clay Shirky and Gina Trapani’s encouragement, this book probably would have never seen the light of day.
Finally, a tip of the hat ought to go to Tim O’Reilly for giving me a platform to share this with you. He’s a mentor and a friend who does not get enough credit for injecting his community with the right kinds of values. Thank you, Tim.
Part I. Introduction
“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
When I saw the cardboard sign—which displayed what had to be the craziest seven words I’d seen in a long time—I knew I had to quit my job.
I was working for the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency operation in Washington, D.C. The premise of the organization was simple: if we give people access to government data, they will demand better government, they will vote differently, and the quality of politicians getting elected will improve. But these seven words, held above the head of what looked to be a 40-something male in front of the White House, broke my heart and made me realize how futile that mission was by itself.
The sign said: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’d spent the past 10 years in Washington, D.C., trying to make a difference. Lots of folks said that my call to politics was like a call to the priesthood: that I was meant for it. It started in 2000, when I did get a call, but it wasn’t from God or even from Washington, D.C.—it was from my mother.
She told me the doctors had found a lump in her breast, and that the diagnosis was breast cancer. Because my father had retired, my mother was ineligible for Medicare and was independently insured; her monthly insurance premiums were going to go from $300 a month to $3,000 a month. My father would have to come out of retirement to work as a psychiatrist for the state of Georgia so that my mother could undergo therapy and have affordable access to healthcare.
I, the bright-eyed twenty-something, thought I’d do something about it, and a couple of years and a war in Iraq later, I found myself driving up to Burlington, Vermont, to work for Governor Howard Dean. I’d never voted before, but Dean was a medical doctor, and had made reasonable moves on healthcare in his home state. He was the only person running for president who seemed like he could get my mother’s health insurance premiums down, and make it so my dad could retire again.
That started my career in politics. After the Dean Campaign ended, I was still convinced that electing Democrats would help get my mom’s health insurance premium down, so I went on to cofound a company called Blue State Digital with three of my friends from the Dean Campaign. Our plan was to take the lessons and technology we’d learned and turn them into a business that would help the Democrats raise money and win votes over the Internet. My naive belief at the time was that if we could simply elect more Democrats to Congress and to the White House, then my mom’s health insurance problem would get fixed.
The story is almost a cliche from there. The company was very successful. I was making far more money than I’d ever made before. But it became obvious (about four years later) that I wasn’t solving the problem that I’d set out to solve. After electing a majority of Democrats to the House in 2006 and still seeing no movement on healthcare, I decided that electing Democrats to fix the problem wasn’t doing a whole lot of good. There must have been some other impediment I needed to address.
Lobbyists! Of course, it was the lobbyists—those dark evil characters in the backs of high-end, smoke-filled cigar bars in Washington, bribing our members of Congress to vote against the will of the American people. Surely it was them.
I left the company after watching Barack Obama, soon to become the nation’s best-known client of Blue State Digital, win the Iowa Caucuses in the winter of 2008. My new job at the Sunlight Foundation was directing a squad of technologists. Our mission was to liberate and analyze government data, and to make it easier for people to make more informed decisions about elections. If we could show America with hard facts that their Congress was being bought off, surely that would spur them to action.
After two years on the job at Sunlight—a full eight years since my mom was diagnosed and two radical mastectomies later—I watched the newly-elected President Barack Obama bring up healthcare. It should have been a great moment, the realization of my hopes for nearly a decade. Instead, I watched the nation go into a bitter and angry debate about the role of our government. Ironically, this was about the same time that my mom became eligible for Medicare.
The news media was saturated with every kind of graph and chart about our healthcare costs, wait times, the efficiency of government, how Canada does it, how old people handle healthcare, and what kinds of medicines would and would not be available to Americans should we pass some form of healthcare overhaul. At Sunlight, we did our best to stick to the facts. We built “Sunlight Live,” which allowed people to watch the healthcare debates online; next to each member of Congress when they spoke appeared the amount of money they had received from the healthcare industry.
During that long, bitter, and angry debate, I took a stroll down to the White House. And that’s when I saw that sign, those jarring seven words, held high:
“Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”
It’s amazing how the little things can give you perspective. But then I spoke to this protestor about his sign. He seemed rather well educated—sure, he was angry, but he was not dumb, just concerned about the amount of money being spent by the current administration. He talked to me about topics that I, as a professional in Washington for 10 years, hadn’t really thought about since my political science classes in college. This man did not suffer from a lack of information. Yet he had failed to consider the irony of holding a sign above his head asking government to keep its hands off a government-run program. To him, it made perfect sense.
Then something else happened. I live near Walter Reed Hospital, a hospital that treats injured veterans. On my jogs around my block, Marines—likely injured from our military operations—often breeze by me with one leg and one prosthetic. Although it certainly wounds my self-esteem as a runner, it’s a miracle. Yet at the front of the gates to the hospital on Georgia Avenue one evening, I spotted another sign:
“Enlist Here To Die for Halliburton.”
