What Worked Last Time?

I’m going to ask a favor, but I need to tell a story first.

Back in 2017, in the wake of Trump’s first inauguration and the Muslim travel ban, I tried to get a bunch of people to write a chapter each for a book that would explain basic ideas in politics, economics, and justice to programmers. The model had succeeded before: Beautiful Code, Making Software, and The Architecture of Open Source Applications were all widely read, so I thought something that covered regulatory capture, how it is that “intellectual” became “property”, why people routinely vote against their own interests, and so on would find an audience.

The project never really got off the ground. The programmers who volunteered to help didn’t really know the subjects themselves (though a couple of them tried valiantly to learn as much as they could in a hurry). As for the social scientists I approached, they were either too busy with their own projects, (quite reasonably) wanted to be paid, or simply didn’t know how to talk to people in tech with essentially no background in the humanities. Their idea of “basic” was what they would teach in freshman college course; unfortunately, most programmers are at a tenth-grade level when it comes to understanding how society works. In fact it’s worse than that: most programmers (including me) know as little about politics and economics as the average political science major knows about recursion, but we think we know a lot more.

So here we are eight years later. I think it’s more important than ever to offer an accessible, compelling alternative to the self-serving libertarian brogrammer bullshit that is Silicon Valley’s default setting, but before I break my “no new projects” rule and try to get something off the ground, I’d like to ask the favor I mentioned at the start of this post. If you were part of something post-2016 that actually had an impact in tech, I’d be very grateful if you could let me know what you did, what it changed, and how you know. The Ford Foundation’s Grantee Safety Program is a great example: thank you in advance for pointers to others.