I don't know how I missed this, but the news broke on September 7 that Jared Cohen had snowcrashed out of the State Department right into a customized Google job leading the Ideas Department.
Oh, I know how I missed it! Not a single tech publication covered it. Nobody seemed to tweet it. You'd have to know to read Politico or hear about it from people in government offices, as I did. That's because it was a loss for the geek squad when they no longer had "their" guy at State so they didn't talk it up, but the career move was emblematic of the whole Gov 2.0 shill, which is so often about Big IT in Silicon Valley gaining influence like old-fashioned lobbyists.
Why Snowcrash? Well, if you haven't read this Bible of Second Life foretelling the creation of virtual worlds, you can go get at least a used copy on Amazon or just get the Wikipedia crib and you'll get the point: in the cybertronic future, the United States of America is just this shrunken vestige of its former superpower self, a glorified post office, and huge transnational corporations like Mr. Lee's Hong Kong have taken over the functions of the state.
I found the glib and facile way in which Jared hob-nobbed with all the social media moguls (he was always tweeting about lunches with IT execs and writing to @Jack with alarming intimacy) to be worrisome in terms of the principles of impartiality that you hope to see in government, and so often on Twitter I pushed back and asked him questions when he engaged in that faux transparency that Twitter enables, where we learn that he's met IBM's VP for lunch, but he won't tell you what they talked about. His role during #rustechdel was also of concern to me, because he's the one who appears to have steered the American techs to the soft option in terms of meeting with NGOs in Moscow, having them discuss child trafficking instead of the murder of journalists (in the end, Russians themselves overthrew this American tip-toeing around the topics annoying to the Kremlin and raised these issues anyway).
Not to mention that superficial yuppie sensibility that enables tweets about "the greatest latte ever" in...Syria, instead of information about serious Middle East policy issues or the torture of dissidents and support of terrorists. That latte tweet may have gotten Cohen in trouble and hastened his departure, because his teleportation to Google took place not long after. Although I do wonder if the New York Times piece, a sickening fanboyz gush which I bookmarked to critique later this past summer, made someone jealous at State (it wasn't like the equivalent of Rolling Stone to Petraeus because he kept to the same content-free comments that he makes on Twitter). Why do I worry about someone who is merely overenthusiastic about cool tools? Because lurking underneath this is not frivolity at the end of the day, but the arrogant undermining of institutions, and of course, the use of the tools to push certain ideologies -- like this terribly revealing article fretting about the "over-democratization" of the debate on Israel and Palestine. Like Beth Noveck and Clay Shirky, Jared was all for "here come everybody" as an ecstatic lever to bring Obama and Silicon Valley to power -- until they came, and then suddenly, he needed filters to be put in to get rid of all those "trolls"...
You couldn't find a better example of the Wired State, in both meanings of the word, than in the career of Cohen at State. He was the boy wonder who contacted Twitter's devs and asked them if they could schedule the weekly maintenance day, when the servers are down, for another day, because it was a crucial moment in the Iranian revolution. This should have brought cries of "evil Amerikan interference in internal affairs" from the left, but instead, they fell in love with him and his concept of 21st Century Statescraft, which sounds a lot like the old boy's network in cyber clothing. The examples of the success of this new wired state was supposed to be...texting aid to Haiti. But the problem with Haiti isn't finding money -- there's tons of it that's been made available -- but spending it in the difficult environment without the infrastructure needed to make it sustainable.
Likely frustrated at State with the slowness of the wheels of government, and likely offered piles more money and influencing opportunities, Cohen jumped ship and did not stay to serve in public office -- something I hear people actually in government complain about, as in "Young people today, they won't serve any more..."
Of course, it's queasy to think what Google is doing moving from the search, ads, and smart phones business into Shaping the Discourse by planting memes -- but then, they've already been going that on policy issues they care enough about (which are usually policy issues that infringe on their servers, i.e. China). So while at first I was happy to see the State not diminished by a Snowcrashian Corporation having a fast-track through an official, I wonder if in fact...the Snowcrash has begun, and the diminishing of institutions occurs not through the invasion of Internet corporate lobbyists, some of whom now quite literally run the code of state with their contracts, but by the fleeing of "talent" out of the crumbling edifice of state to Mr. Lee's...
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