Cory Booker is insufferable -- I really don't care for him. He's a populist blowhard, always distracting from the hard questions with feel-goods. Right now he's using Twitter to fund-raise to run for the Senate. He's endlessly "leveraging" social media where he has gadzillion followers, many of them gushing fanboyz and fangirlz, and it always feels like a concoction.
The Times' Anand Giridharadas ran a gushy article about him as a politician "of the future" (because he's on Twitter, whoop de do) saying Booker was from "the Googley-Facebookish wing of the party" -- and and that elicted Bruce Sterling's dry tweet. Get out your barf-bag, here's Anand on Cory:
He tweets with something approaching the frequency of his own heartbeat, so much that his staff calls Twitter his girlfriend. He meditates. He balances old-school talk of God with new-age ideas of being “open to what the universe brings me.” He champions Big Data and knows how many consumer impressions he got last week. He gushes over what may be called the hipster economy: using technology to rent out bedrooms, borrow vacuum cleaners, share cars and raise seed capital.
Honestly, Cory! Being mayor of Newark, NJ is hard enough -- you should just concentrate on that and do that right rather than exploit this poor town and its problems as a springboard to more power in the Senate!
And hey, Anand, why couldn't you ask about what happened to Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to the Newark schools!!!
I've asked this over and over again on Twitter of Booker for the last two years, and in various blogs -- I see Mother Jones has finally taken this up just three days ago:
In Newark, a local foundation established by Zuckerberg and the state have spent more than two years deciding how to best create a schoolyard revolution with $100 million dollars. At first, the "Facebook money," as it's called in Newark, helped the state hire consultants and establish several new charter schools. But the reform effort has floundered at moments: The first million dollars went towards a poorly conducted community survey that had to be re-worked by Rutgers and New York University, and criticism was fierce when a foundation board established to decide how the Facebook money was spent included only one Newark resident: Cory Booker. ("Yes, it's their money. But it's Newark's kids," an op-ed that ran in the Star-Ledger read.)
Then last November, nearly $50 million of Zuckerberg's money went to pay for a new teacher's contract, the first in New Jersey to offer performance pay for teachers who are deemed as "highly effective." The contract offers up to $12,500 in bonuses for the teachers rated as the best in the district. It's the first contract in New Jersey to offer performance-based pay, a policy that's been instituted in a few cities such as Washington, DC. In DC, the plan was so controversial that it might have cost Mayor Adrian Fenty his job. "I think it helped—I know it helped—to be on our side of the table and have deeper pockets," one school district official said about the Newark negotiations.
Somehow, I'm not surprised that the teachers' unions got their hands on this to pay themselves more.
I didn't realize that questions around this money were persistent enough that even the ACLU filed a lawsuit to get the emails and files on this gift.
Hey, Booker may plan a run at the presidency some day so the stakes are higher -- who knows, perhaps he is the One Obama might annoint, as we know there will be *somebody* he will annoint and give the word to for Obama for America, now renamed Organizing for Action, that has all the coveted -- and locked-up -- data bases of drilled social media data that helped Obama win the elections, and will be turned over to his choice in 2016.
So....I was a bit surprised to see Bruce Sterling mention this -- and I don't know whether it was with a bit of archness because what amounts to the Alec Ross or Anne Marie Slaughter wing of the party is still likely to the right of him, where he's located, which is far more to the technocommunist extreme. I figured Bruce Sterling roots for the hackers, and therefore inevitably does Google's business.
But perhaps Google isn't close enough to its hacker roots for Bruce anymore, I don't know. His account is on private, so you can't tell. Rayne, an Empty Wheel blogger is one of the lucky ones (along with some 25,000 verified special persons) allowed to see his closed account, which is how he focused on this -- and seems to take a further response from Sterling (which we can't see) as meaning he still doesn't "get it" -- about oh, that evil Democratic Leadership Committee which "coopted" the party (even though Rayne himself seems to be fighting to interpret Booker on his side).
But keep that barf-bag handy, because here's what Rayne thinks Magical Cory produces for the People:
What both NYT missed, besides categorizing Booker as belonging to the “Googly-Facebook” portion of the Democratic Party:
— Booker’s efforts with regard to his one-on-one interactions with constituents do not compare with a considerable portion of the party to which he belongs;
— His actions are highly transparent, his words sync with his deeds right there in the public forum of Twitter;
— The tool he uses for outreach more closely matches his constituents’ demographics, not that of the “Googly-Facebook” crowd.
— Booker uses “big data” to make and justify decisions; “big data” is merely a contemporary expression of polling data used in the near-term past and present.
Rayne seems unburdened by the need to prove any of these claims.
My comment on Empty Wheel (before Mother Jones!)
The extraordinary efforts put in to denying Sterling’s apt comment about Booker and then Lanier’s valid critique let us know just how deep the sickness is.
I marvel how you could get through this entire piece and never mention Mark Zuckerberg’s huge gift of $100 million to the Newark schools — a gift that Cory Booker no doubt benefits from in reputational enhancement value and in having pots of money to manage as he wishes, if not personally. Booker is essentially a fake, in my view. He uses the “community managing” populist technique of appearing to be “down with the people” on Twitter, but it’s highly selective. He does star turn after star turn engineered for its retweet value, shovelling snow, running into burning buildings, living on food stamps. But the big picture issues he ducks.
Time and again I’ve asked him how that $100 million is doing, and if we can get some serious report on the abysmal schools in Newark, and whether any improvement is actually coming out of throwing all that cash at them, and I never, ever get an answer. I ask whether it was in Facebook stock and whether that is now devalued and there isn’t any $100 million and I never, ever get any answer. And he never talks about this subject at all. As you don’t. Why? Of course he’s Googly and Facebooky — I’d be Facebooky too, if I had $100 million to play with on the schools from FB.
Then there’s the remarkable — eye-popping, really — refusal to here to criticize Harper Reed and company and the huge, awful Obama data grab that went on — which is now all locked up in a private nonprofit with big spenders that is not the public political party that ran the candidate, and is not available to that party — the DNC. That’s wrong. That’s unethical. That’s been questioned by many including the Sunlight Foundation.
And to think that elections aren’t decided by big data and its drilling! Come now, we’re not children. The entire gambit with the 47% is exactly an example of how social media (Youtube and Twitter) were galvanized and manipulated to turn public opinion into a seething frenzy of hate. In fact, there wasn’t factually anything untrue about the statement Romney made, as louche as it was. In fact, the bartender who taped him didn’t even focus on that remark, but thought the bigger scandal was moving the factory to China. In fact, David Corn and other “progressive” journalist operatives made hay with this often by not really quoting the original statement accurately — Romney didn’t say people were welfare mooches, he just said they were dependent. The entire story then became a “story” pushed relentlessly through all the social networks, emails, DMs on Tweets, etc. etc. It’s *that* use of weaponized social media that is troublesome.
I've never gotten an answer about the Zuckerberg $100 million when I directly asked Mr. Transparency, and never heard from anyone. I figured it probably got pissed away buying computers, gadgets, ed-tech consultants, etc. etc. and probably had little or no effect. Now we're learning finally from the ACLU's probe and Mother Jones that it went to paying teachers' bonuses -- without sufficient community input to determine how effective that is.
The comments at Empty Wheel are filled with critiques of Booker, in fact, accusing him of corruption because he has "privatized" schools (i.e. gone with school vouchers) or he has ties with "private equity" which they find "evil," of course, being socialists. I don't know the facts here, but for me, Booker is largely a fraud -- there's nothing about him that's "transparent" just because he's tweeting inanities on Twitter, if he doesn't answer about the big questions -- and frankly, that $100 million is one of them (not to mention questions about how well the entire school system is doing, given the controversies over vouchers and such).
Now I can see more clearly the issues around Booker -- the leftist anti-corporate socialist wing of the Democratic Party doesn't like him and they will try to sink him around the $100 million and other issues. I questioned the same thing, but from the liberal center, where the more Googley-Facebooky Democrats are still to the left but not as left as Empty Wheel -- they are Hillaryland, not Obamaland, but I don't want them to become worse than they are. It's a terrible thing when your support of free enterprise in the Democratic Party has to hinge on these sorts.
Meanwhile, Audrey Waters, who I've followed on social media for some years, has an interesting blog post up reviewing Morozov's book and questioning the ed tech stuff.
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