Opening text of a thread by Palantir from X Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different.
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PS -- Unfortunately Zoom didn't capture what was happening on everyone's phone screens, but rest assured: it was quality video making.

This Friday, Illinois Signal Collective ran a quick vertical video training for organizers from ICIRR, AAMP, COFI, and Equity and Transformation, all heading to advocate in Springfield this Wednesday.

You can't teach your way past being willing to look a little silly on camera — this room did it!

Really grateful to have gotten to attend the ribbon cutting at Brighton Park Neighborhood Council's new building, eleven years in the making.

Nice to see electeds, neighbors and organizers gathered to celebrate something, instead of dealing with all of Midway Blitz.

Congrats, BPNC!

Regulators OK ComEd’s plan to increase deposit costs for large-load projects like data centers Commission calls the order an ‘important first step’ but initiates proceedings to dig deeper

already, local utility comed says it has more than 75 large-load projects that are waiting to be connected to the power grid. collectively, just these projects are expected to draw more than 2.8 gigawatts of energy—more than comed's highest-ever peak demand of 2.4 gigawatts.

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two books on a shelf, As Long As Trees Last and A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen

Friday Links is UP! Featuring @peacehearty.bsky.social @hkappklote.bsky.social @tonia.thetriibe.com @kdonhoops.com @kimkelly.bsky.social @kathleenmrooney.bsky.social and MORE!

www.lazyandentitled.org?p=162658303

Sam Altman Discovers the Four-Day Workweek This week's 312: Waymo could come to Chicago, the One Fair Wage vote in Springfield making changes deeper than pivoting to video.

always read @hkappklote.bsky.social but especially today

chicago312.beehiiv.com/p/sam-altman...

Sam Altman Discovers the Four-Day Workweek
chicago312.beehiiv.com/p/sam-altman...

Chicago Turns All Public School IDs Into Library Cards To Boost Student Access Chicago Public Library and CPS announced the expansion of The 81 Club, building on a pilot launched in 2022 to give students access to the library system's vast collection and databases.

This is awesome: buff.ly/ipZr7kg

Happening now: an anti-war protest is gathering in Chicago's Federal Plaza over US/Israeli attacks on Iran & Lebanon.

Iranian & US officials announced a 2 week ceasefire yesterday. That's now in question after Israel extensively bombed Lebanon earlier today, reportedly killing over 250 people.

I am not invested in the left as a briar patch of subcultures. I am invested in the left as an ecosystem of political projects, many of which have overlapping interests and concerns. These approaches are not interchangeable and are sometimes diametrically opposed.

I wish there was a world where a media smear campaign against The Third Way, for all of the harm they've done over the decades, could gain frictionless traction in the way that their campaign against Piker has.

Re: Dem politicians using social media, trying to take cues from Mamdani, but without sharing his policy views:

"If you’re doing untrustworthy stuff in the real world, or if your actions don’t align with what you’re building an audience around on social, you’re not gonna win hearts and minds."

No this helps me a lot, honestly. When we meet up I'm looking forward to talking more about it!! The data parallels are so real -- there is a huge spectrum of what is possible + hard to parse what makes sense for each case.

I just am sick of people having strong emotional reactions to -a specific candidate- and then kind of reverse engineering an argument from there, bc the conclusion kind of seems to become "everything is going well, let's keep doing what we're doing"

No one has to do it, but it's worth doing well, and again, it can be done with limited budgets.

We are DEFINITELY on the same page about the unfunded campaign mandate.

Part of my frustration is the amount of resources spent badly on digital without changes in process, or taking it as a critical part of building trust seriously.

We both know I'm talking about bigger campaigns than alder.

100%! Quoting the article I shared: "We are falling short online not just because we’re neglecting our owned socials, but also because we have failed to invest in new media infrastructure. This can’t be fixed by every individual campaign becoming a content shop. This is an ecosystem problem."

This is part of why I started 312 -- bc the work to test, refine, and build a sense of what's needed + draws people in takes capacity that a lot of groups told me they just didn't have.

But over the years, as I've learned from Chicago's giant media ecosystem, this is definitely possible and powerful.

That said, I'm not trying to tell IPOs what to do on this front bc they have their own set of institutional values/work to do.

The problem to me is that again, requires fundraising and a willingness to do things differently around digital that I DO think can be incredibly thankless without lots of work to resource it.

100%. I do think that IPOs can run exceptional campaigns + build community/narrative power in that way -- AND I think this is also where the lack of funding comes in.

All of this feels less important to me than running campaigns that solve people's problems and provide real solutions to what's broken in government.

I do feel genuinely like encouraging people to reach more people and use new tactics in order to do so hits skepticism on the left (based on my 1:1 conversations) and it depresses me. Not sure why this is controversial...

Completely agree with this, but my scope of influence is often with groups/people that WANT to do more effective + meaningful engagement outside of the 'usual suspects' in organizing.

I completely agree with this! I'm struggling because both of you are saying things I totally agree with. It reminds me of conversations I have on the regular with organizers in a way that bum me out, bc I feel like assumptions around change in comms == "influencing" often mean we lose out...