Regrets

I have none, but you might. This post is a rant. It's a vent as much as anything else. I spent somewhere between 14 and 28 years advising nonprofits and foundations about the dangers of networked digital technologies. Amplified, sourced, promoted, and posted for free everything from digital data governance policies to info and ideas on personal digital security. Funded activists who worked on issues from feminist approaches to data to experts on data trusts to builders of community mesh networks. Spoke at conferences, hosted webinars, taught workshops, published annually.

I've written endlessly about the dangers that concentrated big tech presents to an independent, robust, distributed, and diverse civil society. And I've countered countless foundation/funder/donor complaints about how the nonprofit sector in the US was too big, fragmented, and duplicative. Sometimes I used democracy theory about the role of civil society; other times I relied on facts about the size and concentration of these organizations. I often called on people to see civil society beyond the C3 and to re-examine the tax/corporate code to better empower individuals and communities to take collective action. All of these intersected with my argument that a large portion of the American nonprofit sector was captured by government and tech company funding and that this would come back to bite us in the backside of institutional challenges to government and corporate power.

Over the weekend I was drawn out of my isolation from daily news panics by reporting that the administration was coming - NOW - after nonprofits and foundations. As if "now" were the time to worry about this (35 years ago was the time to worry; 400 years ago if you were a stolen African being brought to North America).

Yes, there are real threats to nonprofits/foundations in the USA. This matters - for these organizations, those they serve, and for democracy. Digital technologies make the attack surfaces bigger, the data stolen about each of us by the companies and the government (and the government's grifters) more useful for finding/defunding/attacking/doxxing/manipulating. Many have been warning about this for a long time. I've said it all - for many decades.

And still, at this exact same moment that nonprofits and techies have woken up to threats on their doorsteps, there are many in the sector still pushing the use of AI. Corporate AI. One more time - for those in the back who will be first to the front when whatever form the AI-enabled version of our current kleptocracy brings on. (Please tell me you've wondered what on earth he really wants all that taxpayer data for?)

OK, change that. I've got lots of regrets about all I haven't learned. Including not saying I told you so.