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Ben Mathes's avatar

I'm in group (1). I think you're right that ~tech hasn't done the 3rd part of a Carlotta Perezian tech cycle: Institutional change.

I've wonder why. Code for America, US Digital Service, etc show that many have tried. With some success on the margins. My hunch is that the new forms are crowded out by the old forms (i.e. the industrial bureaucracy).

Another issue w/ philanthropy as risk capital for public goods is that many of the baumol cost disease issues (housing, healthcare, education, etc.) are crowded out with existing institutions that are able to block new kinds of approaches.

my pet theory: the high-modernist institutions (large executive branch, bureaucracies, etc.) had a totalizing bent. postmodernism will purge them from the inside. I hope there will be enough of the social institutions left for the meta-modern to come in afterwards. i.e. there's a sort of Perez-ian supercycle of kinds of institutions

Someone else worth talking to here is Dave Guarino, who spent lots of time in the trenches trying to graft ~tech institutional style onto industrial institutions with california food stamps. Also knows his Theory of Political Change history: https://twitter.com/allafarce

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Yoko Sakao Ohama's avatar

Hi Nadia! My husband and I have a personal project where we set a budget, seek out orgs and individuals to aligned with our values to give the money to, and then reflect on the numbers every quarter. It’s been an interesting, iterative process! You can read more about it here:

http://overeasy.foundation

(It redirects to a Google doc)

So much of what you wrote here brought definition to thoughts swirling in my mind that I’ve struggled to articulate! As someone working “in tech” (lol) I feel like I’ve gained a financial privilege that I’ve been trying to reconcile—in an inequitable world, shouldn’t this wealth be redistributed? How might I do that?

This is the second time I’ve read this post and I’ll likely come back to it again to chew on it some more. I’m also happy to talk you about my project if you’re interested!

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