Hello! I have to apologize, this week’s newsletter is shorter than usual, I’ve been sick this week. Back to our regularly scheduled program next week!

• The SF Homeless Project (as previously covered here) kicks off this week. It is ever bit as ambitious and wide ranging as it promised to be and has certainly succeeded in blanketing local media coverage. And, much like the problem it aims to investigate, the coverage itself can feel overwhelming. Here are some of the stories I’ve found enlightening so far:
CBS affiliate KPIX on a decades long problem.
KQED has a back-to-basics primer.
Mother Jones takes a look at a data-driven approach to tracking chronic homelessness to provide better outcomes with less spending.
And SFist went meta, looking at the language media has used over decades to talk about the problems of the homeless.

• And now: from homelessness to a utopian city dreamed up by venture capitalists! Y Combinator, the startup incubator, wants to build better cities. Their pitch seems entirely earnest, if a bit out of touch and dare I say smug (in Silicon Valley? Surely you jest!). As an amateur urbanist myself, I want to find projects like this one interesting, but they mostly bum me out. Starting from a “blank slate” certainly has appeal, especially to the technocratic types that speak of a city’s KPI’s, though it seems hopelessly naive about how the real (aka not virtual) world actually works. Besides, don't these nerds know that a full rewrite is number one on the list of things you should never do? I hope their studies find something useful but I can’t help but feel that their resources would be better spent engaging in actual politics (reforming California’s dreadful ballot initiative system or repealing Prop 13 would be a great start).

• Maciej Cegłowski has long been a staunch critic of Y Combinator-style Silicon Valley magical thinking (his takedown of Paul Graham from way back in 2005 is a master of the form and incredibly prescient) and recently delivered a brilliant talk titled The Moral Economy of Tech. Cegłowski is a favorite writer of mine not just because his perspective in these effervescent times is so necessary but because he’s damn good writer and funny, to boot, even when the topic is, well, dire.

• Towards the end of this Bloomberg interview with Barack Obama, the president says he'd be interested in trying his hand as a venture capitalist after he leaves the White House. It makes sense, and I would hope Obama and Partners would stand as a rebuke of the current Sand Hill Road regime, rather than a complement to it. It'd love to see the first black president prioritize diversity, or categorically refuse to invest in more Uber for X type business that use capital to take advantage of labor in unprecedented ways. I suspect Obama as VC would be much like Obama as president — at times inspirational, but unwilling to buck the last half-century's trend of neoliberalism.

• New York magazine's Select All tracked down Jeffrey Armstrong, one of Silicon Valley's first satirists.

• How landlords and ISPs conspire to make your internet shitty.

• We still watch a lot of TV.

• As predictably as the seasons change, Facebook tweaked their newsfeed algorithm to deprioritize professional publishers in favor of your friends and family. Or, rather, reprioritize your friends and family since that’s how Facebook worked from day one. These kinds of moves have become fairly routine — witness what happened to Metafilter when Google similarly changed how their search algorithms worked — and really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. “Just keep making good content that your friends and families will want to share!” is a common, if wholly disingenuous, refrain. Ultimately, publishers continue to be at the mercy of platforms like Facebook and don’t have many options if the platforms themselves devalue their work.

• I’m personally excited to see my birth state getting a Texas Tribune style media outfit of its own in Mississippi Today.

• A chatbot lawyer has had over 160,000 parking tickets dismissed.

• I have a strong suspicion that if you read this newsletter you’d be interested in filling out the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Survey.

• The nuts and bolts of how Medium is bringing publishers on board. And Matter, the “start-up accelerator focused on media” has officially launched in New York.

• As in most things, Facebook probably knew about the Brexit outcome before the rest of us did.

• This New York Times piece about public services being taken over by private equity is a maddening but essential read. Don’t miss this related illustrated timeline outlining what happened when a private ambulance company went out of business.

• This long, investigative Mother Jones article about life as a private prison guard in Louisiana is as engrossing as it is chilling.