It seems that by about last Tuesday, everyone in my little bubble of the internet finally just gave up on the election. Block and mute lists weren’t just pruned but chainsawed, friends apologized for saying anything at all election-related, and there was a decided uptick in very conscious discussion about anything BUT politics. Even as something of a junky for this stuff, I finally had to unfollow @538forecastbot and a few louder accounts, and promised myself I’d try harder about contributing to the noise. Thankfully, the Cubs are playing pretty well.

Having now survived the final debate of this mad season, I wonder if it’s even possible to talk about government as something separate from politics. (I realize this is an old debate we’ll be having until we’re all cells in the great singularity spreadsheet). I bring it up now, not just as a counter to the nasty, brutish, and overly-long state of our political discourse, but because there have been some reasons to hope.

First, President Obama (has it sunk in how much you’re going to miss this guy?) sat down for a long discussion with Wired, ostensibly about the future and AI, that veered into lots of interesting territory. A lot of the specifics of the interview are probably pretty well known to the folks that read this newsletter, but I was often struck by how thoughtful and engaged the president was on everything from the distinction between general and specific AI to universal basic income. Our elected officials are often, justifiably, painted as no-nothing neophytes when it comes to tech (Ted Stevens' “series of tubes” was a mere ten years ago) but Obama clearly geeks out on this stuff.

Released in conjunction with the Wired interview (Obama’s media savvy is another example of how much he groks our current age) is a White House report on “the future of artificial intelligence”. It’s actually quite good! At 40 pages, it’s a fairly quick read, the writing is terse and intelligent and doesn’t assume deep technical knowledge but respects the reader’s intelligence. The brief history is a bit too brief but the current state really does seem like a tour of where we are with Machine Learning, automation, etc. And the recommendations at the end, non-binding though they may be, are cogent and reasonable. What a thing!

Venture capital is assumed to be what’s funding the future. But what if what you’re building doesn’t have a clear “go to market strat” as they say. There’s … the federal government! Well, maybe. Investment in basic R&D is at a 60 year low, but there’s still some funding available, especially if you don’t mind working with the military. And none of this would be here if the era of high marginal tax rates and big ideas that proceeded WWII hadn’t given us everything from the Eisenhower highway system to the internet.

It’s not just funding, the government is actually looking pretty entrepreneurial. Take 18F, the two-year-old digital services agency that was born as part of the reforms following the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. It operates like an agency, but instead of building a Facebook game to sell soda, they build websites to help you plan for retirement or get more kids to national parks. Just look at 18F’s handbook! This is serious work from a dedicated group of people who love tech and the internet and helping to actually make the world better (they even use Github, Slack, and vim, like all the cool startups!).

The dominant story for a while has been that our institutions are failing, that libertarian “disruptors” will blithely ignore social conventions in pursuit of monopolies, that tech is something to be feared as much as it is to be excited about. I worry about these as much as anyone. I also have reason to believe we’ll find our way forward.

In pursuit of my hobby as a cranky tech and media blogger, I’ve probably written more about Twitter than just about anything. Much of that criticism is direct, some have said unfair (you wanna piss me off, call me a “hater”), but I like to think it’s always at least thoughtful. The thing is, and like so many people, I really love Twitter the idea but find Twitter the company and even the product just so … bewildering I suppose is the only way to frame it.

I say this only to note that the company’s last few weeks have been hard to watch. Even as someone who has been deeply skeptical of Twitter’s management for a long time, it’s a difficult to watch this thing that’s become this integral part of your life suddenly seem so terminal.

What’s to be done? The plan to sell to a deep pocketed patron seems to have failed, at least in part because Twitter has become a noxious breeding ground for trolls. Which leaves room for a hedge fund — or maybe Peter Thiel! — to pick it up, hack it apart, and try to put it back together in a way that at least makes money.

Everyone seems to agree that fixing abuse has to be the first priority. Not to be flippant about it, but this should also be the easiest problem to address, if not necessarily fix. Smarter, machine learning powered filtering should be able to stem the tide of abuse (and spam!) along with some policy changes that will make Twitter more tolerant. Get over your naive understanding of free speech and prioritize the commons.

The product needs some serious focus. Shut down Periscope and Vine as separate apps and build live video into Twitter proper. Moments has some real potential but making a Moment is no fun — seriously, it feels like organizing a spreadsheet (it’s telling you can’t build a Moment on mobile, but mobile is the best way to experience them). Instagram stories and Snapchat are dumb and fun. Moments can be fun, or serious, they can be dumb, they can be essential, they can be core, and currently they are none of those things. Also, forget the any VR nonsense for now (and thank you for firing this odious human. How on earth did that happen?).

Embrace the social graph. Twitter seems to have done nothing with one of their most important collections of data — the very detailed corpus of very specific interests every one of their users tells them about. Who I follow, what I star or retweet, the links I click are unique and, dare I say, valuable. Cut a deal with Apple to add this graph data to Apple News. Build a social graph API that developers can use to build their own apps with graph data and Twitter ads with revshare. Every media company in the world loves Twitter and is scared shitless of Facebook, give them something to fight back with.

I’m certain all of this has been debated plenty of times. Twitter, for all its mismanagement, is full of smart and capable folks. I just hope they can do something before the knives really come out.

So, I got to the end of this one and decided I need to put the newsletter on hiatus again. Which seriously bums me out! Writing is how I try to make sense of the world and having a weekly deadline to a small but dedicated audience has been so fulfilling. But this isn’t fitting with my life right now and, maybe worse, I don’t feel like this is the right kind of practice — the muscles aren’t developing quite right. I hope to figure out how to make this work sooner rather than later.