Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: What to make of Jeff Bezos's purchase of the Washington Post; more reverberations from the NSA surveillance scandal; a British government agency proves you can make smart use of the web AND work in government; and more in today's round-up of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers:How congressional "oversight" of the NSA doesn't work; Bruce Sterling and Tom Scott's mordant takes on our times; the growing backlash against Jim Messina going Tory; and more in today's round-up of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

In the wake of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations, techPresident's editorial director Micah Sifry wonders, what, if anything, is left of Hillary Clinton's "Internet Freedom" agenda. The answer is not much. Read More

Robert McChesney, who is one of the cofounders of Free Press, the author of several books on the media, and a professor at the University of Illinois, says he always wanted to write a book about the Internet and the larger digital revolution. But he held off, because "grasping the Internet was like trying to shoot a moving target in a windstorm." Then he and John Bellamy Foster co-authored a 2011 article called "The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalism" for Monthly Review and it hit a chord. The time, McChesney says, was finally ripe. I wish he had held his fire. Here's why: McChesney doesn't quite get the Internet. Again and again, in Digital Disconnect, he conflates the free and open net with the larger digital ecosystem, eliding or underplaying important distinctions between the actions and ambitions of big tech and communications companies and the behavior of individuals and networks online. Read More

I read Douglas Rushkoff's new book Present Shock two months ago, and found myself underlining and taking notes on nearly every page. Somehow, he ties together dozens of seemingly disparate phenomena--the popularity of reality TV, the death of ideology, how news has been replaced by spectacle, our compulsion to constantly "check in" on our digital inputs, the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy movements, even our culture's fascination with zombies and impending apocalypse--and finds the signal in all the noise. It's worth a listen. Here's my review. Read More

Did we "Think Bigger?" Yes! Beyond the many great individual talks and panels, I was struck to see several cross-cutting themes emerge over Personal Democracy Forum 2013's two days. Read More

We're almost done nailing down the schedule for Personal Democracy Forum 2013, just a little less than three weeks away. In addition to our main hall keynotes, we're pleased to be offering more than 20 in-depth breakout sessions featuring an amazing array of 90 expert speakers. This year we've developed several core tracks for the breakouts: Net-powered organizing, the growing civic stack, tech policy, and political data. We also will be offering a few sponsored sessions with partners from Mozilla, Omidyar Network, Thoughtworks and a special workshop run by GitHub. Here's what we have lined up for you in each track... Read More