If New York techies (yes, Adolfo, that word is okay) came to a technology policy forum in Queens Monday night expecting to be shown respect and consideration by people competing for their vote, they left wanting. (Two heavyweight candidates, Council Speaker Christine Quinn and former Comptroller William Thompson Jr., did not even show up.) Monday night, hosted by the Coalition for Queens and a smattering of local Democratic and technology groups, wasn't about showing which mayoral candidate knows the most about technology. It was about showing which candidate has the combination of temperament, intellect and leadership skill to work with the city's technology community and lead global a city in the 21st century. That's a test no candidate for mayor of New York has passed so far. Read More

Michael Scherer doesn't seem to have time for allegations of government misconduct. Rather, it's the bits and bytes of an online political philosophy that attracts his imagination, an Internet culture typified by the 2.3 million Reddit users who logged in last month. His recent article in TIME Magazine takes shaky steps towards the idea that there is a culture of technologically savvy twentysomethings who are "challenging" to a stable democracy. This is not incisive commentary on the zeitgeist of young America, this is the construction of a folk devil. I said so in a previous piece, and he has emailed me to defend his ideas. Read More

It would be easy to argue that the latest national security leaks are thanks to some combination of Internet culture and Millennial entitlement, as Michael Scherer does in Time's bizarre new cover story and David Brooks tried to do in an intellectually lazy op-ed hanging Edward Snowden, 29, around the neck of "the more unfortunate trends of the age." This overlooks the fact Snowden is part of an argument, now more than 30 years old, over senior government officials who have skirted the Constitution and then withheld the truth about it to Congress and to the American people. Brooks and Scherer are victims of a logical fallacy. Snowden the leaker of NSA secrets can't be a function of his particular time and place. People have been leaking NSA secrets of exactly this nature since before Snowden was even alive. Read More