Inside Acronym, the Tech Consultancy Behind the Disastrous Iowa-Caucus App - The New Yorker

Inside Acronym, the Tech Consultancy Behind the Disastrous Iowa-Caucus App - The New Yorker

Acronym’s C.E.O., Tara McGowan, seems like a starry-eyed techno-utopian, prone to believing that a wide array of societal ills can be cured by another innovation.T.J. Kirkpatrick / NYT / Redux

In downtown Washington, D.C., in a gleaming new WeWork building that’s still mostly uninhabited, one office suite is occupied by a nonprofit called Acronym, a left-leaning digital consultancy whose mission is to build “modern infrastructure for a new progressive movement.” To translate for anyone who doesn’t speak startup lingo, “infrastructure” essentially means code. (In 2014, when Mark Zuckerberg decided that “Move fast and break things” was too on the nose, he amended Facebook’s motto to “Move fast with stable infrastructure.”) Three weeks ago, I visited Acronym’s office, which is slick and hypermodern, decorated with succulents, cheeky Pop art, and a digital clock counting down to Election Day. Tara McGowan, Acronym’s thirty-four-year-old founder and C.E.O., held a large bottle of kombucha and wore an exhausted expression. In 2012, McGowan worked for Barack Obama’s reëlection campaign, producing digital content; in 2016, she was the digital director of Priorities U.S.A., a super PAC affiliated with Hillary Clinton. “Many big Democratic organizations are beholden to an old model that values traditional media over new media, personal relationships over data, oligopoly over meritocracy,” she said. “If we are going to find more voters where they are—online, on their phones—then we’ll have to be more risk-tolerant, and, if you’ll pardon the word, more disruptive.”

McGowan’s disruption has taken many forms, some public-facing and others more clandestine. Publicly, she has vowed to blanket the Internet, especially Facebook and Google, with anti-Trump ads—not this summer, after a Democratic nominee has been chosen, but now. (One such ad, which just ran on Facebook: a photo of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell emblazoned with the words “END THIS BROMANCE.”) Acronym regularly puts out a newsletter, a podcast, and a plethora of social-media feeds, all functioning as the equivalent of the emergency-siren emoji. “The general election has been happening for months, arguably years, online,” she told me. “The problem is that only one team is on the field, and it’s not our team.”

More quietly, she has founded or invested in several spinoff organizations. Legally speaking, these are separate entities; in practice, they’re all closely intertwined. One is a political-action committee, cunningly named Pacronym, through which McGowan raises money from such donors as Steven Spielberg and Mike Moritz, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. (She says that she plans to raise seventy-five million dollars this election cycle, of which she has already landed fifty-one million.) Other Acronym spinoffs include Lockwood Strategy, a for-profit digital consultancy; a voter-registration drive called People’s Power Grab; and Courier Newsroom, which Bloomberg called “a liberal, digital spin on local news.” A year ago, McGowan tweeted that Acronym was “launching Shadow, a new tech company to build smarter infrastructure for campaigns.” Two months ago, the Iowa Democratic Party hired Shadow to build an app for the state’s upcoming caucus; instead of calling in to report results by phone, as they’d done for decades, precinct captains would report results through the app, which was supposed to make the process more efficient. Instead, on Monday night, the app broke down in spectacular fashion, turning what should have been a news cycle about various candidates’ contrasting visions into a muddle of confusion and speculation.

On Tuesday, as outrage mounted, McGowan tried to distance herself from Shadow. In a tweet, she called it “an independent company Acronym invested in” and claimed that there were other investors as well. And yet, last week, McGowan said on her podcast that Acronym was Shadow’s “sole investor.” Even now, Acronym’s Web site features a prominent link to Shadow, which has described its mission as “working to build political power for the progressive movement by building accessible, user-centered technology products and infrastructure.” (Acronym declined to comment, and McGowan did not respond to my requests.)

The people who responded to McGowan’s tweet were not reassured. “Shady stuff,” one of them wrote. “Rigged!” another wrote. It surely didn’t help that Shadow’s name explicitly invokes darkness, where Batman villains thrive and democracy dies. (One can only presume that Mustache-Twirling Globalists, L.L.C., was already taken.) Nor has it escaped the notice of McGowan’s critics that she has tweeted dismissively about Bernie Sanders (“bernie is not the answer”) and rapturously about Pete Buttigieg (“😍”). In McGowan’s mentions, a few people posted a screenshot of a financial-disclosure form showing that, last July, Shadow was paid some forty-two thousand dollars by the Buttigieg campaign—a campaign that also employs Greta Carnes, one of McGowan’s former employees, and Michael Halle, McGowan’s husband.

Highlights from President Trump’s State of the Union address.

For the record, the full conspiracy theory goes like this: with Sanders surging in the Iowa polls, the Democratic Party, or cronies thereof, contracted with an unaccountable, nefariously named company to fix the election, either by stealing it outright or by muddying the waters. To be clear, there is no evidence that the vote tally was altered in any way—each caucus site preserves its paper ballots, which are now in the process of being counted—and, although the muddying-the-waters hypothesis is harder to disprove, the simplest explanation, as usual, is incompetence, not coördinated treachery. Still, it is possible that the confusion on Monday night hurt Sanders’s campaign, intentionally or not. (It seems to have helped Biden’s campaign, by distracting attention from his disappointing finish.) We will soon find out if Sanders won the first alignment of the caucus vote; if he did, and if that fact had been reported cleanly, Sanders might have claimed at least a symbolic victory, which could have led to an influx of donations. Instead, Buttigieg took advantage of the information vacuum, delivering what amounted to an Obamaesque victory speech. As of this writing, with the final result still unknown, the lead article on Slate is headlined “How Pete Won.”

I find it hard to believe that Shadow would intentionally botch such a high-visibility project, perhaps permanently damaging several of its employees’ reputations in the process. But the appearance of impropriety is all that’s needed, especially on the Internet, for many people to take refuge in the shadows of distrust; and widespread trust in the basic mechanisms of our democracy, insofar as this trust still exists, is one of the few forces holding the country together. In the past, McGowan’s critics have accused her of employing underhanded tactics, or of being “no better than” her most dastardly political opponents, but the equivalence doesn’t tend to hold up. Courier Newsroom, to take one example, is a partisan media company, but it isn’t fake news. McGowan doesn’t seem reckless or sinister enough to intentionally rig an election. Rather, she seems like a starry-eyed techno-utopian, prone to believing that a wide array of societal ills can be cured by another innovation, another round of investment, or another app.

My visit to Acronym coincided with a Democratic debate—as it happened, the final debate before the Iowa caucus. McGowan and several of her employees—some from Acronym, some from Lockwood Strategies—were heading to a Tex-Mex bar to watch, and I tagged along. On my way out of the office, I noticed, leaning against a wall, a large grid featuring headshots of the Democratic Presidential candidates. Graffiti had been added to the grid periodically, in red marker: an “X” through the headshot of any candidate who had dropped out; the word “MATH” above Andrew Yang; a crown on Elizabeth Warren’s head; dollar signs floating around Michael Bloomberg. Buttigieg’s photo was surrounded by hearts. The photo of Sanders was unadorned. When I asked McGowan who her preferred candidate was, she responded, “I am one thousand per cent committed to making sure that the Democratic nominee, whoever she or he may be, becomes the next President of the United States.”

At the bar, McGowan watched the debate for a while, live tweeting from her personal account. Then she stood to order a drink and struck up a conversation with two strangers. Within a few seconds, she was showing off her forearm, where she had a tattoo of Obama’s slogan, “Yes, we can.” (Obama himself had written the words on her arm, and McGowan had had them permanently preserved.) Returning to the table, she told me, “We can be purists all we want. We can sit on the sidelines and do things the old way all we want. But the new political battlefield is Snapchat filters. It’s GIFs. It’s memes. If we want to win, we will engage in that battle.” This is true: in an age of binary political outcomes and unrestrained information warfare, unilateral disarmament is tantamount to surrender. And yet it’s also true that no one who goes into battle is likely to emerge unscathed.

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2020-02-06 00:07:43Z
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-acronym-the-tech-consultancy-behind-the-disastrous-iowa-caucus-app
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