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It appears open source is going to be respected in the White House.
Open-source developer and manager David Recordon named White House Director of Technology
With a background in open source, open standards, and security, Recordon may be ideal for President Joe Biden's White House.
Article didn't say much about the distinction between open-source and freedom.
Facebook has gotten two of its own onto President-elect Joe Biden's transition team. Austin Lin and David Recordon will serve as deputy directory of technology and director of technology respectively.
President-elect Joe Biden's transition team announced two technology officials to serve in the incoming administration, both of whom served in the Obama White House.
David Recordon will be the director of technology in the White House's Office of Management and Administration, and Austin Lin will serve as his deputy. Recordon and Lin both come from roles at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative before taking technology roles on the Biden transition team late last year. They also have in common stints working at Facebook.
The Office of Management and Administration is typically an internal, behind-the-scenes White House office that oversees operations, and the tech functions within it tend to serve the needs of the Executive Office of the President. But it appears the incoming Biden administration may expand Recordon and Lin's roles to be more governmentwide than in previous administrations.
"The technology leaders will play an important role in restoring faith across the federal government by encouraging collaboration to further secure American cyber interests," says a release from the Biden-Harris transition.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2021, @11:50AM (1 child)
Social media companies do not have money in and of themselves.
Even their significant control over the advertising industry does not give them anywhere near the financial clout of major banking institutions.
What social media companies do have, is political clout, influence, and increasing control over traditional media. They also have increasing political connections (and debts) to both politics and media. This is part of a major cultural shift in our post financial crisis society.
Banks and financial institutions also have political connections and influence, but that influence and prestige has taken a huge hit since 2008.
It's important to note that "high finance" has lost its cultural leadership (and mojo) after the bailouts and austerity.
The BSDs of Wall St. no longer strut proudly about the walls of powers -- they mostly ply their trade quietly these days.
A lot of this is actually connected with the influence of tech on Wall St. itself. Traders have been replaced by machines, quants, and outsourcing, so there are a lot less champagne buyers to gain social, cultural and political influence to begin with.
The Millenial generation, culturally, is dominated by social media, tech, and the internet (in all directions). In finance as well as politics.
Nothing captures the disconnect, and the loss of cultural and economic 'mojo' (not nessessarily actual money) by the older generation as much as CNBCs Jim Cramer dazed bewilderment at the phenomenon of WallStreetBets and Robinhood.
The older Boomer utterly lost and confused in the techified, video-gameified world of Millennial stock trading; A self-consciously unserious, cynically disrespectful enterprise, and above all one culturally opposed to the former primacy of high finance and the once respected social airs it put on.
tl;dr Wall Street is dead as a political force for anything other than hard cash.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 09 2021, @01:09AM
What they shouldn't have is government employees including the President from posting on it and making themselves subject to 3rd party terms and conditions. (And the political clout they gain because of that).