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Public Policy and Popular Music

Popular culture is blown by many winds: trends, talent, tradition, technology, treasure... But I haven't seen much on the influence of public policy. Three interesting data points that crossed my radar recently:

>  13 March 2022 | LINK | Filed in ,

Printing Without A License

I knew about the role of printing and English coffee houses in germinating the seeds of the British Enlightenment, but today I learned about the 1662 Licensing Act "An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses."

The Act expired in 1695, which allowed unlicensed printing presses to flourish, reduced the price of printing, eliminated government censorship, and opened the UK to books printed abroad.

Feels like the regulatory context is too often left out of our histories of innovation.

>  30 December 2020 | LINK | Filed in , ,

LobbyPhone

I built an SMS bot! Here’s the story: I’ve been looking at bots for advocacy and have been keeping a short list of inspiring SMS projects including TXTMob, Crises Text Line, mRelief, Planned Parenthood’s Teen Q&A line, and others. I’ve poked around the Twilio API. And then came this message on the Progressive Exchange email list:

Subject: ISO "find your elected officials" by text

I have to think this exists -- is there a simple "text KEYWORD to THIS NUMBER" that will return the names and phone numbers of your elected officials? Congress and state?

Jesse

Turns out it does not exist — so I wired it up and announced it on the list. The response has been super positive.

Continue reading "LobbyPhone" »

>  5 December 2016 | LINK | Filed in ,
I built a thing: text your US postal address to (520) 200-2223 and get a text back with your state & federal legislative rep phone numbers.
Twitter  20 November 2016 | LINK | Filed in ,
ACLU launches legal battle to allow researchers to do anti-discrimination testing of algorithms and platforms.
Twitter  29 June 2016 | LINK | Filed in
Senate to outsource tedious task of writing legislation to industry regulated by same legislation
Twitter  4 February 2016 | LINK | Filed in ,
Secret campaign contributions
Secret trade agreements
Secret subpoenas
Secret evidence
Secret courts
Secret prisons
#NotMyDemocracy
Twitter  30 June 2015 | LINK | Filed in
Heard about that big corporate settlement for defrauding the public? It’s tax deductible — paid for by the public.
Twitter  5 November 2013 | LINK | Filed in



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