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Omidyar

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see Paypal Mafia

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AN 11 23

american Compass is a right-wing nonprofit that, according to the Daily Beast, has been connected to Project 2025 — MAGA Republicans' radical plan to fill the federal government with unquestioning Donald Trump loyalists if he wins the 2024 GOP presidential nomination and defeats Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden in the general election.

The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberger, in an article published on November 22, reports that a 2022 tax statement reveals who some of American Compass' donors are — and they include groups associated with liberal and progressive causes.

"The page header says, 'Do Not File' and 'Not Open to Public Inspection,' indicating the donors may have been accidentally disclosed," Sollenberger explains. "Of the five groups, two stand out for their prominent histories of supporting liberal causes — the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Omidyar Network Foundation."

Sollenberger adds, "According to the tax statement, the Omidyar Network has contributed a total of $400,000 to American Compass since 2020. In reality, Omidyar has donated $500,000, including forthcoming installments. The Hewlett Foundation — a longtime supporter of National Public Radio — has accounted for more than one-third of American Compass' total public support, giving a combined $1,486,000 over the same period, with an extra $475,000 dose this January. That's more than Hewlett gave to NPR or the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in the same timeframe."

The Omidyar and Hewlett donations, Sollenberger emphasizes, are "striking" in light of American Compass' connection to Project 2025.

The reporter notes, "Project 2025 backers include xenophobic Trump advisers Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, as well as Christian nationalist and former Trump budget chief Russ Vought, one of the group's top advisers. According to The Washington Post, Project 2025 has been crafting 'specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents,' with Trump himself 'naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute.' The group is also 'drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations,' the Post reported."

READ MORE:Revealed: Trump's Project 2025 agenda aims for 'total control' of the federal government

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https://www.omidyar.com/reimagining-capitalism

https://www.omidyar.com/beneficial-tech

digital ID

https://www.omidyar.com/our-work/responsible-tech

O Network believes that technology can and should be a force for good in our society. The speed and scale of technological innovation brings opportunities and improvements that shape our economies, our politics, and our communities. At the same time, it can exacerbate inequalities, pose new risks, and raise serious issues about responsibility, accountability, and values.

One root issue facing us is the sheer concentration of power in the hands of a few large tech platforms. Our aim is to clarify the political, social, and economic harms of such platforms, while addressing their dominance over data, markets, and decision-making. To promote greater accountability, more human-centered rules, and better and fairer outcomes, we currently support narrative change andadvocacy,the marshalling of evidence and argument on potential solutions, and coordinated andenlightened regulations.

A primary cause of many of tech’s challenges – spanning data privacy violations, the pollution of civil discourse, and discriminatory algorithms – is the incentives that are built into the business models themselves. No good can come from using widespread surveillance to harvest individuals’ data to advance digital targeting, service provision, advertising, and persuasion. We work to uncover and accelerate alternative business models that enhance user agency and control, respect privacy, and value and monetize data differently.While encrypted messaging is a boon to privacy, it is also a potential source of social disruption that we need to understand and manage better. Research on consumer behavior, a better comprehension of nefarious actors’ incentives, and issue amplification and advocacy can help civil society and tech companies better manage disinformation and dangerous speech, while also protecting user privacy on messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal.

A common thread that runs through our work is our belief that we must come together to envision and articulate a new social contract for data and technology in the 21st century. For this to happen, we will need to engage in deliberate and meaningful conversations about the role of data and technology in society, and what that means for its governance, distribution of benefits and risks, and who gets to have a say in the decisions that matter.

We face a critical opportunity to take stock of technology’s contributions, to redefine the rules and norms surrounding how data and technology are created and used, and to articulate a human-centered vision that can underpin greater individual empowerment, social opportunity,  and user safety.

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sys gig killed

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https://www.democracyfund.org/

. Our grantees include the Maynard Institute, Solutions Journalism Network, City Bureau, Coral Project, Ida B. Well Society, Listening Post, National Association of Black Journalists, the Community Listening and Engagement Fund and others

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https://democracyfund.applytojob.com/apply/dtv6RRVVyt/Senior-Associate-Public-Square-Program

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aug 2018

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Or: How Not to Regret the Things You Build

Visit ethicalOS.org to learn more

REDWOOD CITY, CA —Omidyar Network, the Silicon Valley impact investment firm, has collaborated with the Institute for the Future (IFTF) on the development of a new toolkit — the Ethical Operating System (Ethical OS) — to help makers of tech, product managers, engineers, and others get out in front of problems before they happen. The three-part guide is already being piloted by nearly 20 tech companies, schools, and startups, including Mozilla, Techstars, and others. This is one of many partnerships Omidyar Network’s newly founded Tech and Society Solutions Lab is pursuing to address the growing concerns about responsibility in tech with long-term solutions, a topic of growing importance.

The Ethical OS (#EthicalOS) toolkit is available for Beta testing and community feedback here: www.ethicalOS.org.

What’s in the toolkit:

1. Tomorrow's Risk, Today: Fourteen scenarios to spark conversation and stretch your imagination about the long-term impacts of tech you're building today. 

2. Check Your Tech: A checklist of eight risk zones to help you identify the emerging areas of risk and social harm most critical for your team to start considering now.

3. Future-Proofing Strategies: Seven future-proofing strategies to help you take ethical action today. 

Omidyar Network's Tech and Society Solutions Lab draws on Omidyar Network’s long-standing belief in the promise of technology to create opportunity and social good, as well as the concern about unintended consequences that can result from technological innovation. The team aims to help technologists prevent, mitigate, and correct societal downsides of technology—and maximize positive impact.

“We envision a world where technology companies take proactive measures to ensure products are responsibly designed and brought to market. That time is now,” said Paula Goldman, global lead of the Tech and Society Solutions Lab. “Inspired by industry standards to mitigate security risk, the Ethical OS helps developers think not just about innovation but long-term societal impact.”

“As makers of tech become more mindful of the unintended effects that their products and services have upon society, we saw a need for a practical toolkit and easy to apply framework for learning, discussion, and eventually better products with fewer potential downsides,” added Raina Kumra, the founder of Mavin and Juggernaut and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Tech and Society Solutions Lab. “Something as simple as a checklist can be a real game changer.”

"Building a startup takes a lot more than just funding,” said Cody Simms, partner at Techstars. “At Techstars, we are building a worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. Helping founders anticipate future ethical challenges that their technologies could encounter or incite is critical to their ultimate success. We’re thrilled to be working with Omidyar Network and the Institute for the Future on this initiative and to help our global network of more than 1,500 startups get ahead of problems before they happen.”

“The future is like a game. We have to play it to see how it turns out. But if we wait until the future actually happens, it’s too late to shape it or change our strategies for a better outcome,” said Jane McGonigal from IFTF, a renowned expert in collaborative foresight and human interaction. “But we can play it in advance. Our goal is to engage tens of thousands of tech workers in anticipating the long-term impacts of what they're building today, so they can use that foresight to make better, more ethical choices now.”

“Most people create technology with the hope that it will make the world a better place, but our best intentions must incorporate actionable safeguards to ensure others don’t corrupt our ideas along the way,” added Samuel Woolley, director of IFTF’s Digital Intelligence Lab. “This toolkit helps anyone creating new technology contemplate worst-case scenarios and familiarize themselves with major areas of potential risk. Considering unexpected risks is a must for the entire tech community. Our collective future will be the better for it.”

Feedback on the toolkit and inquiries regarding trainings and workshops related to the toolkit are encouraged by contacting ideas@ethicalos.org. Join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #EthicalOS.

Other Tech and Society Solutions Lab partnerships and investments include: the Center for Humane Technology, which was co-founded by Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, to align technology with humanity’s best interests; Data for Democracy, a global community of data practitioners and technologists dedicated to increasing tech worker participation in civil society; the TechEquity Collaborative, which is engaging the tech community to build a more equitable and inclusive twenty-first century economy; as well as the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, which brings the traditions of ethical thinking to bear on real-world problems; among others. The hope is that these efforts help technologists build responsibility into core business and product decisions and contribute to a thriving tech industry.

Institute for the Future (IFTF) is celebrating its 50th anniversary as the world’s leading non-profit strategic futures organization. The core of IFTF’s work is identifying emerging discontinuities that will transform global society and the global marketplace. They provide organizations with insights into business strategy, design process, innovation, and social dilemmas. The organizations research spans a broad territory of deeply transformative trends, from health and health care to technology, the workplace, and human identity.

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Exploration and Future Sensing team is at the heart of Omidyar Network’s innovation and its commitment to continually sharpen our focus on the deep-seated and emerging issues in society.

But most of all, the Exploration and Future Sensing team seeks to open the door to new perspectives. Early efforts include sponsoring the NextGen Foresight Practitioners Award, building a foresight community, and testing online engagement on emerging issues. Next for this team is incubating ideas out of the opportunities they’ve surfaced and building partnerships in realizing a future that includes and empowers us all.

To do that, the team scans for emergent signals and trends, imagines futures very different from the present, and catalyzes dialogue and experimentation to test new avenues of change. Their research, diverse network, and early experiments provide critical insights that we can use today to prepare for what may come, and build a better future. Sample topics include: the mainstreaming of neonationalism, the “moonshot economy” and applications of 3D and 4D printing, the mental health epidemic, quantum computing, social media influencers, the ascendance of China, and transhumanism.

To follow our insights and join the conversation, you can reach us at explorations@omidyar.com.

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https://medium.com/positive-returns/explorations/home

dnld report

https://www.omidyar.com/sites/default/files/OmidyarNetwork_Explorations_TrendReport.pdf

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A few pieces of advice, inspired by what some of my colleagues have shared with me so far —

  1. Seek discomfort —That’s where the most interesting insights occur. The trends really range, from the rise of neotribalism, to 3D and 4D printing, to “cybrids”, or how Gen Z is developing differently from any generation before them. Despite this range, Ashley Beckner from our US Education investments team, observed, “every single trend in this document has implications for our work focused on early childhood development. From smart toys to the affectional economy and perhaps most importantly the rising generation of cybrids — we have to stay ahead of these trends as we think about the future for children and families.”The US Education team is in the middle of developing their own trends report, focused on early childhood in the US. Ashley shared with me that this document “sparked new thinking that will influence that [US early childhood education trends] report and our work more broadly.”
  2. Examine intersections— as Alex Lazarow, a member of our Financial Inclusion investments team, observed, “Each of these macro trends has the potential to radically change the world. But what has the most potent potential is the intersection between. How can moonshots accelerate moving to blue or 3D printing for social good? How will the tandem rise of neotribalism, the affectional economy, and cybrids intersect? There is both the potential for balancing out on a global scale, and rapid acceleration depending on how they mix.”
  3. Get personal— several folks shared personal reflections that I’d argue can hit on an even deeper insight than a professional read would, because it traverses culture and hits on what it means to be human among these trends. As Peter Drucker said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Yoav Schlesinger of the Tech and Society Solutions Lab, said, “I found the Risk in the White Space section incredibly resonant with our Tech and Society point of view and it pushed the envelope of my individual thinking on how far we might expect technologists to be able to foresee the consequences of their creations. At the same time, as the father of two young girls (ages 4.5 and 2.5), the trends on ‘Cybrids’ was sobering and inspired many conversations with my wife this past week about what it might mean for their neural pathways to be fundamentally altered.” Our colleague on the Intellectual Capital team, Nidhi Hegde, shared, “Affectional Economy was one of the most interesting trends. I have a healthy amount of skepticism about computers having ‘empathy’ but leveraging AI and machine learning to understand different cognitive and emotional states is exciting because it could mean we can finally crack the door open on neurological diseases like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. With an aging world, I think that’s one of the most important problems we can solve and one that’s close to home for me.”
  4. Be skeptical! — the tone of this report is bold and confident in what are still very much early observations of emerging signals and trends. Question the speculation, but not the facts. And click on the links! Also, keep in mind we selected a handful of trends among hundreds. Stay tuned, more to come…
  5. Don’t overthink it— this is brain food; don’t read this worrying about how you’re going to plan for robots affecting human emotion or gaining Saudi Arabian citizenship, knowing that the trajectory of all of this could change on a dime. Sarah Morgenstern from our Financial Inclusion team, had a great approach, sharing the report provided, “a refreshing opportunity to step back from my day-to-day and reflect more expansively on the big questions of tomorrow. From the evolving nature of innovation to the shapeshifting challenges of risk mitigation, this… was wonderful food for thought”

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moonshot

https://www.omidyar.com/sites/default/files/file_archive/10%20Trends%20to%20Watch%20in%202018%20&%20Beyond_Omidyar%20Network.pdf

10 Trends to Watch in 2018 & Beyond

The “Moonshot” Economy – “Moonshots” signal a seismic shift from the innovation we see today to an entirely new era of uninhibited imagination across all industries, changing the how and who in leading innovation

Risk in the White Space – Technology and its impact on society are changing so rapidly, that the calculation and identification of risk is becoming almost prohibitively difficult. Not only are things changing too quickly for risk assessment to ever catch up, but much more of the risk could be considered unpredictable and intangible – not tying back to any clearly liable entity

The “Affectional Economy” – A technological revolution is allowing advanced machines to read, recognize, decode, process, and even mirror human emotion, to enhance their ability to interact with and understand us

Rise of Neotribalism – Humans originally evolved to live in a tribal society, but growth in international travel, communication, and education created a sense of global identity. In 2017 we saw tribalism reemerge, platforms used to connect also used to disconnect. Trumpism, Macronism, are humanity’s divisions becoming more intractable?

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) – Powerful enterprise counterpart to the consumer Internet of Things, IIoT is transforming manufacturing and the mindset such firms need to succeed

“Cybrids”: The Younger Global Generation – Gen Z have a fully symbiotic relationship with the digital world around them; this symbiosis will profoundly affect their cognition, perception, emotions, relationships, values and attitudes, learning capabilities, consumer behavior, and future career

Moving from Green to Blue – The future of sustainability is having a net-positive impact on the ecosystem by putting more back than was taken

3D & 4D Printing as Forces for Social Good and Humanitarian Efforts – 3D printing offers an affordable, sustainable, on-demand manufacturing for immediate, local, and underserved needs; 4D printing adds the dimension of time, leveraging “intelligent” materials that can self-assemble, change shape, and self-repair

Nation, Inc. – The role of institutions is changing and the line between the nation and the corporation is blurring – countries will need to provide jobs or job equivalents, corporations are shaping public policy; where will the roles of these institutions, and the balance between them, fall?

Infrastructure of the Future – Competitive cities, countries, regions, and companies will depend on an entirely different set of infrastructure needs, e.g., smart sensor networks to sustainable urban farming

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March 14, 2018) – Pierre Omidyar, Chairman of the Board of Omidyar Network, today announced the appointment of Mike Kubzansky as the philanthropic investment firm’s new managing partner.  Omidyar also announced that Matt Bannick, Omidyar Network’s managing partner since 2007, is stepping down from his leadership role and will continue to serve on the firm’s board of directors.

Kubzansky will lead a global firm that has invested $1.2 billion in more than 600 for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations across five continents.  He joined Omidyar Network in May 2013 to lead the newly-created intellectual capital function, a strategy and research practice designed to inform and set strategy, explore and seed new focus areas for the firm, and generate and publish insights gained through Omidyar Network’s global work across its initiatives and with its investees.

In his new role, Kubzansky will direct the next phase of the firm’s evolution, one that will:  (1) continue its early-stage investing and grant-making support of sector-level initiatives; (2) launch several existing Omidyar Network initiatives as autonomous organizations; and (3) generate, develop, and share new cutting-edge ideas, insights, experiments, and lessons to drive innovation.  Kubzansky’s appointment is effective immediately.

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https://nextgenforesight.org/

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We are delighted to announce the Winners of the 2018 Joseph Jaworski Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Awards! We received a strong field of applications from 37 different nationalities, from Azerbaijan to Zambia. A big thank you to all of you who applied as well as to our fantastic panel of judges.

Our winner: Pupul Bisht will receive $25k in funding to develop a new foresight initiative as well as mentoring and support, and free attendance at SOIF’s Summer foresight retreat, SOIF2018.

Our runner up: Oluwabunmi Ajilore also receives free attendance at SOIF2018, and along with our 12 Special Awardees, will be supported to develop both personally and professionally.

The long term aim is to create a global sensing-network of future-alert activists and to showcase innovative practice from around the world.

The Joseph Jaworski Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Award was developed by School of International Futures with the support of Omidyar Network, Joseph Jaworski and Generon International.

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drinkwater

sarah is director at the Tech and Society Solutions Lab at Omidyar Network, where she works to test and scale interventions that help maximize the tech industry's positive contributions to a healthy society. 

Prior to Omidyar Network, Sarah was head of Campus London, Google's first physical startup hub offering innovative education programs, a work and event space, and access to a vibrant startup community. Campus London was a pilot that has since scaled to six locations around the world, including Seoul and Sao Paulo. At Google, Sarah also built and led a global Google Maps community team.

Sarah previously worked in community and content roles for early-stage startups in Europe. She also advised brands such as Nokia on their social strategy and was a journalist for newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian.

Sarah received her MA in Renaissance to Enlightenment from University College London. She earned her BA in English literature from the University of Reading.

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Eshanthi is a senior manager on the Intellectual Capital team at Omidyar Network where she advances strategy and research across the firm’s initiatives, incubates new areas of impact, and leads the firm’s work on future sensing and foresight.

Prior to joining Omidyar Network, Eshanthi was a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, working on a range of projects, from analyzing international market dynamics for long-term expansion and exit opportunities for healthcare companies to developing growth strategies for nonprofit charter school startups. Before that, Eshanthi worked for CARE Bangladesh as a William Davidson Institute fellow to value and negotiate a joint-venture social enterprise that empowers rural Bangladeshi women to become entrepreneurial salespeople. She also worked for Ford Motor Company India, where she set up a public-private partnership between Ford, the Tamil Nadu health department, a local NGO, and a university-run rural tech incubator to establish a mobile health initiative.

Eshanthi attended the University of Michigan where she received an MBA from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business and an M.S. from the School of Natural Resources and Environment, with a focus in sustainable systems. She also earned a B.S. in business and a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Tech and Society Solutions Lab draws on Omidyar Network’s long-standing belief in the promise of technology to create opportunity and social good, as well as our concern about unintended consequences that can result from technological innovation.

We are co-creating solutions with technologists and civil society to advance these goals. Examples include partnering with tech companies and others to find metrics that better track their contributions to the health of the public sphere, reinventing how we educate the next generation of technologists so that they think actively about these issues, developing a set of principles for responsible data usage among data scientists, and supporting change agents who are tackling emerging problems such as smartphone addiction. We are also advancing interventions that support more inclusive tech cultures and product design practices, and helping employees more effectively identify and prevent harms.We are at a critical juncture to ensure that technology is a force for good amid rising concerns. Our team aims to help technologists prevent, mitigate, and correct societal downsides of technology—and maximize positive impact.

Our hope is that these efforts help technologists build responsibility into core business and product decisions and contribute to a thriving tech industry.

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ED:

at Omidyar Network, we believe there are few more direct pathways to opportunity than education. That’s because a young person’s education can lay the foundation for a brighter future of economic possibility and societal well-being. Yet for too many people around the world, quality education is out of reach—leaving students unprepared for life and work, and parents unsure how to access quality education for their children.

We know there is no panacea to address the complex local education challenges that exist. But by focusing on improving student learning outcomes, we can begin to address some of the greatest and most persistent unmet needs in education around the world. We consider critical thinking and building competencies like communication, collaboration, and creativity—as well as character qualities like adaptability, initiative, and curiosity—important parts of skill development.

We aim to bring accessible, equitable, and scalable quality solutions to regions where education and employment opportunities are scarce, and to empower parents and communities in the process. We also believe that technology has untapped potential to be a valuable educational tool to support teachers and students.Since 2009, Omidyar Network has made education investments in more than 90 partners. Omidyar Network has a unique hybrid structure we refer to as flexible capital. This structure enables us to support both for-profit entrepreneurs harnessing the power of markets as well as nonprofit and public-sector changemakers who are innovating to bring higher-quality education to millions, if not hundreds of millions, of learners.

Our Focus Areas in Key Geographies

In Africa, India, and Latin America, we are refining the focus of our investments to three key areas where we believe Omidyar Network will have the greatest impact:

In the United States, we seek to increase kindergarten readiness through an inter-generational approach, investing in quality learning opportunities for both the child and the parent or primary caregiver:

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FB task force w/ koch

Two additional foundations will also contribute. They are the Democracy Fund and the Omidyar Network, both of which were founded by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar provided the seed funds for investigative reporting outlet The Intercept but largely shies away from making direct political contributions in the United States–with at least one notable exception: in 2016, Omidyar donated $100,000 to a GOP-linked #NeverTrump Super PAC.

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first look media, the Intercept

invest jrnlism

First Look Media is a news organization founded by Pierre Omidyar that was first announced in October 2013 as a venue for "original, independent journalism." The organization is incorporated as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable entity.[1][2]

The project is a collaboration with Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras with a promised $250 million in funding from Omidyar.[3][4][2] The organization has announced plans to support multiple publications, the first of which is The Intercept, which launched in February 2014. On March 10, 2014, the company announced the addition of Gawker editor John Cook as editor-in-chief of The Intercept[5] as well as Natasha Vargas-Cooper and Andrew Jerrell Jones as writers for the site.[6] In June 2014, it was announced that Morgan Marquis-Boire was joining First Look Media as the Director of Security.[7]

A second publication was announced in February 2014 that would focus on financial and political corruption, headed by Matt Taibbi. Although the name of the publication has not been publicly announced, the name Racket has been reportedly chosen.[8] The publication was to be launched autumn 2014[9][10] but in October, it was reported that Taibbi was on leave after “disagreements with higher-ups”.[11] On October 28, Omidyar stated in a press release that Taibbi had left First Look.[12]

In December of 2014, First Look Media announced the launch of Reported.ly, a social media news service led by Andy Carvin.[13]

In February 2015, senior investigative reporter Ken Silverstein, who'd been hired in December 2013, announced his resignation. Writing in Politico, Silverstein described First Look as "a slowly unfolding disaster, not because of editorial meddling from the top, but because of what I came to believe was epic managerial incompetence. … For all of the bean counting and expense account-approving that Omidyar's organizational structure imposed on us, they were shockingly disinterested in the actual journalism. … Top management was so aloof that it was hard to figure out who was in charge."[14]

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http://sonyclassics.com/merchantsofdoubt/

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rethink

https://www.omidyar.com/news/learnings-decade-investing-impact

Learnings from a Decade of Investing For Impact

From Livemint January 17, 2019

The impact investing - investing in mission driven for-profit entrepreneurs - industry has completed a decade in India, and made important contributions to improving the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians. To reflect on the milestone, we partnered with leading Indian business daily, Mint, to publish a 3-part series of op-eds:

Learnings from a decade of Investing For Impact: A decade after social impact focused investments first began  in India, we look at some of the key learnings of the industry. We also look at what we must do in order to ensure our investments and vision remain relevant in an increasingly digital and mobile-first economy.Read more here. 

Reimagining Social Impact: With recent developments in technology and smartphone penetration, India is changing dramatically, enabling innovative ways of achieving social impact. In parallel, the profile of social impact entrepreneurs is also undergoing rapid change. We discuss the opportunity to reimagine impact investing – including defining target populations for social impact and the sources of capital for impact investing. Read the article here.

Beyond Tradeoffs: As the debate around returns from impact investing capital grows, we suggest that it is time to look beyond trade-offs to develop sophisticated approaches that deploy capital at multiple points along the returns continuum and that appeal to varying types of investors. Read the article here.

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The tech world’s strange love affair with ultraconservative ALEC is unraveling.

Over the past two months, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yelp, and Yahoo have distanced themselves from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Koch Brothers-backed think tank that’s pushed just about every controversial right-wing legislative initiative you can think of. Teaching climate change denial in schools? Check. Advocating for Voter ID laws that disenfranchise minorities?Uh huh. A national “Stand Your Ground” law? Why not?

The breaking point for ALEC’s souring relationship with so many high-profile tech firms appears to be the group’s denial of strong, widely-agreed-upon evidence that climate change is real and humans are making it worse. (ALEC recently denied its, uh, denial, but ALEC’s own model legislation directly contradicts its claims of innocence). But despite the risks of aligning your organization with anti-sustainability interests, there’s one high-profile tech firm that still hasn’t denounced the organization: eBay, along with its billionaire founder and chairman Pierre Omidyar.

Today, over eighty non-profits including the Sierra Club and Greenpeace signed a letter urging eBay to end its affiliation with ALEC. eBay, like Google and Microsoft in the past, is a member of ALEC’s Communications and Technology Task Force, an affiliation that costs the company $5,000 a year in membership fees and thus represents a direct form of financial support for the controversial organization.

“The public knows,” the letter states, “that the ALEC operation which brings state legislators and corporate lobbyists behind closed doors to discuss proposed legislation and share lavish dinners threatens our democracy. The public is asking eBay to stop participating in this scheme.”

eBay spokeswoman Abby Smith has finally responded to the letter, saying that ALEC promotes issues that are “material to the success of eBay Inc and our customers” and that “our team of internal stakeholders meets regularly to assess the best approach for resolving these issues.”

But would leaving ALEC really have a negative impact on eBay’s business?

Possibly. Yelp, for example, had a clear and legitimate legal interest in aligning itself with ALEC. The organization crafted model legislation to fight SLAPP lawsuits, which could be used against Yelp’s users who post bad reviews. Indeed, eBay is currently relying on an anti-SLAPP argument in a lawsuit that a patent troll filed against it. But user-generated content, which is usually what anti-SLAPP legislation protects, is not as fundamental to its business as it is to Yelp. And again, even Yelp has cut ties with ALEC.

Another of the Task Force’s stated areas of focus is “promoting new forms of e-commerce,” which is certainly in eBay’s wheelhouse. But Amazon, the largest ecommerce site in the US, felt no need to stay aligned with ALEC past 2012. Then there’s ALEC’s and eBay’s shared support of net neutrality. That’s the same justification Facebook made when it donated $10,000 to an anti-gay politician: We both support a free and open Internet! But net neutrality has attracted support among a very broad set of organizations, and not all of them were just abandoned by half a dozen of eBay’s peers.

What about eBay’s chairman Omidyar? Surely, this “civic-minded billionaire,” who through his Omidyar Network has given hundreds of millions of dollars to philanthropic causes, wouldn’t dream of aligning himself with an organization like ALEC — an organization for whom social and environmental justice plays a distant second fiddle to the Koch Brothers’ funhouse mirror version of free market capitalism. Or would he? As Mark Ames and Yasha Levine have reported, Omidyar’s politics are difficult, though not impossible, to suss out:

Omidyar Network’s philanthropy reveals Omidyar as a free-market zealot with an almost mystical faith in the power of “markets” to transform the world, end poverty, and improve lives—one micro-individual at a time.

And yet, the Omidyar Network is also one of the leading backers of the upcoming film “Merchants of Doubt,” which seeks to expose the “silver-tongued pundits-for-hire” spreading denial campaigns on serious public health threats like tobacco, toxic chemicals, and yes, climate change. Considering that climate change denial has become the predominant force drawing tech companies away from ALEC, eBay’s continued membership constitutes a pretty significant contradiction for Omidyar. And let’s not forget that for many of the third world communities the Omidyar Network wants to help, devastation from climate change isn’t just a well-supported forecast — it’s already a reality.

Maybe eBay is too focused on its forthcoming PayPal spin off to pay attention to the outcry over ALEC. Maybe eBay has already decided to let its ALEC membership lapse and it simply hasn’t approved the move with its shareholders. In any case, companies like Facebook learned the hard way what happens when you align yourself with anti-sustainability interests that run counter to the fundamental principles of your community or industry. And with the tide in the tech community clearly shifting away from ALEC and other climate change deniers, eBay needs to take control of this narrative before it spins out of control, and people start accusing the company of clubbing baby seals and creating the hole in the ozone layer.

http://pando.com/2014/10/07/what-possible-reason-could-ebay-have-for-standing-by-ultraconservative-climate-change-deniers-at-alec/

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http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/02/first-look-media-hires-matt-taibbi-183638.html

By HADAS GOLD | 

2/20/14 7:59 AM EST

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Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media has hired Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, the company announcedWednesday.

Taibbi, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone with an eponymous blog on its site, will head up a new publication focused on financial and political corruption. The still unnamed publication will be separate from The Intercept, the first publication from First Look Media, headed by former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald.

"Matt is one of the most influential journalists of our time,” Eric Bates, executive editor of First Look Media, said in a statement. “His incisive explorations of the financial crisis — and Wall Street’s undue influence over our political system — have played a key role in helping to inform the public and transform the national debate. He is a journalist who can explain what a credit default swap is and why it’s important — and, make you bust out laughing while he’s doing it. I look forward to having him on our team and helping him launch a dynamic new site unlike any other.”

Taibbi's is the latest major journalist to join the new venture backed by e-Bay founder Omidyar. Along with Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the journalists who have published many of Edward Snowden's NSA leaks, First Look Media has picked up "Dirty Wars" author Jeremy Scahill; Peter Maass, who has written about war, media and national security for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and The Washington Post; Marcy Wheeler, an independent journalist who covers the legal side of counterterrorism programs; and Ryan Gallagher, a Scottish journalist who has written about government surveillance technologies for Slate, The Guardian and the Financial Times.

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