Report by Merici Vinton & Faith Savaiano & Laura Sigelmann: “The book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt states “Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.”

In every retrospective we hosted, participants bemoaned the lack of a strategy and a longer-term theory of change in their work, or “how”, tied to outcomes. No shared strategy of work and functional purpose across the federal teams – USDS, 18F/TTS, OFCIO, and beyond – led to confusion, competition for limited resources, and a focus on individual team or organizational goals rather than shared agency- or government-wide outcomes. No shared strategy for mission outcomes at the government-wide or agency level meant we heard time and time again during the retros that teams at all levels of government felt like they were missing a chance at making an even greater, deeper impact. In the absence of such shared mission outcomes, digital service teams felt like their participation was the metric for success and their activity was a substitute for long-term progress. This is emblematic of a systemic problem – digital service initiatives operate within silos, compete for limited resources and talent, and often operate at agencies that lack a clear sense of how digital service initiatives contribute to their goals, ultimately diminishing the impact.

The lack of strategy impacted not just the teammates trying to do the work, it also impacted the agencies and stakeholders digital service teams interact with. A strategy defines a set of priorities that is repeatable and accountable, making it easier to partner, delegate, and work fast; it also communicates what you don’t want to work on, transparently outlining priorities. For digital service teams, strategy was absent but should exist at multiple levels. At the highest level, it articulates the theory for how digital services contribute to societal outcomes – how digital and service design improves public health through better access to benefits such as SNAP, or simplified access to healthcare. Strategy also exists at the government-wide level, defining priorities and processes for achieving those outcomes. And at the organizational and functional level, strategy defines the logic model for how diverse teams – including crisis response, modernization, implementation, product building, and operations and maintenance – work together across government. 

And now, at a moment of significant technological change and demands on government, the stakes of having no strategy at each of these levels are higher than ever. Without a clear position on AI, government won’t even get their tactics right — they’ll spend all their time debating tools instead of outcomes. A strategy doesn’t require consensus. It is a signal of what you value, and provides the concrete steps to get what you’re trying to achieve, and why — so that people can ignore it, engage with it, challenge it, or build on it.

Moving forward, the digital service community should be a part of articulating an ambitious, outcomes based strategy at each level for what we want to achieve across the country in the next 5-10-20 years; and to look at defining foundational elements that make a strategy effective: building user-centered government and how to reform our institutions to become modern, responsive organizations…(More)”.

Book edited by Jane E Fountain, Sorin Dan, and Niina Mäntylä: “This book examines the relationship between artificial intelligence and power in government. The growth of AI has drastically altered the political landscape, and the shifting power relationships between actors involved in deploying AI have the potential to radically impact the ways in which this technology is understood, adopted and implemented in government.  

Drawing together scholars from public policy, public management, information technology and law, this volume throws light on the implications that AI poses for existing power relationships between actors involved in the deployment and use of AI in government, and for existing power relationships between the state and citizens. It addresses these issues through three disciplinary perspectives – legal and regulatory studies, public policy and governance, and public management and innovation – in order to fully assess the interplay between AI and power in different governmental settings across the world. Chapters examine a range of themes pertinent to AI and governance, including the exercise of power, liability issues, ethical policymaking, surveillance, and the use of AI tools in public organizations. A concluding chapter maps out future directions for the study of AI and power in government…(More)”.

Assessment by AI Vision by GPTZero: “At the current rate, AI-generated content will dominate every major platform within a decade. AI Vision scans the text on your feed as you browse and highlights what’s AI-generated. GPTZero scans millions of posts daily — identifies the ones that went viral and our model caught as AI-written. See for yourself. AI Vision scans the text on your feed as you browse and highlights what’s AI-generated, via Chrome extension.

• Today, 16.0% of the internet is AI.
• Today, 18.4% of Substack is AI.
• Today, 34.3% of Medium is AI.
• Today, 11.6% of X is AI…(More)”.

Article by J.J. Anselmi: “While some are worse than others, the stories people tell about how data centers invade and disrupt their communities follow the same contours. The tech company and their swarm of contractors are in town before you know it, and they’re already scheming with local leaders. In no uncertain terms, your elected officials have chosen tech billionaires over their own neighbors.

Soon, an army of men with bulldozers are tearing out trees near your home and ripping up fields. Dump trucks careen around town, and the night sky is so polluted with light, you can’t see the stars. A year or so later, the data center is up and running. By then, the high-paying construction jobs have all but disappeared.

After months of digging, you finally have an idea of how much water the data center actually consumes. If you’re lucky, your area isn’t in a drought. You hope things won’t get dire. Meanwhile, the monolith is droning and hissing, wearing you and your neighbors down with constant noise. You hope the water you do have will be drinkable this time next year as you try to adjust to the unnatural heat the data center generates.

The militaristic drive to build the best chatbot and somehow “beat China” knows no bounds, including those of logic. This nightmarish iteration of the extraction economy was made possible by undemocratic processes and a national administration that sold us and our resources out to tech oligarchs. But people in these towns and cities are smarter and tougher than the plutocrats accounted for—and they’re putting up one hell of a fight. Told by people whose communities have been impacted, this is the story of unhinged data center expansion in America…(More)”.

Book by Fenwick McKelvey: “How computer models became fundamental to political practice—from winning elections to global affairs—and how we imagine political futures as a computing problem.

For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics, Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace activists all worked—sometimes in tandem, sometimes not—to build simulations to win campaigns, predict coups, forecast the future, and render politics as legible as a spreadsheet.

Drawing on novel archival and historical research, McKelvey recounts the history of efforts to simulate politics by building models of elections, voters, and international relations. Comparing attempts in the United States to simulate domestic electoral politics and international affairs, he reveals the unexamined connections and conflicts between the two projects. His book provides a helpful guide to taking stock of exaggerated claims that AI and technology will fix politics, while presenting the long history of such promised technological fixes…(More)”.

Book by Ahana Datta Fasel: “Even the most elite hackers use common technologies to steal state secrets, which help intelligence agencies to catch them. Are these hackers simply reckless, or do their operations reveal something deeper about their nation-state patrons?

Over a globally interconnected Internet, nations must constantly toe the delicate line of maintaining stability–developing shared tech protocols that they themselves must also break, in order to spy. This is the paradox at the heart of cyber espionage: states need to cooperate if they are to compete. As the US and China vie for strategic advantage through a new form of statecraft in cyber space, an intensifying cat-and-mouse game makes cyber security more difficult, more expensive and more unpredictable for us all.

Full Stack Spies examines the dynamic, interdependent relationships that hackers, cyber defenders, tech giants and nation states forge, leverage and exploit to amass cyber power against a wide range of targets in geopolitics, global trade and finance, the armed forces, and critical infrastructure. But this jostling for cyber dominance makes spying online harder–and, more crucially, undermines long-term trust in cyber space, destabilising the foundations of digital societies..(More)”.

Paper by Geoff Mulgan: “I summarise the perspectives of different disciplines – economics, psychology, computer science, business studies, organisation studies, political science, history, law, international relations, anthropology, design and complexity. In each case I make short suggestions on what would be useful from each, before turning to what a more synthetic approach might look like, in particular using insights from biology and computation to see organisations as living things and addressing the dynamics of ecosystems of organisations which compete and cooperate.

The paper asks of the people working in academic disciplines: how are you engaging with, and learning from, other disciplines? And how could your knowledge be useful to a world that badly needs to reform its public institutions at every level, from the local to the global?…(More)”.

Blog by Stefaan Verhulst and Adam Zable: “The world’s relationship to data is changing rapidly. Artificial intelligence has generated significant excitement for its potential to help solve public problems, improve decision-making, and create new forms of economic and social value. At the same time, it has intensified longstanding debates around access, ownership, attribution, privacy, labor rights, security, and the responsible reuse of public-interest data. Questions that once sat at the margins of data policy have moved to the center.

Governments, international organizations, civil society groups, and companies are responding with a growing range of governance approaches, from executive orders and regulatory frameworks to international agreements, industry standards, and new institutional models. Yet it remains difficult to distinguish short-term developments from deeper structural shifts. While discussion often focuses on the latest AI breakthrough, the more important question for policymakers is how these technologies are reshaping the systems, assumptions, and governance models that determine how data is accessed, shared, and used.

To better understand these changes, The GovLab convened two forecasting studios bringing together experts working in data governance, digital policy, open science, AI governance, and public-sector innovation. Participants explored emerging trends in data access, governance, and reuse, examined the forces driving those trends, and considered what they may mean for the future of open data and public-interest data ecosystems.

The discussions identified seven signals that point to significant changes already underway. These signals suggest that the future of data governance will be shaped by advances in AI alongside evolving expectations around trust, stewardship, infrastructure, sovereignty, reciprocity, and public value. They offer a starting point for understanding how data policy may need to evolve in the years ahead. A longer version of this analysis, with a full list of studio participants and more detailed discussion of each signal, will be published separately…(More)”.

Book by Jibu Elias: “Artificial intelligence has been affecting the way people think, work and create, and the questions that have arisen in its wake are as pressing as they are uncomfortable. Who benefits from this new technology? Who is left behind? And what happens when the tools we build begin to govern us?
In an age where humans are dazzled by machines that seem to think, Jibu Elias -researcher, writer and advisor on AI governance-peels back the glossy surface to reveal systems driven more by prediction than true intelligence; and a world where algorithms redesign economies, redraw social boundaries and challenge the very idea of human agency. Drawing on nearly a decade of experience across the Indian and the global AI governance landscape, Elias points squarely at the widening gaps between promises and reality: from mass job displacements and deepening biases embedded in AI systems to the rapid consolidation of power by tech giants shaping our future and the heavy environmental costs of unregulated innovation.
Moving beyond Silicon Valley optimism, The New Divide is a vital perspective from the Global South. There is a very small window of action open to us in the face of the rapidly accelerating use of AI. Ethical governance and regulation are imperative, and we need guidelines now. This book is a call to action. As AI reshapes what it means to be human, we must reclaim control. Before it’s too late…(More)”.

Paper by Elettra Bietti: “The ability to direct and receive attention is constitutive of human life. Humans have an inborn need for attention, and an inborn ability to direct attention for survival. Yet attention is not just a creature of an individual’s mind. It is a relationship between people and their environment. As such, our attention is shaped by the material, social and economic conditions that surround us. Today, people’s attention is increasingly extracted and colonized through technology. Attention platforms and AI technologies are transforming the shape, objects, metrics and value of human time and attention.

This article focuses on the role of data-attention platforms in transforming time and attention. Data-attention platforms include social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and increasingly AI companions such as Replika or Character.AI. They capture data and attention and draw revenues from them, primarily but not exclusively through surveillance advertising. The business models of data-attention platforms are organized around the data-attention imperative, the drive to continuously capture troves of data and attention to generate value. They capture eyeballs to sell ads and collect data to target ads and maximize engagement. Time online enables more data collection, which, in turn allows for the design of products that more effectively addict users. This extractive data-attention spiral produces a harmful commodification and erosion of time and attention which shrinks the human experience and undermines collective life.

This article asks how governments should and shouldn’t regulate data-attention platform business models and the distortions they cause. It is tempting to reduce growing data-attention disorders to problems of individual choice online, delegating solutions to market-based tools, more competition or the exercise of individual data protection rights and parental controls. Instead, the answer requires moving past individual preferences and embracing an infrastructural approach focused on changing platform incentives and technological affordances and on safeguarding space for offline time. Privacy and data protection, child social media regulations and productivity tools provide for controls and safeguards that too often magnify instead of addressing attention disorders. The idea of individual autonomy that underlies them is unfit for the attention era. The article advocates a conception that takes the power of platforms to shape our attention seriously and advocates for the protection of children and adults’ time away from technology. Time away from technology is a collective good in need of protection. Based on a three-fold agenda that incorporates design changes, taxation, and legal reform to reduce time spent online as well as the speed and scale of the digital experience, the article aims to bring attention platform ecosystems in greater alignment with the interests of society without placing unrealistic expectations on individual users and parents…(More)”.