I am running for the House of Representatives in the Massachusetts 06 District!
From the outside, Congress might look like a wild change from being a Senior Staff Engineer writing healthcare software. For me, it feels like the next step.
I always put my energy where I see the most urgent problems. That has taken me into jobs. It took me out of others. I went deep into optimizing computer vision algorithms, and all the way up to organizational design. It took me into management, and then out of management and into leadership instead. Heck, it's how I got into programming in the first place.
And now it is taking me to politics.
Not that I haven't been doing politics. I wrote the donation site for HfA, raising $22 million+ extra for the campaign by making it fast, performant, beautiful and work with IE 7. A group of us revived my local Middleton Democratic Town Committee and now help people running for school boards and library trustee positions. We established an Affordable Housing Trust in Middleton and I've been a member of that trust since it started.
But the local MAGA group is no longer my biggest worry. I see three major problems Middleton can't possibly fix on our own.
First, America is becoming a "competitive fascist" state. We'll still have elections, but they won't stop Trump from doing whatever he likes.
Second, the Democratic Party today is totally unprepared to deal with the first problem.
He didn't get into politics to fight fascism. He got into politics to tweak penalties for failing to serve veterans from being six months to a year, to change an eight hundred number into a three-digit code, the normal kinds of lawmaking for a normal political time. He is a temporarily-embarrassed billionaire writing politely worded letters, and it isn't effective anymore. He seems to think he can find common ground with fascists, without thinking about what it means when he does, and he spends his time lecturing the Democratic Party about not being far enough to the right.
We need a Democratic Party that is willing to be the opposition. We need more Democrats like Maxwell Frost, who are willing to shove their foot in the door. When Democrats retake power, we need to be willing to enforce the law, instead of chickening out because some of the people doing bribery right now might be wealthy and powerful.
The most effective way to change the Democratic Party is to change the people who represent deep-blue districts like mine. I intend to be part of a Democratic Party worthy of the name.
Third, technology is changing the world and Congress doesn't understand it.
Seth Moulton tried (ineffectively) to ban TikTok after a classified briefing of Congress. Who in that room actually understands how neural nets work? Who could have said whether TikTok was doing anything different than the American companies selling our data all over the world? One in five Americans is employed in tech, but Congress is stuck relying on advice from lobbyists from giant corporations to regulate technologies they don't understand.
This is a huge problem right now.
In the last two years we have seen massive layoffs in tech because of the introduction of generative AI. That isn't going to stop with tech. AI is both a giant bubble, with 95% of attempted LLM projects failing, and a real, radical change to our economy.
The government ignored the automation of manufacturing, and the result has been terrible for American workers. Right now, we tax human workers at much higher rates than we tax automated production, encouraging these layoffs and creating worse experiences for consumers as customer service is replaced with unhelpful chatbots.
We need a robot tax. A robot tax will ensure that all Americans benefit from these new technologies, instead of just the billionaires able to finally fire the workers they resent. It can cover our full commitments to seniors, and fund Social Security for generations to come.
America could have good things. We aren't going to get there by making friends with fascist politicians. We will get there by raising the bar and insisting on better from our elected representatives.
Seth Moulton has a challenger, but I won't be doing this alone. Many people are fed up with politics as usual, it turns out. Our movement of volunteers and donors is creating change in the Massachusetts 06.
Join us! Even $5 signals to the political establishment that it is time for something new. Something better. Something worth fighting for.