04/06/2018
Hi all. I wanted to take a minute to let everyone know of my decision to end this campaign. In spite of some great effort by a lot of people, we’re not on track to hit the required level of petition signatures by May 7, and I don’t want to waste more of anyone’s time. The responsibility for this is entirely on me, and the primary obstacle has been the amount of time I’ve had to spend on house selling, buying, packing and moving (twice!), in conjunction with my “normal job” and family activities. Finding the blocks of time to put up a website, produce more content to convey my views and objectives, while managing the petition process, has been nearly impossible. I don’t enjoy failing, but even more I don’t like dragging out a slow fail at something that really matters. As a 100% self taught technologist, I’m about as familiar as it gets with the “you win or you learn” cycle, and I’ve learned an enormous amount in this campaign process. There may very well be a “next time”, and I will be continuing to do the work now that will make attempt #2 (or #20) more successful.
HUGE THANKS to all of you that helped! It’s got to be about the greatest feeling to ask for help for something like this and have people respond with “just tell me what you need!” Really, truly appreciated.
If anyone else is interested in running for this office in the future, I’d be happy to do a brain dump of requirements and process.
I’d like to close this with three thoughts:
1. Something that should bother all of us is how difficult it is for an independent candidate to get on the ballot. The amount of money that would need to be spent to get elected is absurd, but the cost (in the form of supplies, some marketing, and *many* hours of petition circulation) just to get on the ballot is an enormous obstacle by itself. This is a blocker for not only new ideas, but for any hopes of having an officeholder who is not deeply beholden to a political party or other wealthy benefactors. If we don’t want to be doomed to the perpetual tennis match which is red v blue politics, we all need to find ways to support alternative voices, whether we agree with them totally or not.
2. The biggest problem we have now is unchecked propaganda. Not guns, not immigrants (or people who want to build walls), not nuclear war with North Korea. Propaganda allows the bad actors to work our democracy like a puppet, and the internet and decentralized, no-oversight, agenda-driven news is the perfect toolbox. This is much more complicated than nuclear war or even terrorism. Unfortunately because the Trump-Russia situation is inherently political, we’ve spent so much time focused on Americans who did or did not commit a crime, and have almost completely ignored the sophisticated campaign to turn us against each other (you have to appreciate the irony... you win this round, Boris and Natasha). This seems like an opportunity for a United State that we should all be able to agree on.
3. As I’ve said a few times in this process, I have people I know well and care about deeply that I do not agree with on a lot of things, and they don’t agree with me. I like to think of people (in our best state) as a team of superheroes, and we should be able to agree both that we don’t want only Hulks (or Stephen Hawkings), but that a Hulk (or a Stephen Hawking) is a damn good thing to have when the situation requires that kind of response. So to my Hulk friends, my Stephen Hawking friends, my Michele Obama friends, and everyone one else, I hope if we need to assemble the team to solve some problems in the future, we can all count on each other to show up, get along, and save the planet.
