Notable links: January 16, 2026

Every Friday, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

I don't have a pithy summary this week. It's been a heavy week. These links – about documenting atrocities and finding values-aligned work – reflect that.

Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.

Remarks on the Federal Government’s Ongoing Presence in Minnesota

Minnesota is experiencing unprecedented ICE action — which is a kind of punch-pulling euphemism for what has felt like an all-out fascist invasion that has included murder, kidnappings, toxic chlorine gas set off in city streets, and ICE officers staking out stores and businesses, sometimes arresting the staff at restaurants they’ve just been eating at.

In the midst of this, Governor Tim Walz made an address where he accurately described it as an occupation. Remarkably, he also asked his constituents this:

“Tonight, I want to share another way you can help: Witness.

Help us establish a record of exactly what’s happening in our communities.

You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct their activities.

So carry your phone with you at all times.

And if you see ICE in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record.

Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans – not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”

We’ve seen crowdsourced footage and citizen journalism before — most pervasively during the Black Lives Matter protests five years ago — but I can’t think of a time when the Governor of a State, or anyone in a similar position, has asked citizens to record and save footage so that it can be used to prosecute the authorities for its atrocities.

If we look beyond the obvious shock that this is where we are now, there’s an interesting infrastructure problem here. It’s worth asking: if you were designing a system to gather footage of ICE brutality from Minnesotans, while protecting their safety and ensuring the sanctity of the dataset, how would you do it? Knowing that there will be people who want to make the database unusable, or prevent people from submitting, either directly or through intimidation?

It’s essentially a whistleblower (or journalism tips) use case. Rinse and repeat for the whole country. Some newsrooms have built their own forms, and Letitia James released a portal for submitting ICE footage in New York, but there’s a strong case to be made for a central repository for all ICE abuse, for which sifting through all that video is a problem in itself. There will be a lot of it.

And what if there doesn’t remain a strong government entity at the State level to bring about a case?

There’s a strong argument for sharing to a central repository that can be used and browsed by multiple entities, including governments, advocacy organizations, civil rights lawyers, and newsrooms. When this information is distributed across States, newsrooms, personal Instagram accounts, and more, it doesn’t form a body of evidence that can help bring about more impactful cases and determine patterns of activity. So someone should consider centralizing it — but then mirroring it, Zurich protocol style, so that nobody can hide the evidence and cover the tracks of their abuse.

‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid

This is racial profiling on a grand scale:

“Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address, 404 Media has learned. ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.”

It apparently looks a lot like Google Maps, but designed to show the richness of an area for “targets”, populated in part by density of immigrants. And then you can dig in:

“Once a person is selected on the map interface, ELITE then shows a dossier on that particular person, according to the user guide. That includes their name, a photo, their Alien Number (the unique code given by the U.S. government to each immigrant), their date of birth, and their full address.”

The Nazis could only dream of having such a capability.

Imagine working for this company, on this product. Every day, you go into work, in what I assume is a beautiful office with pine furniture and a well-stocked kitchen, and you build software that will help to deport people using what you know are extrajudicial means without due process. You probably have OKRs. There are customer calls with ICE. Every two-week sprint, you take on tasks that help make this engine better.

What do you tell yourself? What do you tell your family?

Are you on board with this agenda, or do you tell yourself you need the job to pay rent? To get healthcare?

You receive stock as part of your pay package. It’s going up! You can use it to buy a home, or to build a comfortable retirement, or some combination of the two.

Your co-workers are values aligned and work hard. They’re talented and smart. Man, you might think to yourself, I love working with this team.

Or, you might think, man, I’ve got to find another job.

Either way, you’re proud of your product work. You’re happy to take the salary, the free lunches, the espresso. And regardless of how you feel about it, the thing you do every day is powering an armed force that is kidnapping people on the street and shooting civilians, that shot a mother in the face, that is targeting people to disappear using a beautiful, modern map interface.

Bari Weiss Is The Symptom

I wish this essay wasn’t good and necessary, but it is.

“I worry some of my colleagues in the industry are getting the Bari Weiss phenomenon exactly wrong. She isn't a saboteur brought in to destroy one of the last remaining citadels of high journalism. She is one of high journalism's purest products, a perfect symptom of its old, unresolved contradictions. Her disingenuousness about motive is the industry's in miniature.”

The author is correct: Bari Weiss is not an exception to a glorious industry, but one of many. These are people who, although they would not put it that way themselves, seek to make journalism toothless; to turn it into an instrument of power rather than something that interrogates it. They’re the people who see themselves, more than anything else, as an institution, rather than the people institutions worry about when they go to sleep at night. And they are everywhere.

I’m not a journalist, but I signed up to support them. After my hard left turn from tech, I run technology for newsrooms, which includes the technologies that publish their work and keep them safe. And here I have to clarify: I didn’t sign up to do this for all of them. I signed up to do it for the people who want to make the world safer, fairer, more equal. There’s a reason why my two newsrooms have been The 19th and ProPublica. The only journalism I care about aims to hold a bright light to power and established power structures, and truly hold them to account.

The Bari Weisses believe it’s in the national interest to support whatever war the current administration has chosen to wage. They endorse official narratives in the name of covering “both sides”, even when they are obvious lies. They produce journalism about trans people without consulting trans people. They avoid the appearance of activism. They believe in upholding the status quo in the name of stability. And in doing so, they enable atrocities, big and small, foreign and domestic, to the point of collaboration.

How to know if that job will crush your soul

A good list of questions that will help you determine whether a job will be values-aligned or crush your soul from Anil Dash.

They also inform how to ask questions during an interview process. For example, Anil asks:

“What’s the lived experience of the workers there whom you trust? Do you have evidence of leaders in the organization making hard choices to do the right thing?”

If you don’t know — and if it’s not a big company, you probably don’t — the question becomes: how will you find out? The result will be a deeper and more meaningful hiring process.

But in addition to the values questions, Anil also asks about compensation and forward trajectory. These are important too. There’s no sense in taking a job that isn’t going to be sustainable for you, or won’t allow you to grow with it. In those situations, there’s barely a relationship; you’re ultimately just a resource.

The Curiosity Tour

This resonated:

“I had always been a linchpin and had chafed under cog-like conditions. I uncovered a key insight:

The process for finding a cog job and the process for finding a linchpin job are completely different.

I had been following a cog path. Reacting to job postings that were easily classifiable on LinkedIn and had a hiring process run by middle management who had no idea what to do with a linchpin when they saw one.”

What follows is — characteristically for Corey — a clear-eyed, easy-to-follow framework for finding linchpin-shaped jobs.

These are very different kinds of jobs: they often can’t be described cleanly, and although I’d argue strongly that all jobs should be hired through an open process, they might not even be positions that have been defined yet. At any rate, there are only good things to be gained by meeting with leaders and learning about their needs from a position of genuine curiosity.

When I was reading this piece, I realized I’d suggested that a friend do something similar in the publishing industry a long time ago. She wanted to break into publishing and had a core set of skills that operated at the intersection of a few things. More than anything else, she was a doer. So I suggested that she make a list of publishers she’d like to talk to — perhaps by looking at books that she loved and checking who ran the imprint — and reach out to them cold to have a conversation.

It worked, and within a few months she had a linchpin job at a publishing company in London. She wound up empowering an entire range of books to be published, writing some of her own, and transforming the way the publishing company ran.

So, you know, try it. You just might find you get your dream job. One that is values-aligned to you, where you don't need to hold your nose every day when you go to work.