Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.”
Abundance adherents often bristle at the suggestion that the project is orchestrated by Silicon Valley elites. But as the leaked documents demonstrate, Rosen and his colleagues clearly view it as such, and even frequently use the word “elite” by choice.
ROSEN OPERATES AT THE NEXUS of tech titans’ “hostile takeover” of San Francisco politics through a “grey money” network, documented in reporting from The Guardian and Mission Local. The Phoenix Project has dubbed this overlapping set of organizations and campaigns the “Astroturf Network” and detailed its operations in a set of reports and a pair of influence maps.
These people are villains.
And yet, somehow Microsoft can’t figure out how to monetize video games.