March 6, 2018

Remembrance of Technology Past

The BlackBerry Bold 9000 circa 2008. Look at all those cool apps and that gigantic color screen. And it supported full 3G!

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Atrios:

In a novel I’m currently reading (I won’t say which because my point isn’t to pick on it), the author keeps Getting Things Wrong about the 90s, and not to provide deliberate creative anachronisms from what I can tell. The “internet” and “Brooklyn” of 2008 (roughly) are being presented as happening in 1998 and it’s really annoying me.

If this was only a problem in novels, it wouldn’t be so bad. But people have bad memories in real life too, and it has real-life consequences. Hillary Clinton, for example, made her fateful decision to use one email account in 2009. It seems pointlessly stupid to us today, with our iPhones and phablets and smart watches able to do anything we want them to. It’s hard to remember what 2009 was like, but the iPhone was still brand new back then and official Washington was still smitten with BlackBerries. Unfortunately, BlackBerries had serious limitations on handling multiple email accounts in a secure way. In practice, hauling around two BlackBerries was your only real solution.

But we forget about these pesky limitations of the past. BlackBerries today seem about as ancient as fax machines. Being limited to one email account is unfathomable. And yet, for security-minded folks that was reality back in the dim mists of 2009 unless you carried two devices. It was a pain, and Hillary had always used a single email account as a senator, so she just kept on doing it. Plus it was a busy time: everyone had a ton of transition stuff to attend to and no one really wanted to tell the Secretary of State that she couldn’t do this. So she did. And now Donald Trump is president.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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