Inside the Company Behind the Disastrous Iowa-Caucus App

In d owntown Washington, D.C., in a gleaming new WeWork building that’s still mostly uninhabited, one office suite is occupied by a nonprofit called Acronym, a left-leaning digital consultancy whose mission is to build “modern infrastructure for a new progressive movement.” To translate for anyone who doesn’t speak startup lingo, “infrastructure” essentially means code. (In 2014, when Mark Zuckerberg decided that “Move fast and break things” was too on the nose, he amended Facebook’s motto to “Move fast with stable infrastructure.”) Three weeks ago, I visited Acronym’s office, which is slick and hypermodern, decorated with succulents, cheeky Pop art, and a digital clock counting down to Election Day. Tara McGowan, Acronym’s thirty-four-year-old founder and C.E.O., held a large bottle of kombucha and wore an exhausted expression. In 2012, McGowan worked for Barack Obama’s reëlection campaign, producing digital content; in 2016, she was the digital director of Priorities U.S.A., a super PAC affiliated with Hillary Clinton. “Many big Democratic organizations are beholden to an old model that values traditional media over new media, personal relationships over data, oligopoly over meritocracy,” she said. “If we are going to find more voters where they are—online, on their phones—then we’ll have to be more risk-tolerant, and, if you’ll pardon the word, more disruptive.” Read Full Article »