Andrew Yang founding team member seeks to unseat longtime incumbent and House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep.Nadler in June 23 NY-10 Democratic primary.
There’s a lot going on .Amid all of the hullabaloo, you may have missed the fact that a 26-year-old named Jonathan Herzog, a founding team member of the Andrew Yang campaign, is seeking to represent New York’s Tenth Congressional District —the one currently represented by Rep.Jerry Nadler.
I first encountered Herzog through a tweet from crypto wunderkind and Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin .
Herzog’s stance on cryptocurrency is certainly outside the conventional wheelhouse for Congress members, who in 2018 showcased a remarkable cluelessness about even the basic functions of the Internet.That Herzog is running against the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee only throws those differences in starker relief.
It’s a bold position from a young outsider candidate, but that’s familiar territory for Herzog, who was a founding member of the Andrew Yang campaign—and who has been since endorsed by Yang.
Herzog holds a J.D.
from Harvard, has worked as a legal advocate and civil rights organizer, and shares many of Yang’s positions —including on the need for a universal basic income.He grew up in the Tenth District, where he saw the gulf in economic access firsthand.
“I’m the son of immigrants, born and raised on the West side, on the border of Hell’s Kitchen in the Upper West, in the Tenth District, which covers the entire west side of Manhattan and South Brooklyn,” Herzog said in an interview with the author.“It covers Wall Street, it’s the world’s financial capital, but it’s also in many ways the ground zero for the concentration of market power, where one in six people live in poverty—even before Covid, before Trump—and you have public housing sitting opposite vacant luxury housing developments.”
MORE FROM FORBES TikTok’s Format Offers A Loophole For Branded Content Disclosures By Jesse Damiani That sense of the disparity created by “free market” capitalism is what drove Herzog to become a founding member of the Yang campaign, and it continues to drive his Congressional bid.
“Substantively, I’m very proud to be part of the Yang Gang, and endorsed by Andrew,” “If you look through our policy you’ll see—from a universal basic income, to a Data Bill of Rights, to sensible federal cryptocurrency legislation, it’s certainly borne out of this whole Humanity First movement.”
Universal Basic Income At a time when 44M Americans have filed for unemployment amid the novel Coronavirus pandemic, Herzog believes that the highest priority is to ensure that American citizens are able to rely on a baseline of federal support.
“Tragically, we’re in the midst of this pandemic where more than 40M are unemployed, and Congress has literally been on recess,” Herzog said.
“The two times they turned back the session was to pass a multi-trillion dollar bailout for the largest multinational firms.We haven’t learned the fundamental lessons of the 2008 financial crisis and quantitative easing.The bill that the incumbent in this race, Rep.Nadler, co-sponsored, the so-called Heroes Act , was again a mutli-trillion dollar bailout for the largest firms, in a country where tens of millions are unemployed and tens of thousands are being wiped out.”
And he’s already begun drafting the legislation.
“One thing I’ve done over the past number of weeks is actually sit down and draft the ‘Freedom Dividend Bill,’ which would be the universal basic income of $2,000 per month for every American adult for the duration of the pandemic, and $1,000 thereafter, and half of that for every American child,” Herzog said.
Capitalist hegemony frames this economic policy as unrealizable, but Herzog, like Yang, asserts that it could actually become the bedrock that unites those on the right and left—particularly as the fissures in global capitalism widen.
“We’re in the midst of a crisis on top of a crisis on top of a crisis—of a whole set of overlapping structural and institutional failures,” Herzog said.
“More and more people are waking up to the reality that the system, which is working as designed, is unsustainable.We’re seeing this both in the context of criminal justice and policing reform, but also in the context of what may have seemed to be this far out futuristic idea of direct cash relief to all Americans—even though it’s actually a pretty old idea, what Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.was championing 50 years ago.”
On Unseating a Legacy Candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s legacy stands as a shining example of a newcomer unseating a longtime incumbent—but viewing that from a future perch often belies how much of an uphill battle it can be.But in the Tenth District, the number of votes Herzog needs is surprisingly close-at-hand, even if the prospects aren’t necessarily tilted in his favor.
“If you look at this particular race in the Tenth District, in many ways the ground zero for all of these multi-decade trends we talk about—from the winner-take-all economy, the concentration of market power, segregation—if we get just 2% of all people in this entire district, just 15,000 votes by mail, by June 23, we will have unseated a 30-year incumbent, the number-two House Dem,” Herzog said.“It sends a loud and clear message that this new vision for an economy and a system is what we need now more than ever.”
Like AOC before him, Herzog had to face down systems in place designed to keep him out.
In a striking difference, though, Herzog had to sue just to stay on the ballot as the New York Democratic party tried to cancel the primary amid the novel Coronavirus pandemic.
Like AOC before him, Herzog had to face down systems in place designed to keep him out.In a striking difference, though, Herzog had to sue just to stay on the ballot as the New York Democratic party tried to cancel the primary amid the novel Coronavirus pandemic.
“Amidst this pandemic, what our New York City Democratic party leaders and elected officials decided to do was to cancel the primary—on the backdrop of Joe Biden warning that we have to be wary that President Trump could use Covid as a pretense to postpone the election,” Herzog said.
“I could never have imagined the Governor of New York, the New York Attorney General, every single Board of Elections commissioners—the entire NY Democratic party establishment—decided that what they should do is not fund and implement testing or contact tracing, or even shut down the city when recommended, they tried to cancel the primary.”
So Herzog filed a class-action lawsuit.
“We won, in federal court, we filed suit.
We won in the Southern District.And then they tried to appeal it and we won in the Second Circuit,” Herzog said.“Just to restore the basic constitutional right and protections of being allowed to vote.”
A New Embrace and Demand for Accountability in Tech On the back of that experience, Herzog found both frustration and inspiration.
“Was it worse than my greatest possible imagination of what power can lead one to do? Yes.But is that power also largely an illusion? Yes,” Herzog said.
“The expectation was, he’ll just take this as it is.But it turns out, when you tap on that house of cards, when you try to actually fight for what you believe is right, you can and will win.”
In this inspired, “to the moon” approach, Herzog finds alignment with the tech community—in particular the do-the-impossible sensibility often found in the blockchain ecosystem.He also believes there are many others, in the Tenth District and around the country, who crave the kind of massive change that he wants to bring about.
“We can 100% win this race, and it’s in part why I’m so excited about the crypto community in particular,” Herzog said.“The crypto community can really make a massive dent in these races, where tiny, razor-thin margins make the difference.”
MORE FROM FORBES Instacart Surges Past Walmart In Online Grocery Market By Jesse Damiani The Need for a Data Bill of Rights Tech policy cannot be an afterthought in this context, particularly given the rapid concentration of power in major tech companies through the harvesting of data.
“I think Yuval Harari provides the best framing, which is: whoever controls the algorithms today is the government,” Herzog said.“This is critical for framing why a Data Bill of Rights is so essential, why it’s the vanguard of the civil rights fight of this era.
We don’t even have GDPR or basic fundamental data protection in the United States, in an environment when trillions of dollars of value are being returned to the Amazons and Facebooks and Googles of the world.We’re all putting in labor that’s generating that value, and that labor is being uncompensated.”
He refers to Captcha systems, wherein people identify various images to verify that they’re not bots.In fact, that human participation is helping to train computer vision algorithms for free.
“Our federal government has largely been asleep at the switch,” Herzog said.“We’re talking about a federal government that defunded the Office of Technology Assessment for Congress in 1995.So it’s no surprise when our representatives use floppy disks, or don’t have apps on their phones, and we don’t have the time to continue playing catchup.
Unfortunately the veil has been pulled back in this moment where we see how urgent it is to accelerate our government and our society.”
This isn’t just theoretical for Herzog, who says that SEO has been used against himself, Andrew Yang, and other colleagues, to flood their presence on Google searches with information that appears damaging.
“If you Google my name, what you’ll see is remnants of hundreds of thousands of improperly indexed headlines, all by Sinclair broadcasting affiliates, on Google News,” Herzog said.“What happened is there was an ongoing disinformation campaign, where if you Googled any of our names, you’d see a headline related to terrorism, murder, suicide, and a false lede generated under it with our names under it.This covers every single Google News result, burying all the other stories coming up about me and the campaign.”
With the general public still quarantining, information through the Internet becomes even more of a deciding platform than it was pre-Covid.It also applies to facial recognition technologies, which exhibit bias that can disproportionately harm people of color and have come under intense scrutiny in the past week .All of which confirms for Herzog the urgent need for a Data Bill of Rights.
“If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone,” Herzog said.
“It illustrates how important it is to have the right to be informed as to what data is being collected about you and how it is used.”
How Blockchain Fits in In the 2010s, blockchain technology ballooned from a small, die-hard community of cryptography enthusiasts, tech nerds, and Libertarians to what has (at the time of this writing) settled into a $267B market.But leaving aside the crests and troughs of digital currencies, Herzog sees in the technology the seeds of powerful new ideas about the distribution of wealth and power.
“If you look at the genesis of the Bitcoin, it came in the wake of 2008 financial crisis, which is what really heralded in this age of impunity,” Herzog said.“We ended up essentially holding no one accountable and printing $4T for the banks and institutions that led to this collapse.In the context of civil rights and civil liberties, this has the greatest disparate impact for communities of color hardest in the context of redlining and loss of assets.”
A framework that incorporates blockchain theoretically allow for more accountable, egalitarian financial systems—but also for improved cybersecurity and record-keeping.
“Imagine a system where we have a public ledger that is decentralized and that can’t be overridden or manipulated by a single actor,” Herzog said.“This has bearing on our voter records and how we protect the rights of people to vote and express their preferences in a Democracy.This would allow us to bank the unbanked and help people get back on their feet.There are countless examples that we haven’t had to think about in the America because we’ve had a relatively functioning monetary system and functioning interaction on the whole with the banking system.We haven’t had the experience of say, asset-seizure in Cyprus .”
But blockchain is one piece of Herzog’s larger vision, something that crystallized for him watching the Yang campaign become a national movement: that Americans don’t have to just accept the systems and movements we’ve inherited.
“We can do so much better for ourselves, and having a government that understands, engages, and enables innovation in blockchain, crypto, and Bitcoin in particular, is a key part of being able to transcend and move forward,” Herzog said.
“We don’t have to accept the far-left and far-right populism of this era; we don’t have to settle for that.This power is an illusion.
We can do this if we wake up and come together and settle for the way things are.It’s up to us to change things for the better.”
Jesse Damiani
Jesse is a writer, curator, producer, entrepreneur, and public figure in emerging technology.He is Deputy Director of Emerging Technology at Southern New Hampshire
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Jesse is a writer, curator, producer, entrepreneur, and public figure in emerging technology.He is Deputy Director of Emerging Technology at Southern New Hampshire University, Editor-at-Large of VRScout , Series Editor of Best American Experimental Writing , and CEO of Galatea, a screenwriting and project management tool for VR and AR stories.He covers XR, blockchain, AI, art, and media, with work in Adweek , Billboard , Entrepreneur , IndieWire , HuffPost , Quartz , The Verge, and Wired ; and syndication in CBS News , CJR , The New Digital Storytelling textbook, and REDEF .He was listed as a top global VR influencer in 2017 by Onalytica, was interviewed as an expert source in the AP guide for immersive journalism, and runs “Immersive Writers & Storytellers” and “Blockchain XR.” He has served as a mentor in the YouTube VR Creator Lab and worked with Google in their initiative to develop educational content for the VR/AR industry as Curriculum Writer/Editor and on-camera instructor on their “VR and 360 Video Production” and “Introduction to Augmented Reality and ARCore” courses.
A regular speaker and host, he has appeared at conferences, shows, and events such as SXSW, Cheddar, and the School of the New York Times.He hosts TECH TOCK, a talk show in Microsoft’s SocialVR platform, AltspaceVR.He was the Curator/Producer for the XR art exhibition, SPATIAL REALITY, at sp[a]ce gallery; Co-Curator of VIRTUAL FUTURES with LACMA for LA Art Show; and Co-Curator of SIM-CINEMA with FLOAT and Wevr.He also curates The Tech Zone at DesignerCon and XR For Change, the XR summit at Games For Change..