I'm in Michigan again, after being engrossed in the proceedings of the 2026 Code for America Summit in Chicago. The main lesson? Where government meets technology, there is only room for CEOs or politicians to speak up. The old party, -on'line.

The corollary to this lesson seems to be, that there is no place to mention the foreign or domestic humanitarian implications of the current US federal policies. No mention of our national commerce in munitions, or aggression aimed at the ruling bodies of neighboring peoples. No dialogue to address policies, only to accomodate their implementation.

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Here's some background on my relationship with the organization; copied from my recent cover letter to them in an application from January.

I remember the long run of Wednesday nights that I spent at CfA headquarters in SoMa, before I ever applied to be a fellow, pushing along on the program at Code for San Francisco (now called SF Civic Tech). The next year, as a fellow in Seattle, we had a chance to speak to Open Seattle. Years on, I checked in on Code for Philly. They turned me away that night, because I had forgotten to bring my vaccination card. Ironically, by then my vaccination card was being signed by a medical officer in the House of Representatives.

Zoom into the middle of that span, though - and during the pandemic I also honed in on Chi Hack Night, and Lansing Codes. This was a challenging moment for all of us, because the organization where we had found a home seemed to be closing the doors on its most public forum, the brigades. I had one good idea of what could happen, though none of us had any idea of all that would.

More than any other group, Code for America had seemed like a philosophical approach; their name appears to command, or demand, the action they seek. "Code, now! for America!"

Now, rather than being read as an order, their name displays as a menu, only a single option: "Code, for America, from Anthropic AI. Constitution included, deliberation unnecessary."

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Code for America announced their recent partnership with Claude; and I am saddened beyond measure to see the consequences clear as day.

CfA has become a handy vehicle, a ship, to package and bundle through the procurement issues for municipal, state, and federal agencies seeking access to AI products as a guarantee for early, phased-in retirement. Now, the AI that Anthropic has been selling is going to be packaged cleanly, in vibe-coded and tailored-to-size apps for one purpose or another; from food aid to, someday, automated evictions; including those conducted at gunpoint, or remotely by missile.

"The strategy is delivery", after all, in a nation whose primary product is munitions.

How much is able to be cleanly disposed of, brushed under the rug of "AI policy"? How many people shall be disenfranchised from an education in the nuances of policymaking, and equally so from learning of the machinery that is here to replace policymaking?

There had once been room for the audience to draft plans; now we are asked to calmly take our chairs in the lecture hall. How many of these people, barred from taking action to care for their future in a direct manner, aching from the numbness of shepherding inhuman agents, discouraged from composing a real decision when a machine could describe a similar one, are going to finally be eager for the role-model guidance they've so far been lacking, when it lands upon them in the form of a military draft notice?

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Through the many main-stage discussions, rather than dialogues, a common theme had been how to "catalyze and scale our impact"; how some people were still "searching for a magic bullet"; how to measure the consequences when "an impact lands". Nobody seemed to notice that this language is an echo of the explosions, produced and sold by US companies as clean, slick, packaged missiles, aimed at people also disenfranchised by their rulers. Perhaps the "catalyzed reactions" our conference leaders are searching for happens to be the white phosphorous being deployed in Lebanon by Israel, our supposed national ally.

My problem with Code for America has been their lack of public engagement. Before 2021, the organization had been a hub of discussion through the nation, because of the local brigades who circulated ideas day in and day out. When Jennifer Pahlka handed the reigns over, and the organization decided to abandon their grassroots base, they became fully closed to ideas from the public. There seemed to be a cost-benefit decision at play - the cost of moderating discussion boards full of active engineers seemed to surpass the benefit of a thousand considerate and concerned coders, thoroughly embodying the mission of the organization, engaging in local action in hundreds of municipalities - in and beyond the USA.

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Sadly, this could be flipped around easily. Bring an engineer rather than a CEO onto the stage, and we may be reaching through to the demands and clear direction that solidarity groups have been promoting for decades, normally unheard: open access to the means of production.

In this hype cycle, AI is the product; the means of production is access to the underlying, open-source mechanisms:

• the vector databases,
• the encoding models,
• the decoding models,
• the tokenization models,
• the similarity search engines,
• the graph databases for mapping knowledge,

the many pieces whose "sum of the parts" is called AI, though which each in measured additions or absence in a product form the desired recipe that is called for on one occasion or another. An example? You can make more humane decisions by handing a case-manager direct access to a knowledge graph (basically imagine Notion or AirTable), rather than obscuring the facts of the case through an encoder (email correspondence -> assumed facts), and a decoder (recorded facts -> assumed conclusion and irrevocable consequence).

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The one session I did find some solace in though, was the discussion of the group collaborating with IRS direct file; they open-sourced their "fact graph" of dependencies for IRS tax return forms. For more research and open-source programming along those lines, see PolicyEngine.

I made a small proposal to a colleague in the first breakout room of the conference, to examine how often we would hear the phrase "AI" compared to "vector database"; the concluding ratio was as predicted, many-to-zero.

These CEOs charging headlong into the camera lens on stage know that their product is made of a delicate balance of internal mechanisms, that a small shuffle from one direction to another, a dialing in of temperature, can produce the difference between a swell of emergency housing response and a cascade of evictions when people become a problem. The logic of resettlement can be run from a single dial: "Population from 11 to 3, please."

This experiment has played out before, during the election cycle for John F Kennedy, in a corporation called Simulmatics. Simulmatics built a "People Machine" for the 1952 presidential election, which predicted the electoral consequence of polling inputs.

Our modern "People Machine" goes much deeper than polling numbers - it has a full model of the language used to relate and grasp hold of our emotions. How real can this "People Machine" be when making humane decisions, and how shell-shocking the consequences when they fail to comprehend that the've been raised, and hired, in the absence of humanity?

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Contasia, Arlene, Amanda;

I'm on the road to DC and then NYC today after Chicago. I had been either been eager or dreading the summit for months, and I'm sorry to see how the days played out.

My paranoias played a serious role, of course, and my physical exhaustion and lack of company. There seem to be few friends remaining after so many years of changes.

Your organization's productions are emotionally charged for me, especially once again seeing old partners-in-crim(inal justice) amplifying messages that seem designed to keep people in their proper camp.

I hope this opens discussion, and I hope to begin helping those left behind. https://operand.online/chronicle/cfa.2026

To begin a dialogue, if you choose to respond, I'd ask how government is "for the people, by the people" - if the only programming skills on the menu are "Discrete Logic 211" fact-graphs, and the user manual collection for Anthropic products?

I'm glad to see your user researhers are reaching new depths in the Grand Canyon, though for us subscribed to the Baltimore PD's media relations list, the daily shooting briefings imply we cannot do so much to  keep our heads down.

If your purpose is to ensure policies are delivered as ordered, please consider how damnable those orders can be.

(Once again,)
Peace,
Calliope Y

in Proton Mail,  calliope@operand.online
in Signal,       c4lliope.**
in secure,       202-***-****