Katherine Maher is not a liberal or a leftist

On the merger of government and civil society

Katherine Maher, NPR’s new CEO, has been in the spotlight for more than a week now as the straight-out-of-casting avatar of peak woke and peak institutional attainment.

But Katherine Maher is not a liberal or a leftist. Though she apes identitarian thought bubbles you won’t find her on a picket line, or splitting any of her previous 800k annual Wikipedia salary with the downtrodden.

I don’t remember it being a trait of the Left to work at the World Bank, the National Democratic Institute, and HSBC, intern at the Council of Foreign Relations, be a WEF young leader, or a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a NATO affiliated think-tank.

Maher is what I call a Cosmopolitan Authoritarian - a cultural libertine that institutional power has anointed into the charmed circle.

I crossed Maher’s path several times on the digital rights conference circuit but met her only once when I made the mistake of working with an organisation on her supermarket list of former employers, Access Now. Curt would understate the brief meeting, though I’m reluctant to infer too much.

Rather than liberalism or leftism what Maher crystallises is the new mode of 21st-century power – bringing together the cultural and narrative potential of woke empathy, the methodologies of NGO-ism, and the fist of government.

In addition to sitting on the boards of Signal and digital rights NGO the Center for Technology and Democracy, she sits on the U.S. Secretary of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a “longtime fellow” for the Truman Center. At the Truman Center, she led the Afghanistan Operations Center and worked with “Truman National Security Project members” to help extract people from the country after the botched withdrawal. Among those “members” is former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

From overseeing a website to assisting with military operations in just four months. “Rising star” I guess.

This is to say nothing of Wikipedia’s cooperation with election Tabletop exercises with the Pentagon or regular “industry meetings” with the US Government.

There is further speculation about Maher’s government affiliations, but there is already ample in the public record to demonstrate very close ties.

Perhaps I am naive but when I was getting started in activism and civil society in the late 90s and early 2000s you didn’t see this kind of naked overlap between the national security state and civil society. The Left hated it and spent decades railing against government overreach and advocating for civil liberties.

Maher and others have been critical in creating a new normal that now sees the government as a “partner” to civil society, rather than an adversary to be held accountable.

In 2017 she said “Free knowledge is inherently radical” and “We exist to liberate information” in reference to Wikipedia:

Just a few years later she stated that she had abandoned “free and open” as they were a "white male Westernized construct", and that “On the side of governmental regulation, the number-one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment”

Thus the Katherine Mahers of the world shepherded a civil society committed to Internet openness and freedom across a bridge named woke to sign up for government control.

Was the flip because internet freedom, whilst at first useful for foreign regime change, now threatened regime change at home?

With government-affiliated actors like Maher employing woke as a cudgel to radically reshape the norms of the movement for a free and open internet, the bigger question is how organic is woke itself? And how much has it had a helping hand?

I draw no conclusion at this stage, but you may.