I’m John Schochet — a lawyer, a middle-aged dad and stepdad, and Housing & Land Use Committee co-chair for Manhattan Community Board 7 on New York City’s Upper West Side. I grew up in Northern California, studied history at Yale, and went to law school at UVA. I began my career as a law firm litigator and then spent more than a decade at the Seattle City Attorney’s Office, where I advised mayors and city councilmembers, worked on the city’s first-in-the-nation $15/hour minimum wage legislation, lobbied the Washington State Legislature on behalf of the city government, and served as the in-house lawyer for agencies handling everything from animal control to fair housing. I’ve been to all 50 states and driven across the country seven times (plus Canada once). I’m a Seattle sports fan, an Eagle Scout, and a member of the Abundance Network. Twenty years inside and around public institutions is how I learned what this project is about.
What This Project Is
Last year I sat in a community board parks committee meeting and watched a parks department project manager go through 23 slides explaining why replacing two broken drinking fountains in Riverside Park was going to cost $375,000 and wouldn’t be done for nearly two years. No one involved was corrupt or incompetent. Each piece of the project that drove up the price had its own logic, but the end result was absurd. The local participatory budget process had originally allocated the $375,000 for five modern hydration stations with bottle fillers in new locations throughout the park. Instead the city was using the money to replace two existing drinking fountains with updated versions of the same thing — nothing new, not even bottle fillers.
The status quo’s defenders will tell you this is just how things work. I disagree; we shouldn’t have to sit back and accept costs and timelines like these as inevitable facts of life. The populists — the loudest critics of the establishment — don’t have the answers either. Their method is to name villains, promise consequences, and insist that making the villains pay will fix things. That might feel satisfying, but it won’t get drinking fountains with bottle fillers installed on time and at a reasonable cost. The populists’ villains may get their comeuppance; the $375,000 price tag remains.
What’s missing is a path for those of us who are genuinely fed up with the status quo and also unconvinced by populism’s villain-centric worldview — people who believe that government can and should work, that democratic institutions matter, and that markets and the public sector both have important roles to play. We can see that something is seriously broken while recognizing that burning it all down would just make things worse. That path needs a story: a way of explaining what went wrong and how we can fix it that is both true and capable of competing with populism’s emotional pull. Marshall Kosloff, host of The Realignment podcast, made that case earlier this year in “The Missing Liberal Story.” He argues that the center-left has plenty of good policy ideas but no narrative to make them resonate, and he issues a challenge to come up with one. This project is my attempt at an answer.
People vs. the Machine proposes a center-left story built to compete with populism. A story needs an antagonist. That antagonist isn’t a group or a class — it’s a system. The Machine is my name for that system: a self-perpetuating structure of misaligned incentives, accumulated over decades by well-meaning people, that makes everything cost too much and take too long. No one designed it and no one controls it. The Machine is not a conspiracy; it’s the aggregate output of thousands of individually rational decisions that add up to something no one would build on purpose. The People are the story’s protagonists, and everyone who wants to live in a country where things actually work can join them.
What to Expect
People vs. the Machine‘s foundational essay, “The $375,000 Drinking Fountains,” lays out how the Machine operates, the case for building a coalition to fight it, and how Abundance and Popularism fit into that fight. Follow-up pieces will go deeper into specific issues like housing, immigration, and transportation. Others will take on broader topics, including the ideology the center-left actually needs, the architecture of a Machine-fighting coalition and what it could become, why authenticity and popularism are complementary, and the case for social moderation as an affirmative set of values rather than a compromise. My goal is to build on the work of others rather than restate it.
I’m proposing something I’ve put a lot of thought into. I might be wrong about some of it. This framework won’t work if it can’t withstand honest scrutiny, and I welcome feedback and disagreement. I only ask that critics engage with what I’ve actually argued rather than what seems easiest to argue against.
