I saw Jack Dorsey on TV once and he could barely speak or make eye contact. He seemed like the last person who would enter politics, but he has those ambitions, hoping to someday win the NYC mayoralty. Dorsey essentially wants to do the opposite of a Silicon Valley secession–he wants its numbers-crunching technocracy to fan out over urban centers. There’s something to be said for technocrats, but as we have seen with Mayor Bloomberg’s blind spot for homeless people, they too can have agendas colored if not by politics then by their personal experiences and prejudices. From D.T. Max’s recent New Yorker profile of Dorsey, a passage in which the tech titan sees the city as an interface, a Sim City come to life:

“His plans do not lack ambition. For some time now, Dorsey has been saying that he would like one day to be the mayor of New York. It’s a curious goal for someone who has lived in California for eight years, who has no experience in public life, and for whom human contact is a challenge—it’s one thing to look after a friend’s child, another to kiss a stranger’s baby. He does a creditable job on television, but never seems fully comfortable. Two years ago, Dorsey interviewed President Obama, in the White House, for an event called the Twitter Town Hall; the Los Angeles Times described Dorsey as a ‘stiff, sweaty, and serious emcee.’

Last month, at a Square recruiting session at Columbia University, the first question the engineering students asked Dorsey was about the mayoralty. He assured them that no such move was imminent; he could make more of a difference for now in the software world. He praised Bloomberg’s ability to master and improve the various systems of the city. There was no mention of his effect on individual lives. To Dorsey, the city was an engineering problem: Bloomberg had improved the interface and, thus, the experience of being a New Yorker. The audience nodded, though. Dorsey spoke their language. He told me that being mayor would come with ‘a lot of constraints, but I do well with constraints.'”