Hoffman, who believes that immigration reform would right a wrong and also create new jobs at every level, from software engineers to dry cleaners, told Zuckerberg, “The normal Silicon Valley thing is to focus on high-end visas and say, ‘The rest of it’s not my problem.’ ”

“Yes,” Zuckerberg said. “But there’s this huge moral component. We might as well go after all of it.”

“O.K., good,” Hoffman said. “I’m in.”

Earlier this year, Green wrote up a fifteen-page plan—subsequently leaked to Politico—which had more to do with tapping Silicon Valley’s potential as a political force than with the issue of immigration. One section of the text listed several reasons that “people in tech” could be organized into “one of the most powerful political forces,” including, “Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans.” This spring, the founders held a dinner, and pledged money from their personal fortunes; reportedly, the collective goal was fifty million dollars. A staff was hired in San Francisco, and political consultants from both parties were engaged in Washington. One afternoon last month, Green sat on the sunny rooftop terrace of a friend’s town house in Pacific Heights, just south of the Presidio, with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin hills. He was barefoot, in jeans and a red T-shirt, with his left leg propped on a decorative rock bowl and immobilized in a brace. (He had broken it skiing.) A young assistant named Manny brought water and walnuts. Green’s frizzy hair fluttered in the wind blowing off the ocean as he worked his phone and his MacBook Air, which was decorated with a sticker that said, “The Dream Is Now.” An op-ed by Zuckerberg was going to run in the Washington Post the next morning, announcing the formation of a new group in Silicon Valley, called FWD.us. “I’m the president of the organization,” Green said. “There will be an actual office.” He was returning to his first passion, political organizing. His wide, stubbly face broke into a smile: he had spent ten years trying to convince Zuckerberg that politics matters, and he had finally done it.

Gavin Newsom was the mayor of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011. He became nationally known when, in 2004, he legalized gay marriage in the city, despite a statewide ban. He currently suffers the indignities of being California’s lieutenant governor, but he is talked about as a successor to Governor Jerry Brown, if not a Presidential candidate. He’s tall, with perfect teeth, almost provokingly handsome, and also self-mocking (“I’d go after a guy like me—gelled hair”), with a jock’s stride and habit of calling other men “bro.” We met in a cavernous private club, near the Embarcadero waterfront, which is known as Founders Den, and provides a “home base” for select start-ups and “experienced entrepreneurs who are between projects.” Newsom rents a desk there—it’s his San Francisco office, and he wants to be considered part of the tech cohort. He stopped by the desks of hackers, who looked up from their laptops to greet the ex-mayor.

Earlier this year, Newsom, an obsessive reader of business books, published “Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government,” featuring blurbs from Bill Clinton, Cory Booker, Michael Bloomberg, Stewart Brand, Arianna Huffington, and the founders of Yelp, Craigslist, and SalesForce; most of them were interviewed for the book. “In the private sector and in our personal lives, absolutely everything has changed over the last decade,” Newsom writes. “In government very little has. . . . Technology has rendered our current system of government irrelevant, so now government must turn to technology to fix itself.” This is the book’s breezily apocalyptic theme. As mayor, Newsom became friends with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google; instituted smart parking meters; and used cloud computing to collect data on the needs of the city’s large homeless population. Project Homeless Connect, as the effort was named, greatly improved San Francisco’s ability to provide the homeless with services—if people complained of tooth pain, say, volunteers could tell them where to get free dental care. It’s considered one of Newsom’s successes, and has been replicated in hundreds of other cities. But people I spoke with also said that Newsom’s use of technology in government sometimes seemed like a flashy distraction. In 2008, instead of delivering his State of the City address before a live audience, Newsom uploaded a seven-and-a-half-hour speech to YouTube; after being ridiculed, he abandoned the practice.

Since then, Newsom has become even more of a believer in tech as the answer to what ails government. “Citizenville” represents thinking by analogy, and it’s useful primarily as a guide to concepts and slogans about government in the age of the Internet that are currently circulating in the vapor of conferences, political speeches, and TED Talks. (“Gov 2.0” is the term coined by the tech publicist Tim O’Reilly; he also coined the earlier term “Web 2.0.”) Technology has flattened hierarchies. Data empowers people. Government is not a vending machine, with bureaucrats dispensing services, but a platform—like Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone—where citizens can build their own apps and interact with one another and come up with their own solutions.

“We have to meet the people where they are,” Newsom argues. “And where they are right now is playing games and spending time on social-networking sites.” Online games that draw people into collective competitions, like FarmVille—the inspiration for the book’s title—can be models for civic improvements, by enlisting both government officials and citizens in contests to find solutions for urban problems like potholes, and handing out prizes to the winners. Why not use “gamification” to improve service at the Bronx and Brooklyn D.M.V.s, by pitting them against each other in a competition? Crowdsourcing, à la Kickstarter, points the way to funding public projects by raising money from interested citizens. Newsom writes, “What if you could create competition among city services . . . through a kind of government Yelp? Then we’d be on to something.”

“Citizenville,” which seems to be unread, if not unknown, where its heroes live and work, has won praise from no less than Newt Gingrich. This shouldn’t be surprising, since its terms point toward an arrangement in which many of the tasks of government are outsourced to citizens empowered with smartphones. When Newsom acknowledged that San Francisco was becoming unaffordable to many residents—“Can’t have a vibrant democracy without a vibrant middle class”—I asked how “Citizenville” addressed this problem.

“I don’t know that it does,” Newsom said. “I’d like to have an answer to that. I didn’t take that on squarely. I was looking at competence in government.”

Technology can be an answer to incompetence and inefficiency. But it has little to say about larger issues of justice and fairness, unless you think that political problems are bugs that can be fixed by engineering rather than fundamental conflicts of interest and value. Evgeny Morozov, in his new book “To Save Everything, Click Here,” calls this belief “solutionism.” Morozov, who is twenty-nine and grew up in a mining town in Belarus, is the fiercest critic of technological optimism in America, tirelessly dismantling the language of its followers. “They want to be ‘open,’ they want to be ‘disruptive,’ they want to ‘innovate,’ ” Morozov told me. “The open agenda is, in many ways, the opposite of equality and justice. They think anything that helps you to bypass institutions is, by default, empowering or liberating. You might not be able to pay for health care or your insurance, but if you have an app on your phone that alerts you to the fact that you need to exercise more, or you aren’t eating healthily enough, they think they are solving the problem.”

Steven Johnson, the author of many books about technology, recently published “Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age.” Johnson argues that traditional institutions and ideologies are giving way to a new philosophy, called “peer progressivism,” in which collective problems are solved incrementally, through the decentralized activity of countless interconnected equals—a process that mirrors the dynamics of the Internet. In politics, peer progressivism could mean the rise of “citizen journalists” tweeting and posting on social media, or an innovation that Johnson calls “liquid democracy,” which would allow you to transfer your vote to a friend who is more knowledgeable about, say, the school board. In this thin book, Johnson takes progress as a given, without seriously considering counter-arguments about stagnation and decline. It would be foolish to argue that America’s mainstream media and political system are functioning as they should, but it’s worth wondering if “peer networks” really have the answers. An essay in the journal New Media & Society, by Daniel Kreiss, of Yale; Megan Finn, of Berkeley; and Fred Turner, of Stanford, points out that a system of “peer production” could be less egalitarian than the scorned old bureaucracies, in which “a person could achieve the proper credentials and thus social power whether they came from wealth or poverty, an educated family or an ignorant one.” In other words, “peer networks” could restore primacy to “class-based and purely social forms of capital,” returning us to a society in which what really matters is whom you know, not what you could accomplish.