Mamdani Hires Lisa Gelobter as Chief Tech Officer

The misinformation around this is ridiculous. There's a bunch of articles, written more recently than not, that all make some kind of unfounded claim that Shockwave lead to GIFs or GIF animation. One of them is the source for the line in the Wikipedia article that makes a similar claim. The Wikipedia doesn't even mention her working at Netscape ever either. Brutal.

The Director of Program Management may have had the initial, vague idea. Is that "invented"? It almost certainly wasn't "implemented the first working prototype"...

Obviously NYC is very big and very wealthy. But the powers of a Mayor depend on the city.

I'm not a New Yorker, but here's how I understand it: NYC mayor appoints a bunch of people who run various bureaucratic legs of the city government. The guys who manage taxes, zoning, and whatnot. But the Mayor has to get those people approved by the city council. The mayor can also veto policies written by the city council, but he can be overruled with a two-thirds vote by the council. The council writes the budget, and the Mayor can only approve it or veto it.

This all sounds pretty normal, but it actually varies a lot depending on the city. In Chicago, for example, the Mayor writes the budget, instead of the council. But, the Aldermen (a Chicago city council member is called an Alderman btw) have a lot more power downstream of the budget, since they control stuff like zoning within their respective wards. The Aldermen also redraw their own political boundaries every 10 years, with no input from the Mayor whatsoever. I guess I'd say Chicago's mayor has less "first-order" power but more "second-order" power compared to NYC's mayor. Chicago is weird.

What should you make of this? I'm not sure. Maybe Mayors in Europe or Asia have way more power than Mamdani does, I don't know. I reckon that NYC mayor has more power than most American mayors, even when you ignore the differences in scale.

It's interesting to poke around and see how the game of telephone works.

The first mentions I saw on Twitter were from February 2018[0]. Subsequent Black History Months[1] would reiterate how she invented GIFs or sometimes animated GIFs. You even get crazy things like how she invented the animated GIF while working with the Obama administration[2]. (That post references an article that talks about her working with the Obama administration that doesn't mention GIFs[3]. The author just merged the two things she's credited with.)

In 2024, the story is that she invented the GIF at Netscape[4], which obviously makes little sense. It could be a reference to GIFs looping, but I see no evidence for that, especially since her LinkedIn[5] doesn't say she worked at Netscape. She worked at Macromedia, which involved work with Netscape, and I suspect the genesis is her work on Shockwave during that time (2005-2010), and that was taken to be a precursor to animated GIFs (obviously false, but an easy mistake for someone young and non-technical. Maybe it's a cultural precursor to modern animated GIF usage in people's minds?)

Overall, though, this is a pretty dumb thing for them to claim, even if the claim is widespread across the Internet these days. She was roughly 17 when animated GIFs were first developed.

As I said, it's interesting to see how the game of telephone plays out. I don't think anyone involved in this was intentionally spreading false information, and I don't really expect random Twitter users to fact-check carefully. I would like NYT to put some effort into it. As it is, we now have a NYT touting an obviously-false claim when she actually did a lot of really important and impressive stuff they could focus on instead. There's no need to spread fake accolades for her. Her actual contributions stand on their own.

[0] https://x.com/Reel365/status/960288180447694848

[1] https://x.com/search?q=%22Gelobter%22%20%22gif%22%20until%3A... / https://x.com/search?q=%22Gelobter%22%20%22gif%22%20until%3A... / https://x.com/search?q=%22Gelobter%22%20%22gif%22%20until%3A...

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7034543821...

[3] https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2022/08/18/computer-scientis...

[4] https://seattlemedium.com/lisa-gelobter-the-trailblazing-com...

[5] https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisagelobter/details/experience/

Addendum: In the paragraph after merging Shockwave and GIFs, NYT references a Forbes interview[0] where she specifically says she didn't invent GIFs.

NYT:

> Ms. Gelobter was the director of program management at Macromedia where she helped develop Shockwave into a web plug-in that allowed for video games and animation on the web, turning still images into moving GIFs — animated images known as a graphics interchange format.

Interview linked in the very next paragraph:

> Gelobter: I want to clarify that I did not create GIFs although I get credited for it a lot. I think people conflated thinking about animation on the web as being animated GIFs but that was Shockwave. Again, what we did with Shockwave was transformative.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jumokedada/2021/02/18/meet-the-...