What Anthony Weiner Knows About Technology: The New Yorker On Tuesday night, in the quiet of his Park Avenue South apartment, Anthony Weiner, the disgraced congressman turned mayoral candidate turned (once again) political joke, may have regretted not doing a better job of managing social media, that insatiable scandalmonger. In a press conference held earlier that the day, Weiner, with his wife, Huma Abedin, by his side, said that he was surprised that more of his sexually explicit texts had not surfaced earlier. Had he breathed a sigh of relief with each news report that focussed on his electoral prospects rather than on his cyber promiscuity? Or had he always known that technology would betray him again? A month ago, I attended a mayoral forum on tech policy, organized by the nonprofit Coalition for Queens, in which Weiner held forth on his vision for governing and connectivity. He kicked off the night with a joke: "You know, a lot of us who go to these candidate forums are sometimes criticized for always being on our iPhones, but here it's cool!" Sitting in the front row, I was transfixed and amused by his easy confidence and by the obvious pleasure that he took in inhabiting the spotlight. It's easy to forget that Weiner has real political talents. The moderators, the tech journalists Anjali Athavaley and Nilay Patel, quizzed Weiner, along with his fellow-candidates John Liu, Sean Albanese, and Adolfo Carrión, about everything from their phones (Weiner referred to his as "two Campbell's soup cans with a string attached that goes to a IBM Electric Three Typewriter that someone people call a crackberry") to tech clusters, to educating the next generation. Weiner responded swiftly and assuredly, even on subjects about which he knew nothing. "I don't know what that is," he said of a prominent tech start-up, "but its name sounds like a beer you could get at a Williamsburg bar." Repeatedly, he pressed the audience to read his e-book, "Keys to the City," a list of policy recommendations from his 2008 mayoral run that he had not gotten around to updating. Curiously, the book promises to use G.P.S. technology to track sex offenders: "Now that GPS technology is less expensive and less intrusive," Weiner writes, "all movement-limited sex offenders and abusers should be required to keep a GPS tag on their person that alerts the local precinct if they go into restricted areas or near protected people." Could Weiner himself have benefitted from this type of rigorous supervision of online wanderings? Could he have been helped by a device that alerted Abedin whenever he sent sexually explicit selfies to other women? The moderators did not pose these types of questions, and when the audience members were allowed to address the candidates, neither did they. The subject of Twitter was avoided almost entirely. Why, at a forum on government and technology, were we so reticent to confront a politician who had been brought down by the intersection of the two? It was a moment in which Weiner should have been scrutinized assiduously - he was campaigning for the trust that he had recently betrayed. Are we so entranced by stories of resilience and redemption? During a discussion of a crop of tech companies commonly known as "disruptors," Weiner joked that he identified with the term: "I'd like to think I've done that to the mayoral campaign." This one-liner won Weiner one of his biggest laughs of the night, and it was his lone acknowledgement of his messy personal history. Weiner played up his status as the maverick, but his appeal, until yesterday, lay in his ability to convince us that he had changed for the better. That Weiner is "deeply flawed," as he professed to the young woman who chose to publicize his latest round of texts, is perhaps less troubling than his arrogant belief that he doesn't have to fully confront his mistakes, and that the voting public can be as easily seduced as the faceless women whom he has sought out online. That Anthony Weiner understood the crucial role technology could play in painstakingly policing the lives of ex-criminals is telling. He knows better than anyone how difficult it is to change. Photograph by Jason DeCrow/AP.