It’s Like Uber But for the Dispossessed
Tech doesn’t have secrets. It can’t lie. But tech companies can do whatever they want now because the government can’t afford to keep up.
Under these conditions, the first-mover advantage is getting to lobby for the policy that regulates your own industry.
Fucking sweet deal, y’all.
Used to be you had to succeed first and become an industry leader before you could get enough capital to buy politicians. Now you just got to be first in the game and come backed with millions of bubble money.
So you don’t even need to be fucking SOLVENT to lobby for policy that will ruin the competition in your industry. You can kick that ladder out immediately.
It’s not even free market competition at this point — it’s VCs handing money to companies and those companies writing the law that regulates the market.
At this point, it’s worth thinking about who’s actually on the other side of this regulatory circlejerk.
If you’ve ever spent time on the Hill, you know its Congressional cafeterias to be dominated by interns who — if you had to guess — come primarily from wealthy parents because who else could afford to live in Washington, D.C. to work full-time for three months without pay.
Though most interns will never work in policy, the vast majority of people who work in legislation have at least a year of unpaid intern experience. Others will volunteer on campaigns, also largely in unpaid positions or at very low pay. So, exempting overt nepotism, the only way to get a job in legislation is finding a way to live on very low pay for several years without having, I guess, to worry about student loans or, like, eating.
Funnily enough, the conclusion you should draw from this is that the vast majority of young people writing policy today are drawn from the 1%.
Part of the reason Uber and AirBNB can rewrite the laws they break is because the rich kids writing legislation don’t see them as threats. The liberal kids from this class think Innovation will crush our enemies and hoodied entrepreneurs will drag their bodies back to us on gilded tech carriages because they watch Silicon Valley and haha they get it. In other words, the kids writing policy are fucking idiots whose capacity for critical thinking shorts out somewhere on the plane to Grandma’s summer house in the Hamptons.
For this elite group, David Plouffe is to be idolized as the poster child of public-private revolving door success.
Crushing government AND business — suspiciously at the same time?
Hero.
This we should all find this a fairly sorry of state of affairs. The problem isn’t just that the candidates themselves are so often drawn from the 1% (they are), but that so is their staff. The classism that pervades the Senate and House buildings in D.C. never gets much discussed, but it’s always relevant. These are the only line of defense the 99% has against lobbyists wanting to undermine the security of the poor.
So when we’re talking about tech rewriting the laws as it breaks them, it’s important to remember that the lack of diversity everywhere, even in government, has very real consequences for our wellbeing.
When the interests of those writing the laws align with the interests of those breaking them, what hope is there for the rest of us?
This problem obviously goes all the way to the top. Without public campaign finance and spending limits, no one from the 99% can afford to run for office. According to one study, winning a Senate in 2012 cost $10 million. Elizabeth Warren had to raise over $40 million to win her seat.
The rest of us?
Ha, fuck us.
We’re screwed.
When you think about this for more than five minutes, you realize that our governing infrastructure remains underfunded so as to chronically reproduce oligarchy at every stage and in every office. Christ, it’s so endemic that it can’t even be said to be intentional. But it does the job, doesn’t it?
And this state of affairs works extremely well for the emerging class of entrepolicists or policipreneurs or whatever you want to call them. While the private-public revolving door has always existed, with the rest of us jacking off to everything Silicon Valley does, never has it ever been made to seem so fresh and so cool.
Heck, even Obama says he wants to be a venture capitalist now!
Hope and change, people. Hope and change.
