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The Left vs. the Sharing Economy: Where Are the Atari Democrats of Today?
Vox’s Timothy Lee looks at how Republicans and Democrats view the emerging sharing economy. Republicans — at least nationally — seem almost uniformly positive. They see Uber, for instance, as a feisty, innovative startup vs. regulators and the cronyist taxicab cartel. But Democrats are sort of split. Lee:
Some liberals dislike Uber on ideological grounds, but others — especially in the media, politics, and technology centers of New York, Washington, and San Francisco — are regular Uber customers. On one side of this debate are old-school liberals with strong ties to the labor movement and urban political machines. For them, Uber is a conventional story about worker and consumer rights. Labor unions believe Uber is flouting the law by classifying workers as independent contractors rather than employees. And they would love to unionize Uber’s fast-growing workforce.
More broadly, conventional liberals are suspicious of claims that deregulation and innovation will benefit workers and consumers in the long run. They view Uber’s “gig economy” as part of a broader trend toward declining worker power. They blame decades of deregulation — under both Republicans and centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton — for this trend, and believe stricter regulation of Uber could be part of a larger trend toward stricter regulation of labor markets more generally. In his campaign against Uber this week, Bill de Blasio primarily focused on congestion concerns, but he also mentioned workers’ rights as a major concern.
On the other side of the debate are liberals — many of them Uber customers — who see Uber as an innovative company fighting entrenched special interests. While they might be sympathetic to theoretical arguments for government regulation, they remember what the taxi market was like before Uber came along.
These tensions perhaps help explain why Hillary Clinton’s recent critique of the “gig” economy was so muted, like she had to check the box. It fits into her campaign thesis about growing economic insecurity, but she also doesn’t want to appear like an anti-innovation, status-quo Luddite and alienate young people and Silicon Valley supporters. But I don’t see any Dems calling themselves Uber Democrats or Lyft Democrats.
Just yesterday I watched a documentary about the rise and fall of Atari, the revolutionary 1980s video game company. (I had a 2600!) And that reminded me of an extinct political species called the Atari Democrat, which Wikipedia describes thusly: “In 1980s and 1990s US politics, the phrase Atari Democrat references Democratic legislators who suggested that the support and development of high tech and related businesses would stimulate the economy and create jobs.”
Those more business and market-oriented Dems evolved into the centrist 1990s Bill Clinton Democrats, helped along by the 1990s tech boom. Where are the Atari Democrats of today? Too much emphasis out there on the problems and challenges caused by technological change, perhaps, rather than the opportunities. Too much emphasis on wealth redistribution versus wealth creation. In the battle between the Inequality Democrats and the Innovation Democrats, the former seems to be winning.
Published in Economics
They’ve transformed into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation For Ridding The Planet Of Its Human Infestation?
Incidentally, I haven’t seen it yet but I’ve been told that documentary left a LOT out of the whole Atari story. Like, I’m told that it leaves out how Atari’s best game designers left the company to found Activision, which is a big reason why the games for the 5200 and the 7800 where almost exclusively simply remakes of 2600 games.
Who’s gonna pay for a new console that only plays games you already own (albeit with slightly better graphics and sound)?
I was never into games. I had two Atari computers, an 8 bit and then the Macintosh-like 1040STE. The “Jackintosh” was nicknamed after Jack Tramiel, the brash Atari chief who’d been kicked out of Commodore. John Sununu also had a 1040.
It’s true that “Atari Democrat” meant someone who was not only forward-looking, but willing to defy the party’s hidebound heritage without betraying its principles completely. A very roughly equivalent expression was “South Park Conservatives”, for younger conservatives who were broadly free market and pro-defense, but not inclined to get upset over comics saying (C of C violation) on Showtime at midnight.
I imagine the Atari-Democrats are Libertarians or maybe a few are teeth-gritting Republicans.
The next generation of Atari Democrats, I think, have abandoned politics as a means to advance innovation, realizing that it is ineffective. I recall Peter Thiel saying something to this effect, that politics is essentially not going to work to foster innovation, so the only way go innovate is to innovate so fast that the government can’t keep up. Then when you can, start a space colony or some sea-based floating city, or something equally fantastical to have limited government on your own terms.
What happened with Atari was a brain-drain -> death spiral brought about by the business end thinking that the engineers didn’t matter. It all came to a watershed with the ET disaster. The engineers had the last laugh though, all the way to the bank. Activision is a 19 billion dollar company, and that’s only one of the handful of successful companies to come out of that disaster.
Eventually the productive get fed up enough and check out. I’m sure there’s a parallel in here somewhere though…
Today’s console gamers.
Console gamers are scum. Long live the PC Master Race!
Steve Jobs worked at Atari. He said part of the reason he chose the name Apple was because it came before Atari in the phonebook.
#AmigaForever
Kaypro or Wang or GTFO.
One bit of dramatic exaggeration that amused me in Ashton Kutcher’s “Jobs” (which, BTW, was actually pretty good) was his frenzied anger at being “ripped off” by Windows 95. Jobs calling Bill Gates to yell at him was a funny scene partly because of the lese-majesty of imagining being powerful enough to have Gates’ phone number and yet be brazen enough to curse him out.
But of course, it’s largely BS. They would have had to shoot scenes where the CEO of Xerox screamed at Jobs for stealing ideas from a 1979 visit to Xerox PARC’s Alto system of icons, mouse and pointers, or for that matter showing the CEOs of Atari, Commodore, and Apple yelling at each other for having graphics interfaces in 1985.
Kaypro was great in its day, but I recently lifted this “portable”, which nowadays would be considered portable only by men with biceps of more than 24 inch circumference; guess I was a lot tougher in the mid-Eighties.
Today’s Atari Democrat analog (not digital) might be those younger, hipster-doofuses who work in IT, online marketing, online sales (think Dealer.com), etc., but run in the “go along to get along” herd mentality of believing and saying the right things publicly to fit in.
Do that long enough, and you start to get really bad at math, and think Bernie Sanders is right about a lot of things.
The same Democrats that claim to want “high-tech” jobs are the same chowderheads who want to spend billions on California high-speed rails that will go nowhere, and help nobody, except themselves during conversations with like-minded people who also agree that rail is the way to go.
Except when no one’s looking, of course -then they’ll take Uber home or foreign-made SUV that never once goes off-road.
He said “Wang”
If in the next minute, God should choose to destroy mankind in a flash of light, let this be our epitaph:
He said “Wang”.