Obamacore, Ubercore

The revenge of my youth

On Tuesday night, I stood with many hundreds of human beings in Ride App Zone Lot 35, waiting for a car to come and get me. We were all, like befuddled toddlers, squinting at our phones, summoning cars that would not come. We had our credentials slung dutifully around our necks because we had just come from the United Center, where the Democrats had finished night two of their convention. Since we all, apparently, weren’t staying at the DNC-designated hotels—they’ve got chartered buses for that—we were stuck in the lot, the beleaguered masses trying against all odds to escape. At some point, when your driver was within several minutes of Ride App Zone Lot 35, you were supposed to text them to ask them for their lane number—where they might appear to whisk you away. With six minutes to go, I texted my Uber driver to tell me his lane number when he arrived. A minute later, he canceled the ride.

Seeing the snarl of traffic, the delirium of bodies, I did not blame him.

I joked, on another platform that rocketed to great prominence in the 2010s, that I would disrupt all of this chaos with a new technology called “Taxi Stand” and I would bring “Taxi Stand” to Silicon Valley and make $10 billion. As the night wore on, I considered whether I was joking at all, and if this was where the titanic tech revolutions of the 2010s had got us: thronged in a parking lot, clenching dying smartphones, treating the taxicab like Godot.

Because, of course, this was a problem that got solved many, many decades ago. In large cities with large crowds, there were taxi companies and taxi drivers, and they lined up curbside near arenas and stadiums to take people home. No phones were required. Instead, the people would come to a designated point, stand in line, and depart, one-by-one or two-by-two or however large their party might be, into the taxis that were also idling at the curb. This still happens at airports. This is why, when I leave airports in America and across the world, I always take taxis if public transportation isn’t available or reliable. As the rubes peck at their screens, I amble up to the curb and jump into the taxi, telling the driver where I need to go. The process takes upwards of ten seconds.

Chicago has a taxi industry but I imagine, like taxi industries everywhere, it is ailing, and perhaps on the way to being dead. Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention was held, did not seem to have taxis at all, or at least cars that would roam the streets that you could flag down. I asked one convention worker, in Milwaukee, where a taxi stand might be, and he reacted like I was inquiring after Western Union’s telegraph office. In Chicago, I hoped one might exist, a simple place where I could stand in line and eventually enter a taxi. Instead, I found the Ride App Zone.

Eventually, an Uber driver stuck with me, and told me to leave the Ride App Zone and walk several blocks away. I struggled to find him, on the corner of Ashland and Madison, traffic snaking in all four directions. But he waited, and was kindly when I discovered his Toyota near a bus stop. His name was Rodrigo and he told me drivers were canceling when they saw a potential customer was in the Ride App Zone. “It’s too hard to get there,” he said, and he was right. Since the DNC had designated no extended curbside for cars to quickly take people away, there were no straightforward way for ride share drivers to easily reach the lot or the “lanes.” It was a catastrophe, and it was probably going to be my fate for the rest of the week.

In 2019, I wrote an essay on the Uber presidency for the Baffler, and my intention was to link Donald Trump to the ride share behemoth. It was a clever premise, and one I stand by, since Trump’s political career and Uber’s success were built on bombast, deception, and law-breaking. Uber, until recently, never turned a profit, and was able to burn up capital to acquire ever-greater gobs because of the market share it won through its blitzkrieg of major American cities. In New York, where I live and work, Uber expanded exponentially, unconstrained by a medallion system that was created to limit congestion on the roadways. Uber triumphed, in part, because the taxi industry made a great foil, and was genuinely filled with corruption and its own slumlord class of medallion-hoarders. But the drivers of the yellow taxis themselves were working class immigrants and they saw the investments they made in their futures come to nothing; driving a taxi in the 2010s was like owning a house in the latter half of the 2000s, or maybe worse. Some taxi drivers committed suicide. Uber kept growing, even as its business model only made sense as long as interest rates were at zero and venture capitalists were happy to pump ever more cash into its coffers, content that the company had sufficiently saturated the market and made itself indispensable. In the twentieth century, corporations had to turn a profit to expand; Uber grew as it lost money. And since Uber’s labor costs were so low—the drivers were contractors—expansion could continue apace.

In America, Uber has won. They had first-mover advantage to app technology, and now they are every city’s taxi industry. New York’s streets are tremendously congested and the sheer number of vehicles locals and tourists summon on their phones to replicate rides that could be made via bus or subway has played a definitive role. There is a parallel universe where a strong regulatory state forced Uber to follow local law, grow gradually, and local taxis were outfitted with app technology. Today, yellow taxis in New York have an app, but it’s Uber (and Lyft) who get the calls because they were allowed to defy all existing vehicle regulations and flood the streets for a pivotal stretch of years in the early 2010s, when all new tech was venerated and the smartphone was supposed to be liberatory.

This was Barack Obama’s America. Obama, as always, delivered a stirring convention speech on Tuesday, and his wife’s might have been even better. They flayed Trump and elicited many rousing cheers and chants. Michelle Obama proved she could have the Democratic nomination if she wanted it, but she doesn’t need it, since life is better on the outside, where no one is sullying you in the media and there are millions to be made. The speeches were gauzy and ill-defined on the policy front, amounting to little other than certain warm vibrations. No one truly knows what a Kamala Harris presidency would look like. But we know, for all his oratory genius, what an Obama presidency resembled, and it was one where the tech titans were sanctified and the revolving door was thrown wide open between the White House and the richest corporations in the world. Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, scurried off to Amazon. David Plouffe, one of the Obama campaign wizards, became Uber’s missionary to the world and later a Facebook employee, and now he’s back with Harris after his exile during the Biden years. Eric Holder, the Attorney General, went to Airbnb, and Lisa Jackson, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency head, joined Apple. Dozens of less celebrated Obama staffers flooded Silicon Valley, trading on their federal expertise to make far more money while ensuring that those who remained in government treated Big Tech kindly. “There is an undeniable appeal to the growth and excitement of the tech industry—especially when contrasted to working in a large bureaucracy with a lot of rules and a lot of reasons to say no,” Nick Sinai, former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer and a venture capitalist with Insight Venture Partners, told CNN in 2016.

Five years later, Silicon Valley firms were hungry to hire Obama himself.

Those rules Sinai lamented safeguard consumers and curtail abuse; they might have, if applied aggressively in the Obama era, prevented the curdling of the internet and the broader tech that we are forced to interact with daily. There wasn’t a corporate merger the Obama administration didn’t celebrate or at least permit with little tangible resistance. Facebook forestalled eventual oblivion by gobbling up Instagram and WhatsApp. Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged, damaging the music industry and punishing online ticket-buyers. During Obama’s presidency, Google acquired more than 150 companies unchallenged—including Waze for a mere $1.3 billion—and developed a monopoly over search and GPS navigation that has gradually degraded both. It would be an exaggeration to say technology is so rapacious and sinister and inefficient today—search results spamified, social media polluted—because Obama was president, but the Obama administration plainly did nothing to head off this peculiar, numbing hell we all must be subjected to on a second-by-second basis. If Obama didn’t make this happen, he let it happen. Few in the convention hall have seriously thought about that.

Joe Biden, to his credit, installed an antitrust regime, beginning with Lina Khan, his chair of the Federal Trade Commission. The Biden Justice Department has successfully sued Google. Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s Transportation secretary, even blocked an airline merger. There is a budding school of thought, fueled by the new mania around Harris, that this economic populism represented a wrong turn. Centrist pundits like Jonathan Chait yearn for the old world, when the center-left and Big Tech hugged each other tight and never let go. If Biden is so unpopular, it must be his policies, they intimate. The people want their federal staffers cashing out at Uber again! Except, of course, almost all of Biden’s falling fortunes were tied to his age, and his obvious inability to campaign aggressively against Trump. Inflation and immigration were dogging him, but if he were 71 or simply in possession of the cognition of fellow octogenarians like Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi, he could have forged forward and built the kind of polling lead Harris enjoys now. But the voters, rightly, were uncomfortable with Biden, who had visibly declined before their eyes. They were not asking for Harris to purge the trust-busters and tech-skeptics. Most probably weren’t aware of what was happening in the Biden administration anyway.

Obama is a curious Democratic Party kingpin. He exerts enough influence to determine the course of national primaries, and his wife is wildly popular. There is no single policy Michelle Obama is yoked to, or any particular vision—it’s merely her demeanor and natural charisma, her approachable celebrity, and she is probably the most beloved First Lady since Jackie Kennedy. Obama himself has been resuscitated from eight years of Trump and Biden, two elderly men who made history in all the wrong ways. Obama is the first Black president, and he is a special vehicle for nostalgia, especially as millenials slide into middle-age. Even in his sixties, with his hair gone white, Obama embodies youth—had John F. Kennedy lived, he would have been potent in the same way, a callback for the generation of 1960 who revered him so, haunting, in the flesh, Nixon and Ford and Carter and Reagan. Obama’s failures have been sanded away. He can, forever, be the Obama of 2008, Yes We Can, the singular politician who drove college students and young professionals into a sort of frenzy that was almost metaphysical and will probably never be witnessed again. Harris has the vapor of that moment. She is not Biden, not Trump, and that will suffice. She, for now, will offer little else; she doesn’t even remind voters that she would be the first female president. If she wins, there will be, briefly, delirium, and then the grim work of governing will begin. Suddenly, it will matter what she thinks about Gaza and Ukraine and Big Tech. Suddenly, she will have to talk to the press, to the public. Suddenly, as Biden’s staffers realized, she will need to reckon with the legacy of Obama, and all he accomplished and all he terribly neglected.