During the 2008* Democratic nomination campaign we pointed out that although the self-anointed Silicon Valley aristocracy were solidly behind Senator Obama, rank-and-file Dems in Santa Clara county went for Hillary 54.8% to Obama's 39.3% in that year's primary.
The reason this gets interesting is a possible split between various constituencies.
For example the Teamsters union can't be very enthusiastic about the prospect of autonomous trucks.
The bad-apple cops responsible for repeat police brutality claims are protected in their jobs by very strong unions. Who do you go with, the protestors or the police unions?
I don't know how this all plays out but it seems easier to understand if we dispense with party labels and go with a plutocrats/peasants framework.
From Bloomberg:
People are Talking About…*Some of our posts from back then:
** There’s been a lot of handwringing about the on-demand labor practices used by Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit and other companies that match service providers with customers. These startups rely on contract labor - meaning that workers aren’t given the full benefits and rights of employees.
Who knows where the debate will lead, but it seems that a nascent digital labor movement is taking shape in the halls of academia (at The New School in New York City, natch). “Viewed from inside the bubble of New York, the paradox of digital labor these days is the way that tech enables the over-development of under-development,” McKenzie Wark, author of "A Hacker Manifesto, The Spectacle of Disintegration," said during a talk at the Digital Labor conference hosted by The New School.
Trebor Scholz, the chair of the New School’s conference series, "The Politics of Digital Culture," recently published a long Medium post in a similar vein. Scholz goes so far as to suggest that worker-owned cooperatives could provide the same services as the current suite of on-demand apps. He writes:
The stakes for the drivers are clear, the prerogative of VC-backed companies is short-term shareholder profit but when it comes to offering better working conditions, these startups cannot measure up… Why bother handing over the revenue to Uber, the middleman? Lyft and Uber have serious issues with attrition; the pay rates for drivers can (and have been) changed from one moment to the next, workplace surveillance is constant, and drivers can be “de– activated” (fired) at any time for digressions as small as criticizing the Uber mothership on Twitter.Companies such as Uber and Lyft have been good at brushing aside labor practice concerns, and lots of drivers that I talk to have good experiences driving for the companies. Even so, it might be a good idea to keep workers' rights on the radar....MORE
Can Silicon Valley Deal Makers Take the Credit For Obama’s Success? Or was it Wall Street?
President Obama Will Be a Good Friend to Wall Street
And more backlinks:
Obama Shelves Jobs-Credit Proposal
"America’s New Oligarchs—Fwd.us and Silicon Valley’s Shady 1 Percenters"
