Last Monday Uber and Lyft left Austin because they lost an election on a proposition that would have allowed them to use their own background checks instead of using the city's fingerprint-based system. Today on my neighborhood Facebook page an older woman asked why Uber Eats is still operating, and someone (presumably a stranger) replied to her, "prop 1...was about protecting the taxi monopoly, reducing competition, and maintaining city control at all costs. Enjoy your fingerprint-safe-guaranteed pedicab ride to the airport!"
Basically, people are shouting at each other a lot right now over this issue, as they have in cities such as Boston, Dallas and San Francisco before. At the Texas state level George P. Bush chimed in, "This is what happens with liberalism -- the government wins and the people lose."
It is normal for people to take sides and then to get really extreme about their position; one of the most ubiquitous findings in social psychology is that once an attitude is formed it holds on for dear life and makes itself as one-sided as possible in order to do so.
But what was the election really about, and where can Austin and the country go from here?
In order to answer this question, we have to admit that all of this talk of "disruption" and innovation is going to lead us to difficult questions that are completely worth asking and addressing. People contracting to drive, house, sell their unused exercise equipment and deliver groceries to each other just never happened before on a large scale as it does now, because the apps were not there to make it happen. We may need to concede that these business models are odd, not private exchanges, not standard businesses.
Before the election, I had good and productive conversations about it. The arguments did not fall into party lines, and the votes do not seem to have either. Conservative counties voted against the proposition as much as liberal counties did. In my chats with people we worried about how to ensure safety while allowing the services (which most everyone I know uses) to continue. We were also worried about how to ensure that the government had a say in the process, because even if you believe in limited government presumably you agree the government is in charge of basic safety issues. Even strict libertarians call the police when someone invades their home, and expect their food and water not to be poisoned. I guess there are places with no government at all where people can be utterly unsafe, but the rest of us regardless of political ideology have expectations of what protection we can expect when we pay our taxes.
So, reasonable conversations surround how to make the old system adapt to the new realities. Are fingerprints safer than other means, and if not how can we make them safer? Are government systems actually inaccessible to Uber and Lyft drivers and if so how can we fix that? Are the background checks the companies have been using better than fingerprinting and should we enable a hybrid system at the governmental level?
Instead of trying to grapple with all of this, we had Uber driving a horse and buggy to imply the City Council is hopelessly old fashioned, and the City Council in turn writing a Proposition so garbled it was difficult to tell what it was asking.
Austin, and the whole country, are going to bump up against a lot of confusion about how to adapt to new technologies and mindsets about business, and it is not going to get any better. I am worried that people are putting an ideological stake in the ground that will make it difficult to have the subtle conversations we need to have. I feel this process happen in my own reasoning. As one of the most famous Social Psychology papers explains, "the result of exposing contending factions in a social dispute to an identical body of relevant empirical evidence may not be a narrowing of disagreement but rather an increase in polarization."
I guess I am making a plea to all of us not to let this happen over the coming weeks and months, to realize we are going to have growing pains around new business models and that does not mean the world has gone to whatever we worry about as our personal political dark side. Getting all of our competing goals satisfied will be good to do, to ensure business keeps chugging along while society keeps track of it in an amount that feels at least mostly comfortable. The first step to getting all of this done may be admitting that the issues are subtle and do not easily fit into stereotypical "liberal" and "conservative" buckets and their concomitant angers and worries.