Pre-911 — Biden’s passionate populism — Steve Jobs’ FBI file
“You’d feel powerless, disrespected, bullied, trapped.”
Happy Bastille Day, everyone, from hot, hot, hot Washington, D.C., where it is mostly definitely July.
Speaking of revolutions, stay tuned for Friday, where we’ll have a deep dive into what went wrong with the political revolution the Internet was supposed to spark.
And speaking of saggy heat, it turns out that the phrase “dog days of summer” has nothing to do with animals being lazy.
THE PRE-911 TIMES — Slate’s “Hi-Phi Nation” podcast, hosted by Vassar’s Barry Lam, has an episode that recently crossed my radar on so-called feminist prosecutors. One bit in particular jumped out, having to do with why, pre-1980s, police weren’t making many arrests for domestic violence. The assumption is that the causes are social, right? And those factors are certainly there. But, notes Lam, “one explanation is technological.”
Here Lam pulls in the criminologist Lawrence Sherman, who has long studied this sort of thing:
“Even in the 80s when we were doing these experiments, a lot of households in poverty neighborhoods, they didn’t have landlines. And if people wanted to call the police, sometimes they went out to phone booths at the convenience store or somewhere else. Frankly, people couldn’t call a seven digit number very easily…
“When we went to three digit numbers, the total number of calls to the police exploded. Domestic abuse is one of the most common emotional crises that people call the police about. So there is this very steep increase in the number of domestic calls the police confronted.”
As is probably obvious, Sherman’s referring to the creation of 911. Today it can simply seem like an inevitable part of our public infrastructure, but it was indeed invented at some point.
That came in the 1960s. Advocates for better emergency services had long called for a universal emergency number in the United States, but it really got traction amid growing alarm in the U.S. over crime. LBJ’s Crime commission advocated for it in a report called “The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society.” The FCC and AT&T agreed on the 911 number, and while it took years to get traction, today almost the entire country can pick up the phone, call 911, and get connected to what’s known as a public safety answering point.
(Technically, 911 is known as an N11 code in the North American Numbering Plan. Here’s a game: Try to guess the seven others.)
But while the clever use of technology solved one problem — it was simply too difficult to call for help – more than 50 years later, we’re still dealing with the related social problem: what should that help look like?
Right now, this summer, especially in the wake of George Floyd’s death, scores of cities across the country are trying to figure out when those calls should be answered not by police but by mental health professionals.
“Imagine if you’re in her shoes. You’d feel powerless, disrespected, bullied, trapped.”
— Joe Biden, on non-compete agreements
BIDEN’S PASSIONATE POPULISM, IN THE FORM OF AN EXECUTIVE ORDER — President Joe Biden (who, for what it’s worth, made much of his career in the Senate on the issue of domestic violence) gave an incredibly important speech Friday calling for government to rethinking its approach to competition, and signed a less important accompanying executive order.
The most eye-catching bits were Biden criticizing online platforms a la Facebook, Google, and Amazon for what he said was “us[ing] their power to exclude market entrants,” and so on. But what was particularly remarkable was his call for the country to completely reset decades of thinking. He played the inside game, name-checking the father of the current consensus on what counts competitively unhealthy:
“[O]ver time, we’ve lost the fundamental American idea that true capitalism depends on fair and open competition. Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path, in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition.”
But Biden played the outside game in a way that, perhaps, only Joe Biden can.
Let us be honest and say that competition policy is not innately the world’s most exciting topic. But Biden injected flesh and blood into it, like here when he talked about the sort of non-compete agreements popular in the tech industry. I almost fell asleep typing the words. Here’s how Biden does it:
“Think of the 26-year-old employee at a company. She’s a star worker, but she isn’t being treated right. She’s underpaid, passed over for promotions. A competitor across the street knows and wants to bring her in at a higher wage, but she can’t do it. Her company threatens legal action over a non-compete clause she had to sign in order to get hired in the first place. She can’t afford a lawyer for help, so she’s locked in.
Imagine if you’re in her shoes. You’d feel powerless, disrespected, bullied, trapped.
That’s not right. Workers should be free to take a better job if someone offers it. If your employer wants to keep you, he or she should have to make it worth your while to stay. That’s the kind of competition that leads to better wages and greater dignity of work.”
Executive orders often add up to not all that much. But Biden is throwing into it perhaps his greatest political strength: the ability to make policy human.
STEVE JOBS, WHO KNEW? — UC Santa Barbara historian of tech and more W. Patrick McCray is recirculating the FBI file produced when Steve Jobs was being considered for a spot on the President’s Export Council back in 1991. The document itself has been public for some time; it was first released in 2012. But it’s interesting to re-read it amid the rethinking of not just Jobs’ legacy, but how we think about Silicon Valley figures generally.
Much of the report isn’t exactly flattering. Jobs is described as “deceptive.” One person interviewed as part of the investigation reportedly notes that “Mr. Jobs possesses integrity as long as he gets his way.” And then, “Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs’ honesty stating that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals.”
When the report was made public almost a decade ago, Jobs’ reputation as a visionary worthy of idolization was already being rethought. Walter Isaacson’s critical biography had come out the year prior. But what’s striking when you revisit the document is how much of what would emerge about Jobs later was in there, too. “Small Fry,” the book by Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs, wouldn’t come out until 2018, but much of what it would cover about his questionable handling of his personal life is at least hinted at in there, too.
One source describes Jobs’ “personal life as being lacking due to his narcissism and shallowness.” Another “commented that, in the past, Mr. Jobs was not supportive of [redacted] (the mother of his child born out of wedlock) and their daughter;” however, he or she noted at the time, Jobs’ “recently has become more supportive.”
THIS IS WHO KILLED THE SEGWAY, MAYBE — We’ve talked here about the messy, evolving art of covering tech, and as Isaacson’s Jobs bio shows, the book industry plays its part, too. Slate’s Dan Kois wonders if, as a young book agent, his overhyping of a reasonably interesting new scooter technology doomed the Segway.
IS THIS BURGER TECH? The team over at Protocol debates a compelling question: do new plant-based patties made by companies like Beyond and Impossible really count as tech?
My take? I was a firm yes on this. Now? Not so sure. There are people right here in D.C. making strong, delicious competitors with no scientists on the team.