Taunter Media

I have never been a big believer in electronics extended warranties; my general perspective is that if a device works for the first couple of weeks, it is likely to work for the rest of its useful life.  Unfortunately, just before heading off to Europe I seem to have had my black swan moment: my MacBook, iTouch, and cell phone (Samsung) all failed within a few hours of each other.  Perhaps someone set off an EMP.

So I hit Europe the old school way, or at least the early-90s way; no internet, limited phone contact, dramatically less flexible plans.  And it brings me back to an unpopular thesis I have had for most of the past decade: the mobile phone is actually a much more important invention than the Internet.

Sure, the Internet lets us find incredible bits of information; it is hard to believe that not too long ago there were physical travel agents, for example, and these travel agents had retail locations and people walked in and talked to other people about what they wanted to do.  The entire travel industry – beautiful onsens in Japan, isolated glorious restaurants in France, antipodeal adventures – was crammed through the funnel of the one person on the other side of the desk, who may or may not have been waiting for her lunch break and was almost certainly saw her job as selling the glossy Club Med brochures hanging on her wall.  Most of it, however, was available before, albeit less conveniently.  You could access 10-Ks on DVD and order clothes by phone and buy books from book stores.

The phone, on the other hand…cutting the cord created an entirely new way of organizing a day.  Think back to how things worked before.  The road warriors of the world got off planes and raced for banks of payphones.  They called into their messages, figured out who had called them, and then set off to return calls.  If everyone else was sitting at home, of course, the situation worked perfectly – folks got through.  But if not – if someone was running an errand, or stuck in traffic, or taking a shower fifteen feet from the phone – well, the telephone tag game began.  And the game only ended when both parties found themselves at predictable telephones again.

Communications problems meant plans had to be fixed in advance.  Perhaps there was a societal benefit to this – it created a population less likely to simply abandon a plan while underway.  But think of the cost.  Any delay that affected any participant – one guy’s flat tire on the way to a round of golf – threw off everyone else he was in contact with.  Far from being the selfish tool that mobile phone critics have complained about (and I will admit I find it awfully odd to walk by an Italian restaurant to see each person at a table on the phone, presumably not with the people he went out of his way to join), going wireless let people create a firewall between their events and the effect of these events on other people.  Get to a restaurant first and decide it’s no good?  Easy – call the other folks and tell them to go somewhere else.  Get held up at work and can’t meet someone?  No need to keep them stewing; just call.

Perhaps it is the selfish indulgence that makes for the fun side of being out of touch.  As intensely frustrating as it is to try to meet up with someone when out of touch, as ridiculous as it is to run around town when a simple phone call would solve your problem, there is something oddly intimate about moving through life with everyone outside of shouting distance off the edge of the earth.

Indeed, it is amazing just how quickly other people’s problems stop mattering at all.  North Korea tested a nuke?  I’m out of range.  The German government decides the EU ends at the Rhine and backs the Opel deal that closes a plant in Antwerp instead of Kaiserslautern?  I don’t live in Antwerp.  Restaurants in Tuscany stop serving lunch at 2:30pm and it is now 2:45?  Outrageous.

And somewhere out on the road I had the question of whether this isn’t the Achilles’ Heel of the Obama Administration.  Stay with me, John Boehner:

The Obama coalition was successful because it combined the traditional 1960s blue-collar labor base with the 1990s knowledge workers.  Look at the two groups the Administration seems desperate to favor: the United Auto Workers and Goldman Sachs.

For the UAW – and, indeed, the entire lower end of the wage distribution – voting Democrat means nothing more or less than voting in self-interest.  Just as Southern Democrats would reliably vote for public works projects because hell, the North was paying for them anyway, so too do higher taxes and higher government services benefit people whose benefit load exceeds their tax payments.

The tricky part is keeping the knowledge folks in line.  The Dubya Administration so thoroughly mismanaged the nation – and had such a bizarre fixation on the 1840s perspective that the only real economic activity is the kind that kills people downwind – that anyone on the upper end of the education spectrum was forced to go Democrat to try to keep the country from becoming a northern Argentina.  The Republican fixation on its own base of social conservatives exacerbated the problem; the folks in finance and software and media know unwed mothers and gays and folks with different skin colors and aren’t particularly scared by any of them.  Put it all together and the rich counties – even Teton County in brick-red Wyoming – went for Obama.

All it would take for the Republicans to fracture the coalition would be the emergence of a Republican politician who did not hate.  Anyone in the old Rockefeller Republican model would find that the country as a whole had actually moved his way; for all the complaints of Newt Gingrich that this administration is “socialist” or that Sonia Sotomayor is a raving racist, we are looking at a government that seems pretty uninterested in tribes, or even in the machinations of the big cities.  Whether the country has polarized or not, we have at least agreed that the place of interest is not the rural heartland of Reagan’s campaign kickoff in Philadelphia, Mississippi, or the various Democratic campaigns that seemed intent on carrying all five boroughs, but rather some sort of suburb: the battle is between Greenwich and Wasilla.

Good thing Rush Limbaugh and Michael Steele don’t see it that way…