Last week, in a choking haze of ash and smoke as wildfires burned through the state of California, with unemployment still over 16 percent, and in the middle of one of the greatest global health crises in our lifetime, California continued its descent into absolute madness as Lorena Gonzalez, architect of AB-5, argued for the eradication of several hundred thousand jobs, and what would effectively be the end of ride-sharing. As ride-sharing is one of the most popular business innovations of the last twenty years, dismantling Uber and Lyft is a tricky puzzle for politicians trying to eat their rich and have them too. The assault could never be straightforward, so Lorena has instead woven an incredible lie about “worker rights.” The only way to save drivers from the hellish working conditions they are overwhelmingly not reporting, she says, is to force them from the independent contracting work they overwhelmingly want to keep.

I first noticed the AB-5 fight was back on the table when a dust-up on Twitter surfaced a comment of Lorena’s to which I couldn’t respond, which is not (just) to say her stupidity stunned me to silence. The much-loathed politician deactivated replies to her tweets from people she isn’t following — in other words: her “constituents” — as public reaction to her legislation has been so furious she’s no longer able to comment anything, anywhere, without being met by hundreds of angry responses. While the peasantry in her mentions begging to keep their jobs must of course be frustrating, I can’t help but wonder… can she actually stop us from responding to her on a public forum? Last I checked, U.S. public officials were not allowed to block people on Twitter. The courts argue we have a right, in this country, to petition our government for redress of grievances. The right includes social media, and is by the way probably also why every member of Congress maintains a phone number so comically accessible. If not to safeguard our communication with the public officials representing us, what else could possibly be the point of blocking the block? Do we merely have a legal right to read the unhinged attacks people like Lorena routinely levy against citizens of the state? Or do we have a right to tell her — a politician meant to be representing us — what we actually want?

In any case, things got heated.

The war over AB-5 has been raging since 2018. That year, via the Dynamex case, the Supreme Court of California, eager to carry on in the tradition of unelected judicial officials attempting to legislate from the bench, “ruled” (???) a new set of guidelines governing who in the state may be considered an “independent contractor” and who must be considered an “employee.” But not all freelancers are created equal in the Golden State. The court carved out a few exceptions for politically well-connected industries including construction and real estate, which I was not surprised to discover maintain significant power in California, where a catastrophic, government-enforced housing shortage has artificially inflated the price of homes. Such special favor from the government is highly coveted, because in a world where employee status is linked to everything from overtime to medical benefits the distinction between “independent contractor” and “employee” is of potentially-existential consequence. The cost of operation for anyone on the wrong side of the new legal distinction has sharply risen, and for a company scaling this cost to hundreds of thousands of people that sounds like an Uber killer. Enter: our government with a sledgehammer. Sensing opportunity to hurt the tech industry, Lorena sloppily drafted AB-5, and, with the blessing of Gavin Newsom, codified the absurd court ruling into law. On January 1st of this year the law went into effect, and was, of course, an unmitigated disaster.

On the ground floor, sure, the bill designed to legislate several high-profile tech companies out of existence did cast each of these companies into protracted legal battles (running up through last week, which we’ll get to in a moment). My congratulations to all of the anti-tech idiots responsible. But the bill also called into question the legal status of literally hundreds of thousands of workers around the state, including but not limited to: truck drivers, freelance journalists, editors, videographers, DJs, musicians, makeup artists, translators, art teachers, tutors, physical therapists, manicurists, exotic dancers, and literally clowns and ventriloquists. Vox Media cut 200 jobs because of the law, and journalists have fiercely argued they deserve an exemption. My sense is they’ll likely get it. When a government loses the love of its people, it absolutely can’t afford to lose the media. But what about everyone else?

“Some of us care about things besides money,” Lorena said this week. And in California we’d really better, hadn’t we? Because our government seems to be at war with the concept.

The fight between the people of the state and the political officials meant to represent us reached a fever pitch last week when Uber and Lyft, with what seemed no further judicial recourse, and no way — financial nor logistical — to onboard hundreds of thousands of new “employees,” predictably declared they’d be forced to shut down operations in California. Lorena’s ride-sharing doomsday clock was set to midnight, Friday, the 21st of August. Public officials across the state cried foul, ignoring the riders and passengers begging them to relent and blaming the entire disaster on “greedy billionaires,” their favored bogeyman, as if the state officials were not themselves in total control. How dare any company abstain from operating at a spectacular loss! Lorena exploded, demanding Uber and Lyft stop exploiting drivers while at the same time arguing for the destruction of that entire class of work. LA city council members joined in. Dean Preston, the millionaire Marxist representing my neighborhood in San Francisco, took a break from lording over his government-sanctioned tent city on a parking lot he once promised would be housing to remind us all he doesn’t understand basic economics. In the case of every government official, it was argued Uber and Lyft were choosing to shut down. This was, it must be said, technically true… in the sense we all choose to pay our taxes. In the sense a victim of a mugging chooses to hand over his wallet at the point of a gun.

At the final moment, with California literally on fire and now descended totally to chaos, further incomprehensible magic from the bench staved off ride-sharing’s death blow. An appeals court extended Uber and Lyft’s deadline for reclassifying contractors as employees to October of this year, which the companies will almost certainly not do, which will itself almost certainly cast the state back into chaos. This will happen just before a national election, all but guaranteeing California’s systemic failure to competently govern will be cast into a hugely controversial conversation preceding our decision on the future of this country. Lovely.

The question at the heart of AB-5 is whether or not individuals should be allowed to enter into work mutually agreed upon between themselves and others. Should freelancing, interning, private contracting, as a concept, be allowed? There are no shortage of reasons someone might choose flexible work, on their own terms, negotiating with others, on their own behalf, in ways outside the bounds of more familiar ‘9 to 5’ labor the likes of which Lorena fetishizes (but does not herself participate in). Such work is popular, and has been opted into, in this country, since this country’s inception. But among a certain kind of politician such work is intolerable. Lorena, with her cabal of morons, wants control. Fixed hours, salary, and benefits set by the government. To adherents of this political philosophy, it doesn’t matter what’s destroyed in the process of legislating away our freedom to work as we choose — namely, the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of players in our economy Lorena couldn’t conceive of before her sloppy legislation. For her, it’s cradle-to-grave care, within narrow, rigid, state-mandated parameters, a state-run job, and state-run housing (in San Francisco, that apparently means tents), effectively reducing free people to wards of the governor. Even were our politicians competent, this vision would be horrifying. But in California, our would-be authoritarians can literally not even keep the lights on. To such people who still, despite all failure, want more power over our lives, there can only be one response:

Fuck. All the way. Off.

Last week, many people said exactly this, which Lorena, architect of misery, and PUBLIC OFFICIAL ARE YOU KIDDING ME, called “harassment.”

The cascading series of California disasters is such, and by such top-down decision, as I often daydream it all perhaps a part of some elaborate plan to fix the housing crisis. After all, homes become a lot more affordable once everyone leaves the state. But the answer is probably, in all seriousness, psychological. A topic I’ve tread before, and will undoubtedly tread again: we expect our government to fail. We have internalized this expectation. San Francisco is quite obviously the epicenter of this psychological disaster, and here things have somehow gotten even worse. We no longer merely tolerate burglary, for example. At quick glance, it looks like some of us think we deserve it.

Welcome to the psych ward. If our own friends and colleagues, neighbors, family members, think we deserve to be punished by our government, what chance do we possibly have? Such was my dismay last week, when the mini-drama “is wanting not to be burglarized just your privilege talking” exploded across Twitter. But it’s worth noting some small glimmer of hope. The man behind the drama may have attempted to instigate a mob attack on a random social media passerby who just had his home broken into, but it didn’t work. Instead, he himself was overtaken by the Twitter hoards. In fact, he received one of the biggest ratios I’ve ever seen. By the end of it all, I actually felt bad for him. In the case of Lorena Gonzalez vs. the workers of California, Lorena took a hit. She was forced, at least temporarily, to relent in her crusade against our freedom to choose. This all has me thinking: what if for every idiot on TV telling us the world should burn, actually, there are a thousand people at home silently mouthing “what the actual fuck are you talking about,” in absolute awe of the insanity? Reasonable people are often scared to talk out loud on account of unreasonable people mostly hold the megaphones. But I think most of us actually do want to fix things.

California has a long way left to fall before we hit the bottom, and I do believe we’ll fall until we find it. But the country isn’t lost just yet. Reasonable people, from every industry, and of every political party, just need to push back.

-SOLANA