Uber, Gruber and underlying truth

When is a gaffe more than a gaffe?

In this photo combination, Emil Michael, Senior VP of Business for Uber Technologies Inc., (L) and Jonathan Gruber, Professor of Economics at MIT. (Bloomberg via Getty Images, Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo)

Let's get a few things out of the way. Many years ago, I accidentally tried to carry a commemorative hunting knife onto a plane and was briefly questioned. I have forged my wife's name on countless checks. I once sat in the mayor's box at Yankee Stadium and accepted free ice cream.

Since this column concerns a certain Uber executive, I figured I might as well disclose all the embarrassing stuff up front, just to save him the trouble.

Of course, Uber's Emil Michael didn't know he was being quoted when he told an audience last week about his brilliant plan to expose the private lives of reporters. Neither did Jonathan Gruber, who helped craft the president's health care law, when he declared on video that voters were morons. Both men are just the latest victims, I guess, of the social-media culture I've often lamented, which routinely ruins good reputations by magnifying a few clumsy words beyond all proportion.

Except, you know, when it doesn't really do that at all.       

In case you missed it, Michael, who is Uber's vice president of business (because apparently that's an actual job title), spoke at a dinner in New York attended by a lot of journalists. According to Ben Smith at Buzzfeed, Michael mistakenly thought the dinner was off the record, so it seemed like as good a time as any to share his idea for hiring investigators to stealthily ruin reporters.

That story exploded on Twitter, which was still buzzing about Gruber, an MIT professor and health policy expert who was paid to advise the Obama administration on the Affordable Care Act. Gruber was caught in YouTube videos telling academic audiences that the key to passing the health care law was to obscure from the American people the way it was actually financed.

"Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever," Gruber said. His comments were so incendiary that by last weekend both the president and the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, had gone out of their way to denounce them (and to say they barely remembered this guy Gruber, anyway).

You can look at this whole Uber-Gruber business, I suppose, as just the latest example of the utterly destructive, distortive potential of social media. Never before have a few words been able to travel so far and so fast, detached from any context.

Maybe this era really began in 2006, when Virginia's George Allen, then running for re-election to the Senate, was caught on video calling an Indian-American operative from his opponent's campaign a "macaca." (Even now, if you Google "macaca," you immediately see two pictures: a small, furry primate and poor George Allen.)

Barack Obama spent a fair amount of time in 2008 trying to explain his statement, captured on audio by the Huffington Post, that too many American voters "get bitter" and "cling to guns and religion." Four years later, Mitt Romney's campaign sustained a serious blow when Mother Jones obtained a recording of him saying that 47 percent of the country was on the government dole.

By now, of course, almost every candidate for any significant office has to worry about a "tracker" — some kid from the rival party who comes armed with a smartphone, ready to capture any gaffe and upload it to the world before the campaign bus can even get back on the road.

I've written many times, most recently in a book, about the stultifying effect all of this has. Politicians and policymakers are petrified to go off script at an event or to share a single nuanced thought with the media, for fear that the one stupid thing they say will define their careers forever. You try answering questions all day long, seven days a week and on four hours of sleep, without ever uttering a sentence you wouldn't want to see tweeted.

What we talk about less often, though, is the power of even our shallowest social networks to illuminate, in a single moment, what volumes of journalism might miss. And to me, that's what this past week's buzz was really about — not distortion, but rather perfectly distilled truth.

Because Michael wasn't misunderstood when he shared his vision for a company that could discreetly wreck lives and reputations in the service of its goals. He was, in fact, giving voice to a rising arrogance and ruthlessness in Silicon Valley, where ascendant young executives think they should answer to no government or outside scrutiny, since they're doing the hard work of building the new digital economy while the rest of us just sit around waiting for the cable guy to show up.

And Gruber wasn't actually taken out of context when he so coarsely mocked the American voter. (In another moment, he remarked, "Barack Obama's not a stupid man, OK?" He seems to use the word "stupid" more than any first grader I've met.) Let's be real: Gruber was saying only what a lot of like-minded urban liberals believe. Anyone who spends much time with academics and tells you he hasn't heard voters described this way is either lying or has a very poor memory.

Both of these men got caught in a social-media meltdown because they betrayed a common theme among the educationally and economically privileged in our country: contempt for most everyone else.

If anything, in fact, Americans on social media are getting more sophisticated, not less, about which so-called gotcha moments really matter and which don't. Contrast the Uber and Gruber affairs with what happened in September when Joe Biden foolishly called shady lenders a bunch of "Shylocks." The controversy over that comment fizzled quickly. Biden misspeaks plenty, and rarely does any of it resonate much anymore, because his lapses don't tell us anything significant about his convictions.

The Gruber and Michael moments, on the other hand, tell us plenty about a larger current running just under the surface of the society — the sense of entitlement and condescension that seems too often to accompany success in the new, intellectually centered economy. Perhaps after a decade of endless "-gates" and gaffes, we're actually starting to learn the difference.