The political rhetoric of both Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Bill Clinton a decade later set a cultural stage for the rise of venture labor. With manufacturing in decline, competing political proposals emerged for how to fix the problems of the economy. For political conservatives, the answer involved allowing free markets to function more effectively through deregulation, or less governmental oversight in price levels, rules, and industry structure. The result, beginning in the 1980s, was the deregulation of transportation, communication, energy, and banking industries. Deregulation unleashed “powerful competitive forces on the markets for products and labor” far beyond the formerly regulated industries.23 Companies “restructured” by selling less profitable divisions and outsourcing “nonessential” business functions to other companies. The corporate layoff, once a temporary measure, increasingly came to mean a permanent reduction in a company’s workforce. The number of layoffs skyrocketed: at least thirty million Americans have been laid off since the 1980s.24

Political changes during the Reagan and Clinton eras established the tone for the dot-com era. The political rhetoric of both administrations was important because each set the stage for individual entrepreneurial values in the 1990s and the utopian belief in the power of technology to transform the economy. Reagan’s political rhetoric helped shift political discourse away from collective economic and social security toward individual economic freedom and entrepreneurial initiative. Clinton’s political rhetoric relied on tropes of entrepreneurial drive and technological innovation to create images of a resuscitated U.S. economy—and in the process created the discourses that encouraged venture labor in the dot-com era.