The middle generation's perspective on San Francisco's class/tech struggle
I woke up this morning to the latest rhetorical battle in San Francisco’s raging class war. The Bold Italic Editor Jennifer Maerz had sent me an email asking what I thought of Tim Redmond’s latest tech-bashing post on 48HillsOnline.org, in which he runs a fiery speech that writer David Talbot gave at Stanford, and criticism of those perspectives by Bernalwood blogger Todd Lapin (and, to a lesser degree, in a letter from Cachaphonist John Law that Lapin ran). Here’s how I responded:
This a fascinating and important conversation, and while I agree with much of what Talbot and Tim have to say on the subject, my perspective is a little different than that of these baby boomers, who sometimes write with a nostalgia for bygone days that can alienate the younger generations. As Todd correctly wrote in Bernalwood, the ‘60s and ‘70s weren’t all goodness and light, as Talbot’s book does indeed make clear. There were many important social and technological developments during that era that helped create San Francisco’s unique and attractive culture, but the often selfish and overentitled boomer generation had already begun to erode that before the latest dot-com boom hit.
When Marke B and I (both in early 40s) took over the Guardian after Tim’s ouster in 2013, we tried to subtly tweak how the Guardian talked about the techies and their impact at a time when criticism of gentrification and displacement was raging, in our paper and by my pen as vociferously as anywhere in the media world. We wanted to speak to the techies and not just at them, and to make clear that our issues were more with the venture capitalists and wunderkind executives than with the coders or other workers who made good money, but not great money. I’m not sure we always succeeded, but that was our goal, and a reason we did a Good Tech issue and other positive pieces alongside articles on the class warfare that was undeniably erupting in San Francisco, triggered by tech, rightly or wrongly.
My message for the young tech workers settling in The City was the same as I’ve had recently for the mainstream crowd that is flocking to Burning Man: yes, this place is cool, but it’s cool because committed creative people made it cool, and it won’t stay cool if you don’t do your part.
The mantra of the tech titans is disruption, but they and the rest of us need to start thinking more about what they want to build in the place of what’s been disrupted. Maybe San Francisco’s taxi industry needed disrupting, and there are certainly good aspects to what Uber and Lyft offer, but we all need to think this through to the end. Do we all really want to live in a world where essential services are deregulated and controlled by increasingly powerful corporations free to set the terms and conditions of our work and mobility? The system is set up so the rich get richer and the rest of us lose standing, a problem that will keep getting worse unless there are strong checks on capital, which is what the progressives now being driven from the city have always advocated.
Today, the tech workers are being presented a choice between siding with their bosses and the venture capitalists and their vision of the world — which is the one that Talbot and Tim are criticizing, often quite eloquently and correctly — or whether they want to heed some of this criticism, understand that they’re also expendable in this economic jungle we’re creating, and begin to develop a stronger political consciousness and connection to the social fabric of the city that they’ve chosen to adopt. Because they and their money are changing it, they are causing displacement even if they don’t mean to. And yes, I know that San Francisco is always changing, but so far the new invaders have brought with them a love for the city and desire to help elevate it and make it more vibrant and interesting, if sometimes messier.
It’s sort of ironic that people aren’t seeing the new generation of tech workers as continuing that trend, because I think the young coders and entrepreneurs do see themselves as innovators and creators of culture. That’s probably why you get irritated by pieces like Talbot's and don’t think it’s fair criticism. But much of San Francisco feels the disruption that is happening without an authentic new culture being created in its place. That's because tech’s contributions are mostly commercial: pink mustaches on the cars, ordering and delivery apps in the expensive new restaurants, European tourists staying in the apartments where their neighbors got evicted, trendy new websites replacing political newspapers, and gleaming new apartment buildings with rents we can’t afford.
These things aren’t necessarily the fault of the average techie or other young worker — we’re all just trying to get by as best we can in this brave new world — but we’re all waiting for this new community to join the old one and learn about its history and values. The problems are more pressing and universal than they used to be. Global warming and the growing wealth divide are serious problems that we need to address today, now, because they get worse and harder to remedy with each day that we wait.
During the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy San Francisco movement, I had a glimmer of hope that young people understood these problems and would be a force to help address them. After all, they are among the first generations that analysts say will be worse off economically than the previous generations, the current tech boom notwithstanding (booms are always followed by busts, it’s a law of economics that some people tend to forget these days). In San Francisco, I’d add to those global imperatives the local one: is this city going to be just a capital of capital, a place for the rich that excludes the rest, or will it be a city that creates an authentic grassroots and artistic culture that continues to make it great?
My hope is that young, tech-savvy leaders like yourself encourage your contemporaries to be as innovative and disruptive in creating a social and economic culture for the city that is as inclusive as it is interesting, rather than using all of your emotional energy advocating for an economic sector that is widening the wealth divide and driving out the last vestiges of the old San Francisco.
Ultimately, the class war is real, and if workers from the tech sector aren’t willing to choose a side, then we’re all going to lose.
