David Talbot sets the city on fire with his analysis of the war between San Francisco and Silicon Valley: Back then, you didn’t want to examine too closely the political views of these new gods — these masters of innovation and progress. Highlighting the symbiotic connection between Silicon Valley and the war machine, David Packard would become Secretary of Defense for President Nixon, helping to manage the genocidal war in Vietnam. And Shockley would feel free to vent his master-race views on eugenics and call for the voluntary sterilization of inferior peoples. From Shockley’s fascist eccentricity to the selfish libertarianism of today’s baby tech moguls, the lords of Silicon Valley have long felt it was their right and duty to impose their views on the rest of us, no matter how noxious they are. And although their greed-based politics don’t usually play well with the voting public – since their ideas are born in the tech bubbles that only they inhabit – these supremely self-confident men and women keep running for high office. Considering the untold wealth at its disposal, sooner of later Silicon Valley will elect one of its own to the executive mansions in Sacramento and to Washington. And resistance will be futile. When this day comes, it will mark the complete triumph of techno-capitalism – the machine mentality that all social problems can be engineered away. And if your problems don’t fit into this equation, tough luck. You don’t compute. You have no option but to disappear. It’s the law of Darwin. It’s the law of Schumpeter. There is no progress without creative destruction – and, poof! you’re about to be extinct. For those of us who live in San Francisco, and have called it home for many years and have raised our families there, this is not simply a dystopian nightmare of the future. It’s our daily reality. To paraphrase David Byrne, every day we look around our city, we think, “This is not our beautiful home, this is not our beautiful life.” Every day brings new evictions – the carpenters, shoe repairmen, truck drivers, bookstore owners, grocers, nurses, teachers, firefighters, social workers, chefs and waiters, writers, artists. All the people who make up a living, breathing, multidimensional city – all gone or going. Replaced by the new class — those lucky code-crunchers and marketers who just exercised their stock options and can afford to pay cash and pay above the asking price for a home once lived in by a school librarian and her taxi-driving, poetry-writing husband who was just Ubered out of his job. The irony, of course, is that the young techies now flooding into San Francisco were attracted by the very urban qualities – the colorful social mix, the creative vibe, the city’s progressive and compassionate soul – that are now being rapidly driven out by the rule of money. Money buys everything in San Francisco these days. It buys entire downtown city blocks, where armies of Oracle workers and other corporate empires are allowed to occupy the streets and throw parties to themselves. These 1% Occupiers are not beaten and teargassed by the police. They are coddled and protected by the city. While the rest of us can only wail to heaven about the massive traffic jams and the blocked routes to work, these corporate occupiers of San Francisco gate off public streets for their own private festivals — listening to world-famous bands and gorging on the cuisine of four-star chefs imported for their exclusive pleasure. Meanwhile, blocks away in the Mission – the district that is being rapidly depopulated of its Latino and working-class families – kids who show up for soccer practice at their neighborhood park, like they have done their whole lives, suddenly find that the playground has been rented by smugly entitled employees of Dropbox and Airbnb – one of the companies driving the wave of evictions in the city. Sorry kids — in San Francisco these days, it’s pay or don’t play. Tech money has even bought City Hall. Mayor Ed Lee could have been the leader San Francisco needed. Lee’s father was an overworked short-order cook in a Chinese restaurant. Lee himself was once a crusading housing activist, fighting greedy landlords in Chinatown. He makes all the right noises and gestures about saving San Francisco’s gloriously unique identity. But that’s all they really are – gestures. In truth, Lee is owned by avatars of the tech future like start-up investor Ron Conway. And most depressing of all, nobody with a more inspiring vision of San Francisco has emerged to challenge Lee for mayor this year. With each passing day, his disastrous, tech-sponsored reign seems like it will go unchallenged for another four years. All the one-dimensional banality of the current digital era is written all over Lee’s bland, bureaucratic administration. He’s a mustache in search of a man. Here’s the cold reality today. There is a raging war in San Francisco between long-time residents of the city and the new elites. A younger Ed Lee, when he was a Chinatown activist, would have called this a “Class War” – because that’s what it is. A war between the 1% and the 99% over the future of San Francisco’s precious turf. Last year, a young, Latino man named Alex Nieto was shot 14 times and killed by police near my house, on top of Bernal Hill, a scenic area where people like to stroll and walk their dogs. Someone had reported that Nieto, a 28-year-old security guard who grew up in the neighborhood, didn’t look right. These days, fewer and fewer of us long- time residents look right, look like we still belong in our own homes. Sooner or later, if we’re not removed by force, we’ll be moved by the invisible hand of the market. The strange thing about the new digital rich is that they don’t want to live among their own tax bracket – in traditional enclaves of wealth like Pacific Heights or Hillsborough. No, they want to live among the people — the ones they’re displacing — in Noe Valley, the Castro and the Mission. Take Mark Zuckerberg, please. For the past two years, the Facebook zillionaire and his wife have upended a once-quiet, middle-class neighborhood overlooking Dolores Park, as Pharaoh-like construction teams erect a massive $10-million, six-bedroom palace to house the royal couple. Zuckerberg is dying to live in the heart of the city, even though he apparently despises its San Francisco values. His corporate lobby, fwd.us, has championed a laundry list of conservative issues – from anti-labor legislation to the Keystone pipeline – that would make Harvey Milk and George Moscone spin in their graves. 48hillsonline.org/2015/01/26/dont-stanford-asshole/
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 13:54:13 +0000
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