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Food trucks cater to SF tech workers in mid-Market Street.
An endless parade of Google and other corporate buses picking up and dropping off workers in San Francisco is the most visible element of the social friction evident in some neighborhoods — especially the rapid gentrification of the Mission Street area.
In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate, columnist James Temple attempts a “defense of San Francisco’s techies.”
Last month, a group of gentrification protesters unleashed their rage on a piñata of a Google Bus… If we blame the wrong things for real problems – like unaffordable housing and gentrification – it’s much harder to arrive at the right solutions.
He points out that San Francisco tech companies create only 7.5% of the city’s jobs. But that’s a poorly chosen statistic because so many tech workers commute to Google, and other tech companies 40 miles away — these aren’t SF tech companies. The numbers of tech workers putting pressure on rents and other resources is much higher than that number suggests.
The poor choice of statistics leads Mr. Temple to conclude that “techies” aren’t the problem that it’s more about, “Hipster-on-hipster hatred. Middle-class humanities majors grumbling about middle-class computer science majors.”
The problem is not hipster versus hipster. It’s that the city has within it a large population of people that never become part of it, they aren’t that interested in its events, culture, or history. They aren’t integrated or show much interest in being integrated.
It’s as if they live in a parallel world with no interaction with the world around them.
They sweep-in in large numbers when there is a boom and they leave just as quickly when there is a bust. I’ve been here since 1985 and have seen this cycle repeat many times.
It’s best summed up by “Rodo” in one of the comments:
The gays and hippies (as mentioned in another comment) did not come to SF to make money. And they did not displace tens of thousands of people by unleashing a wave of legal and illegal evictions. And they enhanced the culture, created culture, made the city a more interesting place.
I hate to generalize, but I meet tech people every day on my job and there are certain commonalities. The average ones seem to have been here for two months, have ADD, have no curiosity about the culture of their adoptive city, are completely humorless, dismissive of others not of their kind, have their face buried in a device, are poorly read, and demonstrate no political awareness other than a knee-jerk libertarianism bestowed upon them by their corporation.
The “hipster” tag is just silly. There’s nothing hip about a corporate gig or rabid money-seeking. Recently, a Zynga employee talked my ear off about the “artistry” of the “creatives” at her firm. These were mass-produced computer games she was referring to. Puh-leeze! And buying high-priced tickets to Burning Man so you can go wild once a year does not make you hip…
And “goliver5” writes:
Many of the new residents are social media workers, and many of them appear to embrace the culture of their respective companies instead of the culture of San Francisco. When most of us are away from our offices/work, we pursue with zeal all that San Francisco has to offer and we more or less meld to the prevailing cultural norms. I don’t see this among social media workers. Maybe it is because their corporate culture is so great. But it appears to be harmful to the city in that we don’t need another ‘class’ of people that are insular…
Working in “social media” is not the same as being “social.”
Possibly the problem is that these young workers don’t know how to integrate into any community. Their employers try very hard to keep them within their corporate culture from dawn to dusk. They are cocooned in corporate silk from their waking moments: traveling in company buses (with “free” Wi-Fi), they eat for free in company cafeterias, they never leave the corporate campus except to sleep.
Their lives are designed that way for a reason, to keep them from forming any other relationships outside of work that might distract them or take them away from the embrace of their employer.
When the inevitable bust cycle hits and their jobs go away, they go away too because they never had the time to make relationships outside of work, they built no support networks in the city they lived in.
It’s the ascent of corporate culture versus city culture that’s creating divisions in San Francisco rather than any “hipster-on-hipster hatred.”
Tom Foremski is the Editor and Founder of the popular and top-ranked news site Silicon Valley Watcher, reporting on business and culture of innovation. He is a former journalist at the Financial Times and in 2004, became the first journalist from a leading newspaper to resign and become a full-time journalist blogger.
Tom has been reporting on Silicon Valley and the US tech industry since 1984 and has been named as one of the top 50 (#28) most influential bloggers in Silicon Valley. His current focus is on the convergence of media and technology — the making of a new era for Silicon Valley. He also writes a column at ZDNET.
