http://instagram.com/p/ltsiQjFb1X/
My enormous sprawling feature on San Francisco’s startup scene, gentrification, fancy coffee, class war and hacker spaces is up now – it was one of the headline pieces of New Statesman’s excellent tech issue. Extract below, with thanks to everyone who gave their time to be interviewed – and to my lovely hosts at Ardent.
****
SoMa is the Wall Street of the Twenty-Teens, populated by venture capitalists and well-dressed young hopefuls, although that’s likely to mean a slightly more expensive hoodie rather than a suit. Smart, ambitious young people now go into tech in the way that they once went into banking – because their mothers told them to go the hell out there and make some money.
“This new breed, they’re not hackers,” says Jamie Zawinski, who left the tech industry to run the DNA Lounge, one of the most popular music venues downtown. “Not in the true, original sense of the word. They’re not interested in taking things apart, in exploring, in building things. They got into this line of work because someone told them it was a good career, and it’s disgusting – and that’s why I don’t do it any more.”
Zawinski was one of the founders of Netscape, “the first web browser that mattered”, and is often touted as an example of a techie who has worked to keep San Francisco’s vaudevillian weirdscape alive and dancing, rather than just getting out with his pile.
“I’m interested in building things, in how technology can change the world and the way we interact with each other, and how these weird little prosthetics they’re building can improve your life,” Zawinski says. “They’re interested in cashing out. Fifty per cent of their conversation is about finances. I don’t think they even realise it. It’s a dramatic failure of imagination.”
He warms to his theme. “That’s all any of these fuckers talk about. It’s disgusting. They’re just so focused on cashing out and making money, not actually building anything real, just working hard enough to get by. That changed around ’97, ’98, but it got really bad about four years ago. It’s the second bubble.”
There are two things every child knows about bubbles: they are beautiful, and they burst. Time and again, I am told that San Francisco is “a bubble” – referring both to the gorgeous, insular never-neverland where workers in the city’s tech and associated industries live and play and to the localised economic boom that has fuelled the fat years. Those who have been around for a decade or more remember what happened when the dotcom bubble of the 1990s finally popped: a lot of people lost their jobs and homes, and rental prices in the city came down, but not drastically. Rents are now higher than ever – rising more than three times faster than the national average – and despite intra-industry deals of dubious legality to keep tech wages down, they show no sign of dropping.
Zawinski is right: money is more important than ever to San Francisco’s fast-moving youth cohort. But if you lived in the most expensive city for yuppies in America, where you need a $70,000 salary just to pay your debts and make the rent, you might be worried about money, too.
“We want to make money because here, we have to,” says one photographer who now works as an engineer at a start-up, and hence is able to afford lunch. “By here, I mean San Francisco, but also America. Our generation is fucked. We’ll get no social security, we have no retirement, no savings, no job security.”
The young people entering the tech industry today are of a generation that does not necessarily long for riches, but desperately wants to be able to afford a decent standard of living without having to avoid its reflection in the mirror every morning.
“Most of us tech people will never be the 1 per cent,” says the photographer. “We’re aiming for the 10 per cent, which might allow us to have our parents’ lifestyle. We’re just trying to get by in a world that’s not giving us the same chances the baby boomers had. What did I do as an artist? I went and got an engineering degree.”
Sometimes when you’re dying of thirst, you have to drink the Kool-Aid.
If today’s tech industry is what yesterday’s financial sector was, there is one important difference. In finance, making money is the ideology, as well as the effect of that ideology. By contrast, much of the tech sector is driven by an ethos that is liberal, or at least progressively libertarian – it’s supposed to be about making things, breaking things, challenging conventional power and its monopoly over information. It’s about disruption.There are even decent numbers of self-described anarchists filing on to the unmarked Google buses that have become the default symbol of how tech money is taking over the city.
At the heart of the San Franciscan tech industry is a paradox. It’s a paradox about creativity coming to terms with its place in capitalism. Hacking, computer engineering, the entire ethos of changing the world with communications technology, is supposed to be about more than money – but money is what a job for a big tech firm now means. And money changes things. “Don’t be evil” was the mantra of Google, but there is some anxiety that “evil”, or at least callousness, is attaching itself to tech corporations anyway. Google, like other Bay Area firms, is anxious to preserve its benign social reputation; none of its employees was allowed to speak to me on the record about gentrification and cultural anxiety. Tech workers don’t want to see the Mission emptied of poor families. But it’s happening anyway. [Read the rest at New Statesman]
Laurie Penny 