A little while ago, I walked in to my favorite neigborhood bakery and took notice of the t-shirt of the employees was wearing: a simple white on black ‘Die Techie Scum’. I found it mildly disturbing, and my first reflex was to make a comment to that effect. Luckily, I heard my remark in my brain before it went out my mouth, which in turn triggered me to shut the hell up and instead wonder why I felt that way.
A friend jokingly suggested I shouldn’t have left a tip that day. Because as a wealthy individual, that should be the way you communicate your discontent with the opinions of someone making less money than you do. Not.
I, unavoidably and unwillingly, identify as a techie: white, male, upper middle class, SF transplant, graduate in CS and working as an engineer at a top tech company. I was part of the second batch, the one from 2007. I moved to my first apartment in San Francisco because the shuttles allowed me to. Like the eternal September or yore, the three years after the Google IPO marked the beginning of an influx that was only slightly slowed down by the recession.
These days, the valley regales itself week after week of news stories of how Uber threatens journalists and of how Twitter fails to handle the abuse and harassment happening on their network. The language and actions of disruption have become stronger – ads for Prius-leasing companies targeting Lyft drivers are popping up on the web. VC money keeps pouring in, sometimes financing the most absurd projects.
And despite the obvious escalation, the Chronicle published a piece positing that the anti-tech movement has become irrelevant. I think it nails it when even one of the protesters against this year’s Crunchies is quoted speaking against the personal turn that the protests seemed to have taken:
Outside the Crunchies, Marc Bruno, a longtime North Beach activist who ran against current Assemblyman David Chiu for supervisor in 2012, said the antitech movement fell short in part because it failed to win enough potential allies. Tech workers, like the ones he often sees helping feed the hungry at church dinners, could have rallied against industry excess and income inequality, he said. Instead, protests felt like an indictment of techies themselves, hindering the movement.
I never really had any hope that protesting Google shuttles would ever stop the new fangled shiny condo buildings from mushrooming around mid-Market. Getting tech companies to pay up for the use of Muni stops only went so far. Techies are not going away – there’s no other place for them to get jobs. So, as far as t-shirts go, I much prefer the one worn by Diane Lane when she was shot by Andy Warhol:
She, of course, meant the San Fernando valley. Times have changed.