The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (41 page)

I wonder sometimes if there will be a revolt against the quality of time the new technologies have brought us, as well as the corporations in charge of those technologies. Or perhaps there already has been, in a small, quiet way. The real point about the slow food movement was often missed. It wasn’t food. It was about doing something from scratch, with pleasure, all the way through, in the old methodical way we used to do things. That didn’t merely produce better food; it produced a better relationship to materials, processes, and labor, notably your own, before the spoon reached your mouth. It produced pleasure in production as well as consumption. It made whole what is broken.

Some of the young have taken up gardening and knitting and a host of other things that involve working with their hands, making things from scratch, and often doing things the old way. It is a slow-everything movement in need of a manifesto that would explain what vinyl records and homemade bread have in common. We won’t overthrow corporations by knitting—but understanding the pleasures of knitting or weeding or making pickles might articulate the value of that world outside electronic chatter and distraction, and inside a more stately sense of time. (Of course, for a lot of people, this impulse has been sublimated by cooking shows: watching the preparation of food that you will never taste by celebrities you will never meet, a fate that makes Tantalus’s seem rich.)

There are also places where human contact and continuity of experience
hasn’t been so ruined. I visit New Orleans regularly, where music is often live and people dance to it, not just listen to it sitting down, and where people sit by preference out front and greet strangers with endearments. This old leisurely enjoyment of mingling with strangers in the street and public venues forms a dramatic contrast with the Bay Area, where contact with strangers is likely to be met (at least among the white middle class) with a puzzled and slightly pained expression that seems to say you’ve made a mistake. If you’re even heard, since earphones—they still look to me like some sort of medical equipment, an IV drip for noise—are ubiquitous, so that on college campuses, say, finding someone who can lend you an ear isn’t easy. The young are disappearing down the rabbit hole of total immersion in the networked world—and struggling to get out of it.

Getting out of it is about slowness and about finding alternatives to the alienation that accompanies a sweater knitted by a machine in a sweatshop in a country you know nothing about, or jam made by a giant corporation that has terrible environmental and labor practices and might be tied to the death of honeybees or the poisoning of farmworkers. It’s an attempt to put the world back together again, in its materials but also its time and labor. It’s both laughably small and heroically ambitious.

Perhaps the young will go further and establish rebel camps where they will lead the lives of 1957, if not 1857, when it comes to quality of time and technology. Perhaps. Right now we need to articulate these subtle things, this richer, more expansive quality of time and attention and connection, to hold onto it. Can we? The alternative is grim, with a grimness that would be hard to explain to someone who’s distracted.

July 2013

PALE BUS, PALE RIDER

Silicon Valley Invades, Cont’d

The young woman at the blockade was worried about the banner the Oaklanders brought, she told me, because it might distract attention from evicted tenants’ stories and the larger issues. But the words “FUCK OFF GOOGLE” in giant letters on a purple sheet held up in front of a blockaded Google bus gladdened the hearts of other San Franciscans. That morning—it was Tuesday, January 21, 2014—about fifty locals were also holding up a Facebook bus: a gleaming luxury coach transporting Facebook employees down the peninsula to Silicon Valley. A tall young black man held one corner of the banner; he was wearing a
Ulysses
T-shirt, as if analog itself had come to protest against digital. The Brass Liberation Orchestra played the Eurythmics’s “Sweet Dreams” as the television cameras rolled.

The white buses took up most of the four lanes of Eighth Street at Market, and their passengers were barely visible behind the tinted windows, scowling or texting or looking at their laptops for the half-hour they were delayed by the blockade. GET OFF THE BUS! JOIN US, another banner said, and the official-looking signs from the December 9 blockade were put up at either end of the Facebook bus: WARNING: INCOME GAP AHEAD the one at the front said. STOP DISPLACEMENT NOW, read the one at the back. One protester shook a sign on a stick in front of the Google bus; a young Google employee decided to dance with it, as though we were all at the same party.

We weren’t. One of the curious things about the crisis in San Francisco—precipitated by a huge influx of well-paid tech workers driving up housing costs and causing evictions, gentrification, and cultural change—is that they seem unable to understand why many locals don’t love them.
They’re convinced that they are members of the tribe. Their confusion may issue from Silicon Valley’s own favorite stories about itself. These days in TED talks and tech-world conversation, commerce is described as art and as revolution and huge corporations are portrayed as agents of the counterculture.

That may actually have been the case, briefly, in the popular tech Genesis story according to which Apple emerged from a garage somewhere at the south end of the San Francisco Peninsula, not yet known as Silicon Valley. But Google set itself up with the help of a $4.5 million government subsidy, and Apple became a giant corporation that begat multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns and overseas sweatshops and the rest that you already know. Facebook, Google, eBay, and Yahoo (though not Apple) belong to the conservative anti-environmental political action committee ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council).

The story Silicon Valley less often tells about itself has to do with dollar signs and weapons systems. The industry came out of military contracting, and its alliance with the Pentagon has never ended. The valley’s first major firm, Hewlett-Packard, was a military contractor. One of its cofounders, David Packard, was an undersecretary of defense in the Nixon administration; his signal contribution as a civil servant was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law. Many defense contractors have flourished in Silicon Valley in the decades since: weapons contractors United Technologies and Lockheed Martin, as well as sundry makers of drone, satellite, and spying equipment and military robotics. Silicon Valley made technology for the military, and the military sponsored research that benefited Silicon Valley. The first supercomputer, made by New York’s Remington Rand, was for nuclear weapons research at the Bay Area’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The Internet itself, people sometimes remember, was created by the military, and publicly funded research has done a lot to make the hardware, the software, and the vast private fortunes possible. Which you wouldn’t know from the hyperlibertarian language of the tech world’s kings. Even the mildest of them, Bill Gates, said in 1998: “There isn’t an industry in America that is more creative, more alive and more competitive. And the
amazing thing is that all this happened without any government involvement.” The current lords talk of various kinds of secession, quite literally at the Seasteading Institute, an organization that’s looking into building artificial islands outside all national laws and regulations. And taxes. Let someone else subsidize all that research.

The same morning the buses were stopped in downtown San Francisco, some hell-raisers went to the Berkeley home of a Google employee who, they say, works on robots for the military. (Google recently purchased eight robotics companies and is going in a lot of new directions, to put it mildly.) After ringing his doorbell, they unfurled a banner that read GOOGLE’S FUTURE STOPS HERE, and then blockaded the Google bus at one of its Berkeley stops.

So there’s a disconnect in values and goals: Silicon Valley workers seem to want to inhabit the anti-war, social-justice, mutual-aid heart of San Francisco (and the Bay Area). To do so they often displace San Franciscans from their homes. One often hears objections: it isn’t the tech workers coming here who are carrying out the evictions. But they are moving into homes from which people have been evicted. Ivory collectors in China aren’t shooting elephants in Africa, but the elephants are being shot for them. Native sons and daughters also work in the industry, and many of the newcomers may be compassionate, progressive people, but I have seen few signs of resistance, refusal to participate, or even chagrin about their impact from within their ranks.

It may be that 2013 was the year San Francisco turned on Silicon Valley and may be the year the world did too. Edward Snowden’s revelations began to flow in June: Silicon Valley was sharing our private data with the National Security Agency. Many statements were made about how reluctantly it was done, how outraged the executives were, but all the relevant companies—Yahoo, Google, Facebook—complied without telling us. These days it appears that the NSA is not their enemy so much as their rival; Facebook and Google are themselves apparently harvesting far more data from us than the U.S. government is. Last year, Facebook’s chief security officer went to work for the NSA, and the
New York Times
said the move underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon
Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze, and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans. The difference is that the NSA does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.

The corporations doing this are not the counterculture or the underground or bohemia and are only the avant-garde of an Orwellian future.

Last September, City of Refuge, a church serving people of color and queer people, left San Francisco—a city that has long considered itself a refuge—and moved to Oakland. “It became clear,” its pastor said, “what the neighborhood was saying to us: This is not a haven for social services.” The current boom is dislodging bookstores, bars, Latino businesses, black businesses, environmental and social-services groups, as well as longtime residents, many of them disabled and elderly. Mary Elizabeth Phillips, who arrived in San Francisco in 1937, will be ninety-eight when she is driven out of her home of more than forty years.

In many other places eviction means you go and find a comparable place to live; in San Francisco that’s impossible for anyone who’s been here a while and is paying less than the market rate. Money isn’t the only issue: even people who can pay huge sums can’t find anything to rent because the competition is so fierce. Jonathan Klein, a travel-agency owner in his sixties living with AIDS, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge last year after being driven out of his home, with his business in the Castro facing eviction. “EVICTION = DEATH,” a sign at the memorial said, echoing the old SILENCE = DEATH slogan of the AIDS-activist era.

When it comes to buying a home, your income needs to be nearly one and a half times higher in San Francisco than in the next most expensive city in the United States. What began as vague anxiety a couple of years ago has turned into fear, rage, and grief. It has also driven people to develop strategies aimed at changing the local and statewide laws that permit the evictions.

When a Google bus was surrounded on December 9, 2013, it made the news all over the English-speaking world. Though what the blockaders wanted wasn’t so easily heard. They were attacked as people who don’t like carpools, by people who don’t get that the buses compete with public
transport and that their passengers displace economically vulnerable San Franciscans. It’s as though death came riding in on a pale horse and someone said: “What? You don’t like horses?” Many of the displaced then become commuters, but they don’t have luxury coaches pulling up in their neighborhoods to take them to their jobs and schools in San Francisco; they drive or patch together routes on public transport or sink into oblivion and exile. So the Google bus and the Apple bus don’t reduce commuting’s impact. They just transfer it to poorer people.

San Francisco was excoriated again and again by lovers of development and the free market for not being dense enough, on the grounds that if we just built and built and built, everyone would be happily housed. “Let San Francisco have the same housing density as Tokyo & Taipei, both earthquake zones, then watch rental costs crater,” a tech worker tweeted. (His feed also features photographs of a toy mule, the mascot of the company he works for, and occasional outbursts aimed at Edward Snowden.) Another day he insisted with the blithe confidence Silicon Valley seems to beget (as well as the oversimplification Twitter more or less requires): “Higher minimum wage and looser, pro-development zoning laws, housing problem in San Francisco goes away. Simple as that.” (Minimum wage would have to be more than $50 an hour for someone to be able to buy a house in San Francisco, or to ensure that a $3,200 a month rent accounted for no more than a third of their pre-tax income.)

San Francisco is already the second densest major metropolitan area in the United States, but this isn’t mentioned much, nor is the fact that the densest, New York, is also unaffordable and becoming more so even in its outer boroughs, despite a building boom. Meanwhile San Francisco developers are building 48,000 more units of housing in the few cracks and interstices not already filled in, mostly upscale condominiums far out of most people’s reach, and most of which won’t be available in time to prevent the next round of evictions.

How do you diagnose what is wrong with San Francisco now? People bandy about the word
gentrification
, a term usually used for neighborhoods rather than whole cities. You could say that San Francisco, like New York and other U.S. metropolises, is suffering the reversal of postwar white
flight: affluent people, many of them white, decided in the past few decades that cities were nice places to live after all and started to return, pushing poorer people, many of them non-white, to the margins.