Much has been made in the last few days of one particular San Francisco techno-douche who famously raved out about what he hated about the city – and who was promptly savaged by pretty much the entire Internet. As much fun as it was to see the entire 415 going in on some assbag who thirty years ago doubtless would have been coke-snorting his way around Wall Street, it drives home something I’ve been feeling lately – that this time, the up-and-coming generation of rich young dot-communists is materially more unpleasant than before.
I think this is true, I think it goes beyond just the typical generational disdain for those following behind, and I think it can be explained by a couple different phenomena. The first, and most obvious, is that this particular technology bubble (and it is a bubble, don’t kid yourself) is not happening in parallel with a booming economy in general. Famously, in 1999, we hired a waitress from Hooters to sit the help desk at $50K a year, because everyone more technically qualified was working elsewhere for more money. I myself got dragged in off the street in 1997 for $40K with not a day’s experience in IT, and saw my salary jump by almost 40% in the ensuing three years. The dot-com boom went hand-in-glove with the longest sustained economic expansion in the history of this country, and it’s hard to disdain the twenty-something youngsters minting cash out of straw when everybody’s getting paid.
Fast forward to 2013, where the economy has never really recovered from the credit crunch of 2008. A parsimonious Congress, in the grip of a political cabal that’s more than willing to sink the country in order to slag that colored boy in the White House, has given us an austerity binge that slowed recovery to a trickle. Interest rates stay low, quantitative easing continues, but the market gets hinky every time it thinks the Fed might turn off the taps – the economy is on permanent life-support, and people stay in jobs they don’t want or can’t stand for the sake of security, or insurance, or because they have to get the kids through school.
Meanwhile, the nature of the technology itself is more solipsistic than ever before. The dot-com boom was about monetizing the web – search engines, advertising, retail that could offer results superior to brick-and-mortar shopping. And, of course, the technology blue chips that were getting you there: Netscape, Cisco, Microsoft, AOL. Today, that’s all in place; Amazon is everyone’s default shopping choice and everybody’s got an on-ramp to the information superhighway (sneezes cobwebs off cliche). The driving forces behind the modern tech economy are largely centered around social networking and mobile computing. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Foursquare. Google and Apple, of course. It’s all about personal gratification, in a way that can be much more personal, pervasive and persistent than when our internet experience revolved around desktop computers plugged into DSL (if you were really lucky).
The combination of the two is what really drives people up the wall. Things like Uber and Lyft and Sidecar are tremendously useful in a city woefully underserved by cabs, but the cabs are (quite rightly) irate at being subject to a slew of regulations that “disrupting” services are spared. The entire ecosystem of private shuttle buses running from San Francisco down the peninsula – taking ridership from a public transit system that needs it to survive, and frequently usurping public bus stops for their own – offends the sense that we’re somehow all in this together. People looking to buy a house or a condo in the city are finding themselves shut out by people who can swarm in with a cash offer and then just keep the property as an investment. And Sean Parker’s infamous “fantasy wedding” has become the gold standard of cautionary tales about the solipsistic oblivion of modern Silicon Valley wealth.
So what’s the solution? There’s not one, really. Eventually this bubble will bust and all the douchebags will go back to Goldman Sachs or whatever, maybe. Or the economy will take off and enough money will shake loose that everybody’s happy – thought probably not, or it would have happened by now. Or this will just roll itself into the ongoing trend of social bifurcation where certain people wind up with Platinum Plus Preferred Citizenship and everyone else scuffles out a living as best they can.