Those observations mostly boil down to: the owner/professional/service/outsider hierarchy exists in all cities, and SF is no different. What’s special about it? While that’s true to a point, I think SF is fundamentally different in key ways that make it particularly interesting.
-
-
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান
-
Why SF is a unique Petri dish of growing US inequality: 1. The technology ouroboros 2. Radically different returns to technology and capital 3. SF’s (relative) economic homogeneity I'll address each in turn.
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
1: SF is uniquely hostile among its various tiers. Those in the Inner/Outer Party are very explicitly working to eliminate every job the Service class might have, which isn't true in most developed urban economies.
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
When an Uber engineer takes an Uber back from work, they have spent their day working to eliminate the other human in the car from the equation. Their financial well-being (and valuations are steep functions of margins, public perception, etc.) depend on replacing the driver.
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
Contrast that with me as a young, hopeless i-banker, ordering a delivery dinner or taking a black car home. While part of what we did might negatively affect the average American via finance shenanigans, we weren't trying to literally code the service people out of a job.
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
That's actually the main activity of much of the SF Outer Party. Not that the Outer Party is itself safe. AWS put lots of server wranglers out of a job. TensorFlow could do the same for ML engineers. The Party will also eat itself, and automation will be partially automated.
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
Again, contrast this with a more mainstream city like Boston or Chicago: the partner in the law firm isn’t somehow conspiring to put the associate out of a job forever, nor are they concerned with removing their UPS guy or restaurant worker from the economic picture.
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
Put another way, while the threat of automation will have economic repercussions everywhere, in SF it’s happening in particularly sharp (to not say anthropophagic) relief. And because it’s software-driven automation, it’s happening very, very quickly.
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
Point 2: Crazy returns to technology. Consider Facebook. It has a market value of over half a trillion dollars, and it employs something like 20k people. To put that in perspective, that’s about 1/40th of the US GDP (as a reference point).
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
That’s unreal. By contrast, GM has about a tenth the market cap, with 10x as many employees, a full two orders of magnitude difference in productivity (and FB has existed for not much more than 10 years, while GM is a national institution).
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
This means that even if shareholders and VCs keep the lion’s share of returns (which they do), employees are being paid serious cash. The most expensive real estate markets in the US, are in the SFBA. Forget NY and Boston: they’re not even keeping pace with Seattle (AKA, SF II).
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
Point 3: In the SFBA, there’s no game in town other than tech. Most cities have some diversified portfolio of industries that keep the tills and taxmen happy. But not in SF. You’re either a coder, a hustler, a VC, or someone servicing those three. Everything else is commentary.
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
Those three forces together: the cannibalistic relation among tiers, crazy returns to capital, and industry homogeneity, make SF a unique testbed for the forces that will assail the global economy soon.
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
Sure, those forces will impact the entire economy, everywhere. But one can imagine the lawyers and doctors and accountants and salesmen of Boston and Chicago doing their business for decades to come, with no end in sight (though with inequality worsening along the way).
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
In SF, we’ll reach the omega point of automation taking almost all repetitively cognitive or manual tasks in the next decade or so, with the least talented or essential of the Outer Party the next on the chopping block.
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান -
Imagine that: a San Francisco teeming with self-driving cars, delivery robots, and buzzing drones, and almost nobody human except Party members, a smattering of service people, and the odd outcast. That’s easy to envision in SF; bit harder in New York. That’s why SF is different.
এই থ্রেডটি দেখান
কথা-বার্তা শেষ
নতুন কথা-বার্তা -
-
-
George Carlin, a man who saw deeply into the American mind, predicted all this in ‘92 - “... the poor are there just to scare the sh*t out of the middle class; keep ‘em showing up at those jobs.”https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XdH38k0iUgI …
-
Carlin was presciently right about a lot of things.
-
He sure was. Watching Jammin’ in New York from 1992 even today you’d think he’s speaking about present day America.
কথা-বার্তা শেষ
নতুন কথা-বার্তা -
-
-
Chilling but spot on. San Francisco is a surreal dystopian hellscape
-
The feds allow it because it makes big city democrats look bad.
কথা-বার্তা শেষ
নতুন কথা-বার্তা -
লোড হতে বেশ কিছুক্ষণ সময় নিচ্ছে।
টুইটার তার ক্ষমতার বাইরে চলে গেছে বা কোনো সাময়িক সমস্যার সম্মুখীন হয়েছে আবার চেষ্টা করুন বা আরও তথ্যের জন্য টুইটারের স্থিতি দেখুন।

