He worked nights and would take us to school in the morning, pick us up from school in the afternoon. If there was some issue at school, he would be the one that would be available. People talk about the sacrifices that men make when they stay home, having to give up this or give up that. My dad just did it—like it was very natural. Whether or not he enjoyed it, whether or not he was exhausted, whether or not he hated it and cursed us every day, we never felt it. It was just what he did.
When my father got sick and passed away, his book passed to me. A union book is both literal and metaphorical—it states that you’re a member and has your plug number, but it’s almost a simplified passport to a whole way of life. I had the opportunity to go in as a longshoreman.
And I was kind of like, Oh, well, this is great. I could do this for a couple years, you know? Sock some money away, and then figure out where to go from there. Twelve years later, I was still doing it. Still a longshoreman. Bought a house. Traveled a lot. Lived quite happily, I think.
I met a whole bunch of old men who were contemporaries of my father. A lot of older black men, who were kind of extensions of him. A lot of them had grown up in the South, or their family had moved here from the South. They had come to California because they heard there were jobs, or they heard about free schools for their kids, free college, or they heard you could build a life as a black man. So they had very similar stories to my father’s. Suddenly, I was sitting with those men as their contemporary, all working alongside each other.
It was a weird experience: to walk in the same places, to wear his overalls, to do some of the same jobs, work with the same people. It was very comforting.
A ship came in late one day, at a new terminal that I hadn’t worked yet. We’re sitting in the parking lot waiting for the ship to get tied in, it was a foggy day. And somebody comes out and starts just yelling, “I need to see Lyman! Is Lyman around here? I heard Lyman’s here. . . . ”
And I’m like, “I’m Lyman.” I’m wearing my dad’s old overalls—they say Lyman. I’m a junior.
And he’s like, “I knew your dad. Come with me.”
“For what?”
“Shut up. I’m gonna show you how to drive something.”
On the waterfront, if you drive heavy equipment, you get paid more—and you catch better breaks. And so, because of this guy’s respect for my father, he gave me this opportunity.
There was a huge variety of people on the waterfront. There were people who had law degrees who still were putting in a few hours a month as a longshoreman to maintain benefits and things. People who were architects, retired train engineers. More women started coming down, coming from other jobs and bringing those experiences.
There’s nothing like three o’clock in the morning on a container ship, breaking loose a few bays of cargo, removing all these heavy iron rods. Sweaty, greasy, hanging out with a bunch of men of different ages, black men, talking about life. Not competing for money, not competing for a different position, just bullshitting. Politics, love, life, school, friends, your family, the white man. All of those things, but in this amazing, sometimes bizarre, setting.
Especially when you’re out on the terminals closest to the end of Seventh Street, and you have this amazing view of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge and the lights. You’re sitting up high. Thinking, Wow, it just doesn’t get better than this. They’re paying me for this. To be here with these people in this moment. Yes, it’s true: it’s three o’clock in the morning. I’m freezing. I’m wet from sweat. But I am not stuck in an office someplace. I am not programming right now. I’m in communion and in community with people.
* Uber abandoned its Oakland headquarters in 2017.
PART III
THE BALKANIZATION OF THE BAY
Some ask why the public sector hasn’t offered better solutions, or why local government hasn’t intervened with more energy. Others place the burden on those new to the city to take a stronger role in the community, integrate better, volunteer more—or on the leaders of the tech industry to clean up the mess in their own wake. Some even dare to point the finger at the old city and the displaced or at the activists and organizers—if only there was a greater outcry, if only we heard from them more, if only they made more noise, something could be done. Many blame “the technology” itself: if we want “progress,” we have to resign ourselves to the trouble it brings. To them, we have seen this movie here before, and we will see it again.
The deeper the change cuts, the more it destroys the weapons available to combat it. City Hall has to search for new sources of funding as old wells dry up. At home, breadwinners look for new jobs, adapt to new ways of working, as technology and the gig economy make most careers less stable. Competition in the tech industry keeps leaders, even middle managers, preoccupied with their own struggle and either unable or unwilling to stoop and dig through the problems at their feet. Many of our fundamental assumptions about what makes a city work, what knits a community together, are being challenged—even the ability for neighbors, friends, and family to provide for one another in times of need. It is as if everyone has focused for so long on their own problems that they’ve grown civically nearsighted and lost the ability to see across the city, across the street, even next door.
RICHARD WALKER
An “economic geographer” with radical tendencies, he was naturally drawn to UC Berkeley. He devoted his career to studying the evolution of the Bay Area, how its economy and environment shaped each other hand in hand.
One of the great puzzles of the world is what’s called the “Resource Curse.” Why so many places with abundant resources—like the Congo, like Jamaica, like West Virginia—end up poor. The Bay Area is founded on the same mythology—the ’49ers, the Gold Rush, the idea that the Golden Gate is the outpost of Western civilization . . . These are stories trumpeted by the sons and daughters of the Bohemian Club—but to a surprising degree the myths are true.*
So how did California escape the curse? What were the social and political conditions that led to this incredible prosperity?
One is that capital stuck to a lot of hands. Wealth stayed in California and got reinvested in a capitalist manner. First in agriculture. Then in manufacturing, mining. Then in agricultural equipment and the canning industry. These industries built San Francisco and the Bay Area.
Another is skilled labor in abundance. It wasn’t just the rich elite who built this incredibly fecund, dynamic economy, and it wasn’t the miners—a lot of them died with nothing. The new capitalists were educated. Skilled machinists. People who were innovative. People who could get a lot of money in their hands, could be given a long leash, and could revolutionize an industry. The Caterpillar tractor was invented in the Bay Area, the bulldozer was invented in the Bay Area. These are amazing things that nobody remembers anymore. It’s not just the silicon chip.
The third pillar is the mass influx of good labor, good workers, people to man the factories, the fields, the mines. It cost more to get to California, so we tended to get a different cut. These were white and European workers, then the Chinese, then Mexicans and Filipinos and Japanese—everyone under the sun. And unlike South Texas or the Cotton South, the critical difference in California was the racial turnover. We never developed a permanent racial underclass. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of racisms in the world, and California’s is no less serious. But the exploitation in California cut across race.
So we had the best of all possible worlds. Massive amounts of money—makes life easier—that’s reinvested in the region. Skilled labor to use the money to innovate. And mass immigration, wave after wave of educated people who could do the shit work. The three pillars that built California.
And it gave us the independence to build the culture and politics that allowed us to protect what we had built. We were an outlier city, we had money, we had autonomy, and we were a port, so we had intercourse with the world. So this was always a place that had a very “uppity” working class and “up
pity” populace who would revolt against the seizure of power by the capitalists and by the elite: and they have done that several times, whether it was the Union Labor Party or the Workingmen’s Party or the Progressives or the unions of the ’30s, and so on.
There was also always a very strong countercultural movement, and I include in that a culture of sin. They weren’t just a bunch of poets, but were connected with the working class, going against the mainstream bluenoses, bourgeois propriety, and so on. San Francisco always had that—that thread runs all the way through. It helped attract people like Ferlinghetti and the Beats, conscientious objectors, gays in the ’70s, and so on. Even earlier, the first real movement for suffrage was in California, sometime in the 1890s.
Electronic technology is just another goldmine. In a sense, unleashing and controlling the power of the electron is no different than digging in the ground, smelting, yada, yada, yada. The nineteenth century looks primitive today, and we’ll look primitive in a hundred years. The Elon Musk effect, the Travis Kalanick obsession—they’re just the lucky sons of guns who staked their claim on the right river. And it’s produced a volcanic eruption of money.
There’s reinvestment: a lot of money gets plowed back into tech. Hell, since the housing meltdown in 2008, the global economy is so shitty, a lot of the world’s surplus money gets buried in tech because it doesn’t know what else to do. There’s plenty of skilled labor. From all over the world, smart people from Hong Kong, Australia, France, you name it, they’re in Silicon Valley coming up with new ideas, new products, and feeding the engine.
The problem is the working class. A few hundred thousand professionals may think they make the Bay Area great, but they forget about all the people doing the other work: taking care of our kids, teaching in our schools, running government offices, being secretaries, health-care professionals, right up to doctors in local hospitals. We have a giant working class—a working class of color. The bottom 80 percent of the population, 3 million active workers plus their families. And those people still count.
A third of the workers in the Bay Area aren’t paid a living wage. Rent and food and the essentials are extremely expensive now and aren’t getting any cheaper. The average wage in the Bay Area is quite high—but that’s inflated by the filthiness of the super-rich. The average worker does better in Atlanta, or Houston. Plus, California was the center of the housing bubble, and when it burst a lot of people were caught in the fallout. It’s a mess. Now, the higher prices rise, the more they are squeezed. They are pushed to the periphery, two-, three-hour commutes. Or worse, driven out of the Bay Area.
The whole region is skating on very thin ice, despite its immense wealth. We are multiplying millionaires, billionaires, sure. But it is hard to regenerate your workforce under these conditions. If the working class can’t live within reach of their jobs. If young people cannot afford to put down roots. We are destroying the basis of our prosperity. We are eating our children.
ALEX KAUFFMANN
He runs an experimental design team at Google, where he helped build Google Glass and invent Cardboard, Google’s low-fi virtual reality player. In his spare time, he tinkers around, learning how to cook exotic foods from scratch and experimenting with human-to-dolphin communication. We drink free coffee from the Google cafeteria.
I just wanted to learn how to do something with my hands. And a friend said, you should check out this program at NYU. So I went home and looked up “ITP,” the Interactive Telecommunications Program. It was like somebody had gone into my dreams and constructed the perfect graduate program. I didn’t know something like that existed. And once I did, I couldn’t think of anything else.
I literally applied the same night. It’s the only time in my life that I’ve been able to write a two-thousand-word essay in, like, twenty-five minutes. I knew exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to build something that acts on the world. I was tired of doing passive stuff, I wanted to make something that catalyzes.
My goals going into ITP were two. One was to learn enough circuit design that I can get a lightbulb to turn on and off at will. And to learn enough programming that I can make something move around a screen.
So my first day of school, I had Introduction to Physical Computing, which is hardware design, and Introduction to Computational Media, which is programming. And in hardware design we learned how to light up a lightbulb, and in computational media we learned how to move a thing around a screen. So: done. The next two years were pure icing.
I remember various platitudes in undergrad where people would say, “You’re learning how to learn.” At ITP you were learning how to do. “Oh, here’s how you put together a nuclear turbine.” And guess what: even rocket science is not rocket science. You read the book, and if you don’t get it, doesn’t matter. Start playing.
I was recruited in New York. And sure, San Francisco was familiar because I’d been here before. My mom always used to say—and I think this is sort of a ’60s, ’70s view of California—you pick up the US and you shake it, and whatever isn’t nailed down ends up in San Francisco. I think that’s what happened: all the rolling stones landed and gathered moss here. Because the weather is perfect and because there was lots of land and it was cheap and it was groovy.
Now you have this influx of a very brittle, very rational, and extremely practical population taking over. And the two of them, they don’t know how to talk to each other. San Francisco is a city of two extremes. And the normal people get drowned out, don’t they? I mean, I don’t know any of them.
Americans—in general, but especially in big cities—they express themselves through spending. Like a worm expresses the dirt through its body—consume a bunch of stuff and shit it out in a certain shape. The American economy is a digestive thing. Almost a peristalsis of I-work-and-then-I-consume-and-then-I-spit-out-and-then-I-consume-again. San Francisco—it’s now the same.
It’s this messianic tech thing. We’re saving the world mostly making useless products that solve problems that real people don’t have—it’s problems that rich twenty-year-olds have. Like, “There’s nobody at home to pick up the laundry that somebody else did for me.” Thank God somebody is solving that, because what would we do otherwise?
You have an entire population of people who really haven’t done a lot of humanistic learning. People who have been in science programs. Or engineering programs as undergrads, and so they maybe took one history class. And I think you can actually feel that. You can feel that in the callousness, in the oversimplification of political problems.
I am not in the trenches of the boom—living in a mansion with seventy-five other people, because it was cheaper to get than a San Francisco office, working on something that we think is going to change the world. I’m in a lumbering corporation that makes stuff very slowly and scoops up and consumes the little companies that show promise. I’m so insulated from any fluctuations that it’s really hard for me to feel almost anything.
My job is to make things for people, and I can’t do it. It’s easier for me to understand a dolphin than it is to understand a person. Because my worst day is like, The traffic was bad in my chauffeured bus. I had to sit in a comfortable seat with Wi-Fi for an extra twenty minutes. That’s the worst it gets.
I’m always composing my resignation letter in my head, that’s what I do in the shower. It’s always like, Dear Larry and Sergey, I am leaving because this place is perfect. You guys have done such a good job of insulating us from anything that would introduce any worry into our lives that I literally cannot relate to a normal human being. Because I don’t pay any of my bills, because I don’t have to think about my rent. If it doubles, I don’t care. Doesn’t matter. You have completely turned me into a person who is incapable of doing his job.
But one of the other consequences of living in a boomtown is that every time you feel like you have to leave—I have fucking had it, I have absolutely had it!—somebody comes over and is like, “Here’s X amount of dollars,” som
e ridiculous amount of money, “just because you’re doing a great job. We love you!” Or, “Here’s an email from the guy who invented the internet. Maybe you should stick around a little longer, maybe there’s something you can do together.”
As I’m getting older, I’d love to do something on my own. I have every confidence that I could figure something out. And I’d probably end up making lots of money and enjoying it. But at the same time, I’m too comfortable. I don’t have to worry about anything, I don’t have to think about anything. And without any struggle, it’s very hard to find meaningful problems to solve.
Our obstacles here are mountains that we climb or waves that we surf. It’s all about man versus nature. There’s no man versus self here. And the man versus man, it’s more like man stepping over man in the street.
Have you read Mediated? It’s by Thomas de Zengotita. He talks about how when somebody says to you, “Well, this is reality . . . ” that means, “You don’t have a choice.” So the opposite of “reality” is “optional.” But here, all we have are options. You choose to care about this thing, you choose to care about that thing, you choose to cry about this thing, you choose to not care about that thing. We think life is about picking the “stuff,” the information that affects you.
He talks about how disconcerting it is for many people to break down in the middle of nowhere, like Saskatchewan. All the rocks are in a particular place. The fences are somewhere, the telephone poles. But none of them were put there for you. None of them were put there to tell you anything. There is no interpretation. There is no message. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere, and nobody gives a fuck.
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