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Anti-Dot-Com Slogans Pepper SF
marks writes "Wired is carrying a story about some folks in San Francisco that are going around and putting up anti-dot-com stickers such as 'blowthedotoutyourass.com' and 'ButIDon'tNeedMyToothPasteDelivered.com.' They even have a website (blowthedotoutyourass.com) where other people can download and print their slogans and paste them other places. Its funny, in that sick, twisted, 'If I hear one more website commercial I'm gonna kill someone' way."
Couple that with the rather annoying fact that a lot of these pointless (and hopeless) businesses are making money for their employees anyway, and you have a pretty silly situation. It's good to see someone publicly decrying this absurdity.
-jwb
I know plenty of people who are ridiculously successful by these standards, who still don't like what income polarization is doing to San Francisco and other metropolitan areas. It's better to win a horrid game than to lose it, but you can still recognize it as a horrid game and wish that it didn't exist.
You don't understand 'tolerance.' Tolerance is a live-and-let-live attitude. If it were a matter of 'oh, I don't like my neighbor's nice new car, I wish it were gone,' it would be a matter of simple resentment. If I don't like my neighbor's sexual practices or hobbies or skin color, that's intolerance. But that's not the problem.
The problem is an inflationary economy, and the effect on a market when a good sector of the consuming side of the market has a lot more income than another, the local economy will server the former far more than the latter. Food prices skyrocket. Rents and housing go up. Police serve the class in favor over the class that isn't - someone who would have be a functional part of the community 7 years ago is now an 'eyesore' today and hassled by cops. The proliferation of SUVs is a huge problem in a city with a parking crunch, and often present a menace to pedestrians and bicyclists.
There have been a lot of evictions of poorer residents in order to be able to rent at ridiculously higher rates to new ones (fortunately there is some rent and eviction control, but increasingly landlords are weakening it and making loopholes.) New residents in SOMA, where I live, will move near a nightclub, then complain about the noise, move a lot of political money around, and have the night club closed. (Ask jwz, himself a silicon implant 'gone native,' about this sometime.)
People are defending an already rare lifestyle, and they are also protecting some of the little character that exists in an increasingly homogenous, franchised country. San Francisco is - or will have been - one of the last urban places with a true sense of place. (Check out jwz's rant on Silicon Valley to see what many people here are trying to prevent.) You are confusing 'tolerance' with 'acquiesence.'
Some details to be aware of are that there is no commercial rent control, which has a whole slew of corallary effects on market motivation.
That said, your point about the exploding cost of housing in other (non rent-controlled!) parts of the Bay Area is quite accurate, and I'd forgotten it. One little irony is that Marin County, once the most beautiful expensive counties in the Bay Area, has become remained a lot more affordable (especially for renters) and largely avoided the crunch of the rest of the Bay Area. It's not cheap, by any means, but their decision to NOT invest in a lot of transportation infrastructure, and to keep many of their interior roads one-lane and to completely control growth (it's virtually impossible to build on green land in most of the county) has made the portions of it that are far from the freeway an unattractive option to commuters, and kept housing prices stable.
score: revolution 1, .com 0
This gives me the idea that they are bitter overgrown adolescents getting off on their 'subversiveness'. Please. Maybe these people can grow up actually do something that will help their community. I'm glad that they are trying to voice their opinion, I just feel that without a constructive aspect, their campaign is pure egotism.
Anyway, I was much more subversive than this when I was in high school. Maybe I'm just jealous because nothing I did was published on a web site.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
I live in SF, and have to admit that I'd like to see the Beauty Bar burned to the ground when the revolution comes as much as the next guy. But, in general, San Franciscians are actually a pretty small minded lot, and only see the 'big picture' in a ten block radius from where they live.
A couple things are happening here:
1) Land values are skyrocketing around the whole bay. There simply isn't enough land to go around, and poor people and industrial usage are feeling it. Unlike in the 1980s boom, San Francisco hasn't been excepted this time, and rents here are actually similar or lower to Cupertino or anywhere else. The perception is that SF is being 'invaded' by computer jocks that want to enjoy the lifestyle while destroying it. The reality is that many people are being pushed here by the more intolerable situation in SV.
2) Rent Control is having the reverse effect of increasing evictions, rather than decreasing them. Quite a few people have been holed up for years in a victorian flat paying $800/month, split 4 or 5 ways. Obviously, if the landlord can slap on a coat of paint and get $3000 for the same flat, he'll find a way. And since he doesn't want to get into a situation where he's below market again, he might jack that $3000 up to $3500. This sort of thing totally distorts the economics in a city where most people rent.
But anyways, you're right. The days of San Francisco being a real artistic center are probably over. Most of that community is either trust funded or entrenched and over 35 years old. The fear is that we'll end up like a big version of Carmel-by-the-Sea or Sausilito, and the art will be pastel pictures of balloons and seagulls floating over the golden gate.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
http://www.blowthedoto utyourass.com/stats/www2000/stats.html
or
Maybe we need this dotshit
I hate to sound like a gun manufacturer or a child pr0nographer, but it seems like the eToothpaste eDelivery eServices and the trade-stocks-at-3-AM and dancingsquidtitties.com wouldn't be there if people didn't want them. Their movement into the web is more or less the inevitable result of the common folk moving into the web.
So, while I understand the frustration of one of the most empowering communication and information-transforming tools ever created being used to sell crap even more useless than the crap we sold last week, it may be a great opportunity for those with brains. The eOverload lowers the noise-to-signal ratio, but it doesn't drive good information out. If little Johnny's dad gets a shiny new computer and a DSL line so that he can buy underwear at the speed of light using the Business Model of the Future, that doesn't stop Johnny from visiting GNU or Bartleby or the DXM FAQ. I'm talking about guerilla education here. Let's let the dots put a computer in every nook and cranny, build powerful internet backbones and make everyone need high-speed reliable access as one of life's basic requirements.
That's when we move in...
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I'm afraid that this has lost me a little-- I'm failing to see how disliking how a community member chooses to spend his/her money is any different than who a comm. member chooses to associate with, or how he/she chooses to worship or whatever trite comparission you care to walk around the block. Destroying folk's property (i.e. slashing tires or burning crosses or what have you) doesn't sound tollerant-- although both certainly express resentment (and how!)
Also, I didn't want to sound like I didn't understand the hostility. I totally understand why any set community dislikes an interlopper-- people don't like change. That's fine. But it's interesting (which isn't to say significant) that the same excuses ("they're screwing up our community's values, messing with our property values, edging us out, taking our rightful places from us") are trotted out by old white suburbanites and younger, hipper artsy San Franciscans.
Just food for thought. Don't dismiss this out of hand, please.
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
OK, you won't usually hear completely crazy ideas coming from me. But this is different. Those SF people were the usual anti-freedom antitech luddites, but this is an excuse to promote my agenda:
End all TLDs!!!!
This sounds funny and/or sarcastic; I fully expect this time to be moderated into the floor. But ever since Ralph Nader's group started advocating whole new TLDs just for their pet causes, it has occurred to me that the whole notion of .org .net .whatever is silly.
It made sense in the old days, when you needed to know at a glance if you could access a site for regulatory reasons (ie certain mil domains accessing com domains, etc). But what purpose do they serve now?
More web addresses? It doesn't address the limited number of *.*.*.* addresses (there are other solutions for that). Most companies reserve all possible TLDs which could violate their trademarks-- add more TLDs and you won't even see more lawsuits-- the same squatters and the same trademark holders, just more names to fight over.
It hardly serves as an organizing principle. Is an American private school a .com, .edu, or .city.state.us? The latter is ruling of self-appointed Masters of American Domains at USC. They want coke to be coke.atlanta.us. Why? Really, I can't tell. I don't need to look at a web address to tell if I am at a gov't, private or network provider's homepage.
What we need aren't more top-level domains, but less. We have to drop this .com hack and type http://slashdot. Current dot-whatevers can keep their distinctions, but let's let EVERYTHING be a TLD.
End the TLD Tyranny. In your heart, you know I'm right.
If they have some kind of point to make, other than whining, there has to be a more productive method of protest than plastering avery labels all over the place.
read the comments in the html
What the government (state and local) needs to understand is that they must funnel these huge tax surpluses that the Internet economy is creating into capital improvements for school and transportation. If they do, we'll cruise through the recession with new schools and low taxes that just break even on the operating costs.
-jwb (-= 0.02)
(Whoa, I'm replying to a JDax post! ;-) )
Everybody gets sick of stuff they hear all the time, whether it's Brittney Spears or "Cha-ching!" However, you don't very often see people going around vandalizing property over it. The reaction that this article (and many others that you can find at the SF Weekly or SF Gate) is talking about is a different phenomenon.
Namely, it's all about jealousy and class warfare and the incredibly immature (although we've probably all done it at some point) "I got here first, so I'm better" attitude.
Jealousy and class warfare? This shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone anywhere, but San Francisco (no, I refuse to call it "The City") is particularly notorious for it. The bonus is that it takes no thought whatsoever to join this movement -- just go after anything that looks like a yuppie status symbol: in order, the pager, the cell phone, the SUV, and San Francisco real estate.
An aside: I never really understood why yuppie youth thought they were cool because they carried a pager on their belt. To me, it's saying, "Yeah, I lack so much independence that I have to be at the beck and call of other people 24 hours a day." But I digress.
As for the third attitude I mentioned, it's hardly unique to San Francisco, but they seem to do it better than just about anyone save possibly New York City dwellers. Recently, a decent number of gay folks thought it would be fun to start vandalizing people's cars, because too many straight people were moving into their neighborhoods. (How's that for discriminatory irony!) You see it among the Slackers of NYC, too, because the mayor actually had to gall to make run down areas like Times Square safe for families to visit at night. Gasp! This definitely isn't limited to real estate, either, if you've ever heard anyone whine "Man, BandX and TVshowX were so cool, but now they suck because a lot of people like them. Mainstream bastards!"
In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that we're one of the groups that has moved into a place that was vacated by an organization mentioned elsewhere in this thread at Slashdot because they could no longer afford the rent. It still wouldn't change my opinion on this, though, as I've never been harrassed over it, nor has any of my property been vandalized.
I will say, however, that the San Francisco land grab is pretty ironic. Technology, and more specifically, the Internet, are supposed to increase our abilities to work together remotely, yet we're all fighting to squeeze into San Francisco, and paying through the nose for the honor.
And to JDax, since I didn't get a chance to reply last night: Hell, I wasn't going to blame Linux for bad weather forecasting, I was going to blame it for the bad weather itself! Global warming, the recent spate of droughts, floods, and natural disasters: all can be traced back to Torvalds and Cox. It's true! :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
There were campaigns like this in the suburbs of Detroit and Chicago in the 60's, too. But, those were to keep African-Americans and "foreigners" from moving in or staying. Isn't this a sort of distressing reaction to a shift in population demographic? Isn't SF supposed to be an almost mystical land of community tolerance and acceptation? If "artists" (you know, the voice of culture, those who spend every day slaving to prove that human beings are at least a notch above rabid dogs) are stooping (or, god forbid, gladly taking up) subtle (and not-so-subtle) terror tactics, isn't the art scene already dead?
As for BlowItOutYourMonkeysButt.com (or whatever the hell it's called,) some of the material is funny (in a sort of AIRTOONS kinda way), but it seems to me that the whole campaign is just howling-at-the-moon brand rage: futile not only in its tacit attempt (stickers will kill this dot-com bullshit about as quickly as a water hose will put out the sun) but also in its execution (by setting yourself up as not-A [we hate them dot-com coloninc services!], you basically guarantee that every time you impress your message on someone[look, honey: those artists really hate e-colonics], you're also passing on the much-loathed message you're trying to resist [honey, do you think we should get ourselves colonically irrigated online?]. )
Oh, crap; does any of this make sense?
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
I'm sick of this internet BS too...everyone is E-this/E-that. I just want to read a book or something. Even my boss at work seems to be into this whole internet thing...he's always asking me, "Did you restart those webservers?" or "Hey..is that E4500 back up and working yet"/"Damnit, why has our bandwidth dropped?"
Personally, i don't know what he's talking about. I just took this job as a...i think they call me a SysAd or something...because they have a foosball table. Besides - no one has told me why they call the company i work for "Sun" anyway. I mean...it's really not that well lit around here anyways.
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
With a significant segment of the population here taking in income that is an order of magnitude higher than that of the general, non-high-tech population, a local inflation has made it very difficult for the working poor and artists who had long considered this a home to survive. The service industry here has gotten outright hostile to people it percieves as part of that economy - especially the MBA types (less so the geeks, since we're less into conspicuous consumption, even though we are just as guilty of pushing up rent costs.) Jobs at restaurants and cafes that pay $10 an hour go begging.
Also good targets for abuse are people who buy and drive SUVs in a crowded city without parking - there was a campaign encouraging locals to vandalize SUVs and luxury cars, partially out of vengeance and partially to scare away the rich arrivers, who are pushing up the cost of living. (It was called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.) Another source of contention is the property-tax exemption for so-called live-work spaces. Originally designed to motivate artists to move into troubled neighborhoods and convert industrial space into studio and work space, the vast majority of so-called live-work lofts are new construction that simply is built in an industrial style, which is bought for $200,000 to $600,000 a unit by trendy nouveux riches. Then these people pay no tax into the local school system, while local residents in regular housing (including those of us who rent, since it is part of the cost of renting) pay property tax.
I see a lot of vaguely guilty sympathy for these anti-tech-yuppie efforts among the creatives of the web industry - after all, many of them had hoped to be artists themselves - as well as among the more thoughtful tech geeks. Most real artists, unless they are very rich or married to someone who is, are leaving the Bay Area; San Francisco is in danger of falling off the art map.