How San Francisco Hazed a Tech Bro (backchannel.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In December 2013 San Francisco's tension with its surging tech class reached a breaking point. Protesters swarmed Google buses. They stood in front of Twitter carrying a coffin labeled "Affordable Housing." Google glassholes were on the rise. In the midst of this, the CEO and founder of AngelHack posted a rant about the homeless. "In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city," Greg Gopman wrote. He thought he was becoming a thought leader. Instead, the entire city turned against him. Reviled and suddenly unemployable, Gopman spent a quixotic year spinning up businesses to solve homelessness. His journey is weirdly emblematic of today's startup-fueled San Francisco.

Comments

As a tourist...

[x0ra]

walking down Market from Embarcadero to Castro brings up a few areas which indeed do look like shit, not to mention the awkward times when a delirious hobo get in a trolley. SJW are probably gonna mod me down, but that would be one more fact they conveniently ignore...

Re:As a tourist...

[Daemonik]

If you want to live in a curated life, move to Disney Land, buy the clothes they tell you to wear, work the job they tell you to work.

Rest of us will be dealing with real life. You won't be missed.

Re:As a tourist...

[afgam28]

First of all, Market St takes you right between the Tenderloin and the 6th & Market area, which locals knows to avoid. Clueless tourists however, don't.

Second, everyone in SF knows it looks like shit there, no one's pretending it doesn't. But about a third or maybe even half of the homeless people there are mentally ill. It's fucked up that as a society, we'd leave sick people out there to die, and demand that they "beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way". We don't do that with people with cancer, or physical disabilities, and we shouldn't for the mentally ill either. You can look down on "SJW"s all you want, but the guy was acting like a cunt, and he got treated the way he deserved.

Re:As a tourist...

[ooloorie]

Rest of us will be dealing with real life. You won't be missed.

San Francisco isn't "real life". It's an ultra-wealthy enclave that has chosen to turn itself into a filthy dystopia. It is San Francisco that is a "curated life", albeit the curators are doing a piss poor job. In real life, cities are neither as filthy as San Francisco, nor as wealthy.

Re:As a tourist...

[Nemyst]

I'll readily agree that he worded it poorly and I disagree with much of the premise, but... Is the punishment in line with the offense here? He spoke his mind out, something Americans seem all too eager to do and say they have a right to, and then the backlash was not only severe, but persisted for years down the line and probably will for years further. That's a bit much, don't you think? That you can essentially destroy your life in a single act, one that is neither immoral nor illegal?

He forgot the rule #1 of dealing with millenials

[choke]

Talk PC, act sociopathic.

vote with your feet

[ooloorie]

I used to live in San Francisco, and it used to be tolerant, interesting, welcoming, and a live-and-let-live kind of place. These days, it's a dirty dump, full of intolerant people and massive social problems. Of course, the homeless and drug addicts in the street aren't the cause, they are merely the symptom of a broken political culture and corrupt political class and machinery, a toxic mix of nouveau riche techies, public sector unions, retirees, and "social justice" activists. San Francisco demographics are against it: SF has largely destroyed its middle class, leaving the city to young party goers and retirees, neither of which are the kind of people who care about the long term health of their community. Having left SF, I just hope I don't have to bail these people out with my tax dollars, because SF will get a lot worse before it gets better. So, my recommendation: don't try to fix SF, just leave it. Unless you are a 20-something who likes to party, in which case put up with the stink and dirt for a few more years and have fun before leaving.

Not exactly

[rsilvergun]

these high paid tech folks still want and need services. They want teachers for their kids, police and fire dept to keep them safe. Housemaids to tidy up for them after an 80 hour work week and restaurant staff to cook food for them.

What they do not want, it seems, is to pay for all that. See, it's not as easy as "Just move out of San Fransico". When your poor you live where you're born. You don't just move to where the work is, and if you try you're taking a huge risk. You have no savings because you're never paid enough for savings.

What we have is servant class asking members of the merchant class to pay for their services. I don't see a problem with that.

But hey, bashing people over the head with the "PC" moniker never gets old, right? So go ahead. I suppose it's a hell of a lot easier than facing the unpleasant consequences of a modern service economy.

I'm just gonna throw this out here

[rsilvergun]

but wouldn't the solution be to just give them homes to live in? I mean, we're the wealthiest country on plant earth. This shouldn't be a problem.

I read this and I find myself screaming BS

[Crashmarik]

The whole article reads like a package dropped from a PR firm with the sole purpose of rehabbing this guys rep.

Call me when it runs in the Sacramento Bee or any paper that actually verifies what they print.

Re:Screw San Fran

[dryeo]

California is really at a disadvantage compared to Kansas. Everyone wants to live in California due to its climate while people live in Kansas because they do. Someone in Kansas who is mentally ill and homeless is going to have a tendency to move to California, more Liberal and a better climate. Someone in California who is down and out will not move to Kansas. Kansas ends up with a more mentally stable population that is not so demanding on services.
 

Re: Seattle has the same issue

[dabadab]

The ACLU is still proud of ensuring the involuntarily committed were released out of the "institutions".

And is rightfully so.
See, you can actually run a mental health program without practically jailing people as it is evident in many places in the world.

Re:Screw San Fran

[serviscope_minor]

No, my metric for "pretty good" is actual student performance, dropout rates, test scores, and graduation rates. That's the metric that matters.

Hello from the UK. The last Labour government tried that. Actually they were obsessed with measurable metrics and installed them everywhere with severe penalties in terms of funding for failing. Sounds good, right? No it sucked, because the simplistic metrics that you and they proposed don't actually match the real world, and of course large-scale gaming went on.

So, no, those matrics you propose suck. And here's why:

1. Test scores ignore how hard the test is. An A-level in sociology is not the same as an A-level in further maths. An A-level from the "easy" exam board (this is what happens if you apply the free market to exams) is worth more to the school (better grades) but is worth less to the person that matters (the pupil). It is in the school's financial interest to direct the pupils to stuf that is bad for the pupils in order to optimize the school's metrics. That happened a lot.

2. Even if you can do proper scores, absolute scores are not the correct thing to optimize, because externalities dominate the results, not the schools themselves. The schools can make a difference but only so far. Definding all the "bad" inner city schools as punishment and giving the money to the successful suburban schools actually makes things worse even though you're diverting money from poorly performing places to better performing ones.

So, no, the world is vastly, vastly more complex than your excessively simplistic metrics. You think you have the solution, but trust me, you do not. It's been tried before and it failed. The only thing you want to improve is "quality of education". You cannot measure that easily. Any proxy measure is subject to gaming.

So now you need to change your metrics to "test scores on good subject with sufficiently informative tests". Suddenly you've gone from something simple, easy and wrong to something much much harder to measure. And you've still not corrected for external factors.

I also think your post is deeply foolish because you're trying to distill a complex and nuanced problem into one with simplistic solutions with an emphasis on "progressives" versus "conservatives". The world is so very much more complex than that.

Drunk posts

[taylorius]

Gopman's first post "my love affair with SF dies a little" seemed ok (although his having "no clue" about why the homeless were there does smack of techie-arrogance). It was the drunk one after that that that did for him.

In times gone by it would've just been shouting in a bar. Afterwards he could've apologised, laughed it off, and put it down to too many beers. Now - it's affected his whole life. For those living their lives online, every utterance is juggling dynamite. It seems to me that this encourages rather a strict, lockstep approach to discourse. No room to blow off a little steam, everything you ever say will be "googled" for evermore. It's a terrifying prospect, in my view.

He’d always wanted to be a thought leader

[cardpuncher]

I don't think I've ever read such a self-referential, vacuous pile of crap.

"image", "startups", "city tax break", "hackathon host and startup incubator", "photos on Facebook of cash", "Valleywag", "Huffington Post", "the flavor of disruption", "crowdfunding", "Burning Man"

I'm afraid that if you insist on living inside your own virtual reality you're eventually going to be confronted by the fact that the rest of the world neither cares about this parallel universe whose inflation is powered almost entirely by self-aggrandisement. Nor do they believe that warehousing your homeless in instagram-friendly workfare "decadomes" is a solution to the housing problem : it's simply a product of a mind that does not understand the lives of people in the real world and believes the answer is to sweep them under an attractive carpet.

I've no idea who this guy is, nor do I particulalry care about his fate, but the unquestioning belief in the article that the narcissism of the internet should naturally just carry over into real life is breathtakingly insane.