Last week Tim Redmond, my former editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, published on his excellent blog 48 hills an incendiary, comprehensive and whip-smart speech given at a business conference on the “Mid-Market Transformation” last week by the former CEO of Salon, David Talbot.
The piece is significant because it contextualizes the growing, palpable rage over everything from Google Busses to tech-friendly tax breaks that have dominated conversations on the future of urban planning in San Francisco, addressing what many see as an inexorable, shuddering earthquake sliding over the land — the subduction of a thriving and diverse city by a technophilic elite.
Talbot’s assertion that he is “no luddite” should be obvious to anyone familiar with the digital pioneer and his award-winning online publication, which frequently covers topics in tech, innovation and business. But it is nonetheless an important precursor to a discussion that, while granting the great potential of tech entrepreneurship to do good, also outlines a host of real and tangible negative effects directly attributable to the cult of digital capitalism, which promises to strengthen its hold on this city, and plenty of others, in coming years.
I’m a strong believer in the power of technology to liberate the human spirit. And I’m very proud that San Francisco is a beehive of this kind of buzzing innovation.
Talbot writes, and then continues
But over the years, the innovation bubbling up in the Bay Area has become much more market-oriented than socially driven. Vast fortunes have been created overnight by raiding the intellectual content that others have painstakingly built over the years. Other new empires have risen by convincing millions of people to give up their privacy and reveal their deepest thoughts and desires for free – a kind of Tom Sawyer business model based on persuading the public that it’s lots of fun to paint someone else’s fence.
The Tom Sawyerism to which Talbot refers applies to everything from the offering up of private information to a bevy of salespeople eager to pummel it back at us in the form of targeted advertising . . . to the relatively more glacial, but no less tangible, process by which populations create the "cool" that will later be rewarmed and served back to them -- at a fair markup, of course.
In San Francisco, this process is playing out on the physical landscape, as tech entrepreneurs flock to the city and its outposts -- not least of which is Burning Man -- to slurp up what's innovative, repackage it digitally, and use it to finance the very real "reinvestment" by which the city is becoming attractive and commercially viable for a certain set - to the necessary exclusion of others.
As I begin to contemplate my own move from the Bay Area and the art community I've been part of here (more on that later), it's a constellation of issues I'm struggling to reconcile all the time: my belief in the power of place and in the importance of using space to rebuild community, with my fear and mistrust of the bright-eyed and buzzwordy discourse of creative placemaking; my love for the way new forms are born and breed in the crevices of the city and the cracked desert landscape, with my skeptical mistrust of those who say it will "change the world"; my grudging acceptance of the superstructures of real estate and finance and politics and technology that govern what is likely to happen and what is even possible in the complex system we inhabit, with my intense, prideful, jealous, possessive, passionate and perhaps irrational love of the places I have built a home over the past few years.
If you want to struggle with me, perhaps start with Leaving the Garden, Part 1.
These aren't new quandaries; they pre-date the current big-tech big-capital wave of what some would call investment and other would call intrusion. They tie right into my favorite love-to-draw-on discourse by my favorite love-to-hate economist Richard Florida, whose early theories on cities and the creative class were formulated in the wake of the first Silicon Valley tech explosion. But it's pretty impossible to resist drawing a comparison:
Either way, It’s the idea that those who make cities great, and should reap the benefits, are not those true innovators who build, change, transform the environment, but those who can most effectively curate that transformation; whether it was the real estate developer who did the best job of imitating the authenticity of the neighborhood coffee shop or — now — the app developer who does the best job of indexing them for the masses.
Florida’s theories suffered during the housing collapse and ensuing economic slump, but now that the economy is picking up — and especially in tech-centric cities like San Francisco where it never really waned — they are enjoying a rebirth. The only difference is, now it’s not cities and developers making the investments into creative infrastructure; it’s the tech companies themselves. And with huge profits to gamble and even huger profits to be made, it seems that these companies are poised to bring the creative takeover to a whole new level.
During the first wave of creative class discourse, Tom Sawyerism looked a lot like gentrification with a side of appropriated cultural capital. Florida postulated that what made for successful economic development was a series of variables — art spaces, galleries, coffeeshops — that catered to the creative lifestyle and attracted the smart, offbeat young entrepreneurs that would drive the economy forward. As the creative avant grade - everyone from skateboarders to graffiti artists - transformed a run-down neighborhood from downright scary to hip and edgy, their culture became ripe for consumption: street art and style were swept up into service for a whole array of consumer products, while developers copied characteristics of all those weird little one-off shops and churned them out in a never-ending array of “unique” lifestyle centers, “walkable” suburban neighborhoods that required a car to get there, and mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods that somehow always seemed to remain anything but.
The result? Lots of money for developers and cities who granted them land and contracts, and all too often, rent increases and eviction notices that sent artists packing for the next poor neighborhood to call their own, enabling the process to start again.
Today, the lines are a little less clear: those innovators who a couple of decades ago were tinkering in their garages are now the Big Guys, with the big bucks to invest. And yet, they are still pushing a certain type of creative agenda: companies like Google and Dreamworks relied on the creative meme to revamp their industries from within their own walls, experimenting with workplace designs like pet-friendly offices and open salons for collaborating outside the cubicle, along with toy-themed rooms, extravagant meal plans, fitness equipment, free yoga classes, and a whole lot more.
The ensuing fantasylands are widely understood to boost motivation and ingenuity, in addition to offering the perks necessary to attract top talent, resulting in the possibility of big payoffs for companies with the foresight – and profit-margins – needed to invest in worker-friendly infrastructure. It’s a strategy that has distinct advantages for employees’ health and wellness, not to mention morale, and which can trickle into the larger community by introducing new standards and furthering discussion of nourishing human environments – see, for instance, Stephen Kellert’s work on biophilic design — but only if it’s undertaken with such an end in mind. Nearly always, these insular havens remain isolated from the communities in which they’re built, and too often, they run right over them.
Talbot generalizes the problem on so many San Franciscan’s minds,
The tech elite seems more interested in what they can take from San Francisco than what they can give back. It took years of creative and social ferment for San Francisco to become what it is today — a magnet for young and ambitious people from all over the world, including many of the best and brightest digital workers. But instead of expressing gratitude to a city that has given them numerous competitive advantages, tech moguls demand more and more handouts from the city, in the form of tax subsidies and other public giveaways. Mayor Ed Lee has all but turned City Hall over to the tech industry, meeting with digital executives on a weekly basis to ask them what more he can do to make them happy. The mayor not only hands over entire sections of downtown for tech block parties, he has reserved a prime section of the city – the Mid-Market area – exclusively for the Twitterocracy.
Talbot can point to the big-tech tax subsidies of Mid-Market, the taxpayers’ bill — in the several millions — for the America’s Cup he describes as Larry Ellison’s personal vanity show, but he also alludes to the more important, albeit more intangible, dissatisfaction with the increasingly fast — and blithe — make-over of our real cities in the image of the fantastical digital empires that are bourgeoning online.
The intrusion of technology into the real world stretches beyond rising rents and exclusionary enclaves to a cheerful acceptance of the frictionless facilitation of things we used to do perfectly on our own . . . the “answer in search of a problem” that Talbot refers to.
Need to remember your parking space? An app for that. Buy a parking space? An app for that too — just pay someone minimum wage to sit in your spot. Want to know what's hip in your city? A myriad of apps to explore, document, categorize, comment, and otherwise “own,” from the convenience of a pocket-sized simulacrum, 7 by 7 square miles.
In the end, we must address a question about who the places we're place-making are for. After all, what does placemaking even mean -- is it a quirkily little off-beat practice of sidewalk chalking and park-side slam poetry, or is it something that has been conscripted into service, first by the relatively lucrative field of urban development, and now, by the insanely lucrative field of tech development? At this point, creative placemaking doesn't reside in any particular endemic region or circumstance. It has been institutionalized by the government in the form of the NEA's Our Town grant and ArtPlace America -- a good thing, by many measures, but also permission to basically apply a fuzzy and feel-good concept wherever it may happen to serve -- even if it means serving eviction papers.
The most creative of all creative places, Black Rock City, now finds itself inundated with the neatest new toys of the tech elite. 3-d printers, octocoptor drones, infinitely programable LEDs: all creative things in their own way which, I suppose, can contribute more to more exciting, equalizing, people-positive changes in our lives (the 3-d printer, of course, being the return of the means of production to the people, which will beget the great rebirth of sustainable, distributed local manufacturing in America, where one 3-d printer will be able to printer out the next 3-d printer, and so on and so forth and so we've all heard) but more importantly, which announce a demographic shift in the community . . . to one that doesn't sit on any idea for too long.
In some cases, the tech community doesn't seem to be so much about creative foment as it is about creative race to the finish line, collect as much as possible along the way. In others it seems that, at-times eyebrow-raising gadgety gadgets notwithstanding, there is a sincere desire to do good, with a serious talent to back it up. It may be that a group like ReAllocate, whose 2013 Project Blue Sky hit on as many de jour fetishes as possible -- 3-d printers, drones, shipping container warehouses -- really will deliver medicine to via mini-coptor a la Hunger Games -- but in the mean time, it's their wealthier brethren who, for better or worse, have the real power to effect change. Until the little guys get to their IPO, we have to hope the big guys -- the ones shaping our cities and our futures -- will take a page out of their book. And if Black Rock City helps nudge their thinking -- even a hair -- in the right direction, I guess we can put up with the drones.
It remains to be seen whether their entré, en masse, into Black Rock City and into the field of creative placemaking will simply result in more for more's sake, in a overabundance of cute and quirky and ultimately cliche -- but profitable -- new urban forms which win them more and more real estate, more and more (cash) cache . . . or whether there is an earnestness in their participation in Burning Man that belies what's happening back home in San Francisco.
And here, we must return to the question of Tony Hsieh. After spending a week with The Downtown Project in Las Vegas, Alissa Walker, writing for Gizmodo, returned with some of the balanced perspective necessary, writing:
One thing kept popping into my mind as I was walking around downtown Vegas. What if Google/Facebook/Apple/Your Tech Company Here had decided to do this for San Carlos/San Mateo/San Jose/Your San-Prefaced City Here? We'd be celebrating their every move. We give these Silicon Valley places so much heat for not being better neighbors and Hsieh has gone ahead and transcended any possible expectation we could ever have for a tech company.
Instead of staying in his suburban bubble, Hsieh moved his company downtown. Instead of forking over money to a nonprofit, Hsieh is making a sustained, personal investment in his neighborhood. Hsieh has done a wonderful thing that we wish corporate leaders would do more of—not build a hermetically sealed spaceship in an apricot orchard, like Apple has disappointingly done.
Is it impossible to imagine such a marriage between technology and landscape occurring elsewhere? To Walker's point -- and no matter what the criticisms of the Downtown Project may ultimately be -- it's impossible to say Hsieh hasn't tried something new.
Ultimately, his project, and any project in improving urban space, will stand up to practical questions about use, long-term impact, target audience, and social justice. And those questions are the topic of Leaving the Garden, Part 3.
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