Hackers? Techies? What To Call San Francisco's Newcomers
"There goes the neighborhood." Every so often that cry goes up in San Francisco, announcing a new chapter in American cultural history, as the rest of the country looks on. There were the beats in North Beach, then the hippies in the Haight, then the gays in the Castro. Now it's the turn of the techies who are pouring into my own Mission neighborhood, among other places. Only this time around, the green stuff that's perfuming the air is money, not weed.
Locals are agitated over soaring rents and the changing urban landscape, as used bookstores yield to cafes full of people punching out business plans on their laptops. But the most heated protests and discussions have focused on the buses that shuttle 18,000 tech workers from San Francisco to their jobs at Google, Apple, Facebook and other companies. People call them all Google buses, because they're hard to tell apart — oversized Wi-Fi-equipped luxury coaches, usually gleaming white, which scoop up their passengers at transit stops like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You couldn't invent a more compelling visual symbol for the privileged and disconnected lives that the tech workers seem to live, cosseted behind smoke-tinted windows.
The buses aren't really the problem. They may be intrusive, but they also take thousands of cars off the freeways, and their riders are hardly tech millionaires. But the resentment here has as much to do with culture as economics. It has been fueled by a series of public remarks from tech figures complaining about everything from the "bitchiness" of San Francisco women to the transvestites who make it hard to get a late-night taxi. On Facebook not long ago, the CEO of the startup AngelHack vilified what he called the "dropouts," "trash" and "degenerates" on the downtown streets, saying that they don't realize that "it's a privilege to be in a civilized business district ... in one of the wealthiest cities in America."
“ 'Techie' used to suggest a computer whiz with no social skills, now it suggests one with no social conscience.