A history of the city’s anti-tech backlash, as told through protest flyers.
Via foundsf.org
Last week, Peter Shih became the lightning rod for San Francisco's animosity against the influx of rich techies. For longtime residents of the Bay Area, the tensions between the tech crowd and its critics is not just an ongoing struggle, but a pastime of sorts. Apps, Google buses, and twentysomethings with no respect for the city's culture are taking over, says one side, while the other sees the start-up/tech crowd as a force for good in the community. While many of the city's problems stem from the area's giant tech companies, they're largely a result of complicated city politics and real estate issues, not the fault of individual techies.
Nevertheless, the Shih flyers were notable, not as the latest in a series of conflicts, but because they stood out as a rare offline manifestation of the city's mounting tensions.
While there have been a few "real world" demonstrations — the May Day Occupy protest, during which some anarchist activists graffitied buildings and smashed car windows, and the much hyped, but poorly attended Google bus piñata protest — most of the debate happens on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or blogs, often via iPhones. The irony isn't lost on the protesters, but the clash feels more real online than in the neighborhood streets.
The Shih flyers, though, are reminiscent of the last dot-com boom, where the schism between the two communities was more pronounced and its effects much more tangible. The internet was new, the bubble more absurd, the companies far more ephemeral, the sector smaller.
It was the days of Xerox machines, not hashtags. Anti-tech posters, wheat-pasted to walls and taped to street poles, weren't one-off incidents, but a common form of neighborhood protest.
If you lived in the Mission in the late '90s or early '00s, as I did, you probably remember the posters by the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project and the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, which were plastered around the neighborhood.
San Francisco Print Collective hung this on the freeway over Valencia during the dot-com boom in 1999 that was overrunning the neighborhood during the time.
Chris Carlsson / Via foundsf.org
It was a different era of protest, when we didn't live and fight online. Frustrated citizens were required to go to greater lengths, rather than just hitting the "like" button. The protests and posters certainly didn't force the first tech bubble to burst, but they did effect the culture.