It’s social unrest. It’s poor people fighting for their share of the hipster pie outraged at the high rents in the Bay Area and the outrageous pricing of goodies beyond their reach. It’s the rebellion of “social equals” who find they are financial inferiors. It’s the outcry of people who thought they were part of a great movement who discover they are, after all, only menials.
The slacker/stoner/trustafarian/occupy/anarchist left in San Francisco are being marginalized by the wealthy young Obama leftists
who work in Silicon Valley, and who are driving up the price of housing in San Francisco and Oakland. The anarchists are protesting at the homes of the wealthy, tipping over Smart cars, and vomiting on the private shuttle busses that take Silicon Valley tech firm employees to work. They demand compensation for the wrongs they believe are being done to them.
We demand that Google give three billion dollars to an anarchist organization of our choosing. This money will then be used to create autonomous, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist communities throughout the Bay Area and Northern California. In these communities, whether in San Francisco or in the woods, no one will ever have to pay rent and housing will be free. With this three billion from Google, we will solve the housing crisis in the Bay Area and prove to the world that an anarchist world is not only possible but in fact irrepressible. If given the chance, most humans will pursue a course towards increased freedom and greater liberty. As it stands, only people like Kevin Rose [a Google Venture Partner] are given the opportunity to reshape their world, and look at what they do with those opportunities.
*Side note to parents of high school students planning to enroll in college: Most anarchists were liberal arts majors in college. Most wealthy Silicon Valley workers weren't.*
It's the Luddite left versus the high tech left in northern California, and neither side trusts the other. Beyond that, it has also become the corporate left versus the high tech left in the post-Snowden NSA era of tech companies spying on everyone and everything.
The Wall Street Journal quotes Stephen Cobb of information security company ESET: “In the technology industry, companies are finding that the sales cycle is getting longer, as customers ask questions such as whether an Internet router is NSA proof. ‘People are asking questions they didn’t ask before. To be in this place now, given the history of this industry, is just amazing. There is a level of suspicion and confusion we haven’t had before.’”
Side note: Suspicion is well founded. Everything you type is tracked by someone. I did an experiment. I sent my wife and email in which I used the phrase "truck driver training school", a phrase I had never used before. In less than twelve hours, ads for truck driver training schools began to appear on pages I was reading online. And those were followed by ads for trucking companies seeking drivers, and later by ads from truck manufacturers.
Silicon Valley has a trust problem, and it’s growing. Some of this is the result of National Security Agency spying — and the tech community’s cooperation with same — and some of it is based on other things tech leaders are doing. But the worst of it is based on who our tech overlords have become.
The NSA spying has already done harm enough. As Glenn Derene warned in Popular Mechanics when the story first broke, fear of NSA spying is giving a boost to offshore competitors, as companies and users seek hardware and software without back doors and compromised security standards. Some foreign customers feel betrayed by Google, Facebook, and other tech giants.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I have installed a browser called Epic. It works very well. One if Epic's features is privacy. All tracking is blocked, cookies are blocked, and internet searches are private. User information is not sold. An Epic feature is a counter on the screen that counts the number of trackers and cookies Epic has blocked in each session. I was stunned by the number of trackers that want access to my computer as I check blogs, read the news, shop for things.
Left or not, aren't we all becoming anti-tech? We should be, given the amount of intrusion by tech industries into our privacy.
I'm not part of the slacker/stoner/trustafarian/occupy/anarchist left in San Francisco, and I don't want to tip over Smart cars or extort money, but I am sympathetic to people who want privacy from the all-intrusive Silicon Valley tech companies and their offshoots.
