Letter #4

Let's talk tech.

Dear San Francisco,

OK, even I know it’s facile to blame the technology sector for ruining you.  (Not to mention melodramatic.  And cliché.)  I don’t think tech’s inherently awful either; color me tech-skeptical, but I’m not a tech-doomsday type.  That orientation is rooted partly in disappointment at how the industry has morphed since the days predating the dot-com boom/bust.  So, today, join me in the Wayback Machine – wait, scratch that, we need to visit the days before the Wayback Machine – so, umm, grab your flux capacitator and climb into my DeLorean.  We’ll head to a simpler time.  When the lights were always green up and down El Camino Real.  When Chili’s was the coolest new place to go to wait an hour for a table.  (On a splurge night, anyway – what self-respecting college kid could afford Sizzler?)  When, unbeknownst to you and me, the seeds of the tech takeover were being sown ….

But not in a bad or scary way.  My memories of the burgeoning Computer Science field (circa late 80’s/early 90’s) are positive.  Affectionate, even.  Back then, I counted a covey of CS types as housemates and friends.  Those prototypes?  Benign nerds – lovable, if laughable.  And far from the top of the job market heap: the i-banking and consulting crowds disdained CS grads.  My housemates and I kept an ancient Zojirushi running 24-7: rice was cheap, and nobody was flush – elite university pedigrees and tech chops notwithstanding.

Disclaimer: I never got past a lone CS intro course.  But hey, bonus points if you can ID the benign, lovable, laughable character below, who makes a cameo in A Bridge for the City! (Hint: a forerunner of Pong, Combat, Gotcha, et al., he lived in a simple, rigid grid, and beepers, of all things, were involved.)

Anyway, I left the heavy tech lifting to others.  One was my cousin, a CS instructor who said he was pretty sure he could guarantee me at least a D- if I took his advanced programming class.  Cute.  Maybe even benign, lovable, and laughable.  I watched him and the rest goof around during the school year, work summer jobs in slo-mo, and play Hellcats over the Pacific into the wee hours.  If they aspired to make buckets of money – never mind erect empires – they didn’t talk about it.  They just wanted good jobs working for cool companies (Apple, yes; Orifice – oops, Oracle – no) on fun projects.

One thing’s for sure.  Not many made their way up from the Peninsula to you back then.

Maybe they’re still nerds at heart.  But over time, the biz world stopped finding them laughable.  They stopped seeing themselves that way too.  Most aren’t lovable anymore either.  I doubt a plurality could be called benign.  Tech’s a blood sport today.  I bet a few luminaries in the field would get a wide berth from their mirror images, the 80’s-era finance boys of Wall Street and American Psycho fame ….

Apparently, anointing engineers as visionaries has consequences.

Oh, I know buckets of VC money fertilized the field hard and fast.  So, we reap what was sown.  Dispiriting it’s gotten so difficult to distinguish good ideas from crap, and geniuses from malignant Music Man types, though.  And even if money ruining a good thing is an old story, don’t you think we’re way past “tilt” on the pinball machine now?

Anyway, that brings me to the other source of my tech-skepticism.  The part I blame you for: letting tech run roughshod over you, warping an entire generational chapter of your history.

So, be ready to talk about that next time.