Rebecca Solnit reflects on how the social climate of San Francisco has been permanently altered with the rise of tech giants which have widened the disparity between the haves and have nots and who—perhaps surprisingly—are behind some crime in the city, drug-related and otherwise.
Crime in the San Francisco Bay Area can be described in many ways. But there are no dramatic videos showing Palo Alto native son turned crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried misappropriating $8.6 billion of clients’ money or of the scam run by ex-Stanford student Elizabeth Holmes, who raised $700 million for Theranos, a company whose sole product was a medical technology that didn’t exist. Holmes, who used to live in a $15 million mansion and fly in a private Theranos jet, is doing time in federal prison for defrauding investors. Bankman-Fried awaits sentencing. Those thefts were crimes in the most traditional sense, but the sheer wealth generated by Silicon Valley has given its pack of billionaires the belief that they are above or beyond the law. Most of them made their fortunes in finance or technology; those fortunes and the accompanying hubris and seclusion convinced them they were magnificent at everything and anything, including remaking society according to their lights.
Another tech/venture capital billionaire and opponent of Boudin, Ron Conway, has long used his wealth to push San Francisco to the right. In 2010 he was a driving force behind an ordinance banning sitting on the sidewalk intended to criminalise those with nowhere else to go. In 2016, Conway and Oberndorf funded a ballot proposition to outlaw tent encampments, the homes of last resort for the unhoused. The tech elite tends to regard the homeless not as people with unmet needs, but as an intrusion or even assault on the sensibilities of others (though Mark Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, has made more benign donations, including $30 million to study the problem). If you equate your wealth with virtue, you tend to equate poverty with vice, and the enemies of the homeless routinely portray them as criminals. The assumption that Bob Lee was murdered by the underclass rather than one of his own speaks to this, as well as to the sense among tech leaders that they are the good guys, the people with solutions, sometimes the victims but never the perpetrators of problems.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/HJgQ537
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/9jidTFQ
