Now that SF's Tech Larvae are Being Unleashed, They Must Be Kept Far from Actual Neighborhoods
The only answer may be to trap them on high-end, cult-like compounds.
San Francisco's biggest private employer is Salesforce. This company has become a behemoth as a function of its carefully coded inner-mendacity and front-facing non-threatening mediocrity—that and the fact that nobody outside the company knows what they do. And nobody within its ranks can clarify why they're doing it.
Instead of a reasonable explanation of what this...thing...is, they deploy performative jargon like productivity-boosting, and CRM services, and deploying AI, and third-party app building.
Salesforce is, in other words, a perfect reflection of what tech has become: great expectation, unfulfilled promise, and a lot of filler for the proles within its ranks to kill time around it before it implodes.
The thing about the greed-based monoculture that has spawned juggernauts that do nothing and laid waste to SF over the last two decades is it has produced a small class of billionaires and multi-multi- millionaire d-bag bros. From the bulbous-nosed shaved heads have spawned thousands of middling surrogates spewing a spittle-flecked three-drinks-in mess about the necessity of apps that are geared to create consumer-driven blight, 24-hour gridlock, genocide, massive spread of cultish propaganda that begets democracy-ending violence, and worker oppression—or in Salesforce's case—busy work on top of busy work to brand busy work as actual work, all cleverly disguised as data and metrics.
The enterprise cloud computing (?) company that made Dear Leader Marc Benioff worth a cool 9x billionaire—aka gave him enough hubris to shitpost an op-ed in the NYT a year ago simping about how capitalism will FIX the inequities of ...capitalism…hahahahahaha—is now releasing its Ted-X-spewing middle-manager, low-key grifting, aspirational-millionaires from their steel-and-glass cages. God help us all.
The full-time remote option for these middle-ladder workers is something akin to private equity's genius contribution to worker suppression called "unlimited vacation." Work anywhere? Sounds good, but when you read between the lines, it means that nobody takes any, and there's no payout at the end of the job. Permanent working from home merely means—never leaving work. Genius.
Before the announcement that the SOMA prison yard gates would swing wide, an intra-company survey estimated that more than 65% of employees would opt to be continually clearing their browser history from the confines of their domiciles.
This is all very cool considering Salesforce is in year four of a fifteen-year lease for a two-thirds share of the 1,070-foot office skyscraper that bears the company name. The lease was valued at $560 million, so that's a pretty cool write down.
With an estimated 9,000 employees in the Bay Area alone (about 52k total), look for the requisite stories to crop up a nomadic workforce bouncing closed-restaurant-and-bar-stricken SF more friendly suburban, exurban, and tax-friendlier confines.
Other SF big commercial dwellers like Old Navy, Yelp, and Pinterest are all cutting out of their leases—the latter paid $90 m to bounce out of its lease at 88 Bluxome—so look for the
Uber is looking to cancel its 300,000 square feet of office space at its new Mission Bay campus and move back home. Dropbox is set to drop out of SF after announcing its perma-work-from-home policy in January.
And last month, another monolith with no real purpose called Digital Realty announced it'll relocate to (yep) Austin because nobody has any original ideas anymore.
Anyway, because everyone working in middle management for these sycophants stanning one another's regurge, we MUST not let them into our neighborhoods. They'll Gremlinize your local spots leaving only an echo of the cackle fading into the purple-gray of instant pre-dawn regret.
That's why I propose corporate subsidies to round up these meritless drones and place them into mini- work/live compounds strewn about Bay Area exurbs.
I hate to sacrifice this one, but somethings gotta be done to set the tone. It's a 1950 single-story adobe home that came on the market this week for the first time—just across the One from Carmel by the Sea. There's a barn that can be converted into a Zoom cave, a three-bedroom home that looks positively original Parent Trapish, and five acres for these bro-bots to do their worst! Morning EDM stand-ups. Bi-monthly burns. Afternoon shrooms sessions. Organic whiskey-making. Excited-to-announce-offs on LinkedIn. Now, if we could only get them to wear shock collars. Maybe there'll be an app for that.
Tech bros can ruin anything, even this.
A lawn to “ideate” on.
“Where’s the switch for the fireplace again?”
“The outdoor one goes on autoMAGICally.”
Imagine this bench, but surrounded by vape smoke.
“Does the barn have wifi?”