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so as far as I can tell, way back when SF was still a cool viable place to live it became a tech mecca for the following reasons: 1) the close links between the universities and the military industrial complex meant a lot of real engineering talent moved out there and stuck around to work in 2) companies that still did actual research; 3) affordable housing was available with garages for workshops both inside SF and in all the surrounding areas; 4) psychedelic drugs and a general outsider, artistic, borderline anti-capitalist vibe.
NYC has none of this. It is a dead city ruled by finance and real estate psychos.
And in fact SF has none of this anymore (there have been some efforts to bring the drugs but it is not the most important leg of the chair). There aren't engineers, there are startup-brain business school types masquerading as engineers, dreaming of getting rich by doing things that make the world worse and flipping it to retail investors in an IPO or a buyout or just a straight scam. There is no longer anywhere to live that gives the young and weird space to work on idiosyncratic projects that could turn into something. And big companies don't do blue-sky research, they try to buy up innovation when it happens, which it essentially no longer does.
I once dated someone who told me they saw the Castro go from "being a nice safespace for LGBT to express themselves and hit dance clubs" to "an extremely sterilized techbro space with expensive coffee shops and boutique clothing stores". Haight and Ashbury, and all the other SF enclaves that gave the city its character suffered the same fate according to them.
everyone who made SF interesting has been forced out by capital
"I can only hope for more techbros to absolutely suffer. They've completely destroyed the region their microchip country club sits on top of. Underneath all the PCBs, mangled AI hands, patagonia puff jackets and cybertrucks was a rich culture of people- now nearly pushed away or rendered into an inert version of its former self. Outpriced and alienated for craft beer breweries, smartwatches, rent to own apartment homes, vampire weekend and guacamole made with cream cheese."
guacamole made with cream cheese
what's that from?
Vampire Weekend did not deserve that stray, that is not tech bro music
as a tech bro who knows a lot of tech bros, it is, soz
The Haight was a decent spot to find people selling weed in the open in the early 2000s, but The Gap was already at Haight and Ashbury.
Oakland will be 100% white and gentrified because of overflow from SF before they admit that SF housing has been ruined.
So business majors are the reason I’ve grown to hate tech?
No, that's tech bros apologia. The richest and most successful tech founders were largely from a pure technical background. Nvidia guy, Microsoft guy, Google guys, Amazon guy, Facebook guy, etc.
Tech people discovered business and finance and weaponized technology to cash out. Tech people ruined tech because they got seduced by capital