There's been enough tech vs. art or rich vs. poor handwringing going around lately that we suppose this was inevitable: A self-proclaimed "part of the gentrification" from the early '90s Mission district and entrepreneur/recovering barista has leveled a stern accusation at the current influx of tech-y folk to the Mission: "Douchebags like you are ruining San Francisco." It's tech-on-tech hate. Or Gen-X vs. Millennials. Or "old man yells at cloud." It is today's serving of vitriol:
"I moved to San Francisco in 1992. I was looking for a job," writes Chris Tacy who also says he sold a company at the height of the dot-com boom, thus playing his own part in turning "SF into the playground for the rich and educated that it’s become." In 1993 San Francisco, Tacy found a diverse city of individual neighborhoods, ethnicities, world views and economic classes" and "fell in love with the city immediately."
But that's all gone downhill:
But now... Now it’s worse than it was in 2000. Now it’s only about the money. Now the only diversity we have left is ethnic diversity. Everyone is rich and privileged and entitled or hustling as hard as they can to become rich and privileged and entitled. A city once defined by people wanting to change the world is now defined by people who just want to be among the world’s richest. A culture that once understood history and tried to create it now has a memory that’s about 2 fiscal quarters long - and a vision that goes as far out as their funding allows.San Francisco used to be weird. And we were proud of that. Now it's shockingly vanilla and suburban and conformist. It once felt like a city. Now it feels like a suburb.
And that's sad.
And where can we go to experience this "shockingly vanilla" culture? If you said the perennially popular Bi-Rite Creamery on 18th Street, you wouldn't be far off: "Nowhere is this more obvious than in The Mission."
The Mission these days is over-run with the exact same frat boys and sorority girls and mommy bloggers and snobbish rich kids that I moved here to avoid. More than that, however, The Mission is now infested with startup douchebags.
As a finally word of advice for anyone in the tech world in the Mission, Tacy offers simply: "Don't. Be. Fucking. Douchebags!" [Emphasis his.]
For more choice quotes regarding douchy neighbors and why he's ditching his beloved neighborhood after he spent all that time learning how to order off the menu in Spanish, Tacy's blogspot post is worth a read. Especially now that it's been quoted and syndicated everywhere from Mission blogs to Valleywag, the topic will surely come up the next time you find yourself at a house party hosted by a group of social media managers.