• supafuzz [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • Skeleton_Erisma [they/them, any]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      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.

      • iPostPMCLinkedIn [none/use name]@hexbear.netOP
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        1 month ago

        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

  • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    It’s not entirely wrong, what with the early transhumanists setting up shop in SF’s hippie culture there was a new left and left anarchist influence on the early tech scene. However the 1980s and the fall of the left in the 90s caused that to disappear.

    I do want to write my marxist history of transhumanism effortpost one day.

  • mayo_cider [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    as we all know, the best promoters blame the customers when they fuck up the promotion, rent a conference space for 10000 people and end up with 5 people asking for the toilet

    the only reason ny isn’t sf