I had this guy, a client. He got into the car. I can tell from his accent that he’s from India, or Pakistan. No, no, don’t get me wrong—no racism, nothing like that. It’s just part of the story. He goes, “Do you like working with Uber?”
I said, “It’s a trap. But I’m dealing with it. I’m doing it.”
Then he goes, “Where are you from?”
“From Africa, from a country called Congo.” I go, “What about you? Where are you from?”
He goes, “I’m from here.” Just five minutes before, he told me he just moved here six months ago—but he feels, I fit here, I’m part of this society.
So he asks me, “You make money doing this?” I am silent. He asks, “So is it busy tonight?”
“It’s Saturday night. Usually it’s busy.”
“So you’re gonna make good money.”
I turn around and go, “What is making good money for you?”
He says, “I mean, you’re gonna make some good dough.”
“No, no, no. For you. For you. What do you do for a living?”
“I work in finance.”
“So how much money do you make?”
“I make, like, $200,000.”
“So is that good money for you?”
He said, “Well, it’s not bad.”
“So I’m not gonna make $200,000. Do you think that you’re superior to me because you’re gonna make $200,000? $200,000 is not good for me. Maybe that’s what you think is good enough. For me, it’s not, because some people are making $10 billion. Why shouldn’t I be making $10 billion?”
He goes, “How do they make $10 billion?”
I told him, “Well, Picasso used to paint and make $15 million within five minutes. Why can’t I? What separates me and you from him?”
The guy got frustrated and asked, “Can you please just drop me here?”
We get that more and more now.
I was here when Uber was at the beginning, when Travis Kalanick was at his beginning, or Brian Chesky from Airbnb, or Jack Dorsey was trying to make Square, and the beginning of Elon Musk doing Tesla.§ I have driven many of them.
From my own experience, when you meet them, you don’t see anything inspiring on them. You don’t see that genius in them. These are normal people with regular IQs, maybe they’re sneakier than others. Maybe they took the back roads, the shortcuts. In the end, I go to myself, Well, it’s a good thing, because it means it’s easier to succeed in this city than it seems.
But it’s like these people sat down and fixed the next hundred years of what’s gonna happen in the world. A new world order. Soon, we are going to share everything, own nothing. That’s the new era, but is it healthy?
Because the sharing economy means we’re gonna have less control, less power to regulate it, less influence, less voice. Before we know it, we’re gonna be Congo here. Where no one has influence, no one seeks justice. I left that mentality and mind-set only to find it here.
I’ve seen Uber treat people like shit. People begging for work. “Can you please let me begin?” “Please activate my card?” I’ve seen that before—begging, begging for work. The guy in front of them sits in a position of power—they start treating people like shit. People treated like shit because they don’t know how to speak English correctly. For some, this is life or death. Absolutely—you work or you die.
I have seen this story already: a society that doesn’t value human beings will end, just fail. People don’t want to admit that we’re not first in the world anymore. The Michael Jackson ’80s is over. Maybe we have the best army in the world, the best economy, but for how long? What is the rating of our schools when it comes to math and physics, compared to other countries? Do I need to give my kids the same education I left behind in Congo? No. What about the employment rate? How many people that have access to health care?
I’m self-sufficient. I provide my own energy. But every time I meet with someone who’s twenty-one, twenty-two years old, and he’s telling me he’s doing UberX full-time, I feel the obligation to tell him, “You’re gonna be fucked. Go somewhere else. Build yourself a future. Go to France. Go to Europe. Go somewhere that will care for you. That will give you shelter, a justice system, education, medical care.”
These are the difference between animals and human beings. I didn’t get these where I grew up. I came here to find them, and I still don’t have them.
The United States, America, is not a country. It’s a corporation. It’s a platform to make money. It’s an app. Within that platform, you have the options of succeeding or failing. In both cases, you’re responsible.
So you better start running . . .
I’m still running.
JAMES WILLIAMS
Growing up on a farm in the Central Valley, he had a lonely childhood, tending to pigs and vegetables, sneaking to the arcade and drinking tons of soda, dreaming of San Francisco. “You had to entertain yourself and find pleasure in solitary activities.” So he became an artist, moved to the city, and opened a small studio in the Western Addition. Within a few years, the neighborhood got too expensive, the rent too steep, and he put San Francisco behind him.
Today, things have come full circle, and he manages a farm in Petaluma, north of the city. They provide a majority of the produce to Alice Waters’s famed Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, epicenter of the “slow food” movement. Together the restaurant and the farm preach the use of local foods and traditional production methods. The farm teaches aspiring farmers their craft: “We get people from all kinds of backgrounds. Hopefully go on and help people who legitimately need help.”
When I got to San Francisco in 2006, with one of my best friends, we commented on how much we liked the city. Because it didn’t seem like you had to be flashy and successful to have a good life. To have a rich community, a good lifestyle, a house. You could be a little rougher around the edges.
We were wrong. We were late to the show and just couldn’t see the beginning of the deconstruction of possibility. Maybe I had an undiagnosed breakdown: working so much, teaching, bartending, doing freelance design work. I had a gallery that represented my paintings, but I was spread so thin, I wasn’t making any progress. I just couldn’t make it.
We were part of the initial move into this neighborhood, the Western Addition—now it’s called “NoPa,” North of the Panhandle. Then we watched two years of rapid change. And eventually, I had to leave. For financial reasons. I was part of gentrification and then suffered from it.
I feel a lot better about the way I spend my time now.
You’re outdoors and doing things. It is stimulating and invigorating. And your body is all of a sudden activating in a weird way. I found my creative outlet is brightest when I am altering spaces. I am really into my garden, and I treat it like an installation piece.
Immediately, you’re thinking about taking care of other people and being able to do that in the best way possible: by the way that you grow things, by the way that you treat your land, the way that you raise your food, the standards you use, the price that you’re able to sell it to somebody, making sure that you’re not excluding any community from what you’ve grown—these questions and concerns are built into the activity of growing food. What it means to have space and land, and how you use that to build community.
And working in an industry like this means you’re inevitably working with people who don’t have a lot of money. No matter their background or their race, nobody gets rich doing this. So you’re already starting from a pretty good place.
Our head farmer has got this idea that if more people grow food on smaller scales for larger communities, little pockets of good nutrition, then everyone’s brains will work better. It’s funny listening to him talk about it, because he gets into the Cosmic Serpent big-time. The Universal Consciousness is blasting in his ear.
He doesn’t have any idea how to talk to people, but he has this belief that nature is a little smarter than we are. You’ve just got to let
it do its thing, help as much as you can without interfering too much.
Which means that there’s tons of native weed and plant life surrounding everything—a mess compared to the row crop that you would normally be looking at. Those farmers look at his fields like, “Where the fuck is the food?” “Well, you have to dig around in it. The cabbage is in here.” It winds up looking like a weird, pastoral, provincial field that just happens to have a bunch of kale in it.
There’s a lot of reasons why it makes the food better, that have to do with soil growth, soil health, and maintaining a balance between how much you’re partially disturbing, partially destroying the soil, and how much you’re letting the plants take care of themselves and take up nutrients that they want. The surrounding plants also help with weathering, pests, erosion. When there’s that much blanketed coverage and root structure, when it pours rain you’re not going to lose anything.
For me, it is a more beautiful way of doing things. Philosophically and aesthetically. And I think I’m better at it than maybe visual art. There’s also probably an untapped amount of information and emotion built from my childhood.
But there is also a culture surrounding the organic farm, this thing that does not attract certain parts of our community. A lot of it does have to do with prices. If you’ve got nothing but really expensive produce . . .
We live in the middle of an area that has got a huge Latino community, and I almost never see any coming in here to buy their vegetables. They get their vegetables at a local market with all the ingredients that they want, but not very good quality.
If you come here on a weekend, it’s nothing but Audis and Lexuses up and down the lot. People that drive between wine country and Petaluma. I am always trying to figure out ways to get fewer Audis and Lexuses in our driveway, but I think there is just an invisible wall of like, “This cute little thing—this is for white people.”
Land up in Sonoma County and in Marin, just because of its proximity to San Francisco—that’s where a lot of this cost comes in too. There’s only so many ways you can get around the sort of machine that is happening down there and changing things.
Two of our main farmers here are going to move to Wisconsin this year. They’re going to be able to make as much food as they want, because they don’t have the overhead of being in such close proximity to San Francisco.
Land prices, cost of living, a roof over your head. You have to be pretty creative living in an industry like this here. I built my own little house. It’s right next to my garden. I spend almost no time indoors, in my living area. I just sleep there.
In two weeks I turn thirty-five. And often I think that if I did not work and live on this farm—I don’t know if I could stay in this area. I would be homeless pretty quick for a little while, until I figured out what I was going to be doing next.
SAUL GRIFFITH
He was born and raised in Australia. His mother is an artist, his father was a textile engineer, and the family home was part studio, part workshop, part family hearth. They kept a large pad of cotton paper next to the telephone. Over the course of two weeks, Saul’s mother’s drawings of cupids and Rubenesque nudes would fill up his sister’s landscapes, full of Saul’s machines and buildings, surrounded by his father’s math puzzles—layers upon layers. These notebooks captured the family in time and an alchemy that Saul would try to re-create as a husband, father, and engineer. He founded and runs a company called Otherlab, which designs moonshot technologies to protect the environment.
My wife, Arwen, and I bought this building, intending to have the research side of our business and lab always be in this neighborhood that we liked. It was cheap. And this has been an industrial neighborhood for a hundred years, manufacturing.
So we’re like, Okay. We can have machines that manufacture and do industry here. People didn’t complain, because we did the thing that was always done here.
But now the people who work from home in the live-work lofts next door complain that they can’t hear the sounds of themselves typing their 140 characters because of our machines in our industrial neighborhood. So fuck them.
If you invest, and you buy the building, and you’re all in, and you’re thinking about more than five to ten years—then you build gardens and you grow.
We put in all the plants on the sidewalk. We painted the murals on the walls. We upkeep the building as though we’re invested in it for the long term. These aren’t things that start-ups, or landlords with start-ups as tenants, give a fuck about.
I know every business owner by name in a two-block radius. So I know the people who own the art gallery across the road, the not-for-profit. I know the people at the wine bar and the guys who own the cocktail bar, and the chef who runs the two restaurants. We all talk to each other. We talk to each other about crime. We talk to each other about issues with the homeless people. That’s how you build neighborhoods, with investment.
The problem with most start-ups is that they are set on a short trajectory—they are venture-funded and a number of the companies in the portfolio need to get exits within seven to ten years. “Exits” means they need an IPO or they need to get acquired, and you need enough of those exits to make your fund profitable. So they grow, and they move to somewhere else. They aren’t really investing in the community around them because their tenancy in any building or space is one to two years.
It’s the nature of modern work. It’s inherent in the process of creating these new things that people have short tenures. These aren’t companies just turning the sausage-grinding crank. The median person works for three to four years on any one thing, then moves on. In the software world, the turnover is two, or three, or four times faster, because there’s such a huge failure rate.
We’re the first generation that has had this at this extreme. I mean, we’re all dealing with it. I’ve employed, directly, indirectly, maybe a thousand people since I moved to the Bay Area—smart, young people, best and brightest of every college, university. The only security you have now is to imagine with self-confidence that you can string together ten four-year gigs as a career. And if one of the gigs is really successful, it will become a ten-year gig, and then you’ll get out.
We cannot socially continue down this path. I just can’t figure out where everyone is going to be employed.
Look, I’m in technology, and I believe that we work on things that matter and count. But fundamentally what we do—everything we do—displaces jobs. It is the mandate of technology. You make things cheaper by eliminating labor. And we do that really fucking well. And I have no problem with that because I would like to eliminate some of my labor so that I have a three- or four-day workweek. I would fucking love that.
But what we have—at this pointy end of technology—is people working way too hard, way too much, not reaping any of the labor benefits. Even the people who are making the benefits that we should all reap collectively as a new Saturday, or something, they work harder than ever. A few schoolteachers and bus drivers may have the right workweek, but they are not earning enough and are rightly resentful.
So I only know two galleries of people: the overemployed and the underemployed. I don’t know anyone with the right amount of employment that enables them to be civically engaged.
I am a father. I have two children. I used to think it was really important to raise our kids in the city, in a neighborhood that was a mixed neighborhood, where they would be exposed to all of the characters of life. But I’ve really become jaded, cynical.
We send our kids to public school. We volunteer an enormous amount. I teach science in my kids’ class. All they need is inspiration, and that’s easy to do.
The statistics in America show that the most money given is by the poorest people: it’s equally true in terms of people giving their time. It’s the poorest parents at the public schools that give the most time.
Two working parents who are commuting, spending nine or ten hours of the expected workday at Google and another
two hours on the buses, barely making their rental payments, trying to raise a kid at private school because that’s what they’re told they’ve got to do—I don’t think they have any time for volunteerism. I think they are a tax on the community. They take, take, take. They take all the good bits.
Then there’s the homeless issue. People who obviously should be getting mental health care, or actually just plain old health care, if America, the richest country in the world, were able to provide it. Who instead are sleeping in tents in the cracks of my buildings. There is human feces in the garden that I planted to beautify our neighborhood, every morning—and the needles and used condoms and all the paraphernalia. Everything smells bad. Everything looks bad.
I’ve had visitors like Bill Gates come to my building—and the eleventh in line and the thirteenth in line to the US presidency, people who run things like the Department of Energy and people who are very high in the Department of Defense. “Would you mind stepping over this homeless person before I show you the future of technology?”
For the first few years you buy coffee, food for these people. Because you have sympathy. And you try to show your kids that you’ll be nice. But eventually you can’t deal with it anymore. I think my children sadly may just be observing me ignoring it and learning the cognitive dissonance that is required to live with it.
But we need to see more courage.
TIM DRAPER (CONT’D)
Not content with venture capital alone, he also has political ambitions. In recent years, he launched the “Six Californias” Campaign to divide California into multiple states. He wears a tie emblazoned with the movement’s logo, a kind of primary-colors jigsaw of the state split six ways. If he succeeds, the fragments would create the per-capita wealthiest state in the nation, “Silicon Valley,” and the poorest, the largely agricultural “Central California.” Voters rejected his ballot initiative in 2014, but he is determined to push it forward.
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