The Bacon-Wrapped Economy

Tech has brought very young, very rich people to the Bay Area like never before. And the changes to our cultural ad economic landscape aren’t necessarily for the better.

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“I don’t know. I don’t identify with the term ‘rich.’ But I think I make a shit-ton of money,” a 24-year-old Google employee making low six figures told me. Another told me he considered himself upper-middle-class, but “definitely not rich.” Part of that’s inevitable: The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance. And when industry is so intimately tied to place, as it is in the Bay Area, you get something of an echo chamber: Many young developers move straight to San Francisco when they finish college and necessarily become friends with other young developers, aided in part by the happy hours, office parties, and other events that have become an integral part of both the tech world’s social fabric and every company’s list of perks. “If you don’t have other friends, you’re surrounded by people telling you, ‘This is normal, this is normal,’” an employee of a large company told me. And at startups, especially, where the culture is one of long hours and marathon coding sessions, there’s an idea that, as one person said, “you deserve it, because you work hard.”

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[The] thing about this particular brand of low-key wealth is that it can lead to a false sense of self, on both a micro and a macro level. Consumption is still consumption even if it’s less conspicuous. Class may be harder to see here, but that doesn’t make it any less real. Mark Zuckerberg’s still a billionaire, even if he’s wearing a hoodie and jeans. And if you don’t feel or look rich, you don’t necessarily feel the same sense of obligation that a traditional rich person does or should: Noblesse oblige is, after all, dependent on a classical idea of who is and is not the nobility. As that starts to fall away, obligation — to culture, to the future, to each other — begins to disappear, too.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries | Art Practical

“Whether meant to be read and understood or not, the flashing Monaco text in all of [Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries]’ works elicits memories of early computer operating systems, sci-fi movies, and the naive promise of a techno-utopia. It seems appropriate that in 2009 Apple replaced Monaco with a new font called Menlo, seeming to signify that the romantic optimism of modernity had been razed and atop its ruins a new world order was established with its spiritual heart in Silicon Valley. YHCHI’s wily and sarcastic animations appropriate technology and aesthetics from both the Monaco and Menlo eras in order to poke holes in whatever ideologies are present, whether it’s communism, anti-communism, techno-fetishism, or even technophobia. The twenty-first century Riviera is an office park with catered lunch.”