$4 Toast: Why the Tech Industry Is Ruining San Francisco
30th November 2014
In San Francisco, flaunting your wealth has been elevated to new lows, if you will. The labels aren’t the usual lineup of foreign design houses; rather, we pay $300 for simple denim jeans or $200 for plain black yoga pants. We don’t go to the opera; we overspend on the simplest facets of life.
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Good toast and a plain cup of coffee shouldn’t cost $6. But I can’t imagine the tech community putting the brakes on this trend any time soon. We’re obsessed with false ideas of quality. We fetishize the precious processes and benchmarks and prices that, in reality, have no bearing on how good something is.
Actually, it ought to read ‘how’ rather than ‘why’, since the author doesn’t really get into the ‘why’, but it’s still an interesting read.
In a word, we want to look smarter. Ours is an intellectual economy and one that prizes polyglotism. We want to show each other that we are amateur audio engineers and brewers and bakers, that we’re not only wealthy but also knowledgable to an unlikely extreme.