How Silicon Valley Fuels an Informal Caste System
19th July 2018
San Francisco residents seem to be divided into four broad classes, or perhaps even castes:
- The Inner Party of venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs who run the tech machine that is the engine of the city’s economy.
- The Outer Party of skilled technicians, operations people, and marketers that keep the trains belonging to the Inner Party running on time. They are paid well, but they’re still essentially living middle-class lives—or what lives the middle class used to have.
- The Service Class in the “gig economy.” In the past, computers filled hard-for-humans gaps in a human value chain. Now humans fill hard-for-software gaps in a software value chain. These are the jobs that AI hasn’t managed to eliminate yet, where humans are expendable cogs in an automated machine: Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers, TaskRabbit manual labor, etc.
- Lastly, there’s the Untouchable class of the homeless, drug addicted, and/or criminal. These people live at the ever-growing margins: the tent cities and areas of hopeless urban blight. The Inner Party doesn’t even see them, the Outer Party ignores them, and the Service Class eyes them warily; after all, they could end up there.
This is the society that the Democrats are striving to achieve. California is a harbinger of our future, if we let it.