3 thoughts on “A good read–Living through a social media backlash”

1. Allen N. April 10, 2016 at 11:21 am

   Ah, so adults can get entangled in cyber-bulling, not just smartphone addicted school kids, eh?

   Great story. Gives me affirmation about my decision to kerp my time and usage of social media to a bare minimum. While I use it to contact and commicate with friendships that are established in “the real world,” I don’t interact with a large network of cyber friends. Oh, maybe I might respond to a news article or a blog, but not much beyond that. My professional work is kept totally separate from my personal Facebook and Twitter accounts. I find it sad when people make the cyber-world such a big part of their lives that when they experience the backlash from a social media faux-pas, they would actually feel depressed, or even suicidal.

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2. compare and decide April 18, 2016 at 3:10 pm

   The homeless have become emblems for older liberals in San Francisco who feel threatened by the influx of well-paid tech workers who are so often libertarians. That’s sort of the real, hidden story behind other stories.

   Newcomers to San Francisco often push for more development as a logical solution to the housing crisis. The following article article points out that the liberal establishment freaks out at the idea. If the liberal establishment’s response is tinged with irrationality, the following article fairly points out that San Francisco maintained much of its character and resilience by resisting through the decades the forces that destroyed other American cities by adhering to liberal policies.

   http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/business/economy/san-francisco-housing-tech-boom-sf-barf.html

   From two weeks earlier, a story about how Toronto survived its late, colorful mayor Rob Ford, whose voting base was in the suburbs. Basically, Toronto avoided the fate of Detroit by fusing its suburbs to its urban core.

   http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/sunday-review/why-us-cities-should-envy-toronto-for-electing-rob-ford.html

   In 1953, the city itself was doing just fine, but the 12 smaller municipalities surrounding it were struggling to keep up with their postwar sprawl. So the province of Ontario imposed a metropolitan government over the entire region to handle big, costly projects: policing, water and sewer systems and major roads. Each of the cities, still run by their local councils, paid into the kitty according to their tax base assessments. Toronto, which had 57 percent of the population, paid 62 percent of the metropolis’s bills.

   The system certainly had its problems, but it made common cause between the suburbs and the city center. But the rapid rise of suburbia swiftly reversed that cash flow. Just nine years later, Toronto made up just 38 percent of the metropolitan area’s population and it contributed 44 percent of its budget.

   The system was tweaked over time, and the number of municipalities consolidated to six. Then in 1998, the provincial Progressive Conservative government (including Doug Ford, Rob’s father), forced the amalgamation of all six cities into a single large unit.

   Rob Ford was from the suburbs, which are now suffering. That’s the real, hidden story.

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3. compare and decide May 15, 2016 at 10:03 am

   This New Yorker article explores the conflict between old-school liberal San Franciscans and recent newcomers from the tech industry.

   http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/07/california-screaming

   The idea that this involves a conflict between the old liberals and new libertarians does not make sense because in reality both the newcomers and old timers are really more ideologically similar to one another than that (e.g., both groups are environmentalists).

   In fact, one person cited in the article identified a reward system based on talent and effort — meritocracy — as the central value of the tech industry. But it could be argued that the belief in meritocracy is something that virtually all Americans subscribe to across the American ideological spectrum (a spectrum that is actually very narrow compared to other countries, at least before Sanders and Trump became popular).

   So the differences between old-timers and newcomers in San Francisco might be understood more accurately in economic rather than ideological terms — liberal yuppies getting priced out by incoming liberal millionaires and billionaires.

   Let’s look to San Francisco’s past for a precedent for this.

   From the 2000 census, here is a map of the United States by state and county, illustrating the population in terms of predominant ancestry (ethnicity).

   https://upworthy-production.s3.amazonaws.com/nugget/5228fb810fe612794a001236/attachments/USethnicities2.jpg

   The state map in the corner right shows that the population of the northern United States is predominantly of German origin (light blue).

   The southwestern US is predominantly Mexican (pink).

   The lower southeastern US — the “Deep South” — is predominantly African American (deep purple).

   The upper southeast is predominantly self-described as “American” (light yellow). These are basically white Americans whose ancestry goes back so far that they do not know their origins (probably English and Scottish mixed in with Native American and African). (The South was settled before the North.)

   The northeastern US is predominantly English, Irish and Italian.

   Now look at the main map, of counties.

   Look at California.

   Northern Cali is predominantly German, southern Cali is predominantly Mexican.

   A few counties vary from this pattern. On the eastern border, a couple of counties are English, and one county is American Indian (orange).

   Now look at the Bay Area of northern California.

   Oakland is African American.

   But west of that, San Francisco proper — San Francisco County and City — is Irish (purple).

   Despite what most people think of San Francisco today, San Francisco has historically been working class and Irish Catholic.

   When most people think of Irish Americans, they think of Boston.

   But as Ken Burns pointed out on his PBS series on Irish Americans, the two most important Irish-influenced cities in the US are Albany, New York (the seat of government) and Butte, Montana (the focus of labor unrest in the western US). (Boston is really ruled by old-time WASPs, which might include the Kennedy dynasty, who “real” east-coast Irish Americans dislike.)

   The point is, the history of San Francisco since the 1960s involves outsiders pushing out the locals, who were/are working-class liberals. But there are no articles in the New Yorker about that.

   But let’s go even further back. Irish Americans in California were instrumental in pushing out the Chinese with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. No one raised a fuss about that.

   http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=IRISH_San_Francisco

   The Irish also used their ties and connections to gain power in the unions and subsequently exclude non-Irish workers. With the demise of the Gold Rush and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, both Irish and Chinese workers became unemployed. With competition for jobs greater, Irish-led unions stirred up resentment and discrimination against the Chinese, with Dennis Kearny, leader of the Workingman’s Party of California, raising the cry of “The Chinese must go!”

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