Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

The city’s passive-aggressive, progressive, permissive politics tended to rankle transplants, but tech’s self-appointed representatives weren’t for everyone, either. Every three months a different engineer or aspiring entrepreneur, new to the city, would post a screed on a blogging platform with no revenue model. He would excoriate the poor for clinging to rent control and driving up condo prices, or excoriate the tent cities by the freeway for being an eyesore. He would suggest monetizing homeless people by turning them into Wi-Fi hotspots. He would lambaste the weak local sports teams, the abundance of bicyclists, the fog. Like a woman who is constantly PMSing, a twenty-three-year-old founder of a crowdfunding platform wrote about the climate. The extension of casual misogyny to weather was creative, but the digital ambassadors didn’t seem to like actual women, either: they whined that the women in San Francisco were fives, not tens, and whined that there weren’t enough of them.