I lived in the Mission (24th and Potrero) for years during the dotcom bubble, when I was a grad student. Gentrification was just as controversial then as it is

I lived in the Mission (24th and Potrero) for years during the dotcom bubble, when I was a grad student. Gentrification was just as controversial then as it is now. As for mean-spirited auras, look at the "Mission Yuppie Eradication Project" poster in [1] that begins "Over the past several years the Mission has been colonized by pigs with money" (sounds like a michaelochurch post to me!) and ends by calling for vandalizing their cars. People were upset about different things—instead of Google buses, lofts being converted into luxury condos and so on—but the emotions and the discourse were much the same. I remember a startup called Bigstep that got into hot water because they took over office space from a community org or something that couldn't afford the rent any more [2]. There was a lot of talk about the Latino community being displaced by dotcom types, about Marina yuppies taking over the nightlife—at places like Blowfish Sushi, plus a somehow slightly creepy experiment called Circadia [3] that Starbucks ran at Bryant and Mariposa, which was an emblem of dotcom excess. It's just an ordinary Starbucks now. I haven't noticed any change in how "average" people feel about tech, except perhaps that its status has gone up. One thing that actually has changed from the dotcom bubble to now is the massive shift of power away from VCs and MBAs towards founders and engineers. (Which is kind of ironic since it contradicts almost everything you say about the industry.) Investors have lost power relative to founders and managers have lost power relative to programmers. Both of those trends have been going on for a long time, but have been accelerating. They seem to me to be good trends, arguably even for the investors and managers. Curiously, this shift is visible in the cultural ripples around the dotcoms then vs. the startups now. The dotcom bubble produced a lot of ersatz culture that matched its mostly ersatz startups. The parts of it that I saw were douchey and suity; a place like Circadia, which I mentioned above, was an expression of that. It was full of people who weren't actually working on anything. The decor was lavish, but the coffee and food (not that I could afford the food) were mediocre. Compare that to a place like Sightglass now, where the coffee is excellent and most people are working on stuff. Sure they're hipsters, but it's still a crowd I'd rather be around than the one that used to make me squirm back then; and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool programmer type who hasn't much changed. [1] http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradication_Project http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradicatio.... Also http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/macchron.htm http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/macchron.htm and http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/35154 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/35154, and there's lots more where those came from. [2] Googling this turned up http://blog.doubledutch.me/2012/03/the-rise-of-the-mission-startup/ http://blog.doubledutch.me/2012/03/the-rise-of-the-mission-s... which includes some details about anti-dotcom protests in from 1999-2000. [3] https://www.salon.com/1999/01/21/feature_238/ https://www.salon.com/1999/01/21/feature_238/. I sometimes worked on my thesis there because they had internet. Most of their tech-oriented image was silly, though. The place was all pretense.