Letter from the BART, 15-16 April 2024

I’m on the BART and I’m going to my second day at the office. All of the contradictions here are up to my wildest expectations! Yesterday, friends of friends block the port of Oakland; me, I go to the office. The BART is full of tech workers, badly dressed in yoga clothes, grey light fabrics, and there are fentanyl addicts who pass through. The fentanyl addicts move whereas the tech workers stay still. The tech workers are so badly dressed you think they almost might be poor, save for the tell-tale watch or Apple product. There are many people who are struggling to walk in this town, they walk twisted, physically ravaged, if not they are slowed down by bags, mountains of clothes. 

Oakland, where I’m staying, is a ghost town. There’s no one on the streets. The new builds are huge and all shops and stores are more or less shuttered. Many of the condominiums are inhabited by the tech workers who work remotely. They order in with Ubereats, they work out in the gyms nested in the condominiums, and they move around in vehicles plucked from internal garages. 

In the street, people some times hang out and “bip" cars (i.e. break their windows) in plain daylight, night time, whenever. When I arrived to see my dear friends who I have not seen since Covid it was about 2 p.m., and some people had just bipped a car. People complain that tech workers blame everything on the homeless in San Francisco, and according to them Oakland is really dangerous because it’s empty, because of tech. “I had a gun pulled on me last week”, “it’s actually dangerous”, “it’s full social decomposition”, “it’s really sad”, they say. I have trouble, as a visitor, visualising this but I let them walk me home at night. 

There are night herons that sleep in the trees. The George Floyd rebellion was the last time the streets were full, it seems. Huge murals of black panthers, or the minor stars of Hyphy music, decorate the walls of empty lots, apparently commissioned by NGOs. Elaine Brown, the former leader of the Panthers, suspected of also being the person who paid that dealer to assassinate Huey Newton, is building public housing called The Panther Building with “evil big money”. People talk about that. There were no “sideshows” during my visit, but as a pure tourist, of course I yearn to see such a thing one day.

We went to a CVS pharmacy. It was devoid of stock. Apparently since George Floyd there is a common practice of organized looting. The only products that remained, of little value—make-up wipes for example—were behind a locked glass cabinet. The make-up aisles, everything else, was empty. They cannot be bothered to replace the stock. The empty store is guarded by a security guard. But there is nothing in the store. 

While there is no one in the streets of Oakland, in San Francisco, in the Civic Center, there are crowds—hundreds of people—it’s called the “Open Drug Trade”—who converge to buy drugs. I thought it was a soup kitchen but no. Private cops—employees? volunteers?—belonging to an NGO called “Urban Alchemy” are in the midst of evicting them, gently, with moralistic slogans out of a microphone, which no one is listening to. We can’t hear them anyway. They seem officious, wearing fluorescent gilets. A Christian feeling. 

Next to this, the Tenderloin has also been a centre of the opioids crisis, as well as dispossessed people more generally, since the 2008 mortgage crisis. Tents, people sleeping, people searching, a bit more community. It’s true that one “feels better here” since there are people, despite the public lamentations of tech workers that San Francisco is “dangerous”. Then, another ghost town a block away, the big malls which will soon close down forever since Tech prefers to order online. Macys, for example. I went to buy a lipstick. No shop assistant. Have you ever seen an empty department store? 

We went to the Archimedes Banya, the Russian Baths, Sunday, which was a funny mix of muscly naked Russian men, tech workers without any capacity for relaxing, solitary male geeks, people who seemed to be micro- or macro-dosing psychedelics, overly involved couples, people who talk too much at the sauna, and us (me and my dear friends). An “Aromatherapy Relaxation Session” was led by a woman sporting a microphone, motivating people in an enthusiastic tone to wind down, but with the tone similar to someone announcing the winners of a contest. It felt to me like a ride through a haunted house in a funfair. The Russian felt sauna hats, on the heads of so many overexcited people, looked ineffably hippy and hobbit-like. A sense of totally productive and efficient bathing. Bathing adapted to modern technology. Cashless: a wristband for purchases. Borscht, pierogi, sauna hat.

At the office, I had to give my biometrics to get my visitor pass. They took my photo and my finger prints. I have a card with just my first name and picture on, and to go to the office I pass my hand over a sensor. I don’t even touch it. There’s a green light that takes my prints, and then the word “valid”. It reminds me of the film Gattaca. It’s so smooth I don’t even notice it. I go into the office. From street to office it goes like this: security guard and a closed door, stressed-out desk staff who come out and ask to see my ID, a flurry of anxiety because no one has put in a ticket for my presence, finally a staff member on my team who comes down to get me, weird to see these people in the flesh who I have only peered at through google meets, photo and biometrics, then another door, then the gate. So, to boil it down, security guard, card, door, lobby, fountain, security guards, door and card, lobby, kitchen, coffee, gates like on a subway, finger prints, real office. 

The real office is four floors. I arrive at my desk and they take me to the IT desk. They give me whatever I want (“need”): mac products, mouse pad, new Bose headphones, anything I want. In the toilets there’s an abundance of things: toothbrushes made of recycled plastic in brown paper packets, eyedrops, stain remover. Everything so you could stay over. There are velvet couches everywhere, fig trees, basket chairs—Airbnb aesthetic. It is the CEO of the company who insisted on the décor, they tell me. There are rooms for videoconferencing, there are private booths for being alone, there are rooms decorated like someone’s living room. There is a library. Each new full-time worker must put in an order for their favourite book, although now it’s getting too full, they’ve abandoned this policy. I perceive a copy of Infinite Jest. This is what mainly sticks out to me. Every room is behind glass for full transparency. 

There are pastries and cakes that arrive at particular times and days of the week, there’s lunch, there’s a kitchen on each floor with drip coffee, pour over, espresso, decaf, tea, fruits, snacks, chocolate, cereal. A fridge full of kombucha, soda La Croix, half and half, Oatly, Coca Cola that’s constantly being refilled by a discreet, almost invisible, Latin worker. I’ve been here only two days but in that time I’ve developed needs I didn’t know I had—I like this guava rose Kombucha for a healthier gut. Don’t forget to recycle! Here’s another mac product! I love these dried pineapple slices! I think I will come have a red velvet cookie or some pastries from Tartine bakery (a bakery well known for firing its striking staff). 

Outside, here, like in LA, it’s poverty or otherwise great wealth. A low-key dinner for two costs 140$, a croissant and a café times two is 25$, but in this office, everything is free. Going outside I saw this Tesla truck; when you see one it’s truly bizarre, rather like a kind of insect, and it gives me the repulsed feeling of seeing a cockroach in my house. I walked to Mission street. I saw a church turned private school for CEOs of big tech called La Scuola. On the corner of this street, someone gave me a flyer inviting me to a demonstration against the company I’m working at as a contractor. This morning, my manager told me not to use this or that entrance, and to stay safe. In any case I walked to Mission street, which is another world altogether—people selling hoodies, strong smell of weed, tamales, bars. I went to Bolerian books where my friend is an archivist. I almost had a kind of panic attack, the contrast was so intense, and knowing that tech was infringing on this dusty world of struggle. And perhaps the prevalence of all this struggle and left-culture is also what made the bay so suitable for tech. There’s the whole history of the bay area in there, American labour history, gay magazines, smut. Everything is old and material. You can touch it. 

Today the same, except I was writing to you on the BART while going past the docks of Oakland, and the weather was good. Now I’m in Oakland. The special transport police earn between 1-200,000$ a year, advertise the posters on the wall. Apparently they are having trouble recruiting. My friends are struggling on adjunct professor salaries of about 60k, and the salary advertised for the cops matches that of an engineer. On the BART you can’t really tell who’s who but there are little signs: Airpods, Apple watch. Other signs: dirty hands, walking twisted, talking to people (at all). The BART functions exclusively on the sale of tickets ($5 upwards, depending on how far you go), so police arrest people for not paying. The fine is $300 but they tend to arrest people, and so on. 

I’m getting off now, at 16^th street, sending you what I wrote today and yesterday, please excuse this bad writing.