For nearly 30 years, San Francisco has been lifted and defined by ever-rising king tides of technology booms. A niche industry of trade publications devoted to PCs and software in the 1990s gave way to developers doing multimedia (a word not seen since) and CD-ROM titles (how quaint).
The magazine called WIRED was founded back then near South Park, with the prediction that “the digital revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon.” (Bengali storms are in fact cyclones, but the quip landed anyway.)
In short order, people with computers connected to lots of other people with computers, and it was off to the races. Trillions of dollars of wealth frothed up into markets and pockets, only to mostly vanish by the early 2000s. The stage was set: SF was no longer a satellite of Silicon Valley, but the place where big and transformative things would happen, and we would all be better for it.
That’s why, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, City Hall sought to bolster its tech sector. Our budget, after all, depends on business and payroll taxes, and unemployment was as high as 10 percent.
The Board of Supervisors, which typically isn’t a tool of move-fast-and-break-things capitalism, stepped up in 2011 with an idea: Let’s give this dynamic industry’s growing firms a tax break.
Keeping the headquarters of companies like Twitter means there’ll be more people hired here and spending money here. The effort might even catalyze the revival of a long-blighted stretch of Market Street too. Win-win!
Years later, the so-called Twitter tax break is recalled with more than a few regrets. But today, San Francisco is facing a much tougher challenge than how to sweeten the pot for a particularly high-profile company. We need to close the circle with the Twitter tax break: Our mayor, elected representatives, and our swarm of dedicated bureaucrats need to row together to drive Twitter out — not out of business, out of the city limits.
$44 billion payback
As you have undoubtedly heard, a megarich narcissist called Elon Musk bought the social media company in a pique, and then started exploiting it to exact lulz and revenge on his perceived enemies. This became obvious just days after the deal closed, when he used Twitter to spread a noxious conspiracy theory about the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi. Because falsely gay-shaming a senior citizen who needs emergency skull surgery is, in some quarters, tremendous fun.
Musk soon also fired people by the thousands, gutting one of the fundamental goals of the Twitter tax break. But the wrecking ball hasn’t stopped swinging there; he’s stiffing vendors, potentially balking on severance payments, and has stopped paying rent for the SF headquarters at 1355 Market Street.
The boss may be a deadbeat, yet that doesn’t mean the remaining employees can log off and head home at the end of the day. Musk wants staffers to crush it so hard at work that some are sleeping in the Twitter office, something that is not kosher under city rules.
Are there other ways this disgraceful person shoves his manchild middle finger in everyone’s face? Stop the presses: Musk is singling out journalists and suspending them from the platform. (Fitting the pattern of his chaotic direction, some accounts were later reinstated.) Certainly, now that he is sole owner of Twitter, Musk can knock anyone he wants offline, since no one has a right to tweet. This is a private company, not public or government property. But San Francisco doesn’t have to countenance corporate temper tantrums.
In the 2008 bad times, the city that many members of the tech industry’s founder and investor class love to trash took steps to keep Twitter here. It’s now time to roll back the red carpet. SF can campaign against Twitter as a bad-faith actor that flouts the law along with our civic values of openness, equity, tolerance, and diversity.
On one level, the campaign can be ceremonial. There are 11 members of the Board of Supervisors who definitely don’t want to be accommodating to Musk. Any one of them could float a symbolic resolution calling on him to apologize to San Francisco, to follow our labor regulations, to make amends to the LGBT+ community with a donation, or to eat chowder out of a sourdough bowl. It doesn’t matter; the vote will be unanimous.
Beyond ceremonial statements, one of the same legislators that spearheaded the Twitter tax break 11 years ago, David Chiu, is now SF’s city attorney. Chiu doesn’t have the unilateral power to evict Twitter, but what his office can do is investigate and pursue all legal claims against the company for alleged unlawful actions.
For a mayoral administration that wants to show how our bureaucracy works for public benefit, our building inspectors, fire marshals, labor compliance officers, and anyone else who has to tag along should check in on the Twitter offices as much as possible. Twitter got a break, and now it deserves no more breaks — for anything. And if the new owner wants to find more accommodating ground away from the hydra of city departments down the highway or across a bridge, so be it.
This time, the political has become personal. Not even Dave Chappelle could keep the paying crowd at Chase Center from booing the bilious billionaire. They booed because it’s become the most tiresome thing in the world to have debates about freedom of expression and censorship with insufferable tech dudes who never, ever shut up.
It’s no longer interesting to talk about who or what is getting amplified and why, and whether there’s bias against which bunch of bellyachers that keep saying they’re being silenced. When hammers start swinging upon heads, we’re past that.
You can imagine Musk bitching about being “hounded out of crazy socialist San Francisco!” The notion tilts so many parts of his pinball brain that he’d probably take the city up on taking a hike. So if playing by the rules means taking his trolling Twitter and sink memes somewhere else, SF will be better for it.
