150 San Franciscans Explain How Tech Money Changed Their City

DevNull127 writes: In a remarkable odyssey, documentary-maker Cary McClelland interviewed more than 150 San Francisco residents — including a tattoo artist, a longshoreman, a venture capitalist, and a pawnshop owner — to capture the real voices of a changing city, in a kind of oral history of the present. It becomes a magical 'documentary without film... panoramic, complex — and surprisingly well-balanced,' writes one reader, applauding the book's 'dazzling omniscience.' Legendary Silicon Valley marketer Regis McKenna speaks fondly of the days when young Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were dropping into his office, and despite the apparent challenges facing San Francisco, many people interviewed remained surprisingly hopeful.

'Idexa, a German-born tattoo artist who'd hitchhiked to the city from Los Angeles as a teenager, says despite the new displacements happening today, 'It's also beautiful. There's been a lot of money put into the neighborhood and into the buildings. Buildings that would have fallen apart have been renovated. Oh, it's the end of the world soon. We're not the first generation who thinks that.' It's an almost poetic picture of San Francisco that proves the world isn't as simple — or as discouraging — as it's often made out to be, and the book's passionate purpose seems to spontaneously find its way into the words of each interview subject.'
'Until you're standing in front of someone and listening to them with your own ears, you're never going to understand them,' says a survivor of one of California's recent wildfires. So Cary McClelland listens — writing in his introduction that his book asks us to hear the city of San Francisco speak in a chorus of voices, with a message for all the other cities. 'The goal of the book,' he says, 'is to reflect people's subjective perspective, their experience — lived, visceral, emotional, intimate. The living-room experience...'

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