THE LIGHT ATLAS 2016

PROJECTIONS AGAINST EVICTIONS AND DISPLACEMENT IN THE BAY AREA

a city colonized by tech

Everyone says SF isn’t what it was. Everyone says the past five years have changed the city tremendously. Delta_Ark sees the city floating above the earth-- above the attacks in Paris, above the refugee crisis in Europe, yet also somehow acutely responsive (evasive?). Nonetheless, the city cannot escape its own internal crisis: housing crisis (identity crisis?). Middle income families can’t afford it. Long-term residents are leaving. The homeless are being pushed onto Market St., onto the doorstep of some of the world’s largest tech companies, who are content to surveil, but not intervene.

What kind of city is San Francisco creating? Is it going to be a city in which the benefits of technological advancement reach everyone, or only a few? Is it going to be a city where people have the freedom of privacy, or a city where they are intensively surveilled and controlled? Could San Francisco be the first city to implement some form of basic income (or related scheme)? Could it be the first city to explicitly adopt a Data Bill of Rights? It has the wealth and expertise. We lead in technological innovation, why aren’t we also leading in social and political innovation?

While in residence as Eyebeam's Fellow at the Buzzfeed Open Lab for Journalism, Technology and the Arts and then later on at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and in collaboration with The Anti Eviction Mapping Project, Delta_Ark created “The Light Atlas," a series of poetic projections examining eviction, displacement and technological change in San Francisco.

The Map

sensors and the street

During the Superbowl, Mayor Ed Lee declared the homeless ‘would have to leave the street’ (Good luck moving 6,686 people somewhere else). This statement is emblematic of his administration’s approach. On the one hand, the mayor has created a budget surplus and dramatically reduced unemployment (9.4% to 3.6%). On the other hand, San Francisco now has has the fastest growing income inequality and one of the worst housing crises of any city in the country. A month cannot go by without a tech-worker publicly stating ‘I don’t want to see homeless riff-raff’ and long-term residents declaring that they are facing severe displacement.

During the mayor’s administration, ‘developing’ mid-market has been an important priority. Tax breaks, often referred to as ‘The Twitter Tax Break,’ have helped to move a large group of technology companies onto Market Street: Zendesk, Uber, Twitter, Dolby, Square, Autodesk and Salesforce. This development collides directly against the territorial integrity of the Tenderloin, a low income neighborhood with an activist community that worked to control a significant share of the area’s real-estate. Consequently, it’s not going anywhere any time soon.

From this collision, one sees undeniably powerful images: a guy in a faded leather jacket crooning on heroin right below the Twitter building, two young men on ‘hoverboards’ smoking joints, their LEDs lighting paths through crowds of tech workers in hoodies with logos getting off at 6PM, human shit on the street, two guys in collared shirts stepping over an old woman with a needle in her arm while they talk about how natural language processing and machine learning are going to make the world better, the brightness of the day giving way to the night markets, where people are selling plastic necklaces, sneakers, video cassettes, old clothes, DVDs...

A COLLABORATIVE POEM BETWEEN THE EVICTED AND BOTS

Hello sunshine. Good morning. Good morning. Happy Saturday.

Surf is still out of control today-- broken clouds--

It’s time to make some noise again.

Today, there was a #peacefulriot for standing against police brutality.

Today, Yelp wants a Software Engineer - Infrastructure.

Today, Yelp wants a Software Engineer - Data-Mining.

Opened Graffiti request via iphone at 709 Hyde St. Scrawl. (Photo: “evict the yuppies”).

The Light Atlas poem is composed of remixed fragments of twitter gathered by bots, testimonies of eviction collected by the Anti Eviction Mapping Project, excerpts of books, generative writing experiments with bots, observations from protests and speculative narrative. The full text can be read here. The street documentation can be found here. This final installation, below, was broadcast from the roof of The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts for a month during the final weeks of Delta_Ark’s residency.

future cities

The economic developments on Market St. and in SF in general are undeniably part of a larger national and global trend towards increasing income inequality; however, technological developments originating in Silicon Valley drive this trend. The political class’s almost complete inability at every level to adapt to changing technological conditions worsens the situation; nonetheless, couldn’t San Francisco prove the exception and not the rule? Ironically, the most direct response seems to be coming from the startup incubator YCombinator and its basic income pilot program.

Delta_Ark wonders: where is the party of social futurism? (#SandersMusk2016?!). Where is the party that understands technology, but also has a concern for social justice? Why isn’t it emerging in San Francisco? Is it the Pirate Party? Is it the Green party? Is it a combination thereof? Was it beginning to happen at noisebridge at the “Hack the Left” event? Is it happening at the Sudo Room at the Omnicommons? Is it happening at the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Where is the political response to technology that understands technology? What forces are suppressing or undermining its evolution?

Post Script: all of this was written before the 2016 election; the election answers a lot of these questions, with an unfortunate right wing inversion.