Don’t call them techies.

I was a little surprised to hear Geoff Nunberg on Fresh Air deliver a bit of a rant against the “techies” that have been the subject of the recent “tech class war” in the Bay Area. I would be taken aback by anybody professing on national radio their biased assumptions and prejudices about broad groups of people based solely on the industry in which they work. It is even more unexpected coming from Nunberg, since he teaches lots of budding tech workers at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. I imagine his students might be interested to know that their professor thinks they’re “oblivious” and arrogant.

I think it’s strange how so many people are perfectly happy to assume that all – or most – people who work at a tech company for a living are entitled prats, disconnected from their communities and possessing no social consciousness. (And how interesting that these characterizations are never made about workers of private-busing non-tech companies in the area, like Williams-Sonoma or Kaiser.)

The thing is, normally, you’d assume that these negative assumptions are just made by people who don’t really know any tech workers. But Professor Nunberg does know these people — and he thinks they’re arrogant jerks.

Yet one has to wonder if Nunberg’s analysis and judgments in this area can be relied upon. For example: in one sentence, Nunberg describes Silicon Valley’s hermetic subculture” of nerdy “seclusion,” but in the next, he contrasts this with — surprise! — the fact that many tech workers prefer to live in San Francisco! What could cause these tasteless dorks to insist on moving to our socially conscious, hipster capital? Could it be that they’re actually not the arrogant jerks in search of seclusion that you thought they were? Surely not! It must be their libertarian impulses, urging them to come to the big city and personally evict some teachers and artists.

Nunberg’s description of the buses themselves are also telling:

A “luxury” bus surrounded and blocked by protesters.

People call them all Google buses, because they’re hard to tell apart — oversized Wi-Fi-equipped luxury coaches, usually gleaming white, which scoop up their passengers at transit stops like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You couldn’t invent a more compelling visual symbol for the privileged and disconnected lives that the tech workers seem to live, cosseted behind smoke-tinted windows.

(Emphasis added.) If the professor is so insulated that he a.) is this impressed by this bus and b.) can’t imagine a better visual symbol for the argument he’s trying to make — well, Occam’s razor again dictates that the simplest conclusion applies: he hasn’t got a very good argument. And maybe he needs to read some history or even, a news site.

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