Tech Won't Save Us - How Tech Wields Its Power in San Francisco w/ Dean Preston

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Dean Preston to discuss the havoc robotaxis are wreaking in San Francisco and the wider impacts the tech industry has had on the city. Dean Preston is the District 5 Supervisor in San Francisco and the first democratic socialist elected in the city in 40 years. He’s also a tenant attorney and founder of Tenants Together. You can follow Dean on Twitter at @DeanPreston.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Paris interviewed one of the activists placing cones driverless cars to disable them and draw attention to the California Public Utilities Commission’s pro-corporate regulatory decisions.In 2011, Twitter got a massive tax break to stay in San Francisco instead of moving its offices elsewhere in the Valley.Salesforce CEO Marx Benioff was a rare tech mogul to support San Francisco’s ballot measure to create a new tax to fund help for homeless residents.A ballot measure to increase the transfer tax on properties over $10 million won in 2020, despite industry opposition.The campaign against progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin was bankrolled by tech and real estate money. Jacob Silverman put this into wider context in a piece about the rise in the political influence of David Sacks.Support the show

It's not like people in San Francisco came together and voted to say, let's be the testing ground for autonomous vehicles or driverless cars. Nothing like that ever happened. It's not even like the elected representatives like myself ever voted to say, let's be the testing ground for these autonomous vehicles. There was no vote from the city saying, let's ramp up from this nighttime testing to where they can operate 24-7 and where they can take passengers and so forth. It was all done by the tech industry going to host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Dean Preston. Dean is a San Francisco District 5 supervisor and the first democratic socialist

elected in San Francisco in 40 years. He's also a tenant supervisor and the first democratic socialist elected in San Francisco in 40 years. He's also a tenant attorney and the founder of Tenants Together. I wanted to have Dean on the show for a few reasons. First of all, you know, you've probably seen the stories recently about the robo taxis that are all over San Francisco and causing havoc on the streets of the city. So I wanted to talk to Dean about that and how these companies like Google and GM are able to roll these vehicles out on the streets and why they are not being held to account and why those vehicles are not being taken off the street. Because there is a lot of public opposition. There is a lot of recognition that these things are not

performing as the companies promised they are. And so why is nothing happening here? Why is the city not stepping up to do something? And there are very key and important reasons why that is happening. And Dean outlines them, not just because of state authorities taking away power from the city, but also because of a lack of desire from people within the city itself who have the authority to do something about this to actually use that power. But then, you know, that leads us into a broader conversation about the impact that the tech industry has had in San Francisco more broadly, as it has become this major industry, as it has created these people who have immense power and wealth within the city and kind of the wider

Bay Area and who have particular interests, right, and want to see the city act in a certain way. Obviously, we have heard a lot of stories in recent years about the problems facing San Francisco from high housing costs, recent stories about crime, but also the lack of housing available to people, an ineffective public transit system, and all of these sorts of issues that this very wealthy city, because of the tech industry and because of other industries that operate there, is experiencing. And so why is it not able to address these problems? If you listen to people in the tech industry, they will blame it on lefty politicians, people like Dean, who are not

allowing, they would say, good policies to be passed that would actually help the people of the city. But are these tech billionaires who are saying these sorts of things really advocating the types of policies that would actually benefit regular people in San Francisco instead of themselves and their companies? That seems very unlikely. And Dean talks about how the tech industry is very much related to other powerful industries within San Francisco, like property developers who have particular interests and want to see those interests protected and have been able to ensure that the political system protects them, even as the drawbacks, the negative externalities of their

focus on protecting the tech companies and the developers and other major industries has been felt increasingly by the people of the city, who those industries also very much depend on, right, as workers and as consumers. And so I figured that for all the time we spend talking about the major tech companies and talking about these powerful players, we haven't taken enough time to look at the city where so many of their companies and so many of them themselves are based and the impact that they have had on this major city that is seen as one of the wealthiest in the United States, if not the wealthiest when you consider per capita income, but how that has not led to broad prosperity around the city, but has actually led to increased inequities and a lot of kind of social problems and a lot of social harms because these very wealthy people have been able to accrue so much wealth and power and have not been willing to share that with everyone else in the city to make sure that everyone has a good

standard of living. But instead, they sit on massive fortunes and want to command not just the political systems, but the future of the country and the world while they're at it. And that cannot be allowed to happen. So I was very happy to talk to Dean to get his perspective on what is happening in San Francisco. I think that this is an important conversation and I'm sure a topic that I'll be returning to in the future. I would also just note that if you want to know more about the activists who have been trying to stop the robo-taxis in San Francisco, who have been putting cones on the front of those vehicles, I interviewed one of those activists in my newsletter, Disconnect, and I'll include a link to that in the show notes if you want to check it out. Now, with that said, if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share

the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into Making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, so I can keep having these in-depth conversations on various issues that the tech industry has been involved in, you can join supporters like Pierre from Norway, Jessica in Redwood City, and Dennis from Portugal by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Dean, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks. I am excited to talk with you. I appreciate being on. Yeah, I'm very excited. I feel like if there's any kind of politician in San Francisco who's a good fit for a show like this, it's someone like you, you know, who is obviously doing really important work as the first democratic socialist elected in quite a long time in the city.

So, yeah, just really happy to have you on the show and looking forward to digging into a lot of these important issues that are, you know, really relevant in San Francisco right now and that the tech industry has a lot of impact on. Definitely is a tech industry has had a huge impact here and people have strong opinions. So it's certainly one of, I guess, a small handful of cities where I think the role of tech's just been massive. Yeah. And I feel like one of the things that I have noticed in recent years when, you know, obviously I've been observing these issues and writing about these issues for a long time, is that a lot of things that the tech industry wants to try and want to trial often get rolled out in San Francisco first, right? They're trying it locally because that's where many of these companies are based to see if it's going to kind of resonate with the public there before they expand it into other cities across the United States and around the world, right? And I feel like one of the things that I have noticed is I feel like San Franciscans themselves have become much more kind of critical of, skeptical of, even oppositional to

a lot of these experiments that the tech industry is kind of running on the residents of the city. Do you feel like that is something that you've noticed as well? I think that's accurate. I mean, look, I think there's a lot of folks who have been concerned and suspicious of the motives and the potential impacts of the city being a testing ground for all things tech. And that's not a new phenomenon, right? I think there are a lot of folks who have seen various waves of gentrification, displacement in San Francisco, and who going back to things that were controversial decades ago in San Francisco, like a big tax break for Twitter to try to revitalize the mid-market area of San Francisco.

It's not like those things when they were rolled out that everyone agreed on them. There are a lot of people who kind of saw the writing on the wall and, you know, expressed concern and didn't support those kind of policies. But I do think that there's been a growing number of people, particularly longer-term residents of the city, who are seeing the impacts now of decades of tech dominance of the local economy and to some extent local government, and who are seeing that there's a difference between what's promised and what the reality is. And so I think it's accurate to say that there's a lot of folks with a lot of concerns and just seeing what really have been pretty misleading promises from the tech industry around them

being good citizens of San Francisco as an industry. A lot of those promises are not taken at face value anymore. Yeah, the don't be evil certainly comes to mind from Google. But I think that that is something that people even beyond San Francisco are waking up to, right? I feel like, you know, in San Francisco, there's that kind of direct contact to it that is much more kind of relevant or live than maybe in some other cities. But even I feel like beyond San Francisco, a lot of people are saying, you know, these tech companies promised us a lot of things. And now that so much time has passed, we can see that a lot of this is not really coming to pass, right? And so I think that that's important context to kind of set up this

conversation as we talk about the impact of these companies in the city and how people in the city are responding to it. And I wanted to start by talking about a specific issue before we get into this bigger picture, right? Because people will have seen stories and reporting on robo-taxis in San Francisco run by Google's Waymo and GM's Cruise Division that have been running in the city recently. And they've probably seen a lot of stories about them not operating very well and causing a lot of kind of mayhem and chaos on the streets of San Francisco. What is the best way to describe what is happening with these robo taxis to listeners for them to understand it? Well, it's certainly a perfect case in point for the relationship between the tech industry and the people who live in the city. You know, some of whom are in the tech industry, right?

But they're not the decision makers. They're the workforce who have to like walk across the street without getting run over by a robo. Yeah. You know, but it is a good example of a number of dynamics that we have going on. Like, so one thing that's really important to understand with these autonomous vehicles, driverless cars, whatever you want to call it, Waymo's CEO says they're not driverless. They're operated by Waymonauts. I kid you not. Literally. So this is where they're coming from. So whatever you want to call them, I call them driverless cars. They went from operating on a very limited scope between midnight and 5 a.m. in a few neighborhoods. They were testing them,

and they expanded. Now you cannot walk a block in the city without seeing these things. They're all over the streets, causing significant traffic congestion, interfering with fire trucks. It was just a collision with a fire truck that sirens going, and their collision intersection. The fire chief and others have spoken out saying they're not ready for prime time. That was her quote. But what's interesting, I think, and sort of symptomatic of some bigger problems is the anti-democratic approach to these, right? It's not like people

in San Francisco came together and voted to say, let's be the testing ground for autonomous vehicles or driverless cars. Nothing like that ever happened. It's not even like the elected representatives like myself ever voted to say, let's be the testing ground for these autonomous vehicles. There was no vote from the city saying, let's ramp up from this nighttime testing to where they can operate 24-7 and where they can take passengers and so forth. It was all done by the tech industry going to Sacramento, exerting their power and influence through a lot of money in the lobbying. Which I should say is the state capital. So it's on a different level of government, right?

That's right. Sacramento is the state capital and is significantly more friendly to big corporations. Lobbyists kind of call the shots more. And they very successfully had the state basically preempt local cities from adopting rules and regulations around these vehicles on our streets. And so you have this dynamic where, you know, all my constituents, yeah, they're pissed off about this. They're like, how can you have these, you know, unsafe vehicles like all of the streets getting in the way of emergency first responders and so forth? And we got to look them in the eye and say, actually, we're preempted by state law from

doing much about it, right? And so everyone goes to the state to try to lobby the CPUC, California Public Utilities Commission. They're the ones who actually have the regulatory authority. They're very cozy with industry, and they just keep handing out the permissions for these folks to do whatever they want. There's no transparency. There's no real data tracking that's meaningful on what's happening. And so they have followed a strategy of going to the state level, right, to accomplish what they couldn't accomplish locally and to take away the sort of democratic voice and power of cities and local elected representatives. And they're not the first

industry to do that. So, you know, my background for 20 years before I took office, I did tenant rights work and fought evictions and tried to get improvements to, you know, rent control laws passed and other tenant protections. Same dynamic there, right? For years, when cities started democratically passing rent control laws in California in the 70s and in the 80s, the response in the 90s was the big real estate industry went to the state and basically handcuffed the cities and barred the cities, even if a majority of voters want it, from adopting certain types of strong rent control across the state of California. So that is a tried and true tactic. And we see it again and again, right? We see it with Uber and Lyft going to the state level to preempt and change the law that the courts and local

jurisdictions were trying to push around their drivers being employees instead of being contractors, right? So they went and did a ballot measure at the state level. So that's in California, at least, where we have a number of more progressive cities where voters are not enamored with all things tech and certainly not enamored with all things big corporation and are willing and eager to push back and to regulate in what's happened again and again, and especially with these driverless cars, is that the industry wises up to that pretty early and realizes they can just preempt the cities by going to a higher level of government. And former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is not stepping in to help to that pretty early and realizes they can just preempt the cities by going to a higher level

of government. And former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is not stepping in to help you out with this? He certainly is not. And let's be fair, he was a very, very corporation-friendly mayor and remains so as governor. Yeah, these are his appointees on the very body that regulates or theoretically regulates these driverless vehicles. So he's certainly, yeah, part of the problem. And I mean, I think what's different than the usual dynamic here is the emerging consensus among local leaders. I mean, when you have like the fire chief, the president of the board of supervisors, a number of supervisors, even folks who disagree on a lot of issues, are saying, the city attorney here, who is viewed as a more centrist, not progressive politician, others all saying, this is outrageous, right? And urging the state CPUC to rein in these permissions and to, they were actually formally asking them to rescind and revisit their decision

from just a couple weeks ago to basically give the green light to a huge number of these vehicles on our streets. And am I right that the transit agency is also kind of with you in that fight? And am I right that even the police were kind of suggesting that they weren't supporting these robo-taxis as well? Everyone, yes. I mean, yeah, first responders, transit agency. You know, I will say someone like myself, I wish I'd heard a lot of these people speaking up five years ago before I even got on the board when some of these things were being considered. I do think some of these same officials were pretty enamored with all the tech and certainly our transit agency. I don't know that they've taken as strong a stand as they should have in the past.

But whatever led us here, at least now everyone's speaking to some extent with one voice. And look, I mean, there are things that people are all agreed on. There are other parts of this, though, where most leaders are still silent. So I think that everyone can agree that people in local leadership have an obligation to keep the streets safe. And we can't do that when we have no control over these vehicles. And so you see a consensus going around talking about the safety and are these ready for prime time and all that. Where you don't have the same consensus is on some of the other impacts, right? Like I don't hear a lot of people other than, you know, democratic socialists and some very progressive local politicians talking about

things like just transition, right? And impact on taxi drivers who are completely screwed by all this. I like, and aren't even part of the discussion, right? People will debate for hours at the state level and locally, driverless cars. And very few people are talking about the fact that the whole point is to put all these medallion holders who weren't put out of business by Uber and Lyft, just put them completely out of business and make Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, and cab drivers all obsolete. And with bigger plans down the road, replacing public transit, which is where they want to head once they have bigger vehicles. And so I think that while it's great to see an emerging consensus around safety and like, where is this all headed? And what does it do to the human beings who are, you know, largely when it comes to cab drivers, largely immigrants and long term rent control tenants in San Francisco who are somehow managing to survive still in this town, who are clearly, you know, have a target on their back if you phase out their job like abruptly without any kind of plan to help them.

Yeah, I think that's such an essential point, right? And one that doesn't often get brought up in these discussions, because let's be real, the taxi drivers were already sidelined years ago with, you know, the Uber and Lyft, as you were talking about. And I want to come back to that in just a second. But the last thing I kind of want to ask you about this robo taxi phenomenon and what's been happening is you talked about how, you know, this decision was made kind of undemocratically by the state level body, so that, you know, local politicians and local leaders like yourself and these other people who you're talking about don't have the authority to actually do anything about that. Is there any way around that for you? And is it a surprise then to see that people are kind of taking direct action

against these vehicles when it is causing so much chaos in the city, like, you know, the recent campaign by activists to put cones on the vehicle to draw attention to the CPUC being about to make this decision? What do you make of those sorts of developments as well? Yeah, look, I think that our ability to directly regulate them is severely curtailed, if not abolished by state law. It does not mean that we're completely powerless to do anything, right? And I think it's important for people to remember that and to realize that through activism, as some people are doing,

I think there are also things that if as a city, we were really serious about cracking down on these vehicles that we could do. And I said this about Uber and Lyft when they came and operated essentially illegal cab companies for years till they legalized them through the same state law maneuvers, right? There are things the city could have done. I mean, if you have a jurisdiction whose government and whose agencies are serious about enforcing laws and regulations instead of just welcoming whatever the latest tech innovation is, you can do something about it. So, I mean, I'll give you an example.

You know, I've long said it. Pretty much every Uber and Lyft pickup and drop off, unless they're parking in a parking space, you know, and the same with these driverless cars. I mean, most of them violate a local traffic law. What gives them the right to double park and pick someone up in a city, right? I mean, Paris, if you and I opened Paris and Dean LLC and started, you know, got in a car and just started pulling up for hire and someone paid us and we're double parking, I mean, the transit agency here could ticket us for doing that, right? Because the taxis, they have the right to do that, right? And they're given

that by local law and regulation. So, I mean, I mentioned that just because this idea that local residents and local governments are powerless, I don't think is accurate. And you see that with these activists who locally in San Francisco, like you referred to, I mean, they just said, forget it, right? We are going to just take matters into our own hands. They declared it, I think they called it cone week or something, and they just started plopping orange cone on the hood of the car. And apparently that disabled the vehicles. And there was a lot of controversy around that, but it was an example, right, of activists saying, you, the corporate lobbyists and the money may control certain things. You don't control everything, right?

It's kind of like when workers organize and strike. I mean, at a certain point, the big corporations, right, they need the workers to perform the work. And, you know, I think there's some element of that where there's certain lines when they get crossed, people push back. We saw this with the Google buses years ago. There were protests in the street. And at a certain point, if 20 activists stand in front of the Google bus, which is illegally parking in a bus stop and inhib 2000s. People pushed back, and they helped actually catalyze some rules around the Google buses using these. And they were not just Google. They were other tech companies basically bringing workers from who were trying to get to work and the drivers. And as with most act of protest that comes along, but I can just say it has a pretty important role in sometimes showing that even if you have power in the sort of halls of the Capitol and you have the most lobbyists, it doesn't mean you can dictate everything that happens on our streets. Absolutely.

And I think that's a really important point to say that, you know, it's not that the city can't do anything. It's just that the city often chooses not to do things when it is convenient for them to do so. And it's easy to kind of push the blame on a different level. Right. And before we move on from this topic, I did want, you brought up Uber and Lyft and I wanted to kind of bring up that example as well, as we talk about this now, because I feel like as my understanding is Uber and Lyft kind of rolled into San Francisco and these other cities. And once again, it was the CPUC, the state body

that essentially took over regulation of them to allow them to operate in these cities where there was an attempt by activists, by taxi companies, you know, by some local politicians to put in some more effective regulations on them at the local level in cities in California. But once again, it was the state body that preempted those regulations to allow Uber and Lyft to roll out so that they have had that impact. You know, what kind of, I guess, historical examples are kind of happening again here? And what was the impact of allowing Uber and Lyft to roll out in that way in San Francisco? Well, their strategy is to ask for forgiveness, not permission, if they even ever ask, right? But that's the strategy. And again,

I want to situate this in like, obviously, your focus is on tech industry. Some of these strategies, right? The biggest landlords in San Francisco have been using that strategy for, you know, since I started doing landlord tenant work, representing tenants, right? They would, you know, gut apartments and make it a hell for the neighbor next door instead of getting permits. And then, you know, they got fined, they got fined, you know, a few hundred bucks and whatever, right? So it is, I think, not unique to the tech industry to take the approach of we're just going to come in, violate all the laws, and then figure that the fines or whatever accountability there is, hopefully we can lobby our way out of those. And if we can't, we'll pay them and still make money. Now, the tech industry has taken that to

an extreme, right? And the things that you cite, not just the autonomous vehicles, certainly Uber and Lyft, which really, when you step back, I mean, was the point of absurdity. I mean, they launched these cab companies. They claim they're not taxis. I remember the first one that I was aware of was they were called Sidecar, I think. I don't know if you remember that. I mean, this is going way back. But their whole thing was, well, we're not taxis because it's a voluntary donation that people make, not a fee-based structure. And that was how they got around. They were like one of the first ones. And, you know, it's just like, it was like laughable. I mean, everyone knows if you didn't pay, the next one would never come pick you up, right?

And so people kind of know what's going on. These are cabs that are operating outside a longstanding regulatory environment, right? Where people, you know, they purchase medallions and they're allowed to do certain things and not allowed to do certain things. And they have to have a certain, you know, we have a very green fleet of cabs in San Francisco. You know, there's a reason for a lot of these regulations.

Now, what a lot of big tech companies have done well is they have exploited situations where a market isn't working that well, right? So there were huge problems with the cab industry in San Francisco. Like there were times a day you're trying to like get a cab and you just, you can't even get one, right? It's not like New York City where you just walk out and get a taxi. It was really hard, right? And there were neighborhoods where real equity concerns around where cabs would go, where they wouldn't pick up, right? So there were real improvements needed in the industry.

And so rather than just be the better, smarter cab company that comes in and offers a better product and actually applies for the medallions and the permits and comes in in that way, their strategy is to just operate outside all that initially illegally, right? And then to craft the law to allow what they're doing. So that was what Airbnb did in our housing market in San Francisco, right? I mean, they operated, it was completely illegal. What Airbnb, you know, if local officials had not been getting their campaign donations from them and, you know, wanting to curry favor with tech industry, you know, Airbnb. There was a path to shutting all that down.

Every one of their initial rentals violated our local rent control law and what's called the apartment conversion ordinance, which it makes it illegal to take an apartment that is for residential purposes so that someone can live there permanently. You know, somebody working class person in San Francisco needs a home. It's for them, right? that is for residential purposes so that someone can live there permanently. You know, somebody, working class person in San Francisco needs a home. It's for them, right? You don't get to just take those

and make them tourist hotels. It violates zoning laws. It violates apartment conversion ordinance. It violated all those things, yet they were allowed to do it, right? And it took many, many years of activism and pushing back to finally regulate those in

a meaningful way. And a lot of push and pull with state law and local law. I mean, I do think that got to a better place eventually, but not before thousands of people were displaced because some greedy landlords wanted to kick people out so they could turn around and start renting to tourists, you know, on a nightly or weekly basis. And so that is a pattern. And I think it's within the higher ups in the tech industry, it's viewed as a strength, right? They're disrupting, they're not apologetic about it. They're fundamentally libertarians. And they believe all these rules, whether it's rent control, prohibitions on converting apartments,

you know, medallions and regulations for taxis, they believe all that stuff is nonsense, right? And you should just operate outside all those regulations. And that's what they're hell-bent on doing. Yeah. And they also believe that because they have these technical skills, that they also understand everything else in every other venue that they might want to enter or sector that they might want to enter. I'm wondering, you know, describe there a lot of the ways that these companies have gotten around regulations and that the government has had these regulations and could have enforced them, but then chose not to, right? And allow these companies to break the regulations and eventually often write their own regulations or kind of have some versions of regulations written to allow them to be legalized and to operate in a way that was acceptable to the city, even though it had a lot of kind of negative externalities and a lot of problems that were created because of that. What is your theory as to why that was ultimately allowed to happen and why governments didn't crack down harder when these tech companies started flouting these laws?

I think it's political influence and promises from these companies and sort of the promises of what capitalism always offers as you know what they're going to achieve. Right. And there are benefits right for the local city. I mean, that are undeniable in terms of for all the gentrification and displacement that occurred. There's also a lot of real estate taxes, for example, that were collected that wouldn't have been had you not infused some, you know, had you not had like big tech occupying and developing huge amounts of office space downtown and so forth, right? So, you know, I think those aspects of these companies can contribute in terms of tax revenue. And even though I view it negatively, right, like, I think there are a lot of people, not a lot, but there's some who view gentrification through the lens of, you know, great, more like high end restaurants for me to frequent or something. So, you know, just realizing that like some of the decision makers, right, I mean, it's a class-based thing. Some of the

decision makers who are more well-off or attending their cocktail parties with other folks who are more well-off and, you know, people in the halls of power are not necessarily looking at like, hey, what's the impact on the janitor, the paraprofessional teaching in a school that, right, like who's, how are these policies impacting them or the cab driver? They're looking at how these policies impact and bring like money into the city. That's the more charitable view of it. The less charitable views for some of these folks is like they're directly getting funded in their campaigns and their future political endeavors and so forth by this very industry. And the industry has been active politically. A lot of these angel investors and others in the Bay Area,

we have 75 billionaires in the Bay Area. They are very active in trying to influence San Francisco politics. There's been a couple instances that really show this where you actually see the city spring to action. I remember a bunch of years ago when these guys from Italy decided they were going to start some model was illegal. Well, these guys weren't like Ron Conway and Y Combinator and all these people like in the Bay Area, right? They were politically irrelevant. They were quote unquote innovators and disruptors too, but they had no political connections, no political power and weren't active, you know, in the Bay Area tech community. So their illegal idea got shut down. All these other illegal ideas funded by the folks who are more involved in politics somehow magically not only get going here, but it takes many years of activism to finally get to the point where any of them are regulated.

Fascinating. And that leads me really well into the next kind of topic that I wanted to discuss, I guess. And that really is kind of the influence of these powerful and wealthy people in the tech industry on the politics in San Francisco in particular. You know, a lot of these people either are located in San Francisco itself or the companies have offices there. So what do they do to kind of have influence on the politics of the city and to make sure that it ultimately serves their interests above the interests of the general residents of the city, the people who've been there for a very long time? Well, their tactics have changed a bit. They tend to, they're closely aligned with other big financial interests. So whether it's financial services, big real estate, big tech, they're hard to distinguish when you look at what they're funding, right? And any notion that they're

somehow a different, you know, that you've got like the real estate industry over here, but oh no, we're the tech industry over here and we think differently, which I think was part of the promise, right? Like in what folks hoped. And you saw some glimmers of hope. You saw like Mark Benioff at Salesforce who like really leaned in on a very controversial and went to battle with Jack Dorsey, then head of Twitter, on a tax locally on big business that was going to fund homeless solutions. There have been these moments where you see some bigger folks in tech trying to distinguish themselves and be like, no, we're not just like the big real estate speculators or the big investor types. But at the end of the day, those are very, very

rare, a few individuals on a few initiatives. And for the most part, big money in tech, all the VCs, what drives that economy is aligned almost completely with the big landlords, real estate speculators, and other longstanding big corporations, whether they're banking industry or other industries here. And so they're all active, right? And they weigh in and they ensure, you know, this is a city where there's barely any Republicans, but there's a hell of a lot of Democrats who act like Republicans. They just don't call themselves Republicans. And so they're firmly behind those candidates, right? And they put a lot of money into politics to the tune of millions of dollars. I ran a ballot measure in 2020 that was calling to double the tax on sellers of real estate that

sells for over $10 million. So basically, the sales of $10 million in real estate was going to get us at 6% tax, going to bring in $100 to $200 million per year in revenue for social housing and for rent relief. And they spent $5 million, outspent us 20 to 1 to try to kill that measure. And, you know, it was big real estate, big tech, everyone, same groups. We won, by the way, you know, despite all that money by over a 10 point margin, you know. Good. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, again and again. So they weigh in directly with money. I think increasingly, they also have invested a lot, not just in campaign interventions and funding and direct lobbying, but in really trying to control the narrative. Michael Moritz, who's a big VC billionaire, has set up his own website as a faux news outlet that also doubles as his personal pet project. And then he also set up like a nonprofit organization that does all this civic engagement stuff in the city and, you know, cleaning the streets and whatever. And they do all that stuff to build email lists. So these folks are increasingly focused on developing out and creating influence, not just through direct

campaign donations, but through creating a real echo chamber through new sites that they own or control and or organizations that pop up. And they pop up all the time. So I ran for office in 2019. They were called one thing. In 2020, they formed new groups, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco. The next year, they formed a fake renters group. They called the San Francisco Renters Alliance. There's been 10 of these just in the last couple of years. Together SF, Together SF PAC. It's just nonstop, like workforce, housing, whatever. So they've gotten a little more sophisticated around this and a little more brazen in their disinformation campaigns. And so they really, as you see a lot on social media, especially on Twitter, just really coming after, you know, progressive socialists, tenant groups in these campaigns that are just based on absolutely nothing. Because fundamentally,

when they honestly present their arguments, they lose. That's the fundamental challenge that I think big tech has in San Francisco, is that most of these issues, if you ask voters, and this is not me speculating, it's like over and over again, voters want reasonable regulation of big corporations. They want progressive taxation. They want rent control. They want to support labor and unions. And, you know, it remains despite the million efforts to spin it a different way, it remains a progressive city overall. I think what a lot of these big tech interests have figured out is that their only path to winning is the disinformation route. And that's why they come after me. I mean, I've like spent 20 years, you know, representing tenants, right? I'm a tenant rights attorney. So big real estate used to attack me saying I was too strong an advocate for tenants and

rent control. I wasn't considering the poor mom and pop landlords. That's how they came at me. That's such a loser in San Francisco that now they come at me and they literally have these like fake articles saying that I'm a landlord evicting them. I've never been a landlord in my life. I've never evicted anyone. I've defended thousands of people for eviction.

And that's kind of where we are. It's like the Trump impact down at the local level and weaponized by people who say they're Democrats. It's just a wild, wild time. But we increasingly see that. It's really unfortunate, but it tells you how they lack the confidence that their ideas will win. And so they just, you know, increasingly just kind of make stuff up in the local political realm. Do you feel like that has shifted over time? Because, you know,

as you were saying earlier, like a lot of these people would present themselves as like libertarians, right? And kind of are operating outside the government, maybe even wanting to replace the government. And for a long time, there was this kind of narrative that they were like separate from the government, they were just not paying much attention to it. And they were just kind of doing their tech thing, right? But it does seem like in the past number of years, they have become much more politically active and much more kind of openly engaging in the political process. Were they always at these things, but it was just kind of below the surface and you didn't see it as much? Or has there been a notable shift in their engagement in politics in the past number

of years? I think there's been a notable shift, but, you know, as I mentioned, in the toxicity level, right? Like, I mean, it's really only the last handful of years where you just have this kind of like nonstop, especially online, just this kind of like gross, toxic, the stuff that I think most people associate with and assume are sort of like MAGA Republican type tactics and Trump tactics.

But you see a lot of these, you know, that sort of the online, you know, YIMBY crowd, which is, you know, the pro-development and libertarian housing approach and others who just use a lot of these same tactics of disinformation and really kind of toxic personal attacks. I think the other thing that's shifted and certainly for big tech, but also more broadly, I think for like big corporate interests is at a certain point, you know, they've thrown so much at trying to shape public opinion, right. To make people more libertarian, suspicious of government, right? And at some levels it's worked, right? And they've certainly deregulated a lot and had their successes in that effort.

But what's interesting is like, there are limits to that. And I think that one of the things we see in San Francisco and why we see this shift in some of the messaging is I do think that some folks have realized that it doesn't matter how much money you dump in a political campaign. If you're attacking rent control in San Francisco, you are going to lose at the polls. Like your candidate is going to lose. Your ballot measures are going to lose. And if you're an organization like these PACs that do this, like your endorsement is going to be toxic. No one is going to want to be associated with you. Right. I'd say the same thing nationally. It's like with labor. I mean, think of decades of like attacking organized labor from the right, from not billions of dollars have been spent trying to convince workers that they shouldn't be part of a union and that unions are bad. Unions are trying to exploit. And they did that poll last year of everyone, including like the most right wing people and the most left and whatever of all Americans. And they found over 70 percent support for unions, right? And that's after so many years of misinformation and propaganda. And so I do think they've run up against that in certain areas where there are certain things, no matter how much money you throw at it, you're not going to convince people Social Security,

Medicare are bad. You're not going to convince people that reasonable regulations on landlords or that workers organizing or these things are bad things. And that's why you do see a shift in the political realm where their candidates, their measures will not acknowledge what they're doing. They will just say they're doing the opposite. The deregulation crew did a big housing measure in San Francisco, right? Last year, it's called Prop D. It lost, but they ran it as a big housing measure in San Francisco last year. It's called Prop D. It lost, but they ran it as an affordable housing measure. It wasn't an affordable housing measure.

It would make housing less affordable, actually, for people. But they knew they had to run it. They just had to lie about what it was and call it an affordable housing measure. Otherwise, it had no chance of success. And it's the same. You see these as a guy backed by the tech industry running for a supervisor in the Mission District of San Francisco, which has traditionally been a very progressive district. You know, he keeps putting things out how he's the progressive in the race, right? You have to

do that locally. So I think they've wised up to that they have to lie to people to have any chance. And then the question is, you know, can we all get the truth through and get our message out? But it's become much more of a cynical approach in that way, where they're not like engaging on like different views of, hey, should we regulate these things? Do we want a more libertarian society? Like those kind of things, which 10 years ago, 20 years ago might have been the debate as different technologies were emerging. Instead, now it's just all about how these things are actually going to result in these positive progressive achievements, even if those things in reality are completely disconnected from what they're advocating.

Yeah. And a very obvious example of that to me is like the Uber and Lyft and the gig economies pushing Proposition 22, right? And saying that it was actually going to be great for gig workers and they were going to benefit so much from this when it was really an attempt to kind of roll back the regulations that they had won, you know, by getting the government to actually pass protections for them. So yeah, you can see that in many different cases, you know, in, you know, the state and the city, but also like nationally and I would say even internationally as well, right? As these companies recognize what they need to do to move their, their interests forward in a society that is becoming much more skeptical of them and what

they're kind of offering them. I wanted to ask you about one specific case that comes to mind, because I believe, as I understand the tech industry was quite influential or quite involved, like funded a lot, the campaign against Chesa Budin. I don't know if that's the correct pronunciation, but I know he was recalled in San Francisco. And my understanding is that the tech industry was quite involved in that campaign. Can you give us a bit of insight on what happened there and, you know, kind of the influence that the industry is able to exert in these sorts of campaigns. They certainly were a lot of the big funders, more certainly the same folks advancing other

conservative positions, and they backed a recall campaign of Boudin. There were some in the industry who did side with him. So it wasn't a monolith, but I think, you know, definitely far more money coming against him from industry leaders. And, you know, it was really, you know, that recall campaign was an interesting one from the perspective of like how sort of spin and conservative propaganda can drive results. And there's been a movement of recalls, you know, against progressive politicians, progressive district attorneys, anyone pushingate folks, and whether we're talking about how they view unions, how they view rent control, how they view criminal justice reform, right? I mean, this is largely the people we're talking about are well off. They're white. They're

male, almost overwhelmingly. And it is not high on their list to do the kinds of things that progressive prosecutors want to do and that civil rights advocates want to do, which is to make sure we're not just taking the problems, especially the problems of poverty, and just warehousing and caging black and brown people overwhelmingly, right? Low-income people. That is not their concern, right? Their concern is that when they come from their house in the suburbs down into San Francisco to show off some neighborhood to some friend of theirs who's visiting from wherever, that they don't have to see a homeless person on the street in San Francisco, right?

And they don't care whether that person gets housed, right? I don't want to see a homeless person on the street either because I want them to be in stable housing, right? They don't care if they're in stable housing or in jail, right? And so when you have a prosecutor like Jason Boudin, who kind of got that, who's like, I'm not going to prosecute my way out of the problems of poverty here, right? I'm going to focus prosecutions on, you know, violent crime, on things, right, and try to make it safer. And I'm not going to be like prosecuting someone for camping on the street or for using a drug because they're addicted to it. Like he was very clear,

he's not going to prosecute that kind of stuff. And that really is not the vision of these big tech billionaires and multimillionaires, right? They want a city, they have total control over the levers of government, that they keep government out of any regulation of anything that impacts their profits. Government is only there when they need a bailout. And the more altruistic ones also want a place where their upper level workers who are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year can live here and displace all the undesirable people who aren't really contributing to the city in the way that, of course, only tech contributes. And, you know, I mean, I'm being a bit facetious, but that's kind of the boiled down to it. It's like they're primarily interested in their own profits. And like I said,

if they're a little more altruistic, maybe they're interested that their engineers and others, you know, can live in San Francisco as well. I don't know if they're really interested in that. And I can tell you there's a hell of a lot of tech workers, you know, who are very supportive of progressive policies, who are deeply involved in San Francisco, who would probably tell you that the folks at the top couldn't care less about the tech workers either. But hopefully that at least varies company by company. Yeah, it's a really good point. And I think that I remember seeing stats about how many Black people have had to leave San

Francisco because of the gentrification and because of the increasing housing prices and stuff like that, and how they're not kind of in on so you know, so much of the wealth that has been created by the tech industry and whatnot. Right. I wanted to ask you though, because, you know, when you're talking about Cheza Boudin and the recall, obviously people have heard a lot of stories about San Francisco in recent years, you know, about say the crime in the city or the level of homelessness or the inequality and these other problems that the city is facing. I know some of those are real problems and some of them are inflated for certain interests because it will benefit them to have these narratives out there. And when you look at the responses of some of the influential people in the tech industry,

they'll say that these problems in San Francisco are the result of lefty politicians who are, you know, implementing these policies that don't make any sense and act like they have no kind of culpability in what is actually going on in the city. How would you describe the problems that San Francisco is facing and where would you place kind of the root of those problems? Well, I certainly think tech industry has contributed to those. I think they've certainly brought resources to the city. They've exacerbated some of the inequality in the city and fueled the increase in housing costs and the displacement from the city. I think that it's very strange, the kind of blame game right now that they play of pointing at Chase Boudin as a progressive prosecutor, or, you know, they love to point at me.

Like, I'm one of 11 supervisors on a board of supervisors, and yet somehow they think that the democratic socialists who have one representative in city government, any problem that occurs in the city, I have created it somehow. The reality is we have strong mayor city. That's objectively true. Our system of government has a strong mayor system. The mayor literally controls every department, tens of thousands of employees, makes every decision around spending money. We have an oversight role, right, where we can call a a hearing. We can, you know, certainly, and we can pass laws on what's legal and illegal. All the things that these folks complain about are issues of like how things are administered in San Francisco. And that's a hundred percent an issue of the mayor, but they'll never say that because the mayor is their mayor. These billionaires all back Mayor London Breed 100%. And so they're kind of in a conundrum. Like they have the most powerful representative in government.

And yet they point to all these problems and want to blame someone. So they blame, you know, originally they blamed Chesa Boudin. And notably, like crime was down under Chesa Boudin. NBC just did a great segment on this, showing the data. They got rid of Boudin and put in this tough-on-crime friend of the mayor's, and crime's up. So where's the recall of her? For folks here, it's become pretty obvious. It's just like, blame those on the left for problems that are really a result of capitalism and of big corporate interests having too much control, not too little control.

And I'll tell you, you know, the part that's interesting to layer on this is what happened in the pandemic, right? where out of need, not out of some strategic decision-making process or planning process, just because of the moment and the crisis, we actually saw significant launching of major lefty-type programs in San Francisco. And the story that no one will tell is that those things worked and it freaked out the billionaires, especially the tech billionaires and the VC. It freaked them out because what happened during the first couple of years of the pandemic, right? Certainly when it came to healthcare, as close as we've come to social, you get your free shot, your free vaccine, the vaccines, right? So we socialize medicine more than it ever has been in San Francisco.

My office led the way in banning evictions, virtually any eviction, unless it was like a nuisance eviction where someone's going to burn down the place or something, right? Like almost every eviction. The eviction rates plummeted, plummeted through the pandemic. Lowest of any California city. We just banned evictions. We taxed the rich at the ballot to generate more rent relief than over $70 million of rent relief. Sky didn't fall. Landowners got their money. Nobody got evicted over rent. You look at so many ways there were things happening, right?

Voters passed a whole series of taxes on big corporations. We were all told, oh, it's a pandemic. People aren't going to want to tax the rich. Oh, no, no. They passed every single one of them. While other cities like economies were falling off a cliff because of all these progressive taxes, San Francisco's did not until this year. We didn't even have a deficit through all this because we were taxing the

rich. And then the other notable thing is homelessness debated for decades. What did we finally do as a city? We finally acquired hotels during the pandemic and moved homeless people. And guess what? We're the only county in the state where the number of people living on the streets dropped in the pandemic. So we closed the shelters and still had the number of people living on the streets drop by 15% because we were moving

thousands of people into hotels, right? And so those were, it's not like everything was perfect. These were small dents in huge societal problems, right? But those were the path. If we as a city doubled down on those things, ideally with federal and state help, but even if we just did it in the city, if we ramped those strategies up, you would see huge progress on homelessness, on evictions, on all these issues. But you got to fund that. And the voters were ready to fund all that. They did over and over by taxing these folks. And honestly, that's what's going on. It's like they're rebelling now. They're reinventing history

to say the progressive solutions are creating all these problems, blaming all the problems which are actually created by them and their politicians, right? Reinventing the history to try to make all the actual successful interventions look like they failed so that they don't have to get taxed. Because in a sane world that most San Franciscans would support, these billionaires would be paying the damn bills and we'd be buying up more hotels, moving homeless people into those places, banning evictions, taxing the rich to fund rent relief. It's not rocket science, right? And during the pandemic, we saw the glimpses of and were able to test some significant changes. I mean, we haven't even talked about the same around policing, right? This pivot to community ambassadors and street teams instead of police. There were some very fundamental shifts that started

happening early in the pandemic. And the billionaires especially freaked out knowing that they'd have to pay their fair share. And that if people start to actually see progress on those things, it's going to be a problem for them. And so that's really at the heart of the kind of interventions that you're seeing, especially from this handful of billionaires that's very active in San Francisco politics. That's so fascinating to hear, right? And to see that the solutions are quite obvious. They could be implemented. We know what they are. It's just having that political will, which is being kind of kneecapped by the power and influence of these very powerful people, which include the tech billionaires in

Silicon Valley, that is really holding the government both at the city level and the state level back from actually moving forward on those sorts of things. Dean, I think that this gave us a lot of great context for what's going on in San Francisco. Is there anything that we didn't discuss that you think it's important for people to understand about tech's influence and role in the city? I think we've covered a lot of it. I think one thing, though, that we touched on really briefly, but I think is a growing problem, is the disinformation as they get more involved in politics. It's not exclusively a tech issue. It is overwhelmingly kind of shamelessly put forward by a lot of these multimillionaires and billionaires who are weighing in the process.

And I will say it's an area where I think we as a society, and certainly in San Francisco, put forward by a lot of these multimillionaires and billionaires who are weighing in the process. And I will say it's an area where I think we as a society and certainly in San Francisco have not figured out how to counter that. So, you know, just a shout out to you and others who are like actually having these discussions in a more substantive way, because yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about these things and not to have to condense an hour conversation into the two minute soundbite, which increasingly is it seems like the extent of a lot of dialogue. So thank you so much for having me on and for doing this. Absolutely. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show, you know, for fighting for these important measures in San Francisco, of course, and for giving us insight on what's going on there. Because I think it's important to always understand what's happening in San Francisco because the tech industry is so influential there. And often what they try in that city ends up happening in other cities as well,

where they want influence. So I think it's important for us to understand that. And I thank you again for taking the time to come and chat. Thank you. Dean Preston is a District 5 supervisor in San Francisco, a tenant attorney and founder of Tenants Together. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week so we can keep having these critical and in-depth conversations, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.