When a man who said he worked for Google stepped in front of the company’s blockaded shuttle bus in San Francisco last week, it was at once absurd, familiar, and so very believable. But it turned out to be local labor union Unite Here organizer Max Alper indulging in a bit of political street theater: “This is a city for the right people who can afford it,” he yelled at the protestors. “Can’t afford it? You can leave.”

The next day, AngelHack CEO Greg Gopman posted a rant about San Francisco’s poor “degenerates” that was almost too stereotypically insensitive to be believable: “crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash … [who] gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy … act like they own the center of the city.” Yet this post turned out to be true. (Gopman later deleted the post, changed his Facebook profile photo to show he-hearts-SF, and apologized for trivializing “the plight of those struggling to get by.”)

The fake felt real and the real felt fake because all logic has been lost in the midst of a cultural upheaval between those in tech and those outside of it. The problem, though, is that those sides don’t necessarily correlate to “tech” vs. “non-tech”. Not all who enter the tech industry do so with the intention to cash in and build a platform from which to rant about urban poverty. And not all who fight tech are luddites who inherently see coders as the enemy.

Susie Cagle About Susie Cagle is a journalist and illustrator based in Oakland. Follow her on Twitter at @susie_c.

Yes, we’re in the midst of a battle for a culturally, racially, and economically diverse San Francisco and Silicon Valley. (It’s not just a local fight, either; what’s happening here is subtly — and will be overtly — playing out elsewhere, too.) From Google bus graffiti and IPO protests to essays lamenting the shuttle buses and others defending techies, 2013 marked a shift for the geographical hub of the tech that’s reshaping our lives. Lines were drawn. A battle began. And as it did, it became clear just how divided the city had become.

But those lines aren’t so clear in a city where tech work is the only work many people can get. Employees at tech companies don’t all want to live in self-contained, private, home-away-from-home company towns dreamed up by their bosses. Tech work itself isn’t inherently evil — or at least it doesn’t have to be. Nor is it inherently good and helpful. A poll on “Affordability and Tech” released last week by the University of San Francisco bears out these blurred lines: While residents are very concerned about affordability — and 70.1 percent think city officials need to do something about it — they also don’t see tech as the enemy.

“Most respondents see the tech boom as most strongly helping tech executives and workers,” wrote the study’s authors. “Despite these concerns, there was little interest in making it harder for tech companies to come to San Francisco. For now, keeping the economy strong appears to be the priority, and we expect that feelings about the economy will likely stave off a substantial political ‘backlash’ at least at the present time.”

Apps don’t build communities.

Poll respondents were fine with giving tech companies incentives, but “if there are going to be incentives, [they] wanted concessions.” A majority of respondents want the tech sector to contribute not just financially to the city, but through civic engagement — not apps. Apps don’t build communities.

Besides the overt image problems associated with not being engaged in the community, the Silicon Valley tech sector’s actual giving to local charities has declined 20 percent. And in the USF poll, only 35 percent said the industry’s growth had helped them or their family.

Is the current tech culture/class war anything new? Or is it just another gold rush like those to which the city is historically accustomed, a boom that brings with it a new demographic of change? With stark natural borders and a strong resistance to growth, San Francisco has long been a city of the relatively affluent. The city has seen booms before, especially in tech, but this one seems to have brought with it new levels of housing costs, self-righteousness, and anger.

For all its speculative dollars, tech is having a real impact on San Francisco: Its mere moneyed presence is escalating real estate prices, displacing the poor, the older, the less white, and the less code-fluent. For more than a decade, Richard Florida has written about the “creative class” and the power of information, art, and culture to renew urban centers. Farhad Manjoo echoed some of these ideas in a San Francisco Magazine piece about why San Francisco should coddle the tech boom in order to create a better city.

But Florida’s perspective has since shifted. “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits,” he wrote in The Atlantic earlier this year, going on to observe that:

Its benefits flow disproportionately to more highly skilled knowledge, professional, and creative workers whose higher wages and salaries are more than sufficient to cover more expensive housing in these locations. While less-skilled service and blue-collar workers also earn more money in knowledge-based metros, those gains disappear once their higher housing costs are taken into account.

And the benefits are unevenly distributed among the creative class, too. Even some tech workers can’t afford to live in San Francisco. While computer programmers in the Bay Area make more than $100,000 on average (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), this still doesn’t put them in a comfortable enough spot to rent $4,000 luxury lofts — let alone buy one of the city’s more modest million-dollar condos. It’s getting so hard for some tech workers to find housing, that some employers (according to multiple, as yet undisclosed sources) are buying units in San Francisco for their workers.

But though the tech industry has created a new model of surge pricing, it has also created a large and untapped fund for affordable housing. After San Francisco’s resistance to building additional housing, the city’s skyline is now dotted with cranes rapidly constructing new units. The city’s own plans and policies failed for decades, so it has relied on urban renewal born of tech investment in areas like the Mid-Market corridor, giving those companies payroll tax breaks in return (though the returns are yet to be seen).

* * *

Everyone from journalists to onlookers fell for Alper’s parody last week because it fell into that uncanny valley of Poe’s Law. It was just too real. As the stunt went viral, some praised Alper’s “hoax” for the illuminating caricature it was meant to be; others blamed his “deception” for distracting from the real issues, undermining his own cause.

When tech does give back, it does so in its own self-serving image: Google gives Wi-Fi to the city’s public parks, Facebook gives laptops to public schools.

“I was using theater to reveal the real tensions that exist and are bubbling below the surface,” Alper told me. “To me, everything I said was absurd. It’s absurd to believe that we should have a city where only rich people can survive. It’s absurd to believe that poor people should suffer transportation cuts while rich people have private buses.”

Alper, whom I know from past protests in the Bay Area and was able to identify when the San Francisco Bay Guardian posted a video of the performance, told me that everything he said was inspired by real people. “The fact that I could say such hurtful and mean-spirited, nasty, absurdity and people would believe it?” Alper sighed. “That’s the real story here, because everything that I said is mirrored by what the tech companies are doing.”

Alper’s street theater is like the street fight in a Shakespearean play: a sideshow that reveals the cultural landscape. This “fight”, though, doesn’t just highlight the tensions between tech and non-tech, or shuttle passengers and public-transport passengers, but also the cultural misunderstandings between workers, activists, the press, and the public. A misunderstanding that slows down, if not prevents, the very real social and policy changes the city so desperately needs.

This was never so clear as during the summer’s BART strike, when public transit employees making less than the city’s median wage were subject to tech-friendly libertarian politics, from extreme rants that implied workers be attacked by dogs, to the somehow comparably reasonable view that the Bay Area should embrace its meritocracy: “You work really hard, you build something and you create something, which is sort of directly opposite to unions.” What both of these views mask of course is the need for structural change.

The same applies to San Francisco’s homeless epidemic, one that’s been around since before the city’s first techie influx. On one side, the tech community wants to teach homeless people to code; on the other, young entrepreneurs like Peter Shih are disgusted by those homeless. “This problem of how the tech world thinks about homelessness isn’t a newfound phenomenon,” pointed out Noreen Malone in The New Republic. “It’s an old philosophy — economic and cultural conservatism — applied to a new world and by a new generation.” Both sides look down on the city from high on entrepreneurial hill, seeing the poverty and the transportation issues, but missing the systemic problems and their structural solutions.

So when tech does give back, it does so in its own (and arguably self-serving) image: Google gives Wi-Fi to the city’s public parks, Facebook gives laptops to public schools.

What’s particularly ironic and perhaps even troubling here is how tech is obsessed with the notion of “city” without realizing how little it understands it. One programmer, defending controversial Uber surge pricing in a post at Medium, compared the practice to cities dispatching extra buses according to demand — a thing that city agencies can’t and won’t do, for good structural and citizenship reasons that go beyond clinical economics.

The techno-libertarians may heart San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but it’s the idealized idea — not the actuality — of the place.

* * *

Things aren’t going to change because of political street theater in a physical place or ideological warfare on Twitter, however. As Alper observed to me:

I think things change when large groups of people get together and say, this is our community and we have a right to live here. I don’t have all the answers but I know that you have to be out there on the streets. I think the more people go out in the streets, the more people take risks, the more effective we will be in creating a broad movement of regular people, and the more we’ll see these companies start to give back.

But where the Google bus blockade was meant to create confrontation, it mostly created confusion. The real Google employees remained on their bus while Alper was performing, quiet if annoyed. Blockading their bus didn’t mean blockading their flow of information and capital — they could still work with their laptops on the shuttle’s Wi-Fi network. These disruptors would not be so easily disrupted.

Blockading the Google bus didn’t mean blockading their work over Wi-Fi. These disruptors would not be so easily disrupted.

A few weeks ago, Shih wrote about what he had learned from his August dust-up. He was reflective, if not particularly apologetic. “I wasn’t really aware of the huge divide that separates the tech scene in San Francisco from people outside of it. I was so deep inside one community I couldn’t see out.”

When Alper yelled in front of that bus, we wanted to believe in the entitled, enraged Google employee, a figure now familiar to us in the form of Shih, and Gopman, and other figures that would justify our anger. These incidents have created what mostly amounts to a monstrous, albeit a very believable, strawman of the “privileged tech worker destroying a community” (as David Taylor described it). And that strawman ultimately defeats the purpose of what we may be fighting for. It shifts blame to those at the bottom of the tech sector’s food chain, distracting from those who’ve done much to make this mess in the first place.

We need to do more to try to understand one another. I’m no hippie trying to find the positive in everything and everyone, but this anger — righteous as it may be — has blinded many both inside and outside the tech industry to our political diversity, potential strategies, and shared interests.

Of course, there must be sides. “Drawing clear lines in the sand make fighting a battle a hell of a lot easier,” code-writing activist Taylor observes, “it is tactically necessary in most political and social conflicts.” So there’s no doubt this will be a fight. It’s just in everyone’s best interest that it’s the right one.

All images courtesy Susie Cagle for WIRED Opinion. Copyright Susie Cagle 2013.

Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90