The last time there was a real contest for the mayor’s seat in San Francisco, residential rents were falling, the city had 15 million square feet of vacant office space, the empty headquarters of Pets.com was being converted into loft apartments, Apple debuted the iTunes store, the CIA’s venture capital arm invested in a 3-D mapping startup that would become Google Earth, the CEO of Airbnb was enrolled in art school, and the Winklevoss twins had just hired a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg to noodle around with their code.

In the past 15 years, the second coming of the tech boom has remade San Francisco, and last week’s mayoral election---an unexpected race after Mayor Ed Lee’s death in December---was marbled through with anxieties over the industry’s ascent. For decades, City Hall has been run by moderates pushing pro-business interests, who cleared a path for tech’s insatiable growth. But in the midst of all that wealth creation, San Francisco’s most vulnerable residents were marginalized; its middle class vanished. This was supposed to be the election where progressives pushed back, setting the agenda around issues of inequality, such as housing, homelessness, and affordability.

The race came down to three left-of-center Democrats, all current or former members of the city’s Board of Supervisors, all supporting propositions that would increase a tax on commercial rents, and all claiming to want to increase affordable housing: London Breed, Mark Leno, and Jane Kim, from moderate left to progressive left.

Despite the ideological overlap, the campaign turned divisive, distorted by attack ads, misleading Facebook posts funded by dark money, and unexpected alliances. Tech played a central narrative in some of the most bitter rifts.

Breed, who grew up in public housing, is a lifelong renter and would be the first black female mayor of San Francisco, a city whose African American population has atrophied to less than 6 percent. Yet she was denounced as a tool of the tech establishment because of her ties to the city’s top tech donor. Meanwhile, critics of Kim, the loudest voice for the argument that tech should pay its fair share, lambasted her role in the 2012 tax breaks that lured Twitter to a then-troubled part of town; those breaks have since become symbols of the city’s embrace of tech. Then, less than a month before election day, Leno and Kim teamed up, urging their supporters to “Stand up to the billionaires” through San Francisco’s complex ranked-choice voting system by naming the pair their top two choices, in either order.

Almost a week after the election, there’s still not a clear read on how voters viewed tech’s influence. Leno briefly held the lead in the complex vote count, but as of Sunday, Breed was ahead by 1,580 votes; the counting is expected to drag on for weeks.

The mayor’s powers are limited, but it’s a decision worth watching, especially in San Francisco, an incubator not just for invasive species of ride-hailing apps, short-term rental platforms, for-profit philanthropy, and electric scooter-shares, but also for public sentiment towards the tech industry, starting with the humans at the epicenter of its seismic waves. As tech executives testify around the globe, swearing they can still make the world a better place, San Francisco is the quickest test to tell if they really want to be good neighbors.

The political shift, however symbolic, is already underway. “Policies like the Twitter tax break would never pass today. The reverse is now being considered: How to tax and regulate tech,” says John Whitehurst, a veteran political consultant who worked on campaigns against ballot measures to tax commercial real estate.1