In San Francisco’s “culture war,” both sides espouse oddly similar-sounding values. Illustration by Christian Gralingen

In the spiritual geography of San Francisco, Davies Symphony Hall—a glass-and-concrete half rotunda much resembling R2-D2’s neckline—sits between hills steep with layered mansions and the urban basin where the city’s gritty elements now rest. John Adams’s “Harmonielehre” premièred here; so did a recent album by Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks. When the hall opened, in the eighties, it was said to be “dead” and “at war with itself,” but acoustic tinkering perked it up, and today it’s a reminder of the way the urban landscape is perpetually smoothing its sharp edges. Pleasant London plane trees trace the building. A warm, cultivated light glows from inside. On the evening of the Crunchies Awards, one Monday in February, the fog was so low and diaphanous that it appeared only in spotlights by the entrance, pointing grandly toward the sky.

The Crunchies are the closest thing that the tech-startup world has to the Oscars. In practice, this means that the Crunchies are a night when techies do not dress as if they just maxed out a Gap card. Women step from Uber cars with heat-set hair and dresses fit for mention in the party pages. Men, of whom there is a surplus, don the local formalwear of blazers, Tokyo denim, bright sneakers, and pressed shirttails in peacock hues.

Nearby, a throng of protesters had gathered at a makeshift stage, in front of a Henry Moore bronze, “Large Four Piece Reclining Figure.” Facing the dome of City Hall, they chanted, sang, and danced to mock the industry festivities inside.

“Welcome to the Crappies, where we give lots of crap to the tech industry!” one of the protesters, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, shouted into a microphone. He was wearing a sparkly bow tie and Groucho tails over a red T-shirt and jeans; his graying hair sprang in small ringlets from a sequinned top hat. “I’m sure you all know why we’re here, right?”

“Right!” A small crowd shuffled into the space before him. Many of the onlookers were middle-aged. One carried a sign, trimmed with Twitter birds, that read, “The Crappies: The Truth in Tech Awards.”

“Rents are too damn high, right?”

“Right!”

“Gentrification is changing all our neighborhoods! Totally destroying the diversity of our city! Totally evicting our elders, the disabled folks, people with AIDS, people of color, poor people, working-class people! The very heart of our city is being tossed out!”

“Boooooo!” the crowd responded.

Mecca smiled grimly. During the past couple of decades, he has worked as a writer and as an organizer, setting up homeless shelters in the Castro district and performing folk songs of his own invention. Because San Francisco’s real-estate market has grown especially mercenary—no-fault evictions have soared in the past few years—Mecca’s local activism has recently intensified.

“The first award is the tax-evader award—can I have a drumroll?” He nodded to Benito Santiago, a sixty-three-year-old special-education teacher who is being evicted from the apartment he’s lived in since 1977. Santiago nodded gravely and began beating on a dumbeck at his waist.

“The tax-evader award goes to—” Mecca pantomimed shock. “Oh, my God! Twitter!”

The crowd booed. A protester dressed as Dick Costolo, under whom Twitter made a controversial tax-incentivized move to San Francisco’s seedy Mid-Market district, took the microphone. “This is our town, because, you know, we pay for it, we own it. That’s progress, people. That’s—” Three spoken-word artists cut him off. The last of them was Lisa Gray-Garcia, who prefers to be called Tiny. A tall woman in her late thirties, with hair highlighted in alternating blond and auburn streaks, she chanted about “the twenty-first-century missionaries and tech colonizers.” When Tiny was eleven, her mother, a laid-off social worker left by her husband, became homeless. For years afterward, they suffered through poverty; Tiny was incarcerated at one point for sleeping in her car. In a bookstore, as a young adult, she noticed several special-interest magazines—Golfweek, Artforum—but no publication on poverty, so in 1996 she launched POOR Magazine, a hundred-plus-page glossy periodical of memoirs, poetry, and essays which she typeset herself at Kinko’s. Soon after that, she founded MommaHouse, a community home for low-income single parents and their children. In 2010, MommaHouse got hit with a no-fault eviction. Since then, Tiny has been staying with family and friends.

Outside Davies Hall, she wore a baseball cap turned sideways that said “POBRE” and, like others, a gray suit jacket silk-screened with a white wood-block logo: “GentriFUKation.”

“Can we put the houselights up a little?” Ron Conway said, standing at the dais inside Davies Hall. He is a barrel-shaped man with a cap of downy white hair and dark eyebrows set in a perpetual arch of mild surprise. He’s known locally as one of the Bay Area’s most successful angel investors; the companies he early-funded include Google, PayPal, Napster, and Facebook.

“I’d like to step back to two years ago, when I was standing here,” Conway said. “San Francisco, and the region, was suffering from double-digit unemployment.” Past the theatre doors, the lobby was waiting for the post-awards reception, trimmed with product-information tables and signs saying things like “YAHOO! WEATHER: The Forecast Is Beautiful.”

“To meet those challenges, I founded Sf.Citi, a bipartisan nonprofit organization, to represent a collective-policy voice for the S.F. tech community,” Conway went on. He praised its record: “We—the people in this room—cut unemployment in San Francisco from ten per cent to five per cent. We cut it in half.” The audience cheered.

But a new challenge had appeared this year. Techies had to “give back to the community,” Conway said. He introduced Theresa Preston-Werner, a former grad student in cultural anthropology (her work focussed on inequality) who is married to a co-founder of GitHub. Last year, she founded Omakase, a nonprofit startup that channelled money from tech to worthy charities.

“There’s been a lot of criticism lobbed at the tech community recently,” she said, thumbing through some notes on her iPhone. “We hear about Google buses. You may have seen the protesters out there. People are saying that tech is really closed off, that we’re insulated. Maybe that’s exactly what’s happening here right now.” She looked up at the tiers of Davies Hall.

“But I don’t think that’s really our story. I imagine there’s lots of people out here in the audience right now who say, ‘That’s not me. I do my part. I donate. I volunteer. I give.’ ” Conway, she said, had agreed to match the evening’s donations—up to twelve thousand dollars. So would people pitch in? The audience, fairly quiet until then, applauded generously at the thought.

In the folklore of the Costanoan, a native people of the Northern California coast, there is a story about Coyote, the trickster figure from whom all human beings descended. One day, Coyote caught a salmon, but he didn’t want to share, even with his children. As he cooked the fish over the fire, he covered it with ash to hide the meat. When he felt hungry, he plucked up some of the food and ate it. “You’re eating fire!” his children cried. “You’ll be burned!” But when he seemed all right they wanted to eat fire, too. Coyote, still hungry, forbade them. “You’ll be burned,” he said. His children got no fish.