Oral history of S.F. searching for answers
A striking juxtaposition met Cary McClelland when he settled in San Francisco in 2012. He had been periodically in and around the Bay Area growing up, but it wasn’t until he moved here for law school that he truly entered into the middle of what he calls “the story of the city.”
Unlike the East Coast, San Francisco buzzed with a certain boldness of possibility and opportunity — that any part of the way we looked at or functioned in the world, the basic principles of any endeavor, could be reimagined.
And yet, says McClelland, who now lives in Brooklyn, “that was happening all alongside what clearly was a building momentum around social change and economic change that was just accelerating and accelerating and accelerating and bringing more and more inequality in the city, transforming whole neighborhoods, displacing whole families.”
McClelland, who is also a documentary filmmaker, eventually felt he needed to record the striking shift by speaking with those who were directly pulled into the tidal wave, ultimately resulting in his essential new book, “Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley.”
An oral history of a transformative moment in the city’s history, the book presents the varied perspectives of a wide swath of people connected to the Bay Area: activists and organizers; tech workers and investors; artists and entrepreneurs; and a scattered collection of personalities from a cabdriver to a longshoreman.
Each oral account, preceded by a brief introduction from McClelland, provides a singular perspective, often from a fascinating and at times heartbreaking life story. Together, the accounts weave not so much a direct indictment of the tech industry or other forces that have reshaped San Francisco as a conflicted and complex portrait of a city starving for solutions.
“One of the things that I think about most when I think about what the book is trying to capture is the idea of the question of what is a community,” McClelland says. “What responsibility do we have to the people who are living near us, particularly in an age where we’re able to build communities online?”
To answer that question is “the hardest problem,” one the book’s host of characters confront.
“I don’t think there’s a person I spoke to who rejected that there was a problem and who didn’t think that they had an obligation to solve it,” McClelland says. “The other thing that I think is quite beautiful in the book is everybody seems to consider themselves somewhat sort of civically responsible to whatever the circle they draw around their life.”
That would include the players directly involved in the tech sector, which he notes is no monolith. McClelland hopes the book will serve as both a social document for future generations, and a “clarion call” for coordinated, largescale efforts rather than piecemeal attempts to alleviate issues — wealth disparity, gentrification, homelessness — affecting the Bay Area at large.
“I’d say that this is not possible without us turning to the public sector and having expectations for it to build legitimate solutions on behalf of all of us,” he says.
In the long term, McClelland is optimistic, though he admits as much with great pause.
“It’s hard to know what the real experience is of the stories you hear rumors of, or you hear statistics about. It’s hard to hear directly from those people,” McClelland says. “The hope of this book is to give sort of an unvarnished, firstperson voice to all these different points of view. What people do with that I hope is constructive.”