Most of my weekday mornings I bike or walk to my lab, nestled amongst blank-faced corporate buildings that represent the Amazon campus in South Lake Union, Seattle. Across the street from my building is the Amazon courtyard - a space with a raised middle area for bands or events and a wider area below where Pikes Place has a pop up farmer's market on Thursdays. But on any other day you'll spot a bright yellow canopy marked "COMMUNITY BANANA STAND" hanging over an almost too-cutesie wagon filled with boxes of bananas, tended to by Amazon 'banistas' playing music from an Amazon Echo. The bananas are free for the taking, presumably for any 'community' member (not just Amazon employees). And somehow this highlight marker of an anomaly amongst the bland offices of one of the biggest and most profitable tech companies in America has come to represent many of the contradictory feelings I have towards technology and its effect on our American cities.
For a long time I sang the praises of tech. I was constantly cheered by the widening inter-connectedness that came from the internet, from social media, from Facebook. So many aspects of our lives are greatly improved by the supercomputers in our pockets. For instance, on a daily basis, I check my OneBusAway app to find out when my bus is arriving. I get on Facebook to chat with my family, friends, see what they are up to. I get tidbits of news and have conversations with people around the world on Twitter. I call an uber to go out somewhere for a drink. While I'm in the Uber, I go onto ClassPass to sign up for a workout class tomorrow morning. If I'm sick, I order delivery from my phone and it arrives at my door. If I need more garbage bags, I go to Amazon Prime and order that while I'm waiting for my lunch to warm up. Meanwhile, I go on living my life. Or so it seems.
All of these things are mostly well and good. But tech - and it's massive success in cities like San Francisco and Seattle - also seems to come with some bad. And I think that 'bad' happens on a day-to-day micro level but also on a city-scale macro level. The micro level happens in the form of our daily attention and energy getting diverted (sometimes hundreds or thousands of times a day) into meaningless pastimes like looking at instagram. The macro level happens in the form of the pricing out of the diversity in these cities and the uniformity that occurs as a result. A city's very personality, it's culture, it's community voice can afterall not be substituted for Amazon's bottom line.
When I first moved to Seattle to the quiet and quaint neighborhood of Eastlake along Lake Union, I was cheered by the sense of community I felt. The shop clerk at Pete's Market knows me. I know all the baristas at Voxx Coffee. We see the same faces (dogs and people) at the field over by the school across from Louisa's where we run our dogs. There are a lot of single family homes here, old craftsman style houses built in the early 1900's. I would walk to work along the lake and see all this construction, all these buildings going up around me. Dozens of cranes along the skyline that were being dubbed the new 'birds of seattle'. "What a time to be here" I thought...all this growth. But lately as I've watched the buildings go up floor by floor, the windows put in place, the concrete smoothed and the plants planted outside, and I've realized with some horror that all the buildings look the same. Boring, plain, dark greys and blues. Despite the opportunity to create a beautiful building...these builders and architects had all chosen the same plan. Was this a reflection of the culture in Seattle, I wondered? But then I looked at neighborhoods like Capitol Hill with their whimsical features. I thought about the old BauHaus coffee shop and thought no...this couldn't entirely be a reflection of the culture here. We have so much more artistic voice than that!
This year it will finally be time for me to move out of Eastlake. I'll be priced out, in a way. They will tear down this adorable old 1904 craftsman with the chipping blue paint and the giant spruce tree outside and build 27 'high-efficiency' apodments with no parking. I imagine that Amazon employees who work in South Lake Union will be willing to pay the $800 or more per month for their little 300 square feet unit that's close to work. And I want you to know that I know I've had it good - I've had it great. I've been very lucky. And I also know that things are even worse in the rental market in San Francisco these days.
I think what I'm trying to get at is that while Amazon making money and creating thousands of jobs is wonderful -- and while all those people devote their lives to try to make the 'customer's life easier'-- our cities are changing. And I wonder if Jeff Bezos or Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg are taking the time to think about how their behemoths are impacting the communities around their office buildings. If the grad students, and the teachers, and the nurses are having to move further outside of the city and all that remains here in the heart is this homogenous population of software engineers - what does that look like? What does that mean for Seattle or San Francisco?
Because already, I walk around South Lake Union on a weekend and the streets are dead. I know so many engineers live there in those big beautiful high rises - are they inside? Do they go somewhere else to hang out?
Because so many young people these days seem to spend so much time on their phones (myself included). The addictive power of these devices I think is being overlooked and we aren't trying to understand that enough - to get ahead of it. What kind of creative and productive outlets are our communities losing to PokemonGo? Why do I feel the need to constantly delete apps off my phone that are sucking away my focus from my work or paying attention to those that I love?
That banana stand just sits there like this shimmering mirage of a sense of community but I don't think I'm buying it. To me it just feels like a bandaid on a broken leg. Tech holds all this power, all this promise, all this wealth. I just wish, collectively speaking, tech could be a little bit more intentional with the humanization aspect. I wish they would be a little bit more intentional with their impact on our communities and on our lives.