Technology And The Economic Divide

At 25, San Francisco resident Talia Jane was living on company-provided junk food, working as a customer support representative at Yelp Eat24 and crying herself to sleep every night in her bathtub.

Those details, among many Jane provided in aheart-wrenching blog about the difficulties she faced living on her meager salary, aren’t unique.

“So here I am, 25 years old, balancing all sorts of debt and trying to pave a life for myself that doesn’t involve crying in the bathtub every week”, she wrote.  Her situation was so dire that, on one occasion, she could not even come up with the train fare to work.

In the Medium post addressed to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Jane outlines the contours of a life that are familiar to many of the people working on the lowermost rungs of technology’s corporate ladder. And was intended as a signpost for a culture that needed to change.

While Jane may have made a mistake in posting this message on Medium rather than sending an e-mail to Stoppleman, the social-media backlash to Stoppleman forced him to acknowledge that the cost of living in San Francisco was too high. The chief executive tweeted that there needs to be lower-cost housing.

But the problem is more complex than San Francisco’s housing costs.  The problem is the growing inequality and unfair treatment of workers.  And technology is about to make this much worse and create a cauldron of unrest.

[“Source-techcrunch”]