The Summer edition of The Point, a print/digital literary "magazine founded on the suspicion that modern life is worth examining" features a fascinating story by Min Li Chan titled "The Google Bus". The essay is accompanied by images of The Streetviews of San Francisco, a project I developed with my partner in crime, Colleen Flaherty in 2014 as COLL.EO.
Here's an excerpt:
In truth, we are part of an aristocracy. We are tech professionals, who choose to live in the city of San Francisco and commute to and from our suburban workplaces in the heart of Silicon Valley. Every day we sit in company-subsidized buses and gaze through tinted windows at an elevated vista of the gridlock. We lose an average of fifteen to twenty hours on the road weekly to live in proximity to urban vitality and culture. But the tech bus—and by extension, the mass commute down the 101—is also a symbol of what many think is wrong with San Francisco: an emerging monoculture of well-paid Silicon Valley yuppies, rising rents, deepening income inequality, and the displacement of working class families who, after decades here, can no longer afford to live in the city.
Read more about issue 14 of The Point.
