TONY WANG
> studying cs + math @ stanford
Tech Bro Go Home: On Queer Rage and Ruin
Published: March 2024
The first time I saw the phrase "QUEERS HATE TECHIES" it was stenciled in crude pink spray paint on the sidewalk outside a 24-hour diner in the Mission. It was jarring, dissonant. I had come to associate the city with queer freedom, tech ambition, and a kind of tentative peace between the two. But that stencil said something else. Something angry and unresolved.
In the weeks after, I started noticing the phrase everywhere: stickers on Muni poles, scrawled in bathrooms, wheatpasted onto boarded-up buildings. The handwriting was loud, hurt, insistent. It reminded me that San Francisco is not a theme park but rather a battlefield.
In the San Francisco Mission, the phrase "Queers Hate Techies" is more than graffiti; it's a rallying cry from the radical queer collective Gay Shame. This slogan, emblazoned on walls and sidewalks, confronts the tech industry's role in gentrification and the displacement of marginalized communities. Gay Shame, identifying as a "virus in the system," challenges the assimilationist tendencies within the LGBTQ+ community and critiques the commodification of queer identities.
The slogan echoes another from a different decade: YANKEE GO HOME. A post-WWII relic turned protest shorthand, it was used by nations fed up with American interventionism—be it military, economic, or cultural. The two slogans share a cadence, a tempo of refusal. But "QUEERS HATE TECHIES" hits differently because it comes from inside the house. Many of us who live here, code here, organize here, love here, contain both words: Queer. Techie. And yet the fracture is real.
Sometimes I think of that fracture while debugging Python scripts for the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP). The SF AI boom has led to a surge in evictions, often facilitated by corporate landlords operating through complex networks of shell companies. These entities, obscured behind layers of LLCs and LPs, make it difficult for tenants to identify their landlords and hold them accountable. AEMP addresses this issue by developing tools like Evictorbook, which aggregates data on property ownership and eviction history to expose serial evictors. I've been building web scrapers with AEMP to collect eviction records from county databases, parsing through PDFs and poorly structured tables, trying to extract meaning from bureaucracy. The goal is to visualize who's doing the evicting, and more importantly, expose what they can't hide anymore.
Because the people pushing folks out aren't just landlords. They're LLCs spun from holding companies spun from shell corps registered to addresses in Texas, Florida, sometimes the Caymans. Through data pipelines and mapping tools, we've built ways to track how these companies use serial evictions as business strategy, sometimes under a dozen aliases. Evictorbook, our tool, turns their obfuscation into something legible, something we can resist.
But there's also a bitter irony in using tech to fight tech-adjacent power. The same programming languages I use to identify evictors are taught at the coding bootcamps that groom the very tech class that pushes working-class queers, elders, and immigrants out of the Bay. The irony of my position is not lost on me. The bootstraps logic of "learn to code" has never been an adequate answer to "my landlord doubled my rent."
The intersection of queer activism and housing justice is evident in the work of both Gay Shame and AEMP. While Gay Shame employs provocative art and direct action to challenge gentrification, AEMP utilizes data to empower tenants and organizers. Together, they illuminate the mechanisms of displacement and advocate for a more equitable urban landscape.
As we navigate the complexities of urban development and cultural preservation, it's crucial to recognize the power dynamics at play. The fight against gentrification is not only about preserving physical spaces but also about safeguarding the cultural and social fabric of communities.
Sometimes I think people misunderstand the slogan. "Queers hate techies" isn't a policy proposal. It's grief in stencil form. It's the sound a community makes when it can't afford to mourn another single mother's eviction. When the taqueria gets replaced by an oat milk cafe and everyone just shrugs. When a neighborhood of queer elders and trans artists is called "up-and-coming" by a 22-year-old product manager. I think about the graffiti because it asks a question tech rarely asks: who doesn't get to be here anymore?
It's easy to talk about disruption when you're not the one being disrupted. It's easy to fetishize innovation when you've never watched a community archive get erased by rent hikes. It's easy for me to try to "to build the future" when I've never had to fight to stay in the present.
And still, here we are. I write this with a foot in both worlds: AWS S3 bucket open in one tab, Pride zine in the other. I believe in tech. I believe in building tech thoughtfully, with harm in mind. But I also believe in rage. In refusal. In the validity of spray-painted scrawl.
Maybe there's a future where queers don't hate techies, because techies stop treating the city like a playground. Maybe they show up to tenants' rights meetings. Maybe they fund eviction defense instead of another VC-bait roommate app. Maybe they listen.
Or maybe not. Maybe the sticker stays up. And the man at the corner store still plays his drums. And we keep scraping, mapping, fighting. Loving this city hard enough to make it livable again, for all of us.