Why The Battery is the worst thing ever
San Francisco’s Biggest Circlejerk
San Francisco is no stranger to the world of exclusive, private clubs. From the Pacific Union Club perfectly perched atop Nob Hill, to the Bohemian Club, whose notably powerful members retreat to the woods of Sonoma County every summer to enjoy nature, networking, and busloads of prostitutes. Also one time they worked on the Manhattan Project, but don’t worry about that.
The more recent additions to the wild and wacky world of exclusive clubs in San Francisco boast such progressive features as allowing women to join, as well as including non-white members, such as the half white/half Asian flavor that Sergey Brin enjoys. There are also female-only clubs, like The Spinsters, though to join them you can’t be married or over 35, so if you’re a not-yet-middle-aged woman in love then you can just go ahead and fuck right off, apparently.
But at least they own it. Even if the common man or woman can’t join, at the very least these clubs don’t deny their exclusivity.
Until now.Now San Francisco is graced with a new club to suffer through: The Battery. The Battery is the tech scene’s answer to the “old boys clubs,” to the City and Olympic Clubs, to stuffy old titans of industry grumbling about kids these days. The Battery isn’t like those dumb, homogeneous, jock jerks. The Battery is different. And by different I mean exactly the same, save for one outstanding feature: they don’t acknowledge that they’re just like every other exclusive club on the market. They’re the only organization littering the culture of San Francisco who refuse to own up to the fact that they’ve created a club for — get this — rich people who like being validated by other rich people. Just. Like. Every. Other. Club.Except that they have the gall to market themselves as inclusive, while LITERALLY exemplifying exclusivity.
The Battery is the AMEX Black Card of exclusive clubs. People join so they can earn the title of belonging to an exclusive club, unlike every other club in San Francisco that prides itself on being unknown and growing from merit.
The Battery is not only the least-genuine of San Francisco’s private clubs, it epitomizes the stink and noise of Silicon Valley’s circlejerk of a tech scene. It’s like an after-school program for tantrum-throwing attendees of Silicon Valley High. It beckons the social climbers who scorned their Detroit suburbs for the Edgeranked gold of the Bay Area, causing brogrammers and wantrepreneurs to clamber over one another, pants stretched out by their networking boners, desperately asking their Facebook and LinkedIn contacts for an invitation to the club. But it’s not the quirky taxidermied seagull decorations or the 4 bars that attract them, no. It’s the chance to rub dicks with the self-appointed kings of the made-up tech hierarchy in The Battery’s 20-person hot tub so they can use the association to get the kind of girl who ignored them in high school to have sex with them.
In short, the Battery attracts people who would rather be called innovators than actually innovate because it’s an easy way to get attention without having to do much work. These people are determined to solve the problems of the world, as long as those problems are limited exclusively to whether other people know how fat their bank accounts are. People whose friends are valuable as long as they provide a purpose in the ol’ rolodex. People who take pictures of themselves with powerful and important people to justify their own relevance. Scavenging hyenas looking to sneak a bite away from kills made by lions like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. They’re like zombies but instead of brains, they’re looking for funding and accolades from dumb lists.
But have no fear. For those “Steve Jobs’ of [bullshit]”,who at the ripe old age of 23, have had the deep misfortune of not having their “Airbnb of [bullshit]” tech startup take off quite yet, there are alternatives to The Battery’s asking price of $2400 per year. The oh-so generous benefactors that run this establishment have a scholarship program aimed at those who are deemed to be poor, like artists, drag queens, and people who work hard. This absolute steal of a price runs at half the cost, a measly $1200 per year, because the founders, who sold a company to AOL in what turned out to be one of the worst business transactions of all time, believe that money should not be a factor in gaining entrance to a club. That is to say, you can’t have *no* money, but a mere $100,000/year salary should suffice. But rest assured The Battery is diverse, albeit only in the “I have a black friend so I’m not racist” way.
People move to San Francisco to purge themselves of East Coast elitist nonsense, but here we have The Battery, urging people to bring it with them. It’s a place for little people in little kingdoms who can’t face a world where people don’t subscribe to the same bullshit as them. When you surround yourself with others who share the same worldview as you, you cannot grow, and this childish excuse for a club makes sure their members stay exactly the way they are.
Fortunately for The Battery, and its members, there is a simple solution to being the scourge of San Francisco: own it. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. Acknowledge that you are a deeply exclusive club, meant for the ilk of techyuppie networkers, and that $2,400/year is not affordable for most people. Acknowledge that you moved to the Bay Area to make lots of money as fast as possible. Don’t use the word “disrupt” as you launch another iteration of the ad platform every startup boasts, instead be honest that you are looking to be bought by Google within 2 years so you can take your millions back home to Greenwich without ever giving back to the city that made you what you are.
