The Most Innovative Place On Earth
There’s a vaguely annoying poster on BART (the local rapid transit system) in the SF Bay Area that I’ve seen several times recently. It’s advertising HRWest, a human resource conference in Oakland; here’s the web banner:
Never mind that they’re using a photo of San Francisco to illustrate a conference in Oakland (it’s the other way, stupid!), it’s that strapline “The Most Innovative Place On Earth” that does it for me, especially when seen face to face while jammed into an aging train stopped dead for ten minutes under the Bay on a broken-down unreliable overcrowded 1970’s era system like BART.
Innovative? A place whose creaking infrastructure is so well-prepared for the mid-twentieth century… innovative? A place of Dickensian beggars and growing nineteenth-century social and economic inequalities… innovative? A place where mentally-ill homeless people sleep rough on the streets every night… innovative? A place that prides itself on its choices of vegan restaurants and artisanal coffee shops but can’t pay its librarians, social workers, hospital staff, cleaners, etc., a living wage… innovative?
Yeah, that’s real innovative, for sure.
Guys, tech innovation is easy; try social or political innovation if you want something hard — and really innovative. And if you say tech innovation is the key to that other sort of innovation — well, why does The (self-proclaimed) Most Innovative Place On Earth have so much catching up to do with a bunch of other places in the world?
(Note: it’s not really HRWest’s fault that they’re using that tag line — it’s in the air around here…).
