I'm an ex-Bay Area guy living in LA. In LA, it's a slightly different game.
It's sortof like high school. Popular people treat the unpopular badly. Type A's are revered, have lots of friends, and get lots of sex.
Nerds are treated badly because they are "different". There isn't much compassion for people who are "different". You better be funny and Type A or you got some serious character flaws ;-)
Nonetheless, it's still a game. It's also a cold world. Some people transcend and live a more meaningful life, some don't.
The people being targeted by the hate are low- and mid-level engineers at companies like Google and Twitter, who have nothing to do with San Francisco's absurd housing policy or the economic inequality in general. They might be better-paid peons, but they're still peons. They aren't responsible for "this game" and many of them detest it. (Would you want to have no savings at age 37 because, despite your relatively high salary, the landlords have taken everything?)
The First Estate of Silicon Valley (here, including San Francisco) are the highly influential angels, VCs, and corporate executives who can force acquisitions. The Second Estate are the engineers, mid-level product managers, and data scientists. The Third Estate is everyone else. Naturally, the First Estate is trying to prevent any chance of alliance between the Second and Third Estate, and actively encourages tension between the those two groups. It's also clear, however, that the First Estate screws the Second (all of the collusion/anti-poach agreements that have been uncovered). In fact, the Second and Third Estates have a common enemy in the First. They've just been prevented from realizing it, in large part, by all the obfuscation that's going on.
To people in poverty, $120,000 per year is a large amount of money, but it's not nearly enough to bribe city councils into enacting the NIMBY policies that make San Francisco unaffordable.
The real bad guys don't ride Google buses. They have private drivers, and the Google buses don't stop on Sand Hill Road.
>The First Estate of Silicon Valley (here, including San Francisco) are the highly influential angels, VCs, and corporate executives who can force acquisitions.
That would mean the Zeroth Estate are the landlords. Remember, Google proposed to Mountain View to build their own damn neighborhoods of townhouses and apartments for housing their own employees. They got denied. The city council somehow felt that the current situation was better than letting a company, God help them, actually get some housing built for all those employees they hire.
