A San Francisco native reacts to Airbnb's ad blunder

In the spring of 2000, San Franciscans noticed what looked like a guerrilla marketing campaign popping up on sidewalks all over the city. Fully in the throes of the dot com boom, no one was surprised to see spraypainted stencils of a peace sign, a heart, and the Linux penguin adorning the concrete at intersections in virtually every neighborhood.

With no further information, we speculated about who the guerrilla artists were. Maybe an upstart Linux distro? Maybe some idealistic kids trying to remind the world that there were options besides Windows and Mac OS? (Keep in mind that this was a full year before the freeBSD-based OS X was debuted.) No one was sure, but we were all surprised to find out, weeks after the paint showed up, that the real culprit was IBM.

We had been scammed. A corporate giant had successfully posed as underground tech tastemakers and they did it for a profit. They were advertising what would become powerlinux, the server system based on a collaboration between IBM and the, until then, entirely underground Linux community.

When they were criticized for vandalizing SF sidewalks, IBM assured the city that the paint was "biodegradable." The rains came and the paint mostly remained, causing one writer at Slashdot to ponder the semantic difference between "biodegradable" and "readily water soluble." As a native San Franciscan, this was my first memory of a tech company blatantly disrespecting the city in pursuit of profit.

Now, with Airbnb's sarcastic marketing campaign blighting the city, the profits have already been made, and the attention is turned to how the taxes from those profits should be viewed by the city of San Francisco and its residents. "Dear Board of Education," reads one gigantic billboard, "please use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep art in schools." Another is addressed to the Recreation and Parks Department declaring, "we hope some of the $12 million in taxes keeps this park clean."

Other ads specifically address the Public Library and Parking Enforcement with equally sarcastic and petty sentiments about how appreciative these, in some cases, 150-year-old organizations should be about receiving a small portion of Airbnb's $12 million tax bill, a contribution that accounts for approximately .004% of the total yearly tax revenue of the city of San Francisco (around $2.7 billion). Not only are these billboards ill-conceived and insulting, they demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of basic city accounting on every level.

Twelve million dollars is not a huge tax bill for a company like Airbnb, (whose valuation and yearly revenue are virtually impossible to determine with any real accuracy, but who certainly love to tout their own estimation of their value at around $10 billion), and neither is $12 million any kind of a real problem solver for the City of San Francisco.

People who are genuinely interested in keeping arts in schools don't put up snotty, petulant bus advertisements, they attend local school board meetings. Citizens concerned about clean parks spend a few hours a month cleaning up their neighborhood parks and community spaces. Conscientious citizens donate their time and their money to San Francisco's Public Library system all the time, certainly never with the attitude that they are doing some kind of favor to the lowly peasantry of SF.

Those residents who genuinely want to be a part of the community find ways to get involved. What they don't do is publicly advertise their tax contributions with a bitter attitude, as if tax revenue is some gift given by a reluctant uncle, not totally convinced that we're mature enough to spend it responsibly. This is an especially ironic gesture considering that Airbnb was more than happy to spend $8 million on television and print ads urging people to vote against Proposition F, a city ballot initiative that, if passed, will regulate short-term rentals in the city.

If your $12 million pittance comes with this nasty, entitled attitude, I for one think the appropriate solution would be for you to keep your money and your opinions to yourself and to cease doing business in a city that has no need for such blatant disrespect. You just got here. You do not run the city. You and your employees are invited to participate in city governance the same way the rest of us do, by spending time with the members of your community, participating in local government, and donating your time to the causes you find worthy.

We want your time and your thoughtfulness, we do not want advertisements plastered all over the city that frame your tax contributions as benevolent donations to an ungrateful populace. I hope to see some Airbnb employees picking up trash in Dolores Park, or politely introducing themselves at a community meeting, perhaps speaking up about keeping the arts in schools. Even now, after this appalling gesture by this company, I'd still be willing to forgive and forget, if and only if they can manage to do the work necessary to actually become members of the San Francisco community, rather than what they are now, a group of entitled newcomers confused about their level importance in our glorious city.

Path Lassky is a San Francisco-based artist and writer who can be found on twitter and instagram.

Peace, love, linux image courtesy Flickr user Kino-eye