OT: San Fransisco
 

Interesting, well written stuff on SF: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/...silicon-valley

A tiny bit of bike content. I haven't visited for maybe 15 years, what do the locals think?

Rebecca Solnit is the last writer I expected to be referenced on this particular website.

It's a good article. There's a good New Yorker feature by Nathan Heller from last year in a similar vein: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...ancisco-really

The conventional wisdom about a place is never really accurate - once you zoom in, things are much more complicated than any broad generalization or hot take. As someone who has lived in and near the city for a big chunk of my life, including the 90s, I will say that Solnit's idea - that people's expectations of what SF should be have changed much more than SF has itself changed - is spot on.

I will say that I love that city, and I will never stop loving it, despite all of its numerous issues.

It's a good article and hits the relevant points spot on. Sending this to a number of friends because it's so dang good.

Honestly was expecting something on the recent complete nonsense around the Valencia bike lanes. https://missionlocal.org/2024/01/on-...ia-bike-lanes/

I will say the same. I'll be there with my family later this year, and I'm looking forward to it.

Wow, that article covers a lot of ground. Well written and structured and I enjoyed reading it, sad as it is. I lived in North Beach in the early 90’s. Pre tech boom but even then people were complaining how The City had changed. Still, Herb Caen was a regular, the Giants and Niners still played in the Stick, Warriors were in Oakland and it was easy to get tickets (and afford rent even!). I think part of the media punching bag issue with SF is A) it’s always been a notably liberal city and B) it had a unique vibe and community sense found in few other cities that size and it seems that, thanks to the Tech Bros, it’s gone.

I’ve been back to SF several times since I left and I still love the City. I’m planning a trip to California in the summer but my wife (who I met in SF) doesn’t want to visit because of the media stories. That breaks my heart and I’m going to try to talk her out of it.

I really didn’t have time to read that essay but I’m glad I did. Fantastic. It’s fueled by a lot of hard thinking, raw emotion, and a pen that cuts like a knife.

Two paragraphs that bracket the start and end of the article really hit me. The first is the SF I grew up in during the 1970s and 1980s and could even be found in some neighborhoods in the 1990s. The second fills me with nostalgia for the first.

“The San Francisco of my youth was full of small shops whose friendly eccentricity felt like part of the place. Some of them still exist but they’re rarer now. Many had old photographs of the business or the neighbourhood, some had artefacts of the past or pieces of the owner’s art. The little liquor and grocery store in my old neighbourhood had a wall of pictures of locals attending its annual barbecue and a ledger in which the proprietor recorded transactions with elderly locals who bought their groceries on credit and paid up at the end of the month. The exchanges between people who knew one another were non-commodities these small businesses offered along with whatever was for sale.”

“ I used to be proud of being from the San Francisco Bay Area. I thought of this place in terms of liberation and protection; we were where the environmental movement was born; we were the land of experimental poetry and anti-war marches, of Harvey Milk and gay rights, of the occupation of Alcatraz Island that galvanised a nationwide Indigenous rights movement as well as Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers’ movement in San Jose and the Black Panthers in Oakland. We were the left edge of America, a refuge from some of its brutalities and conformities, a sanctuary for dissidents and misfits and a laboratory for new ideas. We’re still that lab, but we’re no longer an edge; we’re a global power centre, and what issues from here – including a new super-elite – shapes the world in increasingly disturbing ways.”

Yes, that article resonated with me, even though I have limited experience in the city. I wonder if the time we spent isolating during the first few years of COVID accelerated the trend of self-absorption and device worship we see, not only in SF, but any large city. I moved to DC a year before COVID and find the contrast between the mandarins and mandarin-adjacent, constantly staring at a phone, and the not so fortunate shocking. Glad some of the SF people found the article worthwhile.

Do Portland (or Seattle) next..

Thanks for sharing. Bookmarked for future reading. I have a few of her essay collections on the shelf.. I’m sure I’ll enjoy this one too.

Same thought occurred to me too.

That was an interesting read. Thank you for the link.

Well written and intelligent.

when did you realize Hunger Games was non-fiction?

As babies we are programmed to mimic. I don't think we ever lose that trait. Seeing all the bad behavior on screen, just will affect enough people to really trash society. I don't think it takes a large portion of the population to really send the population as a whole off the rails.

I think the media has been trying to try really hard to make people who don't live in the SF bay area think it's an absolute hell scape and everything is falling to pieces. Even if some of aspect of it is true it feels like they are playing it all up for views/clicks/ad dollars.

I haven't been to SF since 2013. I absolutely love(d) the area. I wanted to go to Stanford, if I had gotten in I would have, and I bet I'd have permanently stayed in the area. I would have been working in SV though, and I do really feel like the companies and industry is not at all the same thing it was early in my career though, in some ways I am very glad I never moved there.

I do actually work for a company HQed in SF for what it's worth though, but it's an old guard company, not anything to do with consumer tech, advertising, social media, etc.. those are the areas I feel like things have gone off the rails.

Solnit is wonderful writer I think her original SF book was about 15yrs ago ,the collection of writing Cool gray city of love is also an excellent read [full disclosure:- iam a visitor of not a citizen of ]

“Cool Grey City of Love” is not Solnit.

My personal experiences with the author jaundice my viewpoint a bit, and I agree with the crux of the article. But are driverless cars any worse than distracted drivers looking at their cell phones? I’m guessing not.

I know it’s not by her ,I thought the ‘also’ was enough to hint to folk that if they enjoyed Solnit they might enjoy another book