Man I read a bit of Robert Mariani and I think he\u2019s onto something about San Francisco but you keep reading and naw. We seem to be in a Moment of thinking there\u2019s something wrong with SF, and as a cultural critic he\u2019s got a decent eye and tongue so if he describes things with versimillitude and venom there\u2019s a temptation to think of them as part of that, but if you look at the joints it doesn\u2019t really connect to the Moment at all.
Like the points I see hit all the time are \u201cwith a strong tech sector and an imbalanced housing market, 200k/yr programmers are bidding everyone else out, the city\u2019s growing monocultural and full of homeless who shit everywhere\u201d, and he doesn\u2019t hit any of that, his complaint is \u201cas a young single with-it man in tech my social scenes are full of poly dorks who played Magic in high school when they should have been getting laid.\u201d
And set aside the merits of the critique, and set aside that a big chunk of resentment is transparently displaced from himself and the world for not placing him in a deserved position above all this, and set aside that a big chunk of the rest comes from how they\u2019re walking disproofs of the popular conservative trope that you can\u2019t build a fulfilling human society on conditional connections and transactional value.
But if you\u2019re serving up your critique in the form of a bitter aesthetic takedown of 2019 SF types, where\u2019s the polar fleece finance guy? Where\u2019s the shrill SJW? Where\u2019s the fucking street-shitter? And on the other hand, what\u2019s 2019 about your hate on flame shirt dorks, what does that have to do with the Moment? If you went back 10 years you\u2019d run across the same guys, if you went back to the WIRED-reading Burning Man attendees of the \u201890s dot.com bubble you\u2019d still run across them.
And zooming back, \u201cpeople here mix their weirdo sexuality with their weirdo utopian philosophy and invest entirely too much of themselves in the combination\u201d, like, okay, when\u2019s the last time that wasn\u2019t a well known, priced-in thing about San Francisco? Before both of us were born, at least. Complaining about airline food. Even the displacement concerns are about, like, the 40-year-old who can\u2019t move here for the pet play community and support himself working at a hardware store anymore.
I guess part of why it really bugs me is that Portland getting rich, going tech, and turning crap has manifested in a noticeably reduced cultural prominence of sex freaks and awkward weirdos, so I know better than to treat this line of thought as usefully modeling \u201ctech industry-driven urban development\u201d, let alone \u201cHow We Live Now\u201d or \u201clate capitalism\u201d or whatever.
(I suppose that makes sense, that if Portland is \u201ca tech city, but lower cost of living/more space\u201d \u2013 I\u2019ve seen whole-house rental prices that locals called absurd gouging and Oakland expats called absurd steals \u2013 the tech workers who wanted the house/yard/white BMW SUV to drive the kids to soccer will selectively decant off to here, leaving SF to the polycular synthesis types. Honestly the change reminds me how original McMansion pioneers Toll Brothers built subdivisions around my hometown that drew New Jersey telecom and pharmaceutical types.)
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