Man I read a bit of Robert Mariani and I think he’s onto something about San Francisco but you keep reading and naw. We seem to be in a Moment of thinking there’s something wrong with SF, and as a cultural critic he’s got a decent eye and tongue so if he describes things with versimillitude and venom there’s a temptation to think of them as part of that, but if you look at the joints it doesn’t really connect to the Moment at all.

Like the points I see hit all the time are “with a strong tech sector and an imbalanced housing market, 200k/yr programmers are bidding everyone else out, the city’s growing monocultural and full of homeless who shit everywhere”, and he doesn’t hit any of that, his complaint is “as 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.”

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’re walking disproofs of the popular conservative trope that you can’t build a fulfilling human society on conditional connections and transactional value.

But if you’re serving up your critique in the form of a bitter aesthetic takedown of 2019 SF types, where’s the polar fleece finance guy? Where’s the shrill SJW? Where’s the fucking street-shitter? And on the other hand, what’s 2019 about your hate on flame shirt dorks, what does that have to do with the Moment? If you went back 10 years you’d run across the same guys, if you went back to the WIRED-reading Burning Man attendees of the ‘90s dot.com bubble you’d still run across them.

And zooming back, “people here mix their weirdo sexuality with their weirdo utopian philosophy and invest entirely too much of themselves in the combination”, like, okay, when’s the last time that wasn’t 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’t 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 “tech industry-driven urban development”, let alone “How We Live Now” or “late capitalism” or whatever.

(I suppose that makes sense, that if Portland is “a tech city, but lower cost of living/more space” – I’ve seen whole-house rental prices that locals called absurd gouging and Oakland expats called absurd steals – 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.)