IT CLAIMS TO BE “Everybody’s Favorite City.” And it’s in trouble, being destroyed from within by its own economic “success.”
Tech-office-related real estate hyperinflation has gotten even worse down there than up here. It’s now the third costliest town in the world. It’s losing arts spaces, live-music clubs, and what few moderate-income residential stock it had.
Should we pity the San Franciscans yet? Do I have to give up my years-long defensive stance against The City That Thinks It’s So Superior To Everybody Else For No Good Reason?
(1) Yes. (2) No.
The demographic cleansing of Frisco, while sad and pitiable, isn’t a repudiation of the town’s bohemian-hipster heritage. Rather, it’s the logical conclusion of certain aspects of that aesthetic, gone to a cancerous extreme.
Let me explain.
As promoted over the years by the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Hunter Thompson, R.U. Sirius, Tom Tomorrow, the original Wired editors, Jello Biafra, etc. etc. etc., a certain side of Frisco “alternative” ideology developed as an elitism that pretended to be populist. It loved “The People” but hated “The Sap Masses.”
It’s not that I think they were too liberal, but that I think they were too conservative. Too willing to settle for just feeling superior, rather than actually doing anything to make a better world for the hip and the square alike.
Whether superficially discussing politics, religion, art, punk rock, poetry, or ecology, its essential message remained the same: The supposed superiority of the speaker, and of San Francisco hipsters as a group, over all us redneck fascists out here in the allegedly-real America.
In their own minds they dressed better, ate better, had more and better sex, were more cultured, were more intelligent, loved the planet better, and imitated black people better than us poor non-San Franciscans ever could hope to. If any cultural scene anywhere else in America didn’t try hard enough to imitate whatever San Franciscans dictated was cool, the San Franciscans would declare said other scenes to be behind the times. You were only “empowered” or “self-realized” if you let San Franciscans tell you precisely how to be.
The dot-com hustlers merely took this arrogance for their own, added billions of other people’s speculation money, and produced an urban scene where money and attitude, in that order, are all that matter.
As such, the dot-com hustlers are proving that hipness, for its own sake, is not necessarily a progressive stance and probably never has been.
Hipness as an excuse for elitism was not invented in Frisco by any means. It’s one of those eternal human quirks; it’s popped up everywhere from Versailles-era France to Cotton Club-era NYC. The turning of “anti-authoritarianism” into just another authoritarianism is older than Oliver Cromwell. (Some San Franciscans have rebelled against the alterna-celebrity hype machine and unholier-than-thou ideology–the Residents’ “Theory of Obscurity,” the Dead’s party-for-everybody stance, R. Crumb’s championing of retro-jazz style instead of the modern world’s constant screeching self-promotion).
And Frisco had an elitist streak in its municipal ideology (from the upper-crust restaurants and hotels to the too-quaint-for-its-own-good residential architecture) long before Ginsberg and co. redefined it.
So it was only another step for the dot-com hustlers to invent a new hipness hierarchism, with themselves at its center.
The dot-com hype has probably peaked; at least a lot of people here, there, and across the continent hope it has. Here, the real estate hyperinflation seems to be ebbing. (Down there, it may take a while for the downturn to take hold.)
But the long-term trend remains that America’s population is rising, its workforce is more office-bound, and more of those office-based companies want to attract young professionals who like to think of themselves as too hip to be stuck in some suburban office-park cubicle.
So even if tomorrow’s offices house import-export attorneys rather than dot-coms, they’ll still be crowding the hip spaces, driving the artistic types out, unless something’s done to help make other places more attractive.
And that means spreading out the hipness across the continent.
And that means dumping, once and for all, the idea that there are just one or two capitals of coolness to which the rest of the continent must submit.
TOMORROW: The election aftermath.
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