The strangest thing about all of this to me is how contemporary SF seems to have absorbed basically none of the city's previous culture. You can detect the commercial, artistic, cultural histories of NYC in the various industries there, from media to finance. Ditto for LA, or London, or Paris.

In SF though, it’s as if the previous culture of the place has just been overwritten entirely. Hard to believe that it’s the same city which Kerouac, the Beats or Hippies ran around in. Or even the historically wealthy but cultural old money class, like Lewis Lapham’s family, or Michael Douglas’s character in The Game. Nope, all gone, and certainly no one there has ever read On the Road.

I suppose you could probably just blame this on how the people at the top behave: totally uninterested in funding culture, unlike the billionaires of yesteryear that built concert halls and libraries. And so a city which is hyper focused on one economic activity has no space for anything else.

▲

chickensong 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

SF is quite small compared to the other cities you mentioned, both in land and population density, and is quite a young city in comparison. The beats and hippies were a flash in the pan. They left a mark, but many dispersed rather quickly, and the rest have been ironed out for many decades.

▲

keiferski 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The exact same thing is true of smaller cities like Pittsburgh, as well. The point is that their cultural histories still manage to exist today, even at some level, whereas tech has turned SF into a historical culture-free zone, entirely detached from what SF was even 25 years ago.

	▲	chickensong 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I can't say I know much about Pittsburgh's culture, but I wonder how it would have held up over decades of insane money being pumped in and wild rent increases? SF has changed a lot over time, but it has a boom town history of being invaded by hustlers looking for money, so I guess that's something. Gay pride has persisted in SF as well, strong pockets of Asian culture, a saucy underground, etc... Tech has definitely left a mark, maybe not physical libraries and concert halls, but Long Now and the Internet Archive are doing good work to preserve culture.

▲

dansitu 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a famous paper called The Californian Ideology (1996) that shows how all these seemingly incompatible elements of the Bay Area's past created the culture at the time of the dot com boom:

https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_An...

Today's Bay Area has a direct lineage to all of that. Blank Space by W. David Marx does a great job of explaining how the post-2000 parts happened.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DXMVK94H

It's all part of the same long, strange trip.

▲

benlivengood 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hey, I had to read On The Road once for college, and I am currently sitting in SF.

To be fair to Jack Kerouac, I was young when I read it but even at my advanced age I don't think I want to reread it.

Also, the old hippie culture sort of moved out of SF and into the surrounding bay, I think especially toward East Bay.

▲

mkehrt 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think that's true at all. There's plenty of weird post hippies around, including Burning Man culture and the libertarian roots of a lot of the tech world.

But if you're immersed in the modern tech world, you're just ignoring all that.