“San Francisco was the left edge of America, a refuge from its conformities, a sanctuary for misfits, a lab for new ideas”. And now, says Rebecca Solnit…
Often featured in these pages, Rebecca Solnit writes beautifully for the LRB on how San Francisco, her home town, has become degraded by the tech class:
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.
One of the weirdnesses that Solnit covers is riding alongside driverless cars on her bike:
Seeing cars with no human inside move through San Francisco’s streets is eerie enough as a pedestrian, but when I’m on my bicycle I often find myself riding alongside them, and from that vantage point you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand.
Since August, driverless cars have been available as taxis hailed through apps but I more often see empty cars than ones with backseat passengers. These robots in the shape of cars don’t move like those with human drivers.
While I waited next to one at a busy intersection, the vehicle first halted at the yellow light, then rolled into the intersection, where it stopped when the light turned red, confounding the traffic around it.
Solnit laments what the tech-pumped development of the city has done to those small establishments which constituted its social fabric:
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.
In her urbanist manifesto The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs wrote about ‘eyes on the street’: about the way that pedestrian traffic, people moving around – or sitting around – in public, kept a place safe and more than safe: convivial, gregarious.
I think of what has come to my city as ‘the great withdrawal’. People on the street often seem to have their eyes elsewhere, usually on their phones: they might video a crime, but they might also not notice it’s happening. Many seem to flinch at direct contact with strangers or pretend the apparent intrusion didn’t happen, so I’ve come to avoid the tiny interactions that seem much more welcome in New Orleans, even in New York City.
After a childhood nearby, I moved to San Francisco in 1980 when street life and bar life were vibrant, but cafés were rare outside North Beach’s Italian neighbourhood. They proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s as places to hang out, maybe read, maybe chat to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be silently staring at an Apple product, so that the places look and feel like offices.
Even this phase may be on the way out. The next phase – of trying to keep customers from sticking around – has arrived. A food industry magazine published a story in April last year with the headline ‘In 2023, San Francisco Coffee Shops Want You to Get the Hell Out. The Vibe Is to Leave. Like Right Now,’ explaining that cafés were removing tables and chairs and focusing exclusively on take-away products, in part because cafés were being used as free office space.
Cultural, social and religious institutions have been displaced or run aground, film festivals and art centres have left the city, historic businesses, including the oldest Black-owned bookstore in the US, have been evicted, all while wealth continues to concentrate at the fastest rate ever seen.
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