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 Did the Internet Ruin the Bay Area? From the Gold Rush to the dot-coms, San Francisco and the Bay Area have a tangled history with boom times. In the last few years, we saw exponential growth, but it came with a price. Carol Lloyd, a columnist for SF Gate and Salon, comments on the live-work loft situation, and Paulina Borsook, journalist and author, offers her perspective on the radical changes in the Bay Area. Highlights from the Surreal Estate column at SFGate.com, by Carol Lloyd In Harry Lyme's Vienna By Paulina Borsook There's a truism about how quickly and how often political arguments on the Net devolve so that the specter of the Nazis is invoked to explicate the grotesquerie or enormity of one of the debaterâs position. So there is cheap theatric irony in the fact that the dotbomb/dotgone urban landscape of San Francisco evokes Germany bombed to smithereens after World War II. That is, you can see the empty office buildings whose occupants made a hasty retreat -- only it's not the Red Army, but creditors who were being eluded. You see housing where nobody lives any more -- and you wonder where the former occupants disappeared to, although it's probably planes, and not trains, going East, that took them away. Skeletons and innards of buildings are exposed all over town, evoking newsreel footage of bombed-out Berlin. The sensibility of the newly constructed buildings put up during the madness of the recent past (mass-produced live-work lofts, not Party headquarters) is cold, joyless and inhumane. Many people wander around shell-shocked, confused that their Reich that was to last a thousand years -- the New Economy -- turned out to be just another embarrassingly short-lived totalizing annihilating ideology. Everyone ÷ now÷ says they never bought into all that stuff, not really. The populations who were somewhat forcibly relocated -- you know, those unrightminded folks who just couldn't get with the program, people who were just Not members of the Master Race (in this case, either Ivy League liberal-arts undergraduates, or MBAs from HBS or GSB) -- for the most part won't be coming back. A city noted for years for its culture and art and tolerance of the wacked -- has been wiped much clean of the folks who made it so. And it happened so quickly: It took less than a decade to destroy social fabrics that had been extant for more than a hundred years. There are lots of beggars on the streets. A regime with values rather at odds with notions of social capital has put hospitals and public health in desperate straits. You can still occasionally see the signage from the recent occupation (notice of whatever.com slapped on a wall), and people still talk of the day when the sign from the Ministry of Propaganda came down (The Industry Standard's illuminated billboard pitched to commuters coming in over the Bay Bridge). Of course, it's offensively, hyperbolically, morally wrong to compare the dot com destruction of San Francisco to the rise and fall of national socialism. But there just isn't any other handy accessible trope that evokes the ruin caused when invaders, who, while they looked very much like us, were operating from another, deranged belief system. They appropriated and ransacked, in the name of the New Order, and what's left is lots of memorabilia and a city a shell of what it once was. |
  Downtown crosswalk in SF.  Demonstration poster, SF.  Protest poster, SF. | ||
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