Hippies at Hippie Hill in 1977 nostalgic for the Summer of Love. Photo via FoundSF
You can’t create a future while trapped in the past. This is true for both people and places. Nostalgia is an opiate. It can feel good for a while, but before you know it, you’re dead. And I don’t want the Bay Area to die.
In certain ways, we’re more alive than ever. If you look at San Francisco and the greater Bay Area with the eyes of a Silicon Valley economist, the city is booming with tech investment and enough AI startups to turn every billboard into a reminder that you’re eventually going to get fired.
But that doesn’t make a place worth living in. It may make it attractive to work in, but it’s not a place where one really finds community outside of collaborating.
And it’s not just the fault of big business or gentrification. Those things make it worse, but our addiction to the past, and continuing to pejoratively compare it to the present, also makes things worse, significantly worse.
That’s not to say the Bay Area shouldn’t honor its own history, it should.
The hippies of the Haight and Telegraph Avenue laid the foundation for the modern left in the Bay Area. Tree hugging hippies and the student organizers of yesteryear deserve celebration.
But there’s a fine line between celebrating something and becoming a caricature. Those who try to hold onto the past too long rob themselves of legitimate creativity. Imitations don’t create movements, they’re just a response from people who long to experience something similar, but didn’t.
This isn’t just limited to the hippies. This longing for the Bay of yesterday plagues nearly subculture in the Bay Area.
Every era has a different subculture attached and a longing to replicate it.
The 50s had the Beat writers, the 60s had the hippies and the Black Panthers, the 70s is when San Francisco came out of the closet in a big way, the 80s were punk rock, hip hop, and art springing from the ashes of urban decay all punctuated by an appropriately-timed, yet extremely destructive earthquake during the World Series where San Francisco and Oakland faced off in the Battle of the Bay.
The 90s gave us 2Pac, Green Day, and Craigslist. The 2000s was about Mac Dre, E-40 and the hyphy movement.
And those things are great. We should celebrate all of those things, but there is a reason those things matter: they were NEW.
But now it seems newness is sacrificed by pessimism.
I even do it, and I shouldn’t. I remember being a little kid with my mom on MUNI. I remember being crammed on the bus with people and lightly holding my mom’s hand while looking out the window as the bus slowly made its way down Mission Street.
Everything and everyone looked fascinating to me. The East Bay didn’t have the intensity of the Mission. I witnessed every type of person peacefully coexisting in an accepted chaos.
Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys performing at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco in 1983. Photo by Greg Gaar, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
I saw punks who looked like the ones I’d see on music videos sitting in front of shuttered businesses covered in graffiti beside their dogs while badly strumming guitars and drinking beers.
I saw writers, restaurant owners, artists, musicians, gangbangers, nerds, corporate types, punks, dot-com workers, yuppies and everything in between in close proximity to each other.
I wanted to be a part of it, but I wasn’t. I was too young and I was in Oakland. People seem to like Oakland now, but I didn’t like living there at the time, not because I personally disliked it, but because everyone else seemed to and it made me self conscious as a kid.
This fear of missing out only grew as we moved to Martinez, an industrial East Bay town that doubles as the country seat of Contra Costa, roughly 30 miles from San Francisco.
When I was finally old enough to contribute in the way I wanted to when I was younger, everything had changed, and it made me bitter.
While I was lucky to find an outlet for those feelings through memes, and writing, I still was robbing myself of joy as I spent too much time looking for the past. I was cynical, jaded and overt pessimistic.
Was I right? In many cases, yes.
Was I happy? Not really.
We should eat at Hyphy Burger, we should celebrate the poets of North Beach, and name streets after Black Panthers in Oakland, and make murals for hippies in Berkeley, and show love to everything that made us who we are. But if we resign ourselves to becoming pessimistic patrons of museums masquerading as cities, we’ll never find our muse.
And we should.
Also if we don’t do something, this period of life in the Bay will called something dumb like the “AI era” and that really fucking sucks.
Let’s get to work.
