Things I Hate About San Francisco's Gentrification: A Love Poem

Prologue

For three weeks in August-September 2013, I returned to San Francisco for what was supposed to be an eight-week respite from caretaking my mom, whose rare form of cancer seemed to be relatively under control. My dad had died about three months earlier, on May 16, after nine months on "life" support, the ghastly outcome of a tiny mosquito bite that gave him a rare illness as well: severe West Nile, a by-product in large part of capitalist-generated climate catastrophe. The acceleration and proliferation of cancers and viruses is, in no small measure, another by-product of contemporary capitalism. We should then add in all the ways in which the medical-pharmaceutical complex, a phenomenally profitable growth industry today, manufactures all sorts of extra health woes once one is sick -- so-called side effects. It also "extends life" by producing near-lifeless bodies to warehouse in prison-like institutions even as it pays low, precarious wages to "care worker" bodies to deal, quite literally, with shit.

I'd been caretaking both my parents since late August 2012, mostly in mid-Michigan, their longtime home, where second-generation downward mobility seems to have ground people into quiet acquiesce concerning their own social suffering. San Francisco was meant to be a break, with a stay in my beloved collective home at 16th and Mission streets. In March 2013 when I briefly visited San Francisco over the anarchist bookfair weekend, I'd felt such unexpected relief from the crushing weight of being responsible for my parents' lives and deaths that I assumed spending more time in the Bay Area in late summer would offer the same sense of temporary lightness.

I hadn't counted on state and capital to be quite so fierce, though.

On my first day back in August, I walked the length of Mission Street from 16th and 24th, and could hardly comprehend the transformations that had taken place since my last stroll just shy of six months earlier. I swung back on Valencia, then through SOMA and alongside Mission Creek into China Basin, past the AT&T stadium and along the bay-front walkways, over to the Ferry Building, and then along Market Street, winding my way back to 16th and Mission streets, all the while experiencing vertigo from the amount of changes. Giant metal cranes had settled into menacing perches all around the city, aiding and abetting so-called developers to rip the remaining heart from San Francisco. Shiny, anonymous, lavishly expensive new buildings -- a mix of "work place live" structures -- had mushroomed up everywhere, including around the blocks that house (for now) the scrappy 16th Street BART plaza.

My mind could not take in the ability of wealth and power to distort a city so quickly, so completely, in such a short period. This structural adjustment had been taking place in bits and pieces over time, for sure, but capitalist destruction/construction backed up by policy and police was now operating at a speed matching the source of its underwriter: the social media machinery. Within a short span this year, for instance, the financial hurricane called evictions -- hard and soft, legal and illegal -- was able to swiftly uproot most of San Francisco's inhabitants, especially the "tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breath free" who had long called this city their home, and just as swiftly replaced them with an Autonomatronics-like, ultra-hip-rich populace -- trendy pop-up humans to match the trend toward pop-up stores.

The next day after my arrival and long walk, I went to a meeting of Eviction-Free Summer, composed of San Franciscans valiantly embracing a solidarity model to openly contest their displacement. While I'm partial to Don Quixote efforts to fight the windmills of commodification, it was obvious that using direct action tactics to try to mutually aid two or three households at a time from being evicted in the face of the mass de/repopulation of this city was plainly too little, too late. But how could resistance have been "earlier," given the warp speed of what gets called gentrification these days? And what would the strategic targets have been -- targets that would be immediately recognizable to and garner sympathy from large numbers of impacted people, and potentially then coalesce them into a social movement? Sitting down at the front of the Google bus? Throwing a wrench in, say, the new bike lanes and glitter-sprinkled sidewalks, or the decorative kale outside offices and indigenous-vegetation-filled green spaces, that civic and corporate elites systemically used, among other pretty tools, to rearrange the urban landscape as a clubhouse for themselves? Occupations of social media spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Gluten-free, vegan, locally sourced, organic bread riots?

After one too many poignant stories at the Eviction-Free Summer meeting, from people I knew would soon be without their homes, without their city -- people who needed their homes because of AIDS or permanently paralyzed bodies, for example -- I cried my way back to the one place that's ever really felt like home to me, with the nagging knowledge that it, too, will likely soon be only a memory. A couple days later, I went to Eviction-Free Summer's hastily called demonstration, which felt more like a wake, at the corner of Mission and 17th streets after the eviction of one of San Francisco's last autonomous collective spaces, and felt angry (even though I knew they weren't to blame) at all those anarchists who gave up without a fight and moved, a bit too gladly, to Oakland, the newest cutting-edge/edgy city for antiauthoritarians. The might of perhaps the greatest wealth consolidation in history is cornering us all into a series of bad, worse, and far worse "choices." I waved my powerless fist in the air with others, listened to multiple tales from English-as-a-second-language voices of their impending evictions from the Mission, and then couldn't take it anymore, walking away from this act of witnessing with, yet again, tears in my eyes.

My "break" quickly became the source of revealing my own brokenness, of adding further sorrow and loss to all the losses I was being battered by in mid-Michigan. Here, so clearly, was this new loss of a city I loved -- a city that represented, for me and so many others, a place of radical experimentation, countercultures and subcultures, refuge, and queerness, but also a place that was home to misfits and immigrants, the poor and working class, the undocumented and outlaw, because it was affordable and "progressive." It was able to be shaped by the social fabrics of strong Latino, black, Chinese, and Japanese communities, among others; it was able to be shaped by strong communities of anarchist and feminist spaces, to name two, and a long tradition of resistance and social movements to fight against all the ways in which poverty, displacement, and various forms of oppression also shaped this city. The land below San Francisco had certainly been stolen from peoples before -- first inhabitants and first nations, followed by waves of those who weren't wanted elsewhere, who were exploited as laborers, and/or were seen as undesirable and dangerous. Gentrification isn't new; it's gone by other names, like colonialism, and has erased other histories, harming, breaking, and killing a too-long list of other people. But it's usually been a slower process, over years or decades, able to be battled (even if lost) and grieved (even if never replaceable).

Now, it seemed, capitalism had won out before people even knew what hit them, with far-too-much self-satisfaction on the now far-too-homogeneous face of this flattened, upscaled landscape -- as if there had never been another San Francisco, and never will be. And San Francisco, in turn, now looked like too many other global cities, also abruptly expropriated and refashioned. If it weren't for the hills in the distance, one could just as easily walk through parts of Manhattan, for instance, and be confused about which hyper-privatized metropolis one was viewing (for surely, most of us cannot partake in any substantive way in the fruits of these places, even their "public" amenities, so we become more voyeurs than participants or inhabitants, assuming we can afford to return after being pushed out).

Yes, what's happening (or rather, has happened) to San Francisco isn't so different from the sorrow of what's happening to big cities on this continent, like Vancouver and Seattle, Montreal and Brooklyn, and even "livable" smaller cities like Madison, Wisconsin, not to mention metropoles around the globe. But there's also a way in which we fail to see the particularities of how state and capital impacts different places and different people in different, often vastly disproportionate ways, and how we fail to spotlight the structural forces that determine and implement what comes to be known as gentrification. Those particularities are crucial to highlight, even if they seem like minor details against the gargantuan homogeneity that destroys them. They are holders of the differentiation in each of these and other places -- their histories, struggles, memories, lives, accomplishments, pleasures and pains, festivals, foods, inventions and traditions, arts, and so on. They are markers of those things that make us recognize these cities and their inhabitants as distinct, unique, and loved -- as ours, but also as others from whom this same land was stolen in the past. And thus, they hold the key to how to both make this centuries-long theft visible and fight its systemic logic now, in ways -- I hope -- that are honest to the dilemmas embedded in any solidarity and resistance aimed at developing communities of care instead.

Several years ago, a variety of organizers -- indigenous, immigrant, anarchist, queer, feminist, people without homes, people with a variety of access needs, and others -- came together under the banner "No Olympics on Stolen Native Lands" in the Unceded Coast Salish Territories (so-called Vancouver) to contest the historical and current thief of these specific lands -- along with lives and cultures, bodies and minds -- under the subterfuge of the winter Olympic games. Besides forging social bonds and trust, however fragile, among peoples divided by decades and centuries of loss, the week of demonstrations and direct actions was an effort to begin to understand what it might mean to move toward a future that recognized all the ways in which urban spaces have been stolen, from nationalist colonialism and industrial capitalism to settler colonialism and hipster capitalism. The convergence attempted to find a different route -- dignified, ecological, holistic -- and forge different social relations among people/groups often pitted against each other by the murderous hierarchies and exploitation foisted on them. It was also structured around the particular history/present of the Unceded Coast Salish Territories, and illuminated it via the targets and symbols chosen that week, precisely because the Olympics was again stealing lands and spaces from indigenous peoples in particular, all the while engaging in cultural appropriation/co-optation of various indigenous bands to try to hide the economic appropriation that was handing the city over to the rich -- and nonindigenous -- through the building frenzy to showcase the Olympics.

Many tales could be told here for each of the cities and spaces being lost at this historical moment, but let me share just one more. It comes from Brooklyn, the new "New York" (or is it the new "Oakland," or is Oakland the new "Brooklyn"?), and Bed-Stuy in particular. A sixty-year-oldish black woman passed along this story during a panel on dreams/schemes to take land and housing in New York out of market relations, returning them to use value. The panel took place in a new anarchist(ic) social center in Bushwick, on lands stolen long ago from the Lenape peoples, across from the borough called Manhattan that, when first stolen by the Dutch from the Lenape, included upward of one-quarter African slaves among its initial "New World" population. Those slaves, once some of their stolen bodies were permitted some "freedom," were given land for farming and burial, but that too was eventually stolen, as described so movingly in the recently created museum at the recently "discovered" African burial grounds -- "lost to history due to landfill and development," as the official Web site notes -- near Wall Street. But back to my retelling, likely poorly, of this Bed-Stuy woman's story.

When she was a young girl, she used to walk through beautiful Bed-Stuy with her grandmother. They knew everyone, and everyone knew them, and the neighborhood was safe and clean. And mostly black. One day during their stroll, she tried to toss some garbage into one of the city-supplied trash containers on every corner, and realized they were suddenly all gone. The city has taken them all away, overnight. Neighbors soon organized to place their own garbage cans on each corner and then collect the trash weekly to mix in with their own trash at home for municipal pickup there. Soon, the city stopped emptying out the neighborly corner garbage bins. So neighbors organized again, this time to collect anyone's trash right front of their own houses and again mix it in with their weekly city garbage pickup. The city then stopped collecting garbage from the neighborhood altogether, turning the neighborhood, for all intents and purposes, into a dumping ground. The message, of course, was: we see you as garbage. That incident, to paraphrase this woman's tale, is how institutionalized racism mixes with structural transformation to first destroy communities -- treating black people and their neighborhoods as dirty and worthless -- and then later (as in now) sets about cleaning it up (public trash cans reappear and are emptied regularly, sidewalks and roads suddenly get fixed, bike paths and new street lighting are added, etc.), expropriating it, and reselling it to the highest bidder.

Most people, increasingly the majority of people, lose out in this process. Knowing the context and histories of these losses, though, not only honors them and perhaps permits us to learn from them but also might offer us better road maps to sharing, using, and enjoying land and housing, communities and cities, in ways that don't replicate the same colonialist and capitalist logics that are "socialized" into our minds and bodies from birth.

Ah, but I stray from my own route, so let's return to the streets of San Francisco.

To soothe the pain of this devastation, political and personal, I decided to play a perverse game with myself during my short and alas foreshortened August-September 2013 visit (I had to rush back to Michigan unexpectedly for what became the last three weeks of my mom's life; she died well and in her room, thanks to the care and dignity of hospice, on October 3). One has to walk toward and through grief; it doesn't merely go away on its own accord. So I continued to wander far and wide at random through San Francisco, but tried to pinpoint some of the specificity of the changes wrought (and for that matter, bought) by capitalism. Whenever I chanced on something that seemed to capture the high-tech-funded landgrab of San Francisco, I boiled it down to the 140 words or less of a tweet.

I rarely make use of Twitter, but in my sluggish depression, those 140 words or less were about all I could muster, and at first it felt like the equivalent of an angry outburst -- nearly pointless and likely unconvincing, but damned cathartic. I started off by numbering the tweets, with the notion of creating a top-ten list, then top-twenty or two-dozen list, then. . . . And then it struck me: Twitter the form was perfect as a means to mourn the loss of this city to Twitter the corporation and its now-billionaire compatriots, the new ruling class that's shaping and benefiting from the compulsion of contemporary capitalism. Twitter encapsulates the specific neo-enclosure taking place in San Francisco: at once seemingly opening up space for all and yet thoroughly closing off possibilities for most of humanity -- materially, politically, ecologically, and even linguistically.

What better poetic form to use, ironically of course (because irony, too, became almost a structural component in this new stage of displacement), for attempting to grasp all that I hate about San Francisco's gentrification, and make my little game ever more perverse? If I was going to bury my dead, killed off by this system, why not use the master's tools as one last painful stab into my own already-bludgeoned heart?

Tweets, after all, are the new poetry for our age -- an age in which the superpowerful global few are reducing the whole of the world and thus selling off the future, to the point where everyone and everything is threatened with mass destruction. They appear to do the poetic work of offering up emotional responses to the range of experiences, from joy and love to tragedy and suffering, that make us human. Yet by ultimately reducing our communication and dialogue to near-meaninglessness in that always-constrained 140 words or less, tweets reduce us and our humanity too. The tradition of rebellious poetry -- on paper and the streets -- that tagged San Francisco as a place of experimentation with communal and qualitative social relations is now being buffed over by "revolutionary" app developers and "creative" capitalists drunk on kimbucha and their own power to "change the world," with near-meaninglessness attached to their aspiration.

By imposing the 140x140 cage of this form on myself, at best I was attempting to see if I could be precise about this thing called gentrification and what we're up against; at worst, I was acknowledging and maybe exposing the damage done to us all, myself included, simply due to the mere fact of "living" in this social-media-mediated society. What words do we have left for all that's been take away from us, ranging from our ability to remember how to speak with each other in meaning-filled words all the way down the line to our very future? Or is there a way to make each and every word count, and for us to really reflect on, listen to, hear, comprehend, dialogue about, and then collectively contest the twenty-first-century's terrain of pleasure for a miniscule elite and pain for everyone else, and strive instead for ubiquitous, egalitarian social goodness?

So my new goal was to "pen" a Tweeter poem, with broad brushstrokes of irony:

* 140 lines of 140 words or less

* the lines were actually posts, with each one typed on my smartphone with one finger during my various dérives through San Francisco

* none of the lines were created in any coherent order, or with any coherent order in mind; they are chronological, following the order in which I stumbled across something that seemed tweet worthy -- or tweet possible

* all of the lines were the result of letting myself be drawn, willingly or not, into the shiny-nouveau-riche landscape of San Francisco or city news of the day, fleetingly here now and gone tomorrow from our memory banks and Tweeter feeds

* once written, each line was instantaneously whisked into the public cybersphere as a post to instantaneously appear on my Twitter and Facebook pages, all the while knowing that Instagram is where it's now "at" (or was, when I was creating my 140x140 poem), but I'm not good -- yet -- at thinking in squares

* I did, however, use my smartphone's camera, and so have sprinkled various photos throughout my 140x140 poem below, partially to add to the fractured, disorienting, ADD quality of navigating the world today, electronic and "real," thereby making it almost impossible for us to find solid ground from which to act [Note: I couldn't include the photos on this libcom.org blog, so see the original, if interested, with pictures at cbmilstein.wordpress.com]

Grieving what's lost is part and parcel of the practice of loving. If death and dying, grief, and grieving, have been taken from us, hidden from view as commodity forms, it is not only because they are now immensely profitable. It is also because they are the stuff of life, illuminating the meaning within life for its own sake, lives and communities worth living in, including and especially the meaning of forms of love that haven't been privatized, commodified, and enclosed. Love and loving as commons. And that entails the bold, rebellious practice of stealing back and making visible not only life and love but also, concurrently and as part of our everyday lives, death and grief.

So here is the gift of my love poem -- straight from a heart that isn't sure it can weather much more loss, but knows it likely will have to -- for all that's been lost in San Francisco, "thanks" to forces that I hate.

Note: Like any good anarchist, I broke the rules when those rules didn’t make sense. In this case, while I tweeted 140 characters or less for each of these 140 reasons why I hate San Francisco’s gentrification, that meant leaving the period off the end of about a half-dozen reflections. In the interest of consistency and good grammar, I’ve added periods to all the sentences in my poem, thereby making some of them 141 characters. So I figured I could also squeeze in a rule-breaking reason #141 -- parenthetically, though, for those who want to ignore it in favor of the “purity” of the 140x140 poetic form.
Things I Hate about San Francisco's Gentrification: A Love Poem

1. You can now get poutine in the Mission, or, nothing becomes special to or about specific places.

2. So much new housing, from eco-sleek-hip-pricey condos to cart-cardboard "tiny homes" on streets.

3. Rehab of 24th St BART plaza, another infrastructure link in displacing, is dubbed "improvement."

4. A guy starts a friendly chat w/me in a cafe, only to ask my view of his new hi-tech product design.

5. I don't run into tons of people I know, because no one can afford to live here anymore.

6. A lot more folks are talking to themselves, electronically (if rich) & into the air (if poor).

7. Cranes of the animal kind appear to have been replaced by cranes of the metal kind.

8. Small-batch is beautiful -- and expensive.

9. Startups are the new upstarts.

10. The narcissism of the e-nouveau riche prefers huge glass windows, not mirrors.

11. The palette for street art is one's entrepreneurial body.

12. Plaques commemorating working-class history make great additions to new upscale constructions.

13. People begin despising buses because of Google (et al.) instead of Google (et al.).

14. The nostalgia it generates for the "kinder, gentler" gentrification of the dot-com days.

15. For many, collective living becomes a painful necessity not a political or pleasurable choice.

16. There seems to be a direct relation between the rise of "artisanal" food and a neo-feudalism.

17. The public parks are increasingly enclosed by playgrounds built for the rich kids.

18. Eviction as first-world structural adjustment program & lucrative business model.

19. Mutual aid is about savvy evictors freely sharing their newfound expertise with each other.

20. It's the avant-garde of gentrification-to-come elsewhere.

21. Someone hugged & kissed a friend good-bye on the street, then said, "Make lots of money today."

22. Cardboard is more often the stuff of homelessness (for signs or shelter) than protests.

23. Direct action doesn't seem to get the goods ("We are losing").

24. $8.95 burritos are replacing $5 ones; creme brûlée trucks are replacing taco trucks.

25. Unemployment is down 'cause the unemployed have to leave town to find work or cheap(er) homes.

26. It's both hyperbole and lived reality that Steve Jobs started a revolution.

27. The industry around supplying dogs with all the creature comforts, including gyms.

28. Beneath the paving stones installed with glitter & Mexican art motifs, lost & stolen cultures.

29. A Bay Area health clinic defines "low income" as someone making $88,000 or less.

30. Twitter's new headquarters seems less an office & more an anchor to flip another neighborhood.

31. Yoga at the airport.

32. Bikes' use value is transformed into bikes as accessories for a lean, green, costly lifestyle.

33. Social media as city planner & developer, arbiter of cool, news, social reality, insta-life.

34. The number of square blocks of "they'll never be able to clean up that area" gets less & less.

35. The self is both the means & product of production.

36. The enormous slogans on sleek high-rise housing construction projects, like "Life above All."

37. Longtime huge, grungy, $ thrift shops kicked out for ever-changing tiny, cutesy, $$$$ vintage.

38. The re-marketization of Market Street.

39. The dizzying, disorienting, ever-accelerating speed of it.

40. Creation of sweatshops for high-tech workers from low-wage countries for nearly no wages here.

41. "Soft evictions," ejecting the vulnerable under the radar of statistics so they don't count.

42. "Public" parklets (but don't sit or lie unless you buy).

43. One could nearly eat off the floors of the fancy auto repair shops filled with minis.

44. The back alleys are the new front doorsteps for the wealthy.

45. It isn't chic to wear radical T-shirts, even if only for the ironic effect.

46. The city is so ecological one could almost forget about Fukushima's radiation & climate change.

47. The boss must have gluten-free bread, but also single-origin espresso with hint of roses.

48. The de-Mexicification, as a friend put it, of architecture & public space.

49. The Eastern-tinged wellness infrastructure for selfie-actualization.

50. Poor & working-class people's grub, like grits, is grist for boutiquey new & newer restaurants.

51. The yawning gap between min-wage service workers & those hot commodities called baristas.

52. The museum-like quality of bohemia & the counterculture.

53. Accessible City College ed under attack; wide-open embrace for exclusive app conferences.

54. Vacant storefronts whose windows were used for edgy art are now storefronts.

55. White guys carrying around skateboards that look like they've never been used.

56. It's a punishable crime under municipal law not to recycle & compost.

57. Shit suddenly gets fixed up, like roads, bridges & sidewalks.

58. The steepest hill is barely a dramatic enough metaphor for the gap between the rich & poor.

59. Anything proudly declaring itself "local" looks suspiciously like it dropped from Mars.

60. What the abundance of scaffolding & plywood w/Post No Bills & bldg permit signs on them bodes.

61. That there is now a "tech class," and it has lots & lots of power.

62. Gay-friendly heteronormativity replacing queer mecca.

63. City ban on plastic checkout bags ushers in fee for "bio" checkout bags "with a conscience."

64. Diversity-friendly white supremacy replacing people of color, especially black people.

65. Pop-ups.

66. People are desirous of seeing the world through Google glasses.

67. Don't like going to the office? Lease a creative space!

68. Some rich parents are now so extra rich they can afford the time to stroll their own babies.

69. Tinier & tinier & higher-tech surveillance cameras in more & more places, including on bodies.

70. Critical Mass looks like a showroom for the latest, greatest, costliest in bikes & components.

71. The "Live! Work! Play!" (& be happy!) revamp of what's meant by a company town.

72. The use of the word "flexible" as means to mask the reality of "precarity."

73. The fetishization with trying to stay forever young, as via, say, fountains of kimbucha.

74. That new words are created to describe the new people created by the new city, like "glasshole."

75. The beauty (& price list) makeover for barber shops.

76. The only "trickle down" is the further displacement that gets increasingly shifted to Oakland.

77. That SF is likened to NYC & Oakland to Brooklyn, mostly because all are becoming unaffordable.

78. Lusty Lady, the world's only unionized worker-owned peep show co-op, gets screwed by eviction.

79. Adding value by making visible & aestheticizing sites of production.

80. Wealthy corps ask caterers to dress in their own clothes while serving so as to feign equality.

81. The beauty of unadorned expanses of wood is adornment for expensive urban interior design.

82. Whiskey not PBR, or says an SF distiller, "[Certain] people are drinking less, but better."

83. The "foreign" language I randomly overhear most often on the streets is British English.

84. The class divide between stores that still use cash registers & those that use tablets instead.

85. Using an entire city to beta test the privatization of abundant excess for a few.

86. Tech workers who bemoan loss of quinoa as subsistence crop in Bolivia & ignore hunger here.

87. Property developers/owners as part vanguard, part schoolyard bully.

88. Murals look more sanctioned & sanitized.

89. Transformation of cafes from social centers & political hotbeds to centers of cyber industry.

90. Farm markets with nary a farmworker in eyesight.

91. Shift from festival waterfronts, problematic as they were, to fitness waterfronts.

92. It pays to be progressive.

93. The masses only seem to rise up over professional sports team victories.

94. The conspicuous consumption of minimalism.

95. That it instills a perverse eagerness to visit the social media giants' campuses/headquarters.

96. Life imitates memes.

97. The history that is now shaping this place sounds too conspiracy-theory-like to be believed.

98. The big social media companies' private inter-social-media sites house today's old boys' club.

99. Updates are instantly outdated, fulfilling Levi's current ads, "The future is leaving."

100. Full-on, sanctimonious implementation of LSD-induced, hippie dream of cybernetics utopia.

101. Primitive accumulation by turning ex-offices bldgs into "physical social space" offices.

102. Glimpses of institutional mechanisms to make Chinatown too costly for Chinese to live there.

103. The blurred (erased?) line between tools & toys.

104. The glow on the street at nite of thousands of tiny, twinkling electronics like e-cigarettes.

105. As the "dual power" of private transit works its magic, BART becomes a scraggly underdog.

106. Tourists seem even more well-heeled & annoying than in the recent past.

107. Smugness among too many East Bay anticapitalists about not coming over to SF much anymore.

108. City & capital seem to triumphantly believe they need fewer (visible) cops & security guards.

109. Less evidence of generalized antagonism toward police, not to mention state & capital.

110. "Support 'heart' local business" signs gracing the latest interloper niche-shops on the block.

111. Use of "romantic" things of the past, like typewriters & books, as product display material.

112. The neocapitalists are lean, serene, and smile a bit too much.

113. Capitalism here has brought most of Starhawk's vision from "The Fifth Sacred Thing" to life.

114. Absurdly profitable pastiche of high & low eco-tech (& blind eye to its unsustainability).

115. Experiment in forging a whole city into a golden-gated community sans gates.

116. Publicly funded posters at bus stops turning social movement history into kaleiodoscopic mush.

117. That one can still see the contours of a refreshed capitalism from the heights of Twin Peaks.

118. Openness as the newest enclosure.

119. Organized religion, perhaps predictably, collaborates on evictions.

120. Folks are busily seeking tech to capture ever-smarter data, the better to social control us.

121. Calm spots to sit by the bay waters are disturbed by monetized spectacles like America's Cup.

122. Expensively yet understatedly attired, multitasking joggers appear to have won the rat race.

123. The painted-lady Victorian homes are a gaudy theme park for an era of clearer exploitation.

124. Distinct neighborhoods increasingly look indistinguishable.

125. Already-anachronistic anarchist bookstore can't find enough volunteers to even be open much.

126. The private accumulation generated from ensuring a lack of privacy or trying to protect it.

127. Junky "Made in China" dollar stores are reanimated as crisp-clean-cool Japanese $1.50.

128. Veneer of reharmonizing urban/rural via, say, inedible edible landscaping & barnboard facades.

129. The ultra-concentration of power & privilege facilitated by "democratic" technologies.

130. Systematic erasure of history, so that there's only the now, which is also already the future.

131. One sees few peace signs, even fewer circle-As & where oh where have all the unicorns gone?

132. Social prestige (& price tag) of trendy tiny stuff, from cars to itty-bitty grapes.

133. The big footprint of hardware/software innovations allowing for a lightweight lifestyle.

134. Much of the populace looks like lookalike "beautiful," "perfect-looking" 3-D versions of ads.

135. Hubris of social contract & social engineering (under)written & directed by high technologies.

136. Intentionally not-well-kept-secret secret spaces for with-it elites to meet, greet & consume.

137. In contrast to the film "Freaks," the monstrous, greedy "normal" people deform the deviates.

138. Ex-mom-&-pop shop signage is repurposed, w/no regard for meaning, to mark new "no logo" biz.

139. The bay is packed w/luxury boats, the loot of a piracy where the few rich rob the many poor.

140. The comforts of this remade city are, like the LED art install on the Bay Bridge, mesmerizing.

(141. Capitalism.)

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Dedicated with unending love to Station 40 and my parents.

* * *

If you’ve run across this blog post as a reposting somewhere, you can find other blog-musings and more polished essays at Outside the Circle, cbmilstein.wordpress.com. Share, enjoy, and repost — as long as it’s free as in “free beer” and “freedom.”

(Photos by Cindy Milstein, San Francisco, August-September 2013)