The constant tense changes were very distracting. And he forgot the part where he writes an almost poignant blog post making fun of hipsters while (hopefully) ironically describing how you're not a hipster unless you make fun of hipsters.
Not to say I wasn't mildly amused. But this stuff is over, isn't it? I thought it was cool to be earnest again. I thought having read David Foster Wallace meant we can all stop being so jaded and critical of everyone around us and actually try to learn to live in a modern society while having empathy those around us, even in a big, anonymous city, and genuinely enjoy the trappings of modern culture and technology in a way that mindfully acknowledges the amazing privilege of living where and when we are living.
In that vein, this was my favorite part:
I’ll look at Sutro Tower. I’ll feel lucky to be paying too much money for a very small apartment, because San Francisco is worth it in these tiny little moments.
I'm in Portland, but I love SF. It's one of my favorite cities in the world. Can't people just enjoy that?
With all the brand name checking, privileged living and even a homeless person reference, this piece is reminiscent of a 21st century, west coast "American Psycho". I do hope that was intentional!
I found it more reminiscent of Fight Club. Much of it reminded me of Ed Norton describing his apartment. And I was just waiting for Tyler Durden to come along in the middle of this paragraph:
I check-in to BART on Foursquare, because everyone needs to know that I’m about to take public transportation. Which is kind of like the equivalent to doing something mundane, like taking a sip of a drink and telling everyone about it. Actually? I’ll probably check into somewhere for this reason later. To be fair: I’ve heard if you check into BART 10 times you get the “Trainspotter” badge. I don’t know why this is important to me. But it is. I need that badge.
"A" modern San Francisco, not "the" modern San Franciscan. Amusing, but why paint everyone in a negative light. It's an amazing city with a great variety of very different and odd people. No need to stereotype us as all being technology-addicted social network whores.
"Before I go, I pack my black rimmed Ray-Ban eyeglasses and put on my Ray-Ban sunglasses. I then pack my Macbook Pro, iPad, iPhone and Kindle into my Chrome messenger bag."
> May be the only way to be successful is to constantly sell yourself and your products.
Don't worry it's not. This is just the echo-chamber path to success, and it's a crowded one. It might be easier to get hipsters to try something new, but it's just that much harder to get them to actually stick with anything. Another path to success is to be in touch with the 99.99% of people that aren't "early adopters" and figure out a way to make a product that they like.
For the first one (email), gmails priority inbox is amazing. In practice I tune out those sales emails unless I decide to go through the effort of actually looking for them... it's better than just sending them to spam, as I do actually want to read them sometimes.
There are a great number of greying or almost-greying engineers and other tech types who are part of a generation preceding the current "cool" generation.
This older generation of hackers and engineers got into the industry because the allure of building systems that made society a better place and benefited humanity broadly was a very powerful driver. For years and decades, this passion drove them to build the foundations of what we now know to be modern energy production, electronics, computing, and networking.
Dreams of taking civilization to the stars, of creating limitless energy sources, of using technology to empower oppressed people and bring others out of poverty drove many of this generation forward.
The reality? Masses upon masses of highly indebted hipsters sipping lattes, tweeting about a band they heard called "Shitdripper", on a device thousands of times more powerful than anything available to the NSA a generation ago, bitching about how they can't get a seven figure salary flipping credit default swaps anymore, in a city that, although it once stood for real technological innovation, works hard to churn out hundreds of also-ran photo sharing apps so that said hipsters can post a thousand photos of their purse dog wearing a kermit the frog costume.
Because there was a generation that dreamed of greatness, and the technology they delivered is being used to enable mediocrity.
Most of the vitriol is coming from the "cool" generation. It boils down to narcissism of small differences - the author is uncomfortable with the idea that he himself may be a "hipster" and so looks for all the things that are hip that he lacks. He then makes sure to publicly point out how hip these things are and how he lacks them.
I myself have been guilty of this but I eventually realized my own hypocrisy and just stopped caring about it. I'm a cool twenty-something techno-hipster - not because I want to be so much as because that's who I am.
Give me a break. The older generation "dreamed of greatness" and now no young people do anymore? Isn't this the same thing that every generation says about the previous generation?
The tools and technologies that are already changing the world today, and that will change the world tomorrow, are being worked on by people who might fit the description of San Francisco hipsters. Who do you think works on Twitter? Facebook? Who do you think works on the iPhone? These are products that are already having an impact on society, and it's not just the old guys who are working on them. And as for the "current" generation, what about companies like Square, Heroku, and SimpleGeo? Is that what you call mediocrity? Get off of your high horse.
I don't think the companies today are any less impactful than the companies of yesteryear.
What's different is that now, because of consumer Internet, "cool people" are getting into computer programming. The old guard of Silicon Valley was very awkward and nerdy -- Bill Gates is the archetype. Today's software entrepreneurs are more like Jack Dorsey -- they dress well, have no trouble getting dates, and people on the street know their companies.
The nerds look at these people and say "This is OUR thing. Get out of here." And resent these new unwanted arrivals.
Actually, not in the slightest, which you'd know if you'd bothered to go any further than just my hacker news bio - say checking my Twitter feed - before dashing off an ad hominem attack.
No, I thought the post was boring, poorly written and just bitter. And that makes it unworthy, in my opinion, of the front page of Hacker News.
This kind of sophomoric crap belongs somewhere on Reddit, not Hacker News.
No, my point is simpler than that. The linked post is a lame rehash of the "Twitter is for self-centered people talking about mundane crap" criticism, with the twist that it's targeted at hipsters.
The commenter suggested that hit too close to home. Here's a quick test. Look at the homepage of the guy who wrote the OP and look at his Twitter feed -- it looks pretty much like something you'd expect from someone like the hipster made fun of in the post.
I'm a tech writer. I use Twitter as part of my work, and rarely post personal stuff. And more to the point, I really don't care how other people use Twitter, nor do I find my self-worth in making fun of how they do use Twitter or FourSquare -- even when what I do or don't do on those services differs from them.
This post was good, but I actually think the responses here and in the comments on the site are way more fascinating!
I read the post as a genuine description of a normal day for Drew. Not as a bitter or sarcastic post making fun of hipsters, just a description of events in a normal day for Drew. Judging by the rest of the blog I'd call Drew a genuine hipster (unless the whole blog is satire) and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I simply don't understand what people have against them.
This post, accidentially, made my think about the pointlessness of living, but not in a negative way at all.
We are born, live our lives and then we die. After we die, nothing, except for some memories in the brains of people you knew, is left. After the people who have the memories die, nothing is left of you and your life except from history.
Granted, a few people change the world in a measurable way, but they're the 0.00001% group of people who do. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being in the group of the 99.99999%.
Life is pointless except from the meaning we get from it. Since the meaning of life is to enjoy it, who's to say that this guy isn't living life correctly?
I am disappointed. I had hoped for a realistic description of a day in a life of a modern urbanized city. Living in a semi-rural area, I don't always get a sense of the good things of such a place.
Instead I got a nasty diatribe against social media addicts who have a fashion sense and like Macs.
I lived in San Francisco without a car for about 4 years.
San Francisco is very small. It's possible to walk from the ballpark to Ocean Beach in about 2.5 hours. I often walked from my home in Cole Valley to my office in SoMa, even though I could just take the Muni.
The public transportation is pretty good for a city in the USA but pretty bad compared to Europe and really bad compared to Japan. People who like the public transportation in SF usually live near one of the Muni train lines. People who hate the public transportation are usually in a neighborhood where they are stuck taking the bus (which is most of the neighborhoods).
That said, having a car in SF is nice, too. The downside is parking. The upside is being able to just drive over to Safeway for groceries, or drive up to Marin, or throw a surfboard on the roof and go down to Pacifica or Santa Cruz.
You can get most of the way there with Zipcar, but I found that if you regularly want to get out of the city on weekends, Zipcar was not as cost effective as owning a beater automobile.
I just saw your edit. The public transit is not as good (comprehensive) as NYC but is a little better than Seattle.
I have had a car here in SF for the last few years, and only use it to go shopping, or get out of town. Last month I picked up a little motorbike - it is super convenient in the city. Parking everywhere, and for the most part, motorists are fairly contentious.
I liked my motorcycle for city riding, but I didn't have the nerves to ride on any of the surrounding freeways so I got rid of it. Something like a Vespa would be amazing in SF.
San Francisco's MUNI has the problems of most large urban public transport systems (it can be a bit slow, it's not perfectly reliable, every now and then they'll be some crazy person ranting to no-one in particular), but it's OK; half an hour and two buses (or a train and a bus) will get you most places in the city. San Francisco's also pretty small - about seven miles square - so yes, it's pretty easy to get around in the city itself without a car. Of course, this only applies if you're working for one of those hipster Web 2.0 companies that are actually based in San Francisco itself - if you need to get around Silicon Valley, you'ld almost certainly need a car.
Tech company pay is great, if you mean later stage. Google, etc all pay salaries which would seem crazy outside the bay area, and iPads cost the same anywhere.
I've lived in both places - public transit in SF beats the pathetic pants off of Seattle for sure. It won't hold a candle to NYC though, so you may be disappointed.
It's entirely possible to live without a car - very, very much so, but be prepared to pay if that's the case (i.e. neighborhoods well served by transit are expensive, think Manhattan rents... up to $2K for a studio? You bet!).
Seattle definitely has horrible public transportation. There cars really aren't optional.
I'm really not much better off here in NYC though because I live way out on a point in Queens. The nearest public transportation is a bus that's over two miles from where I'm living. The long and short of it is I commute two hours each way every single day.
It's a certain kind of hell I'm not long to suffer.
But I guess my biggest challenge at this point is not only do I not have a car I don't have a license; never bothered and now I regret it. I'm not alone in NYC in this regard. My coworker has lived in NYC all his life and never had a license. He's in his mid-thirties. So I'm trying to figure out if it's practical to attempt the move to SF. Of course there's many things to figure out besides the logistics... but certainly this thread is very helpful in regards to getting around the city.
I would much rather ride a Seattle bus than a SF bus, but the likelihood of finding a bus that goes from A to B (without a transfer) is much higher in SF than in Seattle. This is partly a product of Seattle's shape, where the obvious thing for any bus to do is run north-south from a neighborhood to the downtown corridor. It is also a product of density, which Seattle doesn't really have in large quantities.
And re: expensive neighborhoods for transit. I think your numbers are quite a bit off - sure, if you want to live near the main Caltrain station, you are looking at that much. But you can easily find a large 1 bedroom for $1600 within 5 minutes of the light rail or BART for a total transit time to downtown of 10-15 minutes.
When is the last time you rented? My impression is that the rental market is picking up significantly and there are noticeable rent raises even month to month at this point (bubble, anyone?)
Being near BART is going to set you back at least $1700 at the very low end for a studio, $2000 for a 1BR. More for both depending on quality of the place, naturally. You might hack 10% off either of those prices if you pick up a particularly sweet deal.
FWIW, I signed my current place last month, so that's when my knowledge of the current rental market ends. I talked to numerous people including an apartment hunter, all of whom expressed incredulity at how much prices are shifting, even on the order of a couple of months.
I stand corrected, and should have checked Craigslist before posting. It is astounding how much rents have gone up recently. The neighborhoods I had in minde were Lower Haight (5 minutes-ish to the N, 10 minutes-ish to the rest of the lines, 15-20 minutes-ish to 16th & Mission BART) or the part of Market near the Castro Safeway (shave 5 - 10 minutes of all of those times). It seems like $1800 might be a better floor, and that is a studio-like thing. Of course, its a small market in those places so you may be able to find better (or worse or absolutely no) prices.
No, you can get by. It's just annoying at times and you have to make sure you live 1 bus away from where you work or you will be hating life. You can also do the bike thing if you are careful. (Dear SF bikers, red lights mean stop for you too - you will get hit that way.)
I got by without a car when I lived in SF. It can be inconvenient if you make many trips outside the city, but it's not hard at all, and considering the high cost of living in SF, a great way to save some money as well.
It's possible, but having access to Zipcar is quite essential for pretty much anything outside of the city limits - rail expansion was severely hampered by some nearby suburbanites who were afraid that the worst of the city was going to take the train out to visit them, so you have to get in a car if you want to visit your classist neighbors.
It's not "essential" -- there is BART, Caltrain and a pretty extensive public transportation system in the greater bay area, but ZipCar could be a useful additional tool.
As far as your history lesson on rail expansion. You have it completely backwards. The bay area had a very extensive rail system 60-70 years ago. One level of the bay bridge was just for trains. Google the Key System for more information. When cars increased in popularity, most of the train and tram system outside of San Francisco went bust, rail corridors were turned into expressways (a great example on the peninsula is Foothill Expressway that runs from Stanford University to Cupertino).
It's not totally essential but trips outside the city are 2-3x slower without a car. When you factor in wait times and switching trains/buses, you can spend half the day in transit to do a trip which only takes 40 minutes each way in a car.
Also, many destinations in the surrounding area are suburban or semi-rural. You need the car when you get there, because where you actually want to go is not usually near the transit station.
For example, it was theoretically possible for me to take public transport from SF to TechShop in Menlo Park, but it involved 2 hours of trains and a very limited bus service or 45 minute walk through an industrial park. Or, I could just drive there in 40 minutes.
I suppose I could just Google this, but if you know off the top of your head, is ZipCar subject to the same age rules as normal car rentals? i.e. I think you have to be 26 or is it 24 before you can rent?
This reminds me of a blog post I read months ago. I can't find it, but the long and the short of it is that us making fun of subcultures (hipster, goth, nerdy or otherwise) is kind of like the popular kids making fun of everybody who isn't a popular kid in highschool.
As someone who lives in San Francisco and works for a startup I have no idea what the value of this is.
The basic premise boils down to, I live my life poorly, boo hoo.
Everything the author writes is of their own doing, no one is forcing you to check Twitter and Facebook 100 times a day, no one is forcing you to use foursquare.
This is like a little kid binging on candy all day and then whining about a belly-ache at night.
Not to say I wasn't mildly amused. But this stuff is over, isn't it? I thought it was cool to be earnest again. I thought having read David Foster Wallace meant we can all stop being so jaded and critical of everyone around us and actually try to learn to live in a modern society while having empathy those around us, even in a big, anonymous city, and genuinely enjoy the trappings of modern culture and technology in a way that mindfully acknowledges the amazing privilege of living where and when we are living.
In that vein, this was my favorite part:
I’ll look at Sutro Tower. I’ll feel lucky to be paying too much money for a very small apartment, because San Francisco is worth it in these tiny little moments.
I'm in Portland, but I love SF. It's one of my favorite cities in the world. Can't people just enjoy that?