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That's very well written. As someone who has never been to BM I wonder if it also is suffering due to larger trend of increasing skepticism and hostility toward

by nafey 8y ago

That's very well written. As someone who has never been to BM I wonder if it also is suffering due to larger trend of increasing skepticism and hostility towards SV. Thoughts?

aaroninsf 8y ago
TLDR the expulsion from the [ utopian giddy visions of pre-first-boom-collapse internet culture ] garden most definitely changed things. For myself I'd say that back in the day, I had the luxury born mostly of historical blind luck of going to that event and seeing it blow up, when for a brief period it really seemed both like we were over a hump, as a civilization, and things were going to get better (for all), and we in SV were right there making it happen. That naive optimism married to the de rigeur aggressive curiosity, monomanaical focus and work ethic, intelligence, and growing affluence of the boom times, really defined how things scaled up. Fast forward to today. SF is again in the midst of profound inequality and cultural shift; an industry which collectively seemed headed towards doing no evil is now beset by endless . scandal for ethically dubious behavior; the current boom has been defined publicly, accurately or not, as identified with a cavalier contempt for the interests of the commons... ...and the political moment is much much darker. Not just in the industry, or the Trump years; also things like Occupy and BLM and our various neocon fabricated military excursions have reminded everyone at some deep level, things are not actually getting inevitably better, have never been getting better for _all_, are really broken in lots of ways; and now we are more divided than ever... I think all of this inevitably translates through the preconditions into BM as much as anything. TLDR it's only able to be a distillation of what's brought into it, which has changed. Today I personally wrestle with whether it is "OK" to go indulge myself in escapism, when [ so much ] is going wrong. It is, if it makes life worth living; but that's a different thing than not having to even ask the question. (A wiser older me recognizes those questions were always there, but there was a giddy moment in which they were collectively disregarded in favor of self-serving but well-meaning optimism.)

by nafey 8y ago

That's very well written. As someone who has never been to BM I wonder if it also is suffering due to larger trend of increasing skepticism and hostility towards SV. Thoughts?

aaroninsf 8y ago

TLDR the expulsion from the [ utopian giddy visions of pre-first-boom-collapse internet culture ] garden most definitely changed things. For myself I'd say that back in the day, I had the luxury born mostly of historical blind luck of going to that event and seeing it blow up, when for a brief period it really seemed both like we were over a hump, as a civilization, and things were going to get better (for all), and we in SV were right there making it happen. That naive optimism married to the de rigeur aggressive curiosity, monomanaical focus and work ethic, intelligence, and growing affluence of the boom times, really defined how things scaled up. Fast forward to today. SF is again in the midst of profound inequality and cultural shift; an industry which collectively seemed headed towards doing no evil is now beset by endless . scandal for ethically dubious behavior; the current boom has been defined publicly, accurately or not, as identified with a cavalier contempt for the interests of the commons... ...and the political moment is much much darker. Not just in the industry, or the Trump years; also things like Occupy and BLM and our various neocon fabricated military excursions have reminded everyone at some deep level, things are not actually getting inevitably better, have never been getting better for _all_, are really broken in lots of ways; and now we are more divided than ever... I think all of this inevitably translates through the preconditions into BM as much as anything. TLDR it's only able to be a distillation of what's brought into it, which has changed. Today I personally wrestle with whether it is "OK" to go indulge myself in escapism, when [ so much ] is going wrong. It is, if it makes life worth living; but that's a different thing than not having to even ask the question. (A wiser older me recognizes those questions were always there, but there was a giddy moment in which they were collectively disregarded in favor of self-serving but well-meaning optimism.)