When I first moved to San Francisco I hated it and was surprised to hate it. I lived within walking distance from the western terminus of the Underground Railway, the former home of the Six Gallery and the legendary 60’s rock venue The Fillmore. I was so earnest and enthusiastic to meet new people, but at the time my excitement was turning people off.
The first party we went to was in Russian Hill where after an hour of contributing nothing to a conversation about triathlons, I hid in the kitchen talking to someone’s younger brother. My second party was in the Lower Haight where everyone was trying to look working class and I was in my best clothes but really WAS working class. My third party was in the Marina where I was the only woman to arrive in a mustache to a “mustache and wig” costume party.
My uncultured, working class, small town Canadian-ness was seeping out, making me say offensive things like “Frisco”. San Francisco was bringing me down and it took me a year to unlock the secret and cut through the bullshit to assemble my crew of friends.
SURVIVAL
There are about 4000 people under “Born and Raised in San Francisco” on Facebook and more than 66,000 people on the “Pickles” page. Most San Francisco residents are transplants — and it was at this point that I realized that I owned the city just as much as anyone else around. There was something strangely comfortable about meeting venture capitalists from Winnipeg, leather-clad post-punk lesbians from Minnetonka and goths from Rancho Palos Verdes. I realized that all these transplants were coming to this city as a beacon of innovation, inspiration and above all else, weirdness. I wasn’t expressing my full range of weirdness. I stopped worrying about people liking me and I started doing stuff.
Now I like San Francisco. I like that the sadomasochist community does its part to fundraise for breast cancer awareness month. I like that no matter how wealthy the tech industry gets, they still dance like Snoopy characters at the end of the night. I like that between the Beats, Black Power and the Technologists there is a rich history of legendary weirdos - the lunatic fringe that lassos mainstream America into changing their perceptions and beliefs.
Hang in there newbies. It gets better. In a year you’ll feel like you own SF and defend it too.
RESOURCES FOR NEWBIES
- Magazine with some events and cool hidden SF: The Bold Italic
- 6 Awesome SF Hours of YouTube: Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City featuring Laura Linney and Parker Posey
- Local Happenings: SFist
- Arts and Culture: Squidlist
- SF Kickball Association: WAKA
A year ago when we visited Base Elements Gallery in Barcelona, the owner was hesitant to let me film some quick shots of Pez’s graffitied canvases. Now I understand why.
I just got out of Exit Through the Gift Shop - a Banksy film about Thierry Guetta’s rise from amateur filmmaker to Warhol-esque copycat art sensation. Essentially it’s the realization that if you’re even anecdotally related to artists like Banksy, Shepard Fairey and Dave Kinsey, you can pretty much dupe hipsters into buying your screen prints.
Jesus. It’s all pretty simple. If all you want to do is collect eyeballs and money, you simply placate the egos of those with influence, get them to talk about you and then emulate their style as best you can. Forget the concept of a magnum opus. If you don’t care about offering any value or insight to others and you just want to swim through money like Scrooge McDuck then let your minions stencil an eyepatch over someone else’s work. Or better yet, just retweet it and remove the attribution.
Maybe I’m too earnest about constructivism, but this movie made me depressed. There’s nothing wrong with producing a hackneyed piece of steaming crap if your intentions are good. It just seems callous when you reduce the value of works that do aim to move beyond the trivial.
I really do hope this film is a prankumentary like some writers suggest.
Twelve years ago, under the shadow of a huge bodhisattva, a Taiwanese priest threw my i-ching and told me I’d have a good career but that I was a “horse in the gate”.
In Chinese astrology horses are strong, determined and animated, but a horse in the gate is one that is stubborn and impatient. This is the type of employee I am. When I’m given a problem and I’m given the freedom to solve it on my own, I’m happy and I do a great job. But when I’m held back by unnecessary process or bureaucracy, I get bored and I’m bad at hiding it.
ON CULTURE
A few weeks ago I interviewed Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh about his latest book Delivering Happiness. He talked about motivating people and the importance of culture. After just completing NetShelter’s summit, I’m beginning to understand what all this “culture” talk means.
While I was the official project manager of the event, the reality is that much of my planning was simply a checklist for Office Manager Carrie Ann Cleveland to execute upon. If I was onsite by 7am, she was there at 6am hauling furniture. If I was eating lunch with publishers, she was tearing down the rooms. If I was changing the program order, she was calling caterers, delivery people and maintenance staff.
She was and is phenomenal, and if she didn’t already have enough on her plate - she was also answering the switchboard and greeting people as they came into the office. If Carrie wasn’t patient and professional under pressure, imagine how that greeting might appear to an outsider.
CULTURE HAPPENS OVER BEER
There’s a common misconception that the President of the company is its face. But the reality is that a company’s face is formed through unscripted interactions between employees, vendors, partners and even friends of employees.
Happy people unknowingly advocate for you when they’re drunk with their friends. Frustrated people bitch to anyone who’ll listen. Trust me, I know. As an animated “horse”, I’m really good at weaving drunken tales of victory and defeat.
While we can’t expect people to be happy all the time, whether we like it or not, the conversations about our companies and ourselves are happening. The next drunk conversation I have about Carrie Ann will be this:
“If it weren’t for that chick, my head would have freaking exploded. Shepard Fairey should do a poster of her. In the event of a zombie apocalypse I will be choosing her for my team of road warrior renegades.”
While I can’t expect the one she has about me to be as glowing, I hope she feels appreciated. I’m ordering her a gift as I type this.
I recently came across an article written by former Knight News Challenge organizer Susan Mernit asking the question, “Can you Gentrify the Local Web?”
After creating the Oakland Local portal/aggregation site, Mernit’s group has quickly gained visibility and as a result has been accused of harming older area-specific sites including the more established Block Report Radio.
In researching traffic patterns after the launch of her site, Mernit hopes to answer the question,“Does Oakland Local, merely by existing and gaining visibility, inherently harm older local sites (particularly those few run by people of color) by diminishing their audience and attention?”
I found this fascinating. Traditionally gentrification is used to describe diaspora and one ethnic group displacing another from a finite geographic location. But we’re talking about the web here - real estate is cheap, so the finite resource being usurped is audience mind share.
The argument criticizing Oakland Local is then this:
a) There’s only so much mind share in a community to go around; and,
b) Those that share similar identities to the perceived community majority deserve amplified voice.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. Firstly I like to believe that netizens have an insatiable thirst for knowledge and an increasing agnosticism regarding web information. And secondly I wonder - do most netizens consume news to look inwards or outwards?
God I love me a good rant. It reminds me a little of Dave Olson’s Northern Voice 2008 presentation entitled, Fuck Stats, Make Art.
This presentation at the 140 conference by writer Chris Weingarten is pretty darn fascinating. It’s true that those listening to Hype Machine believe they’re getting an alternative rather than the aggregate of common blogger tastes and it’s true that negative reviews rarely get clicks or SEO juice. But, I’m not sure I see it in quite so bleak a light.
I think there are a fair number of netizens that are curious enough to seek out great content and art rather than listen to the “bland middling taste of the internet hive mind”. And regardless of what we think about other people’s content, I really believe the accessibility afforded to so many voices is a good thing for obscure writer, artist and music discovery.
My favorite line of this rant by far is, “Don’t click on things that just exist for you to click on them” - the irony of it is that when someone tells me not to click on something, I totally will.
This past week has been amazingly different from my old days of blogging. I’ve started redirecting urgent pitches to tips[at]readwriteweb.com, I am no longer on the RWW payroll, and I no longer have the authority to publish at will. The reality is, I just write and they take it or leave it.
I’ve written one guest post on Labor-as-a-Service being applied to Haitian disaster relief. No one read it, but I enjoyed writing it and I’m tickled pink that I didn’t feel the need to write about Twitter or Facebook. I am beginning to understand that I no longer have to ignore my bladder or skip lunch in order to do well at my new job at NetShelter. I still have an enormous amount of respect for full time bloggers and while I love writing, I personally am so much better when I’m not under the gun.
I recently received an angry email explaining that UK Facebook profiles have been “hijacked” as a popup survey is asking users whether or not they’ve registered to vote. A “no” response sends them to the UK Electoral Commission’s page.
The note reads, “Facebook should not be a political tool. It should NOT favor voting or not voting. It should be neutral. Some people don’t like the government and don’t like any of the political parties…This is a huge privacy breach.”
I think this is interesting for a number of reasons:
1. This guy thinks I matter to his cause. Not a problem dude, just let me take the glass casing off my red Zuck phone and dial that shit in.
2. Facebook is so huge that users treat it like a public service. But public services are funded by tax dollars and Facebook is a private entity. So basically Facebook can contribute to political campaigns with cash, in-kind donations and any number of political advertisements. Think of it as putting a sign up on your own front lawn.
3. The term “political tool” is being used from a purely utilitarian sense as rather then using Facebook to further a specific party agenda, the service is actually being used by the Electoral Commission to encourage the civil act of voting. As a person who works within the general confines of society, I see this as a convenient method of outreach with a clear conversion funnel. I guess if you’re railing against the system it marks the further marginalization of libertarians / anarchists? Can anarchists really be surprised that the electoral commission isn’t counting them? Those zany and unpredictable kids… Sigh.
4. Special interest messages often appear on Facebook as targeted advertising. This is no government conspiracy, it’s just about the fact that people who start companies like to make money from them - even if that money comes from your government. If you’re a particularly pissed off Brit, write your MP a terse email for letting American Mark Zuckerberg roll around naked in your tax dollars. I’m sorry, this is outside of my jurisdiction. My hands are tied.
Two years ago I sent myself a letter on FutureMe to be delivered on my birthday this year. I just read it and it makes me feel incredibly grateful as I’ve gotten to blog for others, my student loan is paid off, and the love of my life is now my fiancé.
I distinctly remember wanting to send a FutureMe email to myself at 50-years-old, but with the way things were already going then, I doubted that email would be the protocol of the day. So I sent it to 2010 and then it appears I blogged about forgetting what I’d sent.
It occurs to me that buried time capsules really may be the easiest way to send your future self a note. I guess you could be like the dude from Memento and tattoo yourself. You could get inked every year with a stream of consciousness birthday rant. For those with a love of cheese, here’s what I wrote in 2007:
———————————————
Dear FutureMe,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
When you were me you liked to blog: http://www.hiyaa-a.blogspot.com/, if you can’t find that site you should type “Way Back Machine” into the latest search engine and then plug in the URL.
The guy in the photos is the love of your life. At first you hooked up with him because you thought you’d never see him again, but then he was sweet and kept making the 10 hour Greyhound trip to see you. He must’ve thought you were one sexy dame.
You and your love live in San Francisco and are riding a second, albeit more cautious, dot com boom. You like all of the things that other nerds like including: pirates, tesla coils, monkeys, graphic novels, robots and ninjas. You specifically also giggle like a schoolgirl whenever you see former City Lights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and you wish you had something profound to say to him. Today you wish you had something profound to say to you. Sorry, I’m just not a Hallmark kind of person.
In any case, I hope you and your love are happy and healthy. I also hope you’ve paid off your student loan or at least changed your name.
Love,
PresentMe
