I feel like people discount how much the “weird” contributed to the success of SV. You had The Grateful Dead in Palo Alto, Clifford Stoll types in Berkeley, etc. [1]
Monocultures aren’t very conducive to creativity.
Monocultures aren’t very conducive to creativity.
And how can we be sure SV is a monoculture? Because in San Francisco, and now Austin, residents are complaining loudly about the blight of uniform techies with nothing to offer the community at large but glass skyscrapers and hunched backs. Case closed!
It's the mops who have trouble. They're always like "X place used to be cool. There were all these people who did Y here". Well, those people are elsewhere and you don't know it because you were never one of them. You were a groupie. So the mops always get annoyed at some point not because some lower class of mop arrived but because there is only so many of them that can exist without ruining their thing.
So, usually it's earlier groupies complaining about later groupies.
"Man, Oakland used to be full of artists"
"Oh yeah? What kind of art did you make?"
"Oh not me. I studied chemical engineering. But there were all these artists back then."
Riiiiight
See essay "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution":
> The new scene draws fanatics. Fanatics don’t create, but they contribute energy (time, money, adulation, organization, analysis) to support the creators.
> Creators and fanatics are both geeks.2 They totally love the New Thing, they’re fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs, and they spend all available time either doing it or talking about it.
> If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture.
> If the scene is unusually exciting, and the New Thing can be appreciated without having to get utterly geeky about details, it draws mops.3 Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time, and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.
* https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
* 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21963626
Geeks create most of the artifacts & traditions of that culture, but the entire community (either passively or actively) contributes, supports, and adds to it.
When that culture blows up, the vultures move there because they find value to exploit in that culture, while simultaneously supplanting/destroying/building over that culture.
In your example, maybe the local ("earlier groupie") who studied chemical engineering knows the artists, supports their shows, smokes with them, shares his or her life with them, and has the culture ingrained in them even if that person isn't directly an artist or geek.
Continuing the example, contrast this with a "later groupie" who would move to said location. This person might move into a new highrise development that used to be the warehouse where aforementioned artist & chemical engineer would kick it on weekends. The vulture will also support noise ordinance laws that would kill the informal events/performances of the culture that said chemical engineer used to attend, and where said artist would perform his or her art when that person was still 'underground'.
- what you describe about SV isn’t as much a culture, as it is psychographic homogeneity that is in its own way unifying [1]
- but about how “weird” as a culture can be good and important, I see that as the existence and acceptance of various sub and counter cultures, leading to an air of vibrancy, excitement, and “cool“.
[1] where people view the world the same way and have similar values and aspirations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychographics
I've never been to SV, but when you put it like that - it sounds pretty damn awesome.