The strangest thing about all of this to me is how contemporary SF seems to have absorbed basically none of the city's previous culture. You can detect the commercial, artistic, cultural histories of NYC in the various industries there, from media to finance. Ditto for LA, or London, or Paris.

In SF though, it’s as if the previous culture of the place has just been overwritten entirely. Hard to believe that it’s the same city which Kerouac, the Beats or Hippies ran around in. Or even the historically wealthy but cultural old money class, like Lewis Lapham’s family, or Michael Douglas’s character in The Game. Nope, all gone, and certainly no one there has ever read On the Road.

I suppose you could probably just blame this on how the people at the top behave: totally uninterested in funding culture, unlike the billionaires of yesteryear that built concert halls and libraries. And so a city which is hyper focused on one economic activity has no space for anything else.