has benefited from the better experiments (and been entertained by the sillier ones). Think of San Francisco as both a laboratory of the new and a preserve for the old subversive functionality of cities. Think about what happens if both these aspects get bulldozed by the technology economy. The Internet too may be a laboratory for the new, but even if it is a great organizing tool it is not presently of much value for social critique or the expression of cultural genius.
A 1971 documentary about San Francisco titled “The City That Waits to Die” presumed that San Francisco would be destroyed by its unstable geology, but the earthquake that has come at the millennium has been a temblor of capital and its unstable distribution, altering San Francisco more than could almost any natural disaster. This book is not about the new technology economy, nor is it an economic history of cities or gentrification. It is a portrait of what a sudden economic boom is doing to a single city and a reflection on what is being lost and what its value—its nonmonetary value—is. It focuses almost entirely on San Francisco, not because what is happening here is unique, but because it so resembles what is happening elsewhere that I believe it can stand alone as an example of a crisis in American cities. Hollow City focuses on artists, particularly visual artists, because artists are the indicator species of this ecosystem: from their situation can be gauged the overall breadth or shrinkage of the margin for noncommercial activity, whether that activity is artistic, political, spiritual or social.
A few days after my excursion to the Coltrane church and the park, I go to see Chris Carlsson in his office on Market Street, a big room that with its posters, clippings, abandoned coffee cups, bicycles and beat-up furniture looks more like the living room of an activist household than anyplace else I visit now—and it is an activist household of sorts, both the site for Chris’s typesetting business and a gathering place for myriad political activities. In 1981 Chris cofounded Processed World, a situationist magazine analyzing and promoting subversion of the white-collar workplace. Along with Re/Search publications and the punk-and-populist-politics magazine Maximum Rock’n’Roll, P.W. represents a little-recognized punk-culture golden age for alternative publishing (Processed World folded in 1993, but the other two grind on). In the mid-1990s Chris cofounded Critical Mass, the collective bicycle ride that has since become a global phenomenon to protest the lack of safe space for bicycle transit and to help create that space. For a few days in 1997, San Francisco’s Critical Mass became a national news story about bicyclists’ confrontation with the law and with Mayor Willie Brown. Chris’s concerns with public space, technology and social life continued with the City Lights anthology Reclaiming San Francisco he co-edited, and with his CD-ROM Shaping San Francisco expanding on that history installed in two independent bookstores and the main library to prove that the new technologies need not be privatizing. A guy whose hectic conversational pace seems younger than his forty-something years and whose nearly white, sea-captainish beard seems older, he settled down on one of the thrashed couches in front of a bookcase full of San Francisco’s history to give me his version.
“I’ve lived here since 1978. I came here as a twenty-one-year-old guy and got a job with an environmental group doing canvassing and thought, This is it, I want to live in San Francisco. At that point Haight Street was fifty percent boarded up and overrun with alcohol and heroin and there was no sense of gentrification being around the corner at all. When I got here it felt kind of bleak and slumlike. I didn’t know what to expect and didn’t have a sense of the previous cultures. The punk scene was unfolding around me, and the city’s been reshaping itself around me ever since. I have a sense of connectedness to San Francisco as this site of change. There’s something very exciting about the endless influx of new energy looking for something inexplicably magical. Everybody keeps coming here to renew that quest or had until now. And that’s exactly what I think we’re losing at this moment, this endless arrival of the young, the radical, the political and the marginal and the edgy. They’re not coming here anymore. If they do come here, they can’t stay or they’ve gotta find themselves a six-day-a-week job, which is what people here think is an acceptable mode.
“It’s ironic that, in a city that was the founding place of the eight-hour day in the 1860s, there’s no eight-hour day anymore 140 years later. This is the first city in North America where the eight-hour day was really established. The first technological coup against organized labor was the transcontinental railroad, which broke the back of the eight-hour day in San Francisco. The railroad builders brought all the unemployed laborers back from the east, but before the railroad was finished there was a tight labor market. The workers who were here at the end of the Civil War realized, ‘Hey, we can control this,’ and so they published decrees in the local newspapers announcing the eight-hour day. Group after group did that, and in 1867 they had a march of a thousand workers up Market Street marching in the order by which their trade had established the eight-hour day—but by ’72 it was gone.
The St. John Coltrane congregation arrives at its temporary home.
“Now we live in a world in which the eight-hour day is not only a wistful memory for a lot of people, but they don’t even conceptualize it as an issue. You individually have to deal with remaining competitive in the market, and the number of hours you work is just not a relevant issue to band together with other people about, because there’s no sense of class, no sense of shared commitment. You are an independent entrepreneur in the world. Your job is to work as much and as long as you can in the labor market. It’s a laughable predicament, and there’s not much time to find your way out of it, it’s a bit of a rat’s maze. And that’s speedup. That’s my experience of San Francisco: we are living through the greatest speedup in human history, and nobody’s even saying it out loud.”
“Is there a dot-com culture?”
“No, there’s no culture, we’re all greedy … no,
that’s a joke. A few months ago in Fortune magazine
there was an article called ‘Doing Business
the Dot-Com Way.’ The priority is definitely making
money—fast. It’s a multicultural business—or
maybe forced to be. It’s hard to find skilled people,
so you’re drawing from everywhere in the world:
Asia, Africa, India, Europe—anywhere skills have
been acquired.
“It’s a fast-paced industry, with long hours and
constant learning—though sometimes it’s not the
money, it’s the adrenaline.”
“The company is in e-marketing. We provide
loyalty solutions. We build the technology that
makes people come back to a website.
We think of it as a tool that manages loyalty
between customer and company.
“Most of the people in this business
are very young, and they don’t all have
experience in communication.
So
