In reply to Venkatesh Rao's Blyg — Venkatesh Rao
Other cities are relatively new to involutionary states and are borderline aware of it, so there's a bit of an edge to the performance. San Francisco is like that.
San Francisco is hardly new to being a center of cultural evolutionary scenes – it just does it in waves, and one wave may or may not build on what has gone before. It is very good at spawning new subcultures. Erik Davis must have written on this:
- Your instinct is right — Davis is squarely the person to look to here. His body of work is essentially a sustained investigation of exactly what you're describing: SF/Bay Area as a serial generator of subcultural waves, not a one-off scene.
- A few of the most relevant threads from his work:
- Davis has described himself as "a culture historian and journalist who has extensively covered California's fringe movements." That coverage spans from the Gold Rush forward. He explicitly frames the Bay Area's history as wave-structured.
- He has described how "a certain pragmatism about belief and practice entered into the cultural bloodstream," followed by "successive waves of people coming here for health, to escape tradition, to find their fortune and to dream their material dreams."
- His key structural claim is that "San Francisco is the only city in the history of the country that has basically escaped a Protestant or Puritan influence" — which is his explanation for why it keeps generating new scenes rather than consolidating around a dominant normative culture.
- In his 90s writing on the rave scene (now archived on Burning Shore), he articulates the carrier-wave mechanics directly: "The soul of this city has long fed on frequently nebulous visions of virtual reality, LSD, Zen, brain machines, and pagan tribalism, and raves have become a vital carrier wave that focuses and redefines all those disparate signals."— the idea that each new wave redefines the accumulated prior signals is exactly your point about waves not necessarily building on what came before.
- He has also noted that by the time Burning Man emerged from "blue-collar bohemians in San Francisco in the 1980s," the broader countercultural movement "had splintered into a whole bunch of little underground subcultures, most of which weren't very visible outside of their own world[s]."— again the pattern of fragmentation and re-emergence rather than linear continuity.
- The best single place to dig in is probably his Substack Burning Shore (burningshore.com), where his work covers "the intersection of alternative religion, media, the popular imagination, and the cultural history of California," framed through what he calls "California consciousness." His 2006 book The Visionary State is the most systematic treatment, using physical California locations to anchor the historical arc of these waves.
Thought occurs to me that what makes a city culturally big (not necessarily population-wise) is that its voluntary long-term inhabitants are really into each other. This is involution at an urban scale. An entire city that is collectively a hikikomori. Some have been doing it so long the city is not aware of the fact. That's New York. Other cities are relatively new to involutionary states and are borderline aware of it, so there's a bit of an edge to the performance. San Francisco is like that. This is interesting because it allows the city to cohere in a way that makes it a more predictable macro unit. William Sewell had a notion of "eventful time" marking out things like revolutions as "special" in that same sense of predictive coherence. I think this kind of involution is the same thing in (social) space. Just like bodies begin behaving like liquids at sufficient density, causing stampedes, minds too undergo some sort of phase shift at sufficient density in cognitive space.