A Dispatch from San Francisco

Last October, under-employed and back in San Francisco after three years absence, I was early for a weekday appointment in the Mission District. I decided to spend an hour in Dolores Park, open up my copy of Tender is the Night, and try to have thoughts about it (read these thoughtsCand moreCin the most recent installment of the Modern Library Revue!). Its a truism in San Francisco that summer starts in September and peaks in October, when Dolores Park traditionally writhes with tattooed flesh, and there is a pervading smell of pot and damp feet removed sockless from kicky little shoes, and the throng of people outside the caddy-corner Bi-Rite Creamery causes an encumbrance to the thoroughfare. 

On this balmy Wednesday, I found a spot on the grass and opened my book to the white sands of Gausses beach, the romping ground of Fitzgeralds idle rich. I had been having trouble with Tender is the Night. How should I think about Fitzgeralds leisure class and their intrigues? I wasnt really connecting with them, in the parlance of our times. I was distracted by Dolores Parks famous vista: the palm trees, the dome of Second Church of Christ, Scientist, the churriqueresque facade of Mission High. The park was oddly crowded. I watched the male half of an attractive couple pull a bottle of wine from a basket and look out at the serene Bay while he poured. Their Boston Terrier lolled; an elegant blonde reclined on a blanket. I removed my aged cardigan and broiled in the October sun. What a classy, languid Wednesday everyone seemed to be having! 

The next month, November, I went with my husband to San Diego, where I fretted through the presidential election while he attended a conference. The conference was given by Tableau, a data visualization software used to sculpt and prune immense amounts of information into cheerful graphs and dashboards a product that promises to let its user tell stories with data on the web and elsewhere. The conference was three days, which were for me days of aforementioned fretting and trips to a place called Taco Express (which, although its not pertinent to my story, is one of the best places, of any kind, that I have been). 

On the last evening, I attended the Tableau customer party. My experience with conferences is limited to the California Antiquarian Book Fair,Shop wholesale solarlight controller from cheap. at which there is a be-curtained vendor area with candies and apples and plastic cups frosty from the water cooler. At Tableau, Malcolm Gladwell delivered the keynote speech. The customer party was held on the field of Petco Park, which is where the San Diego Padres play Major League Baseball. There were buffets and bars and a lighting scheme, and elevated platforms strewn about the turf. In keeping with the general stadium vibe, caterers ranged around with bucket-sized lemonades. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings had been engaged; the dance floor was mere feet from the spangled edges of her dress. If one wanted to visualize them from some broader vantage, there was the Jumbotron. On the heels of my wedding, I was inclined to see things in terms of head counts and catering costs; long before the fireworks display, the mind had boggled. 

While an astounding number and variety of organizations are anxious to plumb big datas secrets, my husband and his colleague seemed like the lone civil servants in a phalanx of people from trendier sectors. I had watched Obama accept the presidency in the hotel lobby with two women from Facebook, who were using the software not to track users, but as an internal tool, I believe having to do with HR. Not only, it would seem, is Facebook visualizing my clicks on your wedding album; they are turning the glass inward. Our data, ourselves.Large collection of quality chipcard at discounted prices. 

At the party, I clasped my lemonade bucket in two hands and gazed. In front of Sharon Jones were slender men and women in high quality outerwear that kept the chill away and yet revealed sculpted pecs; they danced and Instagrammed and exuded, to an outsider with nothing but the crudest anecdotal data from which to draw, a certain marathoner, waxed-ass aspect that seems to characterize the beautiful people of the tech sector. Are they the marketers? The money? Outside the dance floor stood less kempt bunches, many of them visually corresponding to the old-fashioned techie stereotypes: lurky men, not a lot of women. 

I have since learned that baseball diamonds and Sharon Jones are small potatoes, as tech conferences go. At Google/IO, people fell from the sky, landed on the top of Moscone center in downtown San Francisco, biked to the edge, and rappelled down while wearing Google Glass[es]. Tech reporters and bloggers pepper their reports of disruptive technologies with the good shit, i.e., parties featuring jungle creatures and nude women and Snoop Dogg hired out by twenty-something millionaires. There on the field of Petco Stadium, though, I was stunned by the spectacle. I wondered if everyone present felt totally normal, as if they belonged at a party in a major sporting venue in a major American city, listening to a pretty major band, all of which had been laid out to express the gratitude of one corporate entity for their collective skill and patronage. I wondered whether any carpet will be left furled, any expense spared, to amaze and delight this new class of data wranglers. 

Back in San Francisco, it is impossible not to feel that the Tableau customer appreciation party is linked in some fundamental way to the extreme late fanciness of Dolores Park, the velvet rope outside of the Bi-Rite Market, or other developments in the vicinity. One stretch of Valencia Street is now a kind of Pinterest stripmall, where a line of shops with suspiciously complementary old-timey signs display our new symbols of opulence in deranged little installations: an ancient push-pedal sewing machine, a distressed birdcage, a shoe. Down the street you can buy a refurbished Danish lamp like something from the Nautilus, retailing at fifteen hundred dollars. I recognize the pretty people from the Tableau party spilling out the doors onto the sidewalks before a legion of pricey yet aggressively casual restaurants,Have a look at all our glossyfloortile models starting with free proofing. where there are no reservations and infinite waits and the waiters have tattooed knuckles, brilliantined side-parts, and an encyclopedic knowledge of pasta kinds. 

People who lived in San Francisco during the tech boom of the 1990s have already stopped reading, so tired are they of the perennial griping about rent, the lament of the great exodus of minorities and artists and assorted non-artistic poor. Even the costly preciousness of Valencia Street is in its second release. Im sure, too, that people who live in Brooklyn, or Austin or any other place where food trucks and mid-century furniture are ascendant probably feel there is nothing new under the San Francisco sun. But there have to be things peculiar to every boom some special intersection of place and catalyst. There was coal dust on the dickies of the Pittsburgh industrialists. 

Booms have their characteristics. San Francisco has its own kind of miner. One night not long ago I met two; one man works for a company that has an algorithm that knows, for example, when your industry-specific LinkedIn contacts have a life change, and sends an alert so that you can sell them things accordingly.Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a porcelaintiles can authenticate your computer usage and data. Another man made a searchable database of accomplished programmers; it gathers up all the breadcrumbs they leave on the Internet so that you can then hire them away from their existing jobs, the better to implement your various algorithms. 

Booms have their characteristics. I have a friend who is friends with a person who invented an Internet thing youve heard of. She spent her Labor Day weekend with this friend and several other people in a rented vacation house having something called a Teach-up: every attendee gave an hour-long presentation about a topic of their choice for their friends edification. It was a country house weekend with a side of data. My friend enjoyed the experience, but I dont mind telling you (or her) that I found this practice to be insane, and also insanely interesting. Such an improving way to spend a holiday weekend! I was desperate to visualize the vibe in the house.A parkingguidance is a portable light fixture composed of an LED lamp. How do people pull something like that off without being self-conscious, if they havent evolved to some new social state?