Well, sure. Unlike traditional émigres to San Francisco, who came for the landscape or to live in a human-scale, cosmopolitan, liberal city or to explore whatever personal desires, strange art forms and political activism they couldn't in their own hometown, the dot-com people are coming mostly for the money -- whatever San Francisco has been historically or culturally is beside the point. San Francisco is a collection of distinctive villages with their own microclimates and strong community feeling, from North Beach to Noe Valley to the Haight to Bernal Heights, but that's not why it's become the top destination for graduating MBAs. Dot-com people just need a place to crash after they work 15 hours a day -- sleep is for the weak and sickly. They haven't lived here long enough to know or care about civic issues, for the most part --- and for those who subscribe to the prevailing high-tech orthodoxy of libertarianism, there's not much reason for them to care.

Larry Rothstein, a San Francisco plaintiff's attorney for 20 years, talks about the "I've got mine so screw you" attitude of the dot-com folks he has been running into "in the last couple of years" on San Francisco juries. "They're just here to make a buck and quickly leapfrog up the corporate ladder," he says. "They grew up under Reagan-Bush and parrot the line about how frivolous lawsuits are bad for business and how nothing must interfere with profit flow of a company. They're under- and un-educated -- they've only ever worked in high tech, can't imagine what it's like to not have insurance, not be able to afford a car, not be able to get a job. They have sick pay, they have a safety net, they have money, and can't understand that there are people who don't. They have a total lack of spirituality or soul. They're a new generation of Republicans."

This in San Francisco, the city that all the world likes to deride for the silliness of its political correctness? Truly, these are end times.

A friend who's an exec at a high-tech P.R. firm commented to me on what he called "the voracious sense of entitlement" he runs into in the dot-com kids he employs, fickle creatures with no loyalty. Yet we both know that while he and I came of age during the era of guys with Ph.D.s in economics driving cabs and stagflation, the dot-coms have never known anything but a bull market.

I don't want to demonize the entire dot-com world. Long before the Net boom, many liberal-arts flakes ended up working in computing because in the Bay Area, that's where the jobs were. And it's a good thing that former English majors from Cal can go on to become productive members of society working as sys-admins. There are carpetbaggers, yes, but there are also plenty of newcomers who both live and work in the city, and proudly so. Take bike riding, an important measure of good urban citizenship: The Net start-ups are much more bike-friendly (and thus, sensitive to the stressed city infrastructure they are located in) than more established companies. CNet, for example, has space for about one-third of its employees to commute by bike.

But the good dot-com citizens, at least at this point, seem to be in the minority. Take politics. The in-flow of new people into the political process is what a city relies on to keep it vital. But San Francisco's newest arrivals seem utterly disengaged. Admittedly, the city's current mayoral race, an embarrassing three-way battle between a corrupt, out of touch, master-of-machine-politics mayor, a scary, slimy political consultant and a well-meaning anti-charismatic former mayor/cop, doesn't inspire much passion -- nor does the who's-a-bigger-victim identity politics that have dominated much of San Francisco civic discussion for the past decades. But there's a lot more to politics here than that. Besides, what has San Francisco always been but the place where, if you didn't like the politics, you could go out and make some of your own? The late Harvey Milk may have been the first out gay supervisor, but he was a supe for all the city. Jello Biafra was a mayoral candidate.

Remembrance of things past: Part 2

Back in 1981, I attended something called the "Bad Attitude in the Woods Picnic," a get-together in a state-owned redwood grove just north of San Francisco for folks interested in Processed World, a goofball anarcho-situationist publication that was the mother of all zines, focussed on though not limited to critiques of information technology, and whose commentaries on computers, sex, work and play still ring true today. There I met Chris Carlsson, PW's chief instigator, a sly wit of pastiche and a subversive of the best kind. Chris has gone on to be a ringleader for Critical Mass and of "Shaping San Francisco," a sort of collaborative people's multimedia history of San Francisco, and was co-editor for the City Lights anthology "Reclaiming San Francisco," which contains essays on everything from the lost natural history of the city to the origins of its foodie culture. In other words, Chris is just the sort of home-grown home-brew rebel-creator who embodies the good wackitude of the city.

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