Comment by anonnon
5 days ago
> 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.
So you're saying migration changes a society's culture, sometimes to the point of ruination?
There was a high-profile example of this phenomenon recently in NYC, where a 35yo nobody managed to win the mayoral election with fake smiles and empty promises, because 40% of the city is now foreign-born. Had only native-born Americans (not even just those born in NYC) voted, he would have lost.
And it was telling how differently his opponents presented themselves, emphasizing, in their dying outer borough accents, their "toughness"--an attribute once thought essential for the mayor of America's largest city to possess, especially for anyone with a memory of the city before (and during) 9/11. Now? Apparently superfluous. And the victor's ever-present smile, rather than off-putting to the city's voters, who in the past might have perceived it at best as phony, and at worst, as more befitting one the city's countless mentally ill transients, instead unexpectedly found it endearing.
> a 35yo nobody managed to win the mayoral election with fake smiles and empty promises, because 40% of the city is now foreign-born. Had only native-born Americans (not even just those born in NYC) voted, he would have lost.
Ignorant on so many levels, I truly feel sorry for people who have been brainwashed by their media to think so uncritically.
And why does it matter in any way whatsoever what would have happened if immigrants who gained citizenship couldn't vote? They can vote, and did. So? That is about as relevant as the observation that if Mamdani wouldn't have won if he ran for mayor of Tampa. So? What's the point? I'm truly curious.
America is a multiracial democracy fueled by waves of immigration, NYC especially. Those people live there and are citizens. What's your point?
> waves of immigration
It's not just immigrants. Mamdani did extremely well with the college demo, a great many of whom are transplants paying through the nose for the "big city college experience" who have as little of a stake in the city as many recent immigrants.
> What's your point?
I'm not sure how much more clearly I can spell this out for you. The NYC of 20 years ago never would have elected someone as soft as Mamdani. Look at him, and then look at his immediate predecessor. Look at his opponents. Look at how they crafted their messaging, how they emphasized their "toughness" in a vain attempt to a appeal, in accents fast fading, to a city that is likewise fast fading.
No, what an asinine construction.
What has changed the city's culture is money. As mentioned in the article, virtually every billboard and advertising surface downtown is for some SAAS or B2B company. Every startup that gets capitalized dumps a load of money into saturation advertising making itself look like the new hotness, and the corresponding rise in advertising prices means nothing is advertised but tech and ways to make money with tech. A lot of the adverts even look the same.
That's not the product of migrants. SF is turning into a ghost town because the entire downtown area increasingly feels like the inside of a conference center. There isn't anything fun to do or places to go besides work, nothing that might appeal to youth, nothing that isn't business focused. Can you imagine being a teenager in SF? You go to the middle of town and every advert is just an elevator pitch for HR services or devops or model training, and most of the them aren't even visually interesting to look at. Entire subway stations are taken over with adverts touting how agentic or accelerant some new brand is. It's boring. A Japanese acquaintance of mine who visited SF recently asked 'don't people here think about anything but work?'
How you ended up blaming this humanity-free environment on 'too many migrants' is beyond me.