The Great San Francisco Exhale: Part 1

Submitted by Rob on November 17, 2005 - 00:39.
Probably the statisticians noticed it first. The hard core number crunchers that supply The Economist with it's information if not it's perspective. The ones that love numbers, see the world as numbers, see the world in numbers. And see it before the photographers and the writers and the commentators, your eyes and ears.

The men and women whose five senses are coordinately attuned to counting, who even though fundamentally there is only addition, build whirring worlds of numbers, full of continents of information, traversed by formulas complex enough to appear to you and I as magic, arcane, unintelligibly, and vaguely threatening. There is no fear there, there are no consequences.

You and I can feel it now. Can't get away from it. It feels like: standing barefoot on a steel floor, with a current pervading it. It feels like: peering over a cliff. It feels like: there's somebody right behind you.

Some of us went crazy for a dream. It caught us up. It took us away, and as it took us away, we ran after it, not knowing that as we lunged that it was not our strength that propelled us but the thing itself that pulled us. 

The dream looked like money and it looked like peace. It looked like freedom and it looked like progress. It sounded like pounding, hypnotizing drums. A few of us went all the way. Everybody else pushed them along. Somebody called it a bubble, but nobody paid any attention to that.

On the surface, it looked like we were all chasing money, gobs of it, enough to permanently solve our problems, resolve our needs, pre-solve our desires. Some achieved the name of money (trying to say money on paper), most got over paid and learned to rationalize our ostentation by masking it with futurism (talking about big cars and palm pilots). 

In the words between us, it looked like a new age, another era, in need of a name, like the industrial age, the space age, the information age. Somebody called it the new economy. Not very economical. We were also chasing...We chased this progress like we chase kites. Like a bumper chases an SUV (ech).
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( categories: Essays | Rob Prideaux )