North Beach: Counterculture x Tech Advancement

I find that over the years I’ve learned a lot from my neighborhood in SF, North Beach. I think it represents the intersection of counterculture & technological advancement. Living here has always felt special. This year especially, it’s made me reflect on why.

I’ve always been drawn to math, physics, & technology when it comes to academics & my career. Outside of school or work, my passions lived elsewhere though: traveling, listening to music, spending time with friends, learning about history & culture (the way I wanted to), experiencing life. I emphasize learning about history & culture the way I wanted to because there is such a wide range of things you can explore under that umbrella & I never enjoyed the academic approach… it always felt constraining & boring. Same with English class. It frustrated me that we had to read the same books & write papers that all came to similar conclusions in a very rigid format.

For a long time, it felt like I had to choose between the two, like they couldn’t exist in the same lane. My work life was going to be built on my book smarts, sitting at a computer doing the technical build of something someone else designed. Then my personal life would be where I explored everything else. North Beach has been the first place that’s really fed both of these parts that coexist inside of me.

On any given Sunday, you can find this happening in North Beach. I think it perfectly captures its essence.

There are two main coffee shops I’ve gone to in North Beach this year, & they capture this contrast better than anything else. One is Compton’s Coffee House. The other is Caffe Trieste.

Compton’s opened a couple of years ago. On any given weekday, the place is filled with people working throughout the day & you can tell a good chunk of them are tech workers. I was there yesterday. I went in & said hi to Alex, one of Compton’s friendly faces who always remembers my order (even after I switched it up recently). I admired the music they were playing, which usually happens because whoever’s working has aux for the day & it rotates. I couldn’t find a table though… which was a problem. My head was on a swivel & I saw someone packing up their stuff. I walked over & asked if I could snag the table when she left. She laughed & said, “OH it’s one of those coffee shops.” Yes, yes it is.

I think tech workers like working there for a reason. It’s one of the few places that’s extremely accepting of people working there all day without feeling sterile, overpriced, or snobby. My observation is that a lot of coffee shops that attract tech workers lean that way. Compton’s doesn’t. That’s what’s made it special to me. It’s where I go to do a lot of technical work without feeling like I’m living in a dystopian world. I can throw my AirPods in & knock some shit out for a few hours in a shared space with other people building startups, designing, or coding.

Caffe Trieste, on the other hand, has been open since 1956. You walk in & immediately know it hasn’t changed much. It’s cash only & it’s usually packed with regulars. You see very few laptops & the ones you do see mostly belong to writers or designers. I don’t come into Caffe Trieste to write code or do technical work. In fact, I’m sitting in Caffe Trieste right now writing this.

Today, I sat next to two older men chatting over coffee & you could tell they’d been coming here for decades. I try not to wear AirPods when I’m here because there’s something special about listening to the conversations around you. One time I sat next to a group of regulars talking about the 60’s & 70’s. One told a story about being on tour with Santana. Another talked about the different drugs he’d consumed during that era.

As I started writing today, the two guys beside me struck up a conversation. They told me they’d been regulars for 30+ years. We talked about the history of North Beach & the SF music scene. I walked away with a list of things to dive into about the SF punk scene in the 80’s based on their recommendations.

The thing about Caffe Trieste is that it holds its history while staying open to newcomers. They aren’t anti-work or anti-laptop, they just want to protect the thing that made it special in the first place. If people started coming in & working the way they do at Compton’s, there would probably be an issue… & rightfully so. Compton’s feels like a space for younger people to work in, while still feeling like a true neighborhood spot. The establishments that have been in North Beach for decades & the new ones that have successfully integrated into the neighborhood have both known how to evolve while honoring the foundation.

I find that this way of thinking applies to so many areas of life. It’s shaped how I problem solve & create. I like to understand what’s been done before & why. What worked & what didn’t? I can take the combination of those lists & learn from them. I combine that with my own ideas & find you can end up with something that honors the people who came before you, while still creating your own solution.

This year I’ve specifically found myself learning from the 60’s & 70’s when it comes to music & culture. A lot of this inspiration stems back to North Beach. Haight-Ashbury is the neighborhood most associated with that era & hippie culture, but the Beat Movement that started in North Beach in the 50’s paved the way for it. North Beach was still an area that drew a lot of creatives at the time.

What did those movements stand for? Freedom, peace, equality. Breaking out of rigid societal molds & opening new ways of living for younger generations. It was the complete opposite of how their parents lived. But this is where I think that era went wrong… they wanted to go completely against the grain. It was freedom, it was no limits, but I think as humans we’re still built to have some discipline in our lives. We need to be grounded. You can’t be away on an endless vacation with your head in the clouds because it’s unsustainable, both physically & economically.

That era fueled incredible art & culture, but when you read the stories of what it ultimately did to the artists, the come down was often devastating. BUT there was something to it. Everyone was creating. They were connecting. There were fights for equality & peace. People had HOPE. It was effective in communicating those ideas & igniting change, but it burned out.

I obviously didn’t live through the 60’s or 70’s, but I’ve lived through my own version of a cultural shift. In both, you can see what happens when movements lose their grounding before they’ve built something sustainable.

I’ve been actively observing another version of that inside the tech industry, from my first internship in SF in 2017 to now. That’s just my career, but I also grew up alongside the evolving tech scene, which is what drove me to want to be a part of it. I was born in ’97, so I sit on the cusp of Gen Z & Millennial, which I honestly think is a bit of a superpower. I grew up before iPad kids. I was outside playing with friends. There was one computer in the house that you could play games on. I was in middle & high school right as social media was becoming a thing. Social media was simpler then & people still used it in a goofy, non-performative way.

I’ve seen how far we’ve gotten from the point. I’ve watched how the industry tries to automate everything. How it has become increasingly capitalistic while forgetting one of the reasons technology was so special in the first place. To build cool shit.

I find the way the industry has handled the advancement of AI to be pretty tacky & reckless. Not saying everyone has done this, but as a whole it’s embarrassing to see what this has turned into. Every billboard in the Bay is AI-related & it’s clear that people are racing to cash in on the trend rather than thinking about how this actually impacts our human experience. Name a product that hasn’t loudly shoved AI into it. AI is a really fucking cool piece of technology & when used with intention, it can elevate our lives & free us up to do more creative, thoughtful things… BUT we actually have to use it correctly. We also need to think about the implications on climate & energy usage.

On the other side of things, we can’t have people living in the past trying to be anti-AI across the board. I understand the fear, but realistically, it’s here to stay. AI doesn’t belong in every application of technology, but there are places where it genuinely improves day-to-day life. Those are the areas worth embracing.

I find that if you tone down the extremes on both ends, the reckless capitalization of tech & the unsustainable idealism of counterculture, you end up on a much more sustainable path. What if we took what the 60’s & 70’s were fighting for, the human experience, creation, community, equality, & combined those beliefs with where technology is now? How do we use technology to support those ideas while still evolving? These are the questions we should be asking ourselves.

As I create with my technical skills, my baseline questions are simple. How does this solve a real-world problem? How does this enhance the human experience rather than extract from it? I want to build things that fit seamlessly into someone’s day-to-day. I want to build things that actually make people want to connect, with others or with themselves. That’s what I think technological advancement should be.

So every day I find myself sitting & learning in these coffee shops at the ground floor of the place that’s paving the future of technology & the place that paved the way for counterculture movements before. I’m right at that intersection. Literally.