Last year living close by, I found this place because they play classical music. It’s the usual set-up in Berkeley, as in a lot of other places across this country: A bunch of people sitting at tables with one computer each, hacking away, and drinking coffee or tea while enjoying the benefits of free internet. Traffic on the outside. Traffic on the inside. It’s not your internet cafe of the 1990’s. Everyone brings their own computer these days. All these kids have broadband at home, so it’s something else. It has to be the non-action, which is also a kind of action.
These places are close relatives to the hangouts of the internet stone age: I know from last year a lot of the people who come here are regulars. The guy who just evacuated the bathroom (the loo, as the they say in the old world), walked very slowly last year, too. When I lived here. He’s about 80 – now. I know. We talk. He wasn’t much younger last year. He used to be a professor at UC Berkeley, and he’s still a lot sharper than I will ever be. In mathematics, that is. He talks about that. And the future of UC Berkeley.
The guy at the bar said hello, nice to see you — as if I never had left.
It is quiet, it is social and yet it is weirdly individual at the same time.
Now I find myself here again, after making the 2-hour train ride from Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley to Berkeley — the city that never grew up after the 1960’s. There is something to be said for cities that, like some people, refuse to grow up. Walk down the streets of Berkeley, and you know for a fact that it’s not Palo Alto. Of course, it goes the other way too. The two cities are worlds apart, as are its two main universities – Stanford University and UC Berkeley. Kind of reminds me of Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Disposessed, where two worlds exist side by side, and far apart. Her father was a famed anthropologist at UC Berkeley, a certain Alfred L. Kroeber, if I am not mistaken. Read him in college.
Ursula LeGuin, too. Read lots. So maybe the two worlds, in a manner of speaking, was Berkeley and San Francisco – who can tell? Whatever else the world (or worlds) is, it is a disjointed speculation. All writers know it. A joint, so to speak. Witness Republican foreign policy in the US. Or male French politicians in general. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs qualify for jointness.
Stanford, south of San Francisco, is rich, serene, beautiful and in certain ways efficient to the point of being monasterial. This means: You are in, or you are out. You pray the prayer, or you don’t. You observe the Pope, but here is the twist: YOU get to decide whether that is Mammon, or Knowlegde. Mammon is a beast, and Knowledge is a virtue but how does one distinguish when both cost a lot of money? You may feel a little like a living Rodin sculpture walking around in all that chiseled softness. I like it, and I have good friends there. But I am a sucker for conundrums – so there you go.
UC Berkeley, on the other hand, is a beehive, crowded onto a few poorly mantained city blocks. No one smokes in Palo Alto (at least you have to look for them). In Berkeley not that many smoke tobacco on the street, but you can get a free high just walking down some of those Berkeley streets. Try Bancroft or Durant. Weed is bought and sold, smoked, and inhaled.
There’s lot’s of money in Palo Alto, and few people begging on the streets. The reverse is true of Berkeley. And one can speculate as to what is the cause of what, and whether there is at all a consequence of anything in the world of money.
Yesterday on CNN, I heard three of the presidential candidates seeking the Democratic nomination label big banks, finance and Wall Street a “bunch of crooks”. There is that. Not what you would have heard four years ago. Bernie Sanders from Vermont running for president on a Democratic Socialist ticket and sticking in the race unexpectedly long. There is definitely that, too. I heard there was a line stretching around the block when he last spoke in Minneapolis, that other hometown of mine — where, like in Portland Oregon, common wisdom continues to defy politics, by beating the conservative consensus one time at at time.
Now, I am not partisan. Believe me.
But here we are. In Berkeley. In a smoke free and dope-free coffee house currently playing something that sounds like Joseph Haydn – and all us guys and girls hacking away. Not sure. About Haydn. The hacking is ok – I don’t have time for that sort of stuff at home and at work, in ol’ Norway, but I met these guys in Palo Alto last week, and it was like, hey, dude. Innovation. So I hack.
And then there is that second reflection on “Friendliness works” – started in the previous blogpost:
It’s about a 10 minute walk from my hotel to the Berkeley Espresso Bar. Another 20 mins. and I would be at my house from last year. I incidentally ran in to my landlord from last year, in Palo Alto. She’s a friend. But that’s another story.
Here is my note on how Friendliness works – stage 2:
One time I came in to the Berkeley Espresso Bar last year, I had forgotten the key to my bike lock. So I asked the guy at the bar, and what did he do? He opened up the door to the storage room, besides the counter, and told me “just put it in there”. It sat there for most of the day.
I’d like to see the coffee house at home that would even consider it. And strangely enough, the guy remembered me. We had a little conversation. Enough to convince me that the world is going to last at least another day. And that whatever innovation is, it is a richer story than the Stanford one. Add the Berkeley one.
Down the street I stopped by the place where I got my bike last year.
They say there’s a huge fair on Shattuck Avenue tomorrow. “You can hang out here all day”, the guy added.
I call this society. And I welcome my self for having made the transition via 2 hours of train traveling between Ursula Le Guin’s – supposedly – two worlds. It certainly is two worlds for me. Tomorrow I am having breakfast with solid friends, who connect. And they come from all over the world. One of them is a friend from my local city in the margins of the world: He once came there, then he lived there for 20 years, and now he lives in Berkeley – wondering what happens next, and how come his kids are so strangely at home, at the same time, in the UK, in Australia, in the US, and in Norway? Me, I can only count Norway and the USA – a place I cherish. Berkeley, in particular.
Then there is Iceland – I am guilty of high subjectivity there. And have been for years. Can’t help it, but my tour of places to stick to does not follow the pattern – I once came there, and I saw the Northern fandango, whatever that phrase means. Reykjavik is another Berkeley. And another story.
Then I sat down to write this little piece. Not exactly high-level prose – maybe just my raising my hands, like Bernie Sanders does. In a wide swing. Pointing at someone. Now time for a walk in Berkeley before it gets dark. It’s a nice place. As usual, the fog is rolling in from across the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. And Hillary Clinton is most likely the next US president.