San Francisco's DNA is mischief

I guess I'm a prank historian now

Mischief: playfulness that is intended to create trouble.

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Before San Francisco was known as the tech capital of the world, it was the city of the weirdos. Mischief in the city belonged to various communities: hippies, artists, scientists, pranksters, hackers. On surface, it might look like they were busy with different occupations; but at its root, these people were animated by the same playfulness and itch to question the rules. They also hung out at the same parties, shared intellectual references, and dated across friend groups. That cross-pollination, coupled with the mischief spirit, is what made the SF bay area so generative.¹

The tech boom didn’t kill San Francisco’s soul by bringing tech to the city. It killed it by bringing normies in patagonia vests. The real loss ins’t art vs tech, it’s mischief vs conformity. The status players who would previously seek a stable career ladder in finance started studying CS. The very origin story of how tech as an industry started was forgotten. Steve Jobs, one of the fathers of this ecosystem, was immortalized as a difficult boss instead of a rebel who wanted to make tools for other rebels.

Apple team in 1984 – Photograph by Norman Seeff

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For my whole life, I dreamt of living surrounded with other rebels. As a child in France, I grew up making subversive art. Then, I dropped out of high school at 16 years old to build my own school (my first attempt at bringing rebels together). At 18, I had reached the ceiling of what my home country had to offer and went to travel the world. When I finally landed in San Francisco, I had heard tales about its mischievous history, and felt the cultural loss many people were raving about. Soon enough though, I also discovered that this lineage was kept alive in pockets of the city; and I got nerd-sniped into learning all about it.

One of my first findings was a book: Tales of The Cacophony Society.² It retraces the history of the legendary SF-based prankster group, active from the 80s up to around the 2000. One of my favorite pranks started by Cacophony Society (and which has become a yearly tradition since) is the salmon run: in 1994, during the bay-to-breakers run, a few of the group’s members crashed the run costumed as salmons, and started running in the opposite direction. The reason why I love it so much beyond the fun, is for the well fitted metaphor of SF’s weirdo culture: the most creative people are always going against the current of what everybody else is doing and thinking about.

Bay to Breakers in 2018 - photograph by Douglas Zimmerman

I ended up cold-emailing one of the leaders of Cacophony Society and got coffee with him. He generously shared anecdotes about this era, his take on the philosophy behind prank culture, and I promised myself I’d write a proper interview of him soon.

I also read Season of the Witch, a popular book on the history of San Francisco. A small detail in one of the chapters led me to discover hundreds of letters written by runaway teens in the 70s who were trying to make their way to hippie San Francisco. After seeing the praises my blog post on this research received, I realized people craved for more of these stories. Our world has become much, much more boring than it used to be, for better or for worse.³

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It led me to believe that San Francisco might be ready for a new era, inspired by the mischievous and creative tales of its own past. Technologists and artists, together, are part of this mischievous/ prankster lineage, and I’d love to see more people own it; and I think that will come with reminding them of those great stories.

So my current-side project is to document the mischievous history of San Francisco; I have a series of blog posts lined up, a couple of events I’d like to host, and I’m also building an online archives of pranks in the SF bay area.

If someone is interested in sponsoring this work, I’d love to chat! I’m at zeldapoem@gmail.com. Let us not be won over by conformity; let us inspire the next generation of mischief.

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Thanks to Eugene Angelo for the conversation that helped me put this post together.

1. As an anecdotal joke, it’s fair to say that the scientists made the LSD that inspired the technologists to invent the personal computer, and the artists to make music that we still listen to nowadays.

2. Thanks to M, one of my prankster friends for showing the book to me. It’s been more impactful than neither of us expected!

3. The Decline of Deviance