"A guy walks into A Different Light bookstore [a famous gay bookstore] with a big list of high-end books ... and asked our clerks to help find them. We were happy to oblige, and when he was finished looking at a dozen or so books, he put them away and the clerk asked, 'So can I help you with a purchase?' The guy said no, he just wanted to look at the books before he bought them from Amazon. We've got news for you, buster: Keep doing that and you aren't going to have any bookstores where you can paw the books."

So what can San Francisco mean, if it's not a place where you can be arty or subversive or living in genteel socialist poverty? Yes, there have always been rich people in San Francisco -- hell, robber barons made San Francisco -- but the point is, there was always room for the rest of us. You could have the backyard, suburban pleasures that are possible in a city that's not built to bulk, a city where well-to-do people lived right next door to people of modest means. Gross class stratifications weren't there. But not anymore. The San Francisco of Sierra Club founder John Muir and Ambrose Bierce; of Kenneth Rexroth, impresario of the alternative without whom there would have been no Beat scene in San Francisco; of the Tubes and the Jefferson Airplane; of R. Crumb and Bruce Connor; the place where Sam Shepard and Allen Ginsberg arguably created their best work; the great beautiful last-chance saloon, the last best hope for those who can't fit in anywhere else -- gone.

Gentrification is a story that's been told many times in many locales -- but the difference is, it happened so fast in San Francisco. Yes, boomtown Silicon Valley means money is pouring into the city -- but the city that remains is not San Francisco.

So that's what the Internet has done to San Francisco: given it the devil-or-the-deep-blue-sea choice of becoming either Carmel (its architectural heritage and physical beauty preserved like a dollhouse for the exclusive use of the touristic or the rich) or Hong Kong (economic development above all) or most likely, some hellish convergence of the twain. Or maybe, more accurately, it's becoming the place that seems to be the techno-libertarian idea of the good polis: Singapore with better movies. Business couldn't be better. And real soon now, there will be nothing troubling on the streets, nothing at all.

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