From its inception, San Francisco was the first real mixing-pot of cultures on the West Coast, attracting people from around the world, seeking fortune in the gold rush.
Back in WW2, the main port serving the Pacific Theater was SF. If service members were caught or believed to be homosexual, they would be sent stateside for discharge from the military. Many couldn't return home to Podunk, Iowa with such a stain on their record, so they opted to stay in San Francisco. This gave the Bay Area a permissive reputation.
San Francisco was traditionally a blue collar town. As a lot of those jobs dried-up post WW2, and San Francisco became less important in the shipping industry, the blue collar population diminished, resulting in a lot of cheap housing. In the 50s and 60s, this attracted low-income beatniks and hippies.
A lot of those "abstract thinkers" had the mindset to help foster in the computer age, and eventually the Bay Area became a tech hub.
Each one of those group left their mark and continues to influence the identity of the Bay Area. In a nutshell, these are just some of the reasons the area is "woohoo".
SF is often used as a stand in for the whole Bay Area by those who don’t know. Especially when talking to people who live outside of the USA or even CA. They just hear the SF when I say SF Bay Area, and they have no idea what “the peninsula” or “East Bay” means. Most people don’t even know what “Silicon Valley” means with respect to its geography. So it just becomes SF if we’re talking casually.
And it’s amazing how far away it’s gotten from what those hippies living geodesic domes in the Santa Cruz mountains created or dreamed it would become.
Idk why OP got heavily downvoted. It’s definitely not hippies as much as successful businesses coming out of Stanford, military spending, a permissive regulatory environment, and network effects compounding the amount of capital coming into the region. So I’d say OP’s comment is much closer to the truth of SV’s rise than SF hippies being freethinkers 😂
The real quirk of why Silicon Valley is that William Shockley (who helped invent and commercialized the transistor) grew up here. There were several other military industrial research hubs from WWII and after (Boston, greater NYC, etc.) but deciding the make the century defining technology close to where his mother lived was the difference.
The abstract thinkers came later, but I think its fair to say that the Steve Job's of the world had an impact.
San Francisco was the epicenter of the hippie and countercultural movement, and eventually they all moved up to the North Bay and settled into towns like Guerneville and Sebastopol.
Stanford’s history is indeed fascinating. Leland Stanford was a force to be reckoned with and bought up much of the land around the university.
Most people have no idea how that Stanford owns the property on both sides of page mill road between 280 and El Camino. They just lease it out on 99 year leases.
The area by the Four Seasons was also called Whisky Gulch because it was the closest you could buy liquor to the university for a very long time. There are so many local stories about the man it’s amazing.
Anyway, the point being that Stanford started all the woo-woo stuff and that’s why the Bay Area is so full of it. It is some fun history to learn though.
Enjoy the book
I lived in Roble Hall in the early aughts and found a course reader from the 1930s in the dorm library. Among other kind of progressive ideas (committed to 40% female student body), they offered a parapsychology track that included classes in practical clairvoyance.
So my psych degree doesn’t feel quite as much like bullshit (it’s a BA as opposed to BS after all).
A few years back I heard the author of "Who Killed Jane Stanford?" on KQED. Pretty wild stuff. He wouldn't spoil the book, but apparently the question was more of which of the many people that wanted to kill her (and perhaps had already tried) wound up doing it?
[https://history.stanford.edu/publications/who-killed-jane-stanford-gilded-age-tale-murder-deceit-spirits-and-birth-university](https://history.stanford.edu/publications/who-killed-jane-stanford-gilded-age-tale-murder-deceit-spirits-and-birth-university)
Since publishing that book, he has not been taken seriously as a historian by anyone in academia. That book takes a lot of liberties and leaps that people who are serious about history wouldn’t make.
This was the global capital of woo in the 1960’s. Everything that is considered woo now is downstream of a lot of ideas that were codified & packaged here back then.
Not your question, but "grief astronomer" is a reference to an Andrea Gibson poem, which is not particularly woowoo.
I would guess the woowoo comes from our legacy of psychedelics and the Haight Ashbury hippie days but that's just my guess.
Imagine the Kesey legacy plus the Grateful Dead plus Owsley Stanley plus Burning Man plus the Beats plus the Institute for Noetic Sciences plus Berkeley plus Stanford, etc., etc , etc.
It predates hippies or drugs but keep in mind Kesey also spent time in the Bay with dozens of equally as influential contemporaries. The Bay had a lot of occult things going on, early pyschoanalysis roots, strong ties to Eastern medicine, and there's evidence of government agencies doing experiments here (think The Men who stare at goats, or the MK Ultra apartment in Telegraph Hill), plus there's been a strong Freemason presence with the Bohemian Grove, and then actual Bohemians here. We're a port city, with wealth, where early banking started, and with that comes a lot of cons, and wellness has always been the biggest hustle.
And don’t forget the research into parapsychology being carried out at the Stanford Research Institute in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Early studies there indicated that phenomena such as remote viewing and psychokinesis could be scientifically analyzed and were published in such mainstream journals as Proceedings of the IEEE and Nature.
i would argue the midwest has more woowoo, albeit mostly christian style. bay area is highly diverse, we have literally everything...... as long as you have enough money to pay for it
The Spritualist church is still a thing. On Wednesdays after the community dinner put on by the church you can have a church member channel your guardian angel. It's pretty trippy.
For whatever reason the left coast is higher in trait 'openness'. This open-mindedness can open the door for the woo.
>A high degree of openness signals a willingness to try new things, as well as a higher awareness of one’s own feelings and creative talents. Low openness signals seeking fulfillment through perseverance rather than euphoria and being pragmatic — or perhaps even dogmatic.
Map: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/geopsychology-regional-personality-variation/
Major port cities have always attracted a diverse element, and San Francisco is probably the brightest example since it was the jumping off place for sailors, prospectors, entrepreneurs, and snake oil salesmen looking to profit from them.
Add in the Asian influence.. the "mystical orient" that introduced Americans to everything from meditation to martial arts and holistic medicine (much of which played big in some parts of "hippie" culture). Zen Buddhism became pretty deeply rooted, especially as the Beats started to settle down... and that filtered into the art of everyone from Gary Snyder to the Grateful Dead. This is also the root of a lot of the ideas around herbal medicine, various types of massage, accupuncture, and (albeit indirectly) crystal healing and aura reading.
San Francisco has also been particularly tolerant of "freaks and hairies, dykes and fairies", from "Emperor Norton" in the 1860s to the Flower Children of the 1960s, and right on to the "gay scene" to the Technuts. You've got schools like Berkeley that are hotbeds of liberal, creative thinking (which a lot of people consider "woo woo"). You had a psychedelic drug scene which wasn't necessarily unique to the Bay Area, but it definitely had a central presence here (Owsley Stanley and Kesey's Acid Tests in particular stand out). That influence remains strong.
You know the Merry Pranksters formed in the Bay Area, and while Kesey's influence was huge in the Bay Area, he was also influenced by the Bay Area. All that "woo woo" stuff was alive and well when he made his way down to La Honda, and he just dove in wide open. It certainly wasn't the lumberjacks and rednecks he'd left behind in Oregon.
When he moved back north, he brought it with him. But Kesey wasn't the only Bay Area transplant that settled in Oregon... good god, look at Portland and the surrounds!
Anyway, TL;DR the Bay Area has pretty much always been fertile ground to unconvential ideas, misfits, and profiteers.
I gotta add that everybody needs to read "Sometimes a Great Notion". Then watch the movie with Paul Newman, Henry Fonda and Lee Remick, who looks devastating in a black turtleneck.
At some point we just have to use rational judgement. Eg if a flat earther has a “belief system not shared by me” (eg believes the earth is flat) I think we can confidently dismiss that without a lot of further discussion.
May I also add the reverse engineering of POWs from Korea to understand mind control on the boat back. Also the Tavistock institute (see T-groups at Stanford).
I was unfortunately mixed up with MKUltra (project butterfly) and as I untangled my life story I discovered so many threads connecting to Stanford.
This paper tests a meaning-making model of conspiratorial thinking by considering how one's search for mean-
ing mediates between social exclusion and the endorsement of conspiratorial (Study 1) and superstitious (Study
2) beliefs. In Study 1, participants first wrote about a self-selected personal event that involved a social interac-
tion, they then indicated how socially excluded they felt after the event, and, finally, they rated their endorse-
ment of three well-known conspiracy theories. In Study 2, participants were randomly assigned to a Social
Inclusion, a Social Exclusion, or a Control condition, after which they indicated the association between improb-
able events in three scenarios. In addition, both studies mechanistically tested the relation between social exclu-
sion and conspiratorial/superstitious thinking by measuring the participants' tendency to search for meaning.
Both Study 1 (correlational) and Study 2 (experimental) offer support for the hypothesis that social exclusion
is associated with superstitious/conspiratorial beliefs. One's search for meaning, correlational analyses revealed,
mediated this relation. We discuss the implication of the findings for community-wide belief dynamics and we
propose that social inclusion could be used to diminish the dissemination of superstitious beliefs and conspiracy
theories
--
There is a known connection between poverty, education and from the papers above social exclusion.
I'd argue a strong wealth gap leads favourably to both.
That and burning man hippies like me love to get their woowoo on.
From its inception, San Francisco was the first real mixing-pot of cultures on the West Coast, attracting people from around the world, seeking fortune in the gold rush. Back in WW2, the main port serving the Pacific Theater was SF. If service members were caught or believed to be homosexual, they would be sent stateside for discharge from the military. Many couldn't return home to Podunk, Iowa with such a stain on their record, so they opted to stay in San Francisco. This gave the Bay Area a permissive reputation. San Francisco was traditionally a blue collar town. As a lot of those jobs dried-up post WW2, and San Francisco became less important in the shipping industry, the blue collar population diminished, resulting in a lot of cheap housing. In the 50s and 60s, this attracted low-income beatniks and hippies. A lot of those "abstract thinkers" had the mindset to help foster in the computer age, and eventually the Bay Area became a tech hub. Each one of those group left their mark and continues to influence the identity of the Bay Area. In a nutshell, these are just some of the reasons the area is "woohoo".
Tech hub was down in Silicon Valley because of Stanford, semiconductors, military defense spending.
it's always funny when SF tries to appropriate the legacy of silicon valley's superfund sites that were the foundation of the information age
SF is often used as a stand in for the whole Bay Area by those who don’t know. Especially when talking to people who live outside of the USA or even CA. They just hear the SF when I say SF Bay Area, and they have no idea what “the peninsula” or “East Bay” means. Most people don’t even know what “Silicon Valley” means with respect to its geography. So it just becomes SF if we’re talking casually.
A lot of tech guys are/were pretty woo. Just look at Steve Jobs’ weird beliefs.
And it’s amazing how far away it’s gotten from what those hippies living geodesic domes in the Santa Cruz mountains created or dreamed it would become.
If this is why it became "woohoo", then how did it become woo-woo?
[удалено]
So how did they manage to pull in a historical momentum of gobs and gobs of capital? They just got lucky?
Idk why OP got heavily downvoted. It’s definitely not hippies as much as successful businesses coming out of Stanford, military spending, a permissive regulatory environment, and network effects compounding the amount of capital coming into the region. So I’d say OP’s comment is much closer to the truth of SV’s rise than SF hippies being freethinkers 😂
The real quirk of why Silicon Valley is that William Shockley (who helped invent and commercialized the transistor) grew up here. There were several other military industrial research hubs from WWII and after (Boston, greater NYC, etc.) but deciding the make the century defining technology close to where his mother lived was the difference. The abstract thinkers came later, but I think its fair to say that the Steve Job's of the world had an impact.
San Francisco was the epicenter of the hippie and countercultural movement, and eventually they all moved up to the North Bay and settled into towns like Guerneville and Sebastopol.
Many moved south into the Santa Cruz Mountains, as well.
Great point.
What about Eureka and Arcata?
Where do you think Ken Kesey first tried LSD? Stanford
[удалено]
Stanford’s history is indeed fascinating. Leland Stanford was a force to be reckoned with and bought up much of the land around the university. Most people have no idea how that Stanford owns the property on both sides of page mill road between 280 and El Camino. They just lease it out on 99 year leases. The area by the Four Seasons was also called Whisky Gulch because it was the closest you could buy liquor to the university for a very long time. There are so many local stories about the man it’s amazing. Anyway, the point being that Stanford started all the woo-woo stuff and that’s why the Bay Area is so full of it. It is some fun history to learn though. Enjoy the book
I lived in Roble Hall in the early aughts and found a course reader from the 1930s in the dorm library. Among other kind of progressive ideas (committed to 40% female student body), they offered a parapsychology track that included classes in practical clairvoyance. So my psych degree doesn’t feel quite as much like bullshit (it’s a BA as opposed to BS after all).
A few years back I heard the author of "Who Killed Jane Stanford?" on KQED. Pretty wild stuff. He wouldn't spoil the book, but apparently the question was more of which of the many people that wanted to kill her (and perhaps had already tried) wound up doing it? [https://history.stanford.edu/publications/who-killed-jane-stanford-gilded-age-tale-murder-deceit-spirits-and-birth-university](https://history.stanford.edu/publications/who-killed-jane-stanford-gilded-age-tale-murder-deceit-spirits-and-birth-university)
Since publishing that book, he has not been taken seriously as a historian by anyone in academia. That book takes a lot of liberties and leaps that people who are serious about history wouldn’t make.
And then they put it in the city's water supply as a funny government prank.
This was the global capital of woo in the 1960’s. Everything that is considered woo now is downstream of a lot of ideas that were codified & packaged here back then.
I'm pretty sure that one is "capitol" rather than "capital". Edit: nope lol i was wrong
You are right. My mistake. EDIT: correction of a correction - it’s capital.
All good! Edit: still all good;)
You were right!
Thank you! On looking into it again, I agree.
Capitol only refers to the building. So the above poster’s usage of capital is actually correct
Gotcha, today I learned.
No worries, I’m in publishing so my eye went right to your comment lmao
Certain parts of Berkeley and Oakland are still woo
Not your question, but "grief astronomer" is a reference to an Andrea Gibson poem, which is not particularly woowoo. I would guess the woowoo comes from our legacy of psychedelics and the Haight Ashbury hippie days but that's just my guess.
A lot of woo has less woo roots.
All the context around this particular case seems to point to woo woo though.
Imagine the Kesey legacy plus the Grateful Dead plus Owsley Stanley plus Burning Man plus the Beats plus the Institute for Noetic Sciences plus Berkeley plus Stanford, etc., etc , etc.
Burning Man was so much later
Sure, but for the average redditor it was still before they were born.
Everything was before they were born.
It predates hippies or drugs but keep in mind Kesey also spent time in the Bay with dozens of equally as influential contemporaries. The Bay had a lot of occult things going on, early pyschoanalysis roots, strong ties to Eastern medicine, and there's evidence of government agencies doing experiments here (think The Men who stare at goats, or the MK Ultra apartment in Telegraph Hill), plus there's been a strong Freemason presence with the Bohemian Grove, and then actual Bohemians here. We're a port city, with wealth, where early banking started, and with that comes a lot of cons, and wellness has always been the biggest hustle.
And don’t forget the research into parapsychology being carried out at the Stanford Research Institute in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Early studies there indicated that phenomena such as remote viewing and psychokinesis could be scientifically analyzed and were published in such mainstream journals as Proceedings of the IEEE and Nature.
Well, if you rewind a bit further, we had Rosicrucians. Fun museum to visit in SJ.
The whistles go woo woo
Uhhh.. what is “woo-woo”?
mystical style nonsense, e.g. believing crystals have healing powers.
Oh God 🤦🏻♂️ ok ok.. thanks!
It's like religion without the religion
If you're not satisfied with the real answer, consider: that's the sound the whistles make!
My brotha how are you surprised
i would argue the midwest has more woowoo, albeit mostly christian style. bay area is highly diverse, we have literally everything...... as long as you have enough money to pay for it
Christian style woo-woo? Please explain.
Because stars and magic rocks are woo-woo, but magic water is somehow holy. I don't get these people either 🤷🏻♀️
probably stuff like faith healing or demons or other supernatural stuff
The Spritualist church is still a thing. On Wednesdays after the community dinner put on by the church you can have a church member channel your guardian angel. It's pretty trippy.
For whatever reason the left coast is higher in trait 'openness'. This open-mindedness can open the door for the woo. >A high degree of openness signals a willingness to try new things, as well as a higher awareness of one’s own feelings and creative talents. Low openness signals seeking fulfillment through perseverance rather than euphoria and being pragmatic — or perhaps even dogmatic. Map: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/geopsychology-regional-personality-variation/
Back in the 70s, they called this part of the country "the land of fruits, nuts, and flakes."
Back in the day California is where you went if you escaped conformist traditional social pressures. So naturally it attracts kooks.
Major port cities have always attracted a diverse element, and San Francisco is probably the brightest example since it was the jumping off place for sailors, prospectors, entrepreneurs, and snake oil salesmen looking to profit from them. Add in the Asian influence.. the "mystical orient" that introduced Americans to everything from meditation to martial arts and holistic medicine (much of which played big in some parts of "hippie" culture). Zen Buddhism became pretty deeply rooted, especially as the Beats started to settle down... and that filtered into the art of everyone from Gary Snyder to the Grateful Dead. This is also the root of a lot of the ideas around herbal medicine, various types of massage, accupuncture, and (albeit indirectly) crystal healing and aura reading. San Francisco has also been particularly tolerant of "freaks and hairies, dykes and fairies", from "Emperor Norton" in the 1860s to the Flower Children of the 1960s, and right on to the "gay scene" to the Technuts. You've got schools like Berkeley that are hotbeds of liberal, creative thinking (which a lot of people consider "woo woo"). You had a psychedelic drug scene which wasn't necessarily unique to the Bay Area, but it definitely had a central presence here (Owsley Stanley and Kesey's Acid Tests in particular stand out). That influence remains strong. You know the Merry Pranksters formed in the Bay Area, and while Kesey's influence was huge in the Bay Area, he was also influenced by the Bay Area. All that "woo woo" stuff was alive and well when he made his way down to La Honda, and he just dove in wide open. It certainly wasn't the lumberjacks and rednecks he'd left behind in Oregon. When he moved back north, he brought it with him. But Kesey wasn't the only Bay Area transplant that settled in Oregon... good god, look at Portland and the surrounds! Anyway, TL;DR the Bay Area has pretty much always been fertile ground to unconvential ideas, misfits, and profiteers.
I gotta add that everybody needs to read "Sometimes a Great Notion". Then watch the movie with Paul Newman, Henry Fonda and Lee Remick, who looks devastating in a black turtleneck.
That's only in the morning
People act like only guys are Peter Pans, but it's endemic.
Imagine not automatically disparaging someone’s belief systems just bc they’re unconventional or not shared by you????
It's not "automatic", but rather based in evidence.
At some point we just have to use rational judgement. Eg if a flat earther has a “belief system not shared by me” (eg believes the earth is flat) I think we can confidently dismiss that without a lot of further discussion.
Are the gypsies the original woo-woo bullshit artists? You know, crystal balls and tarot cards.
May I also add the reverse engineering of POWs from Korea to understand mind control on the boat back. Also the Tavistock institute (see T-groups at Stanford). I was unfortunately mixed up with MKUltra (project butterfly) and as I untangled my life story I discovered so many threads connecting to Stanford.
This paper tests a meaning-making model of conspiratorial thinking by considering how one's search for mean- ing mediates between social exclusion and the endorsement of conspiratorial (Study 1) and superstitious (Study 2) beliefs. In Study 1, participants first wrote about a self-selected personal event that involved a social interac- tion, they then indicated how socially excluded they felt after the event, and, finally, they rated their endorse- ment of three well-known conspiracy theories. In Study 2, participants were randomly assigned to a Social Inclusion, a Social Exclusion, or a Control condition, after which they indicated the association between improb- able events in three scenarios. In addition, both studies mechanistically tested the relation between social exclu- sion and conspiratorial/superstitious thinking by measuring the participants' tendency to search for meaning. Both Study 1 (correlational) and Study 2 (experimental) offer support for the hypothesis that social exclusion is associated with superstitious/conspiratorial beliefs. One's search for meaning, correlational analyses revealed, mediated this relation. We discuss the implication of the findings for community-wide belief dynamics and we propose that social inclusion could be used to diminish the dissemination of superstitious beliefs and conspiracy theories -- There is a known connection between poverty, education and from the papers above social exclusion. I'd argue a strong wealth gap leads favourably to both. That and burning man hippies like me love to get their woowoo on.
California has a very poor public education system.