Berkeley Would Like to Speak to the Manager

The city that taught America to say the wrong thing out loud has decided it would rather not make a scene.

I said good morning to a man on Solano Avenue this morning and watched him decide what it meant. The entire interaction took about a second and a half. You could see the machinery: threat assessment, then a quick scan of what I might want, then some sort of third calculation that was beyond me and probably him too. His eyes wandered, found a spot near my sternum, and delivered a small closed-mouth nod there. He kept walking. Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen. No one was harmed in the making of this awkward exchange.

I've thought about that nod more than it deserves.

Before I continue, I should say that I live in New Orleans, where it's customary to acknowledge everyone you pass on the street, from your neighbor to the homeless man asleep on your front steps. Honestly, it’s one of the things I love about the city. I'm by no means comparing the two towns. That would be like comparing a California-hand-reared, artisanal, grain-free, soy-free, humanely slaughtered chicken to New Orleans' best fried chicken bought at a gas station - these things are not the same.

Enough about me, let’s get back to Berkeley.

In 1964, a philosophy student named Mario Savio climbed onto a police car in Sproul Plaza — he took his shoes off first, which is the detail that always gets me — and argued that a university had no business deciding which political opinions could be expressed on its sidewalks. Thousands of people surrounded that car for thirty-two hours. The point was not that the students were right, though mostly they were. The point was that being wrong in public was a thing a person was allowed to do, and that the correction for it was other people, out loud, in the same square.

That was the invention. Not protest — protest is ancient. The invention was the idea that the messiest possible version of a conversation was better than a clean one supervised from above.

Berkeley sold that idea to the entire country. It worked. It is arguably the most successful cultural export ever produced by a city of 120,000 people.

The city no longer uses it.

Savio's most quoted line is the one about the machine becoming so odious that you have to throw your body upon the gears. It's a good line. It has a plaque on the Mario Savio Steps.

The machine now has an intake form, and Berkeley loves it.

This is the part that gets called "Karen behavior," which I think is the wrong frame — not because it's rude, but because it's imprecise and lets the argument become about a demographic when it's actually about a reflex. The reflex is this: when something goes wrong between two people, you do not address the other person. You address the authority above them.

It’s not entitlement. It’s closer to the opposite. Handling something yourself means an unscripted exchange with an outcome you can’t guarantee, and this is a city where unscripted exchanges have started to feel expensive. So you find the website. You find the commission. Berkeley has so many commissions that in 2022 the city had to run a process to reduce the number of delegations – yeah, a new commission was formed to reduce the number of commissions. Among the survivors is the Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Product Panel of Experts, better known by the mind-numbingly lame acronym SSBPPE, a real government body created by the voters, seated in the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, convening on the subject of soda.

You can see the same sort of passive-aggressive behavior on the pavement. Some of the city's streets now carry more instructional paint than asphalt — bike lanes, buffers, sharrows, parking, crosswalks, the little pictograms clarifying which of the four available behaviors you are currently performing. As if you were a little game piece moving on a game board. Just following instructions with the eerie feeling that you know you have to be doing something wrong.

The sit-in is now the 100-page impact report. The picket line has become “I want to speak to your manager”. Seems that sixty years of self-marinated institutional distrust was clumsily digested and returned to the world as a weird customer service philosophy with a complaint portal.

The good news is that nobody is being dragged off. That’s not the thing.

The thing is that in a place where any exchange might be evaluated, the rational move is to stop initiating exchanges. Eye contact is a commitment to an interaction whose terms you can't verify in advance. Good morning is an offer. Offers can be declined, and worse, offers can be misread, and worst, offers can be described later by someone who was standing nearby.

So a city gets quieter in a strange way. Not silent because Berkeley is loud; constantly talking. But it talks in ways that have been stamped with approval, deemed acceptable by the panel, the subcommittee, the sign in the yard listing eight things the household believes, none of which any neighbor has ever heard the household say aloud.

Meanwhile, the register that's disappeared is the low one. The unimportant remark. The dumb joke or meaningless exchange with a stranger at the crosswalk that costs nothing and that should be forgotten in nine seconds and is also, it turns out, the entire load-bearing structure of living near other people.

I like to believe that you can measure a city's health by how cheap its smallest interactions are. In Berkeley, they have gotten very expensive, and the price isn't paid in traffic infractions or tolls. It's paid by a man on Solano Ave deciding, in a second and a half, that the nod and thinking that I’d rather not get involved in a harmless interaction was the safest path forward.

I don't fully trust this essay, and here's why.

Every city has gotten worse at this, even New Orleans. Phones did some of it. The pandemic caused a lot of it. Money did more than either — when the median house price passes a million and a half, you get a population that has less in common with the sidewalk than any generation before it, and people who feel like guests in a neighborhood do not say good morning in it. That's not ideology. That's being priced out.

I’m sure there's a version of this piece that's just a guy blaming political culture for something that's mostly economic and partly technological, and I'd rather name that than get caught at it.

Except that the mortgage theory has a hole in it, and I live in the hole. New Orleans is poorer, hotter, more dangerous, and considerably worse governed, and nobody there has any trouble saying hello. Whatever produces the nod on Solano, it isn't hardship.

And I keep coming back to the irony, because I don't think it's decorative. The other cities got quiet by accident. Berkeley got quiet on purpose, out of care or fear, maybe both, probably with excellent intentions and a very thorough process — which is a strange way to arrive at a place where nobody looks up.

I'm not going to end this with what Berkeley must do, because I don't think it's a policy problem and they sure as hell don’t need to convene another commission on the subject.

Here's the whole prescription; it's embarrassing, and it goes for everyone:

Say “hello”. Risk being slightly wrong in a way that requires no red tape or preapproval. Make the silly, throwaway remark to a stranger at the crosswalk, in line for coffee, or while waiting for the BART. Oddly, the city that invented the right to speak badly in public has spent sixty years making sure nobody can, and the result is not safety; it feels like fear.

Savio took his shoes off before he got on the car. He wasn't being careful. He was being polite. Those have never been the same thing, and Berkeley used to know the difference.