Steve is an engineer. I mean that in its fullest sense of the word. Steve wears washed up jeans and t-shirts with funny quotes. One of his t-shirts has his phone number on it. He works for a very, very important company that has been in its pre-IPO stage for four years. He doesn’t drive a car, but when he does, the car must be a big truck that can move many cows. In discussions, Steve is officious, narcissistic, and driven with an extraordinary ego. Steve goes to burning man every year and hallucinates with Jack Dorsey. He thinks he’s very smart because he talks fast and doesn’t leave any room for give and take during the course of conversation. He works long hours and has very strong feelings about alternating current. Steve believes grooming for men is a sign of moral weakness but he thinks it’s adequate to smell like a goat. Steve also drinks lots of coffee.

San Francisco is a city where people, both in lore and reality, can be hard to understand. San Francisconians are famously outspoken about their grievances. Obviously, there’s plenty to complain about when you live in a big city: overcrowding, potholes, high prices, train delays, cyclists, homelessness, and rotten tomatoes. In San Francisco, add the existence of hipsters to the equation. Those who act like little cute dictators -with no intellectual substance and a bloated sense of self. These guys portray all that’s gone wrong with our socio-economical standards. With their transactional behavior, short attention span, and a trendy sense of fashion that’s next to tacky, hipsters aim to shape the future.

By definition, future is defined as an accumulation of events and facts that are yet to come. We don’t know what happens in the future, but we know that any permutation of the future has two characteristics: (a) it’s a continuous tail of the present and (b) it’s different. If true, chances are low that trendy hipsters are the ones who will get us there. Shaping the future requires serious intellectual intake, focus and persistence, and the ability to see the present differently. That inherently assumes you’re connected to the realities of the present time beyond the shackles of ego and vanity.