Something is Very Wrong in San Francisco

Once again– Nat here, from Simpler Machines.

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Last weekend I visited San Francisco, for the first time since I moved to Minneapolis in October, and man the vibes there are off. I miss a lot of people who live in that area, and it's still heartbreakingly beautiful (there is nothing quite like a Saturday afternoon Giants baseball game) but I was surprised how much I didn't miss the city or the experience of being there. I was expecting to feel really homesick, and sad that I'd left. Instead I kept thinking, "No wonder I was really unhappy when I lived here" and "I can't wait to get back to Minneapolis."

The vibes of the software industry as subject to the AI boom seem wretched. The people rolling out AI seem at best anxiously manic, and the people being subjected to the rollouts are exhausted and cynical.

You can't avoid the vibes just by not talking about AI, either, because of the advertising. Maybe I just lost my tolerance in the six months away and they've always been this way but I remember the ads on BART being corporate and baffling and kind of soulless. I don't remember them being actively anti-life.

I used to find this sort of ad kind of... funny? Sure, the advertisements on public transit and on the billboards between Oakland and SFO were both incomprehensible and kind of soulless but there was also a kind of guilelessness to them. You got the impression that the people making these breathless advertisements for enterprise permissions systems that were being displayed on the side of the highway really thought that what they were doing was important. I could make jokes about living in a cyberpunk dystopia but it didn't feel like the people making the ads were in on the joke.

I've worked on products that I suspect may have made the world, on balance, worse. I've spent a lot of my career working on software that makes it easier to make more software, especially for large companies and governments. This has, at best, had a very mixed impact on the world. I'm comfortable taking a relatively mercenary approach to my work, and focusing on the impact I can have on the people I directly interact with.

I cannot imagine advertising a product I was working on with the message, "You have to make the world worse, and we'll help you," the way that these ads do.

I can't tell from this vantage point if I've changed or if the city is changed. Probably both– I'm a little older, I'm seeing this tech wave mostly from the outside, I'm not at a point in my life where I can get as much out of a place like San Francisco... and there's something particularly dark about AI and the moment surrounding it that's crystallizing there.