San Francisco Bay Area

2025-02-22 — 2026-01-18

quality 5.1

Wherein the Bay Area Is Presented as a Magnet for Visionaries and Weirdos, and Its Faltering Public Works Are Documented by Accounts of Sewers, Storm‑water Issues and Ageing PG&E Equipment.

innovation
place
Figure 1

The Bay Area! The tech hub of the western world, at least by some definition. It’s still somehow an intoxicating place to be a visionary or a weirdo, although the threshold for the quality of a business model that makes this feasible is increasingly high.

I don’t have a Grand Unified Theory of the Bay Area; in fact I’ll try to avoid having one, because there are too many people inventing them. But! I hope to keep dropping into the Bay Area, because I enjoy the tempestuous relationship we all collectively have with it.

1 Fun institutions

  • FAR.Labs, an AI Safety research lab in the Bay Area, with a great vibe
  • DNA Lounge: The cypherpunk dream of the ’90s is alive, under the guiding influence of jwz, the classic coding grumpfluencer
  • Frontier Tower— Look in the Bay you cannot afford to rent a room for the night but you can afford to buy a giant office block and fill it with DIY biohackers
  • Lighthaven — Rat HQ.

2 Wow, they suck at infrastructure

I mean, their public transport isn’t that bad, asides from the patchiness of partial coverage, but generally everything is falling down and half finished forever.

There are Reasons. People are angry about them.

3 Lesser-regarded interesting people

4 Incoming