San Francisco Bay Area
2025-02-22 — 2026-01-18
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.
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 hope to keep dropping into the Bay Area, because I enjoy the tempestuous relationship we have with it.
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! If we visit, here are some things that will colour our experience.
1 Fun institutions
- FAR.Labs
- DNA Lounge: The cypherpunk dream of the ’90s is alive, under the guiding influence of jwz, the classic coding grumpfluencer
- Frontier Tower
- Lighthaven
2 Wow, they suck at infrastructure
I mean, their public transport isn’t that bad, given the partial coverage, but generally everything is falling down and half finished forever.
- Comic: How San Francisco’s sewers do (and don’t) work is a great essay about sewers and storm water in general
- The great PG&E debacle: A timeline 1898-1997 - 48 hills
- Here Are Photos of Some of the Dilapidated Equipment San Francisco Wants to Buy from Bankrupt PG&E for $2.5 billion
3 Lesser-regarded interesting people
- Mari Meireles is super interesting
- Boardwalks: Join us for a walk in your city!