Save San Francisco’s Soul: Jonathan Weber on Technology and Politics in the City By the Bay
About this episode
Jonathan Weber discusses the transformation of San Francisco and the impact of technology and politics on its identity.
“The same creative and political forces that gave rise to [San Francisco’s] boom nearly engineered its collapse.” — Jonathan Weber In Hitchcock’s Vertigo , the quintessential San Francisco movie, the villain points to an old painting of the city and tells Jimmy Stewart that San Francisco has changed. The real city has been lost, he says. Somebody has stolen San Francisco’s soul. The veteran tech journalist Jonathan Weber is the latest writer to search for that soul. In City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco , Weber bemoans the disappearance of the real San Francisco — the city not just of the Beats and the Counterculture but also of ordinary teachers and policemen. We’ve had thirty years of boom, bust, and Big Tech. The ordinary folks of San Francisco have been replaced by a new class of tech bros. In 1992, just 2% of San Franciscans worked in tech. By 2019 it was 35%. As a longtime San Franciscan, Weber had a front-row seat on the dot-com mania, the rise of social media, Uber and Airbnb, the pandemic’s great emptying of downtown, and now the AI boom driven by the San Francisco-based Anthropic and OpenAI. In City on the Edge , Weber…
People in this episode
Host: Andrew Keen
Guest: Jonathan Weber
Topics covered
- San Francisco
- technology
- politics
- cultural change
- Big Tech
- urban development
Keywords
- San Francisco
- technology
- politics
- urban change
- Big Tech
- cultural identity
- Jonathan Weber
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Anthropic, OpenAI
Books & works: City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco
Places: San Francisco, City By the Bay
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