On The Eve
It's fun when you're the one doing the disrupting
The world outside the Silicon Valley bubble may find the tech industry's obsession with 'disruption' excessive. To work in tech is to disrupt.
We view ourselves as heralds of progress, bringing efficiency to stagnant industries and antiquated processes. Disruption was great business if you were the one doing (or funding) the disrupting – software was eating the world. Uber had eaten taxis, AirBnB had eaten hotels, Instacart had eaten going to the grocery store for yourself. I won’t deny the benefits of all this disruption – Uber, Google, and the like had all improved my life, and I profited from tech’s upwards climb. Boosted by a decade of low interest rates, tech had disrupted its way to vast quantities of wealth. By way of example: Apple alone was worth more than the top twenty energy stocks combined, including Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, and ConocoPhillips. Sure, I owned both an iPhone and a MacBook in a long line of Apple products, but I must admit that this seemed wrong to me.
Tech was no longer an upstart outsider, it had grown into Big Tech, and was now faced with a whole host of unfavorable disruptions: remote work, rising tensions and deglobalization, rising interest rates, an aging population. Tech had built the tools for remote work, and reaped the riches along the way, but did not want remote work for themselves. The disruption of the pandemic and remote work was unwanted, the experiment was over, and could we all just head back into the office now?
Suddenly the disruptors were being disrupted.
I traveled back to San Francisco where I lived for 15 years, the bastion of technology and fog. I had returned, as I did almost every month, to visit friends and once again enjoy the moisture in the air that now felt like a luxury after moving to the desert. I met my sister at the airport. She’d just arrived from Berlin, Germany, where she’d moved to from San Francisco several years earlier. The first thing she asked me was, “Is it actually worse here than before?” San Francisco was in the air lately, in the news for the wrong reasons.
San Francisco is a city of contradictions and it begins at the airport: San Francisco International Airport sits twenty minutes to the south, and a sense of strangeness begins when you are looking for something to eat. Like vast swaths of its namesake city, there are zero chain restaurants or fast food shops to be found. Local chains like Ritual Coffee dot the interior, but places like McDonalds are conspicuously absent. This choice to eschew global chains might not stand out if the airport did not simultaneously offer Gucci, Hermes, and Burberry stores alongside. I suppose they wanted chains only if they were unaffordable.
The incongruence of the airport is matched by the city itself. It is a city of extreme wealth and liberal optimism, coupled with visible poverty and dysfunction, a confusing cocktail of ingredients that threatened to break forth and disrupt the natural order of things, and it was this that the nation at large had latched onto. The failures of Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank, the fentanyl crisis, the ‘bomb cyclone’ resulting in the heaviest rain on record, the homelessness and attendant high cost of housing, the contentious school board recall, the even more contentious district attorney recall; San Francisco was a city experiencing disruption from all sides: the media, the weather, the residents, the economy.
I met some friends for dinner who I’d worked with at Google a decade earlier in an apartment they were renting while their house in the Castro was being renovated; a process that was going to take another year and a half, maybe more – San Francisco has never been in a rush when it comes to construction. They were staying at The Infinity, a pair of luxury high rise towers on the waterfront with a mildly Titanic-sounding name, and we ate by the curved floor-to-ceiling windows that provided stunning views of the Bay Bridge, as well as directly into the living rooms of the units in the other tower. It seemed somehow fitting: all of us sitting in our multi-million dollar units, looking at the view, avoiding what we did not want to see.
I asked them what they thought about AI, the topic of the day. They did not seem particularly interested. “I am a tech curmudgeon,” one of them confided. They had done their disrupting and struck their gold. I understood of course the reluctance to hop on yet another hype cycle (after blockchain, after VR, after fintech, all promising to change the world). And the locusts had descended quickly: products launched years earlier suddenly sprouted .ai domain names while Twitter crawled with AI ‘influencers’. Still, creative destruction was the holy grail of technologists. Wasn’t disruption what we’d signed up for?
The city was built on disorder, and never stopped: the ‘60s of Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the housing battles of the ‘70s, Harvey Milk and George Moscone’s assassinations in ‘78, the dotcom boom and bust of the ‘90s. People had forgotten, maybe unsurprisingly – nearly sixty years had passed since the ‘60s, and the social chaos of that decade was now consigned to tourist shops selling tie-dyed shirts along Ashbury St. Things had ossified, but why should we expect San Francisco to remain as it ever was? San Francisco, technology, the world – we were all being disrupted.1 “Tomorrow composts today,” Bruce Sterling once wrote on technosocial upheaval in Shaping Things.
Technocultures do not abolish one another in clean or comprehensive ways. Instead, new capacities are layered onto older ones. The older technosocial order gradually loses its clarity, crumbles, and melts away under the accumulating weight of the new.
It clicked then why the contradictions seemed everywhere: We were stuck in that twilight between the old and new order; We were accumulating the weight of the new; We were on the eve of something unfamiliar. There is a cliche in Silicon Valley startups: “building the plane while flying it”. We were all of us building the plane together now, even as it choked and sputtered in the air for the first time in a decade, and I could not tell you what the new order would be, where our collective plane would land. All I could tell you was to brace for impact.
Thank you to Megan Goering Mellin, Zach Brock, and Eliott Mogenet for feedback on this piece.
I am aware that I am merging San Francisco, the city, with the tech industry, and that this might be ironic given the historical love-hate relationship between the two (love: tax dollars / hate: gentrification). But in this instance, they were aligned:
Among those cheering on his call to return to work was San Francisco Supervisor Matt Dorsey, whose District 6 includes Mid-Market, SoMa and Mission Bay.
“In-person collaboration helps create vibrant workplaces *and* vibrant urban neighborhoods,” Dorsey said in a tweet Saturday, thanking Altman for his “influential thought-leadership” on the matter.