The old SF tech scene is dead. What it’s morphing into is far more sinister.

If you commute from the East Bay into the gray heart of San Francisco, you’ll see them everywhere.  

They string together nonsense words. They stare at us with dead eyes. They exalt the far right while claiming to be apolitical. And, worst of all, they bully us: As you wait to board the crowded Muni bus home after a long day at work, they brag about how they’ll eventually replace you and rob you of your livelihood. 

In the year 2025, billboards advertising artificial intelligence have become inescapable, crowding the city’s skyline and sneering at us from every corner. To the average person, they’re both dystopian and indecipherable, and for cash-bloated executives behind these campaigns, that’s the point. 

But the city’s horizon didn’t always look like this — nor was the Bay Area tech community so homogeneous and cutthroat.  

In the mid-2010s, long before ominous phrases like “generative AI” and “the singularity” became part of public lexicon, San Francisco’s burgeoning startup scene could be considered quaint. In 2015, some of the most exciting fledgling companies were flower delivery services, T-shirt design websites, and secondhand furniture marketplaces. The CEO of one workplace social media app, cheekily called Slack, even wore a bow tie like a 1930s marionette. While Facebook was already well on its way to becoming a national political scandal — and Uber was slowly muscling its way toward a multibillion-dollar valuation — the tech scene still had at least some quirkiness and diversity amid its relentless expansion.

Around that same time, a conference celebrating some of “tech’s wildest success stories” included a panel with executives from Houzz, a digital interior design company, and Pinterest, which essentially built an empire off of aspiring brides with severe mason jar addictions. Aside from a modest virtual assistant company called Clara Labs, few organizations of the era signified just how different the world would inevitably become. 

These small tech operations were cute, but more importantly, they presented themselves as mission-based.

Meanwhile, as talk of gentrification echoed within the smoking rooms of Edinburgh Castle Pub and Hemlock, VC funding trickled throughout the city, creating new jobs and beckoning underpaid retail workers like myself to join the movement. 

Suddenly, everyone around me quit their minimum-wage gigs to pursue slightly-higher-paying roles at fashion startups scattered throughout the Mission and Bayview. At first, these seemed like life-changing opportunities: After all, where else could you get a catered vegan lunch and play a game of pingpong right after for $17 an hour? Some people — rather naively — announced that they would proudly toil at these ventures forever. 

Less than a year later, many of them would either collapse or get bought out, crushing dreams and complimentary gym memberships in the process. Washio, the on-demand laundry service, is no longer. Shuddle, the ride-hailing app for kids, also shut down. The city is a graveyard lined with endless tombstones for gourmet meal delivery services, e-commerce platforms and independent social networks — but it was almost worse when these redundant startups were considered successful. I still recall hearing the news when Twice, a clothing resale operation, bragged about trashing Dolores Park to celebrate its sale to eBay, only to quietly return to clean up the mess after getting publicly called out. 

While San Francisco’s tech world has always been obnoxious on a cultural level due to its own lack of self-awareness, what it’s morphing into now is downright terrifying. 

As websites like Teespring continue to peddle pumpkin spice propaganda to die-hard autumnal girlies, OpenAI and Anthropic are sucking up billions of dollars in funding, signaling a new dawn in the Bay Area’s capitalist landscape. Perhaps in a futile effort to keep up, powerful biotech, hardware and software companies are axing thousands of workers, many of whom are now probably struggling to afford basic resources like food, gas and medical care. Dropbox and Salesforce executives have shamelessly admitted that they sacrificed them in favor of AI — and the smug new billboards we see every day are just an ugly symptom of their rotten ideology. 

According to tech recruiters, executives believe that perfectly capable, intelligent people who have been laid off are “table scraps” and “damaged goods.” Mark Zuckerberg wants us to trust and develop relationships with his digital chatbots, stating that “the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends.” Meanwhile, his same company’s guidelines also previously said that it was totally “acceptable” for them “to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” Marc Benioff is practically frothing at the mouth to cut costs, declaring that now, thanks to his company’s new fleet of AI workers, “We can have less support agents, human support agents, more digital support agents. We can mix our human labor with our digital labor in a new way and create an incredible new Salesforce.”

Based on these recent events, it’s obvious, to me at least, that investors and founders alike couldn’t care less about the consequences of their ungodly creations. 

What these tech oligarchs are ultimately telling us, dear friend, is that they simply don’t care about us, and when they finally pillage every last resource the Earth has to offer, they’ll happily throw back $64 olive oil shots while dancing like idiots on our graves. 

Overall, it feels like we’ve drifted past a point of no return. While change is constant and inevitable, what’s happening to San Francisco — and the world at large — feels deeply unsettling. 

For a while, we could at least laugh about the absurdity of the Bay Area tech world. Now, it just keeps me awake at night.