network state
The Point: During a tech podcast last September, Network State leader Balaji Srinivasan appeared to confirm that the California Forever project in Solano County is, indeed, part of the cultish Network State movement. This could further complicate things for the project's developers, who already face strong opposition from
network state
Maybe you can literally have like the sovereign city of San Francisco and secede effectively ... if you have total control of the city ... maybe it's possible. – B.S. The Point: Like some mustache-twirling cartoon villain, the main tech figure behind the Network State cult lays out a "
garry tan
What if [A.G.] Sulzberger is more like Keyser Söze? What if his employees are highly self-interested professional prevaricators? What if they've always been like that? – Balaji Srinivasan, "The Network State." The point: The New York Times profiled Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, but failed to
The Point: A candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors got caught puffing up his résumé and – in a highly-anticipated escalation – billionaire-funded tech "mods" declared MAGA-like war on the San Francisco press. There may be a method to their madness. The Background: The story is simple and
doom loop
The Point: The line between truth and lies – and even life and death – gets blurry in San Francisco politics. Avoid hasty conclusions. The Backstory: It is a season of questionable obituaries in San Francisco. First there was Richard Parina, the elderly pro-police law-and-order activist whose sudden death sent SF'
san francisco
AI ended San Francisco's Doom Loop. Then Macy's brought it back
The point: Yet another major poll reveals catastrophic numbers for San Francisco Mayor London Breed. With multiple surveys showing Breed's political career in a doom loop, her politically amateur Tech Bro supporters face a simple electoral IQ test: Stick by a failing and flailing incumbent, or to start
garry tan
Is this why Garry Tan blocked you on Twitter?
The point: We may be seeing the emergence of a new strategy in which certain kinds of "journalists" go on the attack against other journalists who report on billionaires. Expect this trend to continue as billionaires continue to fund new forms of "parallel media," wholly dependent
I have been promising to start a newsletter focused on Bay Area meta-politics, and so here it begins. My goal in starting this chain of essays is to expose and highlight the propaganda tactics and strategies at work in Bay Area politics in 2024. We are witnessing a big shift