Jonathan Weber on the Good, the Bad and the Ugly about How Tech Remade San Francisco

In 1990, at the dawn of the internet age, reporter Jonathan Weber was tapped as the LA Times’ first Silicon Valley correspondent. Taking up a perch in San Francisco, where he went on to become one of the city’s leading journalists, Jonathan over the next three plus decades had a front row seat to watch how tech innovation – closely followed by growing pyramids of tech money – transformed an economically down-at-the-heels but funky, counter-culturally adventurous, egalitarian and welcoming city into the affluent but sharply unequal global tech hub that San Francisco is today. 

His colorful new book vividly telling the story of that transformation, City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco, has just been published. So we invited Jonathan onto BCB to recount both the gains and the losses for the city from its odd couple marriage with what, from humble and unlikely origins, rapidly became San Francisco’s Big Tech-driven economic engine. 

Weber recounts how early internet culture was shaped less by the pursuit of wealth than by countercultural ideals of openness, experimentation, and community. As venture capital flooded into the city during the dot-com boom that began in the mid-'90s, those ideals gradually gave way to enormous wealth, rapid gentrification, and intensifying political conflict. Housing pressures led to rising rents, skyrocketing evictions, and displacement and resentment among longtime residents who did not share in the prosperity the rising tech economy created in the city. Beyond economics, many San Franciscans came to feel that their neighborhoods were being culturally transformed by newcomers with different values and lifestyles.

Our discussion goes on to explore how San Francisco's political leadership – mayors Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, Ed Lee, and London Breed – struggled to manage the tech boom and its attendant growth, and failed to fully capitalize on the enormous wealth being created in the city. We also delve into how, more recently, progressives spectacularly mishandled issues like homelessness and public street disorder, and how relations between the tech industry and blue-city politics have become increasingly strained. With the city now benefiting from another boom driven by artificial intelligence, Weber praises current Mayor Daniel Lurie for reversing the city's pandemic doom-loop vibe, but laments that San Francisco has lost much of the artistic, experimental culture that once made the city so distinctive.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Jonathan Weber, City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco, Simon and Schuster (2026). 

Survival Research Labs, "Illusions of Shameless Abundance" robot battle video (1989), YouTube.

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