City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco

Former San Francisco Standard editor-in-chief Weber’s enlightening debut traces the tech industry’s influence over three decades of San Francisco’s booms and busts. The author begins his survey in 1990 during the early, idyllic days of the internet when “a small but growing cohort... believed computers could change the world for the better” and created nascent online communities via mailing lists and forums. From there, Weber tracks how this utopian dream of “the Internet as a liberating tool of personal empowerment” turned into a roller-coaster ride of economic excess and devastation, from the dot-com bubble and its 2000–2002 deflation, which saw “some thirty thousand people” move out of San Francisco, through the second internet boom of the mid-2010s, centered on venture capital–funded start-ups, to the postpandemic “doom loop” of office closures that resulted in empty storefronts and hollowed-out business corridors. Weber tracks how these fluctuations affected the city’s habitability, character, and politics, including skyrocketing rents and the growing influence of the tech industry on government and media. He particularly focuses on San Francisco’s ongoing issues with homelessness, which became a cause célèbre for right-wing tech titans like Elon Musk and David Sacks. With a new “revival” occurring in San Francisco due to the rise of AI, this is a timely cautionary tale about what tech cannot fix. (June)