Reflecting on Dystopian San Francisco Again

One of the reasons I started Exolymph is that I live in the Bay Area. San Francisco is the hottest local metropolis, so I visit occasionally, both for work and pleasure. The city is a parallel mixture of luxe yuppie haven and downtrodden slum:

“He pointed out the animated software ads wrapped around bus shelters and glowing on the sides of buildings. He reminded me that the streets smelled of urine and we were passing homeless people wrapped in rags. Sleeping on the damp sidewalk. Meanwhile, money churned in and out of Silicon Valley’s sister city.”

I’ve written about this before, as have others, so please forgive me for flogging a dead horse. But it never ceases to astound me: in this place of economic and technological abundance, you walk by people subsisting on garbage. Maybe if I’d worked in the city full-time for more than three months, I would be desensitized.

Artwork by Silvio Bertonati.

It’s bizarre how normal it feels to live in a dystopia. That is one of my central premises — a lot of the frightening themes of classic cyberpunk fiction have come true in one way or another, but daily life is still mundane. You and I are side characters or NPCs, not the protagonists, so all the depraved systems aren’t exciting. They’re just exhausting.

And I do feel exhausted. I feel exhausted by the constant deluge of bad news — certainly not the first to say so — and I feel exhausted by the pressure to react to each new development, to perform outrage or heartsickness for a drive-by audience.

I feel exhausted by pointing out, again and again, that while technology does “change the world” just by virtue of existing, sometimes it allocates power in scary ways. The ever-accelerating ~innovation~ will knock some of us down.

There’s no solution here. This is just how the world works. Bad things happen. New media happens. Tech businesses happen. Maybe I’d feel better about it if I were more personally laissez-faire.