A journey south. If my running commentary on the world seems a little more relaxed this week it’s because I’ve been working from Los Angeles, and now Palm Springs. Even at a cool 115 degrees the desert feels alive in comparison to San Francisco, which by all indication appears to be dying. Homelessness spiked this year, the natural result of any practice highly subsidized. The city government, which allocates over 600 million dollars a year to the problem and still can’t manage to build a few thousand beds, finally turned to formalizing our lack of shelter with government-sanctioned tent cities, by my eye tripling the homeless population in my neighborhood of the Haight. Transportation is close to collapse. Iconic bars and restaurants have continued to permanently close as the city fails to shut down almost any high-traffic throughway for expanded outdoor seating. It’s foggy and cold and trash gently tumbles down our desolate streets like some giant, rolling weed in an old western movie. But there’s no Marlboro Man to save us from the black hat bandit at high noon. As the city gets worse, a loud minority of people grow more hysterical about things like masks on joggers, which are by all reasonable consideration not necessary, and have taken to screaming at anyone outside not covered in the orthodox attire of what feels increasingly like an apocalypse cult. It’s a dramatic, intricate social performance. Some people need to feel in control of an apparently uncontrollable situation, so they cling to a kind of legal ritual, even while the law makes no sense. If only the joggers wore masks, this would all be over. But the pandemic hasn’t broken our government, and our government is our biggest problem. The pandemic has only revealed the extent of the brokenness. This is unfortunately not something that can be corrected without competent leaders, which we neither have nor have running for office. The city will therefore continue to decline, though likely in new and interesting ways. But hey, at least vaping is illegal!

With no city rehabilitation in sight, and with every major technology firm normalizing remote work, San Francisco has predictably begun to hemorrhage the tax paying tech workers our city supervisors have for years demonized. Tech has long been blamed for the city’s wealth gap, as if the gap has caused what is effectively a ban on new housing rather than the obvious truth, which is precisely the opposite. The supervisors’ policies, with no shortage of help from the state, have created a city affordable for drug addicts and billionaires and almost no one else. Empty as the city is becoming, with no end to decline in sight, it does seem our local politicians will at least finally be left to build the utopia the tech industry has, one supposes, been in the way of all this time. God speed.

Beyond Zuckerberg Derangement Syndrome (ZDS). I critique the tech press often. I know this. And I swear — I swear — I try each week to give them a break. Many tech reporters are doing good work. I reference their good work in these wires all the time. But each week some spectacular new failure pops up that needs addressing like some never-ending Whack-a-Mole from Hell. The problem is typically activist opinion dressed as simple reporting. There’s a clear divide in the niche press, with many tech “reporters” concerned principally with dismantling tech, a beat that does well on Twitter while calmer, more thoughtful writing, with real reporting, goes largely unnoticed. But sometimes the problem isn’t fake reporting, it’s just an actually despicable opinion plainly stated to a massive audience. This week, Sarah Jeong drew an absolutely unhinged equivalency between America and China.