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.

Kara Swisher may have mainstreamed Zuckerberg Derangement Syndrome, but here we finally drift from ignoring the atrocities of the Chinese Communist Party to erasing them. The crimes of the CCP have been noted as often as they have by members of the tech community because America is now obviously in some form of conflict with China, an aggressive, authoritarian ethnostate currently invading border territory. The CCP has stolen U.S. technology for years, which many Americans have tolerated as a cost of doing business with a tyrannical government at the helm of a significant market. It should here be noted many of us also turned a blind eye to the human rights violations of that government for years. This refusal to act on information we had about the CCP is something we should all be reflecting on today, and in this regard our largest companies — as well as many of our politicians — are in need of serious critique. But regardless of our history here, the recent enslavement of the people of Hong Kong in the middle of a distracting pandemic the CCP itself exacerbated, while hoarding PPE, marks a huge shift in international relations between the free world and despotic China. There is an obvious danger in allowing a country so inclined to brutal authoritarianism direct access to the inner lives of free Americans as this conflict intensifies. But among a handful of anti-tech writers the notion our technology industry is evil has so been internalized that they registered the technology industry’s strong condemnation of China as indication there must be something redeeming about the CCP. Or, if the men of that despotic government are in want of condemnation, it should be noted their behavior is comparable to the behavior of our own insidious technology overlords and government. At least, this is the crux of Sarah’s flaming hot take:

“‘The question ‘Is Facebook better, the same, or worse than TikTok?’ is more or less the same as ‘Is the United States better, worse, or the same as China?’

And in 2020 this is becoming a genuinely difficult question to answer.”

China, argues Sarah, may be operating concentration camps in which members of an ethnic minority living in that country have been imprisoned, “re-educated,” sterilized, and forced to work in between actual fucking organ harvestings, but America is stopping would-be immigrants trying desperately to enter this country at the border. China is a dictatorship, but Donald Trump tweeted something stupid last week about our elections that was widely and rightly condemned by politicians from both major political parties before it was promptly forgotten on account of the statement had no teeth… because Donald Trump is not, in fact, a dictator. Political dissidents in China are routinely murdered, but a handful of violent anarchists in Portland, where of course Sarah lives, were recently arrested for arson. Sarah invokes another dumb tweet of Trump’s, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and compares this — I kid you not — to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which ended with the Chinese military murdering somewhere between one and three thousand students, details of which have by the way been censored by TikTok.

Sarah ultimately anticipates the backlash she plainly courted (obviously read between the lines, but also almost literally in a laughing tweet about all of the people she intended to make mad with her apologia for tyranny). She invokes something called “information nationalism,” and asserts there is a phenomenon in this country in which critique is met with fierce backlash. She equates this — critiques of critique — to the systematic execution of political dissidents in China. But is her implication here critique of America is in some way novel, rather than ubiquitous? Rather than constant? Rather than obvious? This isn’t an elevated, important argument. This is the kind of argument I used to make in college, as a teenager, while stoned. I’ve followed the press’ relentless critique of our government throughout my life. Reading back through history, it seems our press has acted in such a manner since before the founding of our country. Beyond the press, Americans critiquing government is a pastime older than baseball. I began today’s wire with a critique of my own. Such critique is part of our identity, likely in no small part because of the rather formative fact that our existence is itself a critique of another government. Critique is in some respects who we are, and while I would not venture so far as to say that relentless critique is “good,” the ability to critique is obviously essential to freedom. While this ability is something many in the press argue against in the context of social media, with their now-routine calls for political censorship, it is an ability nonetheless protected by the courts of this country, which remains, despite the wildest fever dreams of Sarah Jeong, very much free.

It has been noted that had Sarah written something so critical of China while a citizen of that country the opinion would have been well-founded, and for it she would have been jailed. While this is true, it remains beside the point. The biggest problem with Sarah’s piece is that in attempting to draw an equivalency between the United States government, which most Americans find tedious but in no way analogous to Nazism, and China, which most Americans know very little about, she does not diminish the perceived goodness of this country, which was presumably her purpose. She normalizes the CCP.

I often roll my eyes at the Verge, but I don’t consider anyone there a bad person. They just think they’re right, so they miss a lot (I miss a lot too). But Sarah’s piece is not merely idiotic. It’s absolutely shameful.

1918. On my drive down to Los Angeles I listened to an episode of WNYC’s Radiolab called “Dispatches from 1918.” Interesting first the degree to which we’ve memory-holed the “Spanish Flu,” now referred to nearly without exception as “the 1918 Pandemic.” But the episode was pretty interesting. The premise: let’s look back at New York Times coverage from 1918, and see how Americans at that time thought about their own, far more deadly tussle with plague. I anticipated a healthier, more robust attitude of perseverance. What I did not see coming was their almost never mentioning the disease. Americans at that time were in the middle of the First World War, after all. But surely millions dead deserved at least a little more concern?

The hosts of the show were as shocked as I was at the difference in reaction to our respective pandemics. Their read seemed to be the people of 1918 under-reacted, while the virus nonetheless shaped the world in countless ways that no one living really understood. But I couldn’t help but wonder if the opposite were true. Did Americans just used to be a lot less risk averse? People understood perfectly well the costs associated with “opening up” in 1918, and they paid the costs willingly. This got me thinking about the nature of Americans today.

San Francisco, in a state of total decay, is in many ways accepted. Why do we tolerate such broken governance? Do we not care, or do we think on some level we deserve it? The equivalency drawn between America and China. Do the Americans drawing such equivalency hate themselves this much, or do they rather believe conflict with a nation so effectively brutal as China will end in misery for Americans? Are they perhaps, if even on some subconscious level, trying to avert a challenge they fear — correctly? — Americans are no longer capable of meeting?

More than incompetence, more than the occasional bit of malice, I’m struck by what appears to be our essential weakness. But in case you haven’t noticed the world is unraveling. There’s no going back, and there’s no opting out of challenge. The challenge is here. We’ve got to grow a spine.

In case you missed it:

Nano factories, and the future of manufacturing. I sat down with Matthew Putman, founder of Nanotronics. We talked about a factory the size of a one-bedroom apartment that will fundamentally transform the global supply chain, and integrate production into our communities.

Cigarettes and Soylent. I interviewed John Coogan, founder of both Soylent and Lucy, and discussed, among many things, the forbidden conversations surrounding addiction and diet.

Inflation is coming. By the way:

It’s time to trade in your cash. Five more months of 2020, and call me crazy but I think we have a few more surprises to look forward to.

-SOLANA