Covid didn’t catalyze San Francisco’s doom loop, San Francisco voted for it.

Checking in on Prop C(atastrophe). Tuesday, the San Francisco Chronicle produced two remarkable stories concerning Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. First, the Chronicle reported, due to San Francisco’s increasingly dire homelessness and drug problem there is a very good chance next month will mark Benioff’s final Dreamforce conference hosted in the city. Second — a total coincidence of timing, I’m sure — our industry’s champion of the downtrodden, the poor, and the dispossessed just donated $1 million to the Salvation Army in support of an “aspirational” program for pulling drug addicted homeless people off the streets. It was a “desperately needed” gesture, said Hillary Ronen, a city supervisor who has presided over San Francisco’s decay for six years, and she was not the only one who seemed to truly love this man.

Reaction to Marc’s selfless donation to the Salvation Army (tax deductible, of course, and actually made by Salesforce) was equally, and overwhelmingly effusive online, not only from the press and local government, but from activists of every political stripe, and leaders throughout the technology industry. I followed the coverage in genuine shock. How was it possible, I wondered, for Marc Benioff to receive such praise in 2023 for tackling a problem he declared public victory for solving — at something like 1,000 times the cost of his donation to the city, and with an actually incalculable cost to the technology industry — in 2018?