San Francisco’s meteoric transformation into a global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom nearly engineered its collapse. San Francisco’s Doom since the Gold Rush of 1849 and Bust loop after the pandemic when business flight and surging homelessness appeared to threaten irreversible urban decline.  At the dawn of the 1990s, San Francisco was beautiful if troubled mid-sized metropolis. It was still reeling from the AIDS epidemic and the Lome Prieta earthquake, its economy struck in a post-industrial slump. Once considered to be the capital of the American West, and later the beating heart of the global counterculture, the mythic, fog-shrouded city at the edge of the continent faced an uncertain future.

Jonathan Weber’s fascinating account of the past three decades of political mismanagement and stuttering tech advances in a city that has long relished its separateness. San Francisco long existed on the periphery of the tech industry. Google and Facebook built their empires to the south, among the sterile business parks of Silicon Valley. 

City on the Edge tells two parallel histories, one being the progressive activists and city politicians who presided over the festering homelessness that turned into a full-blown crisis, first with fentanyl epidemic and then the pandemic. The other is about a band of free-thinking technologists, immersed in the creative Zeitgeist of the city, were inventing the contemporary internet who brought new wealth and a third of city’s jobs by 2019, but failed to forge a durable partnership with city government.  The internet’s “new economy” turned out to be “just a slightly different type of profit-maximizing machine”. San Francisco and its remarkable diversity, from the old money in Pacific Heights dating back to the city’s first railroad, banking and real-estate fortunes, to the progressivism of the Mission district and an Asian-American community that has only recently exerted its political power. Conversely, his detailed history of the Web2.0 revival at the start of the century reads, in tech industry terms, like ancient history. Local politicians including Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, advanced to the national stage. An unlikely marriage of underground culture and technological optimism gave rise to the annual reverie known as Burning Man. According to Weber these are two worlds that often existed in shocking ignorance of each other. But as the city’s tech economy roared, a host of urban ills lurked in the shadows: homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness, and crippling lack of new housing. The city’s famous left-wing political establishment struggled to get its arms around the problems, becoming a punching bag for President Trump and the new right. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, it created new crises and laid old ones bare, shattering a “City Family” that had ruled politically for more than thirty years and prompting a sharp rightward turn by the once-liberal tech industry.

Ev Williams, a Twitter ex-founder, summed it up in an interview ahead of the 2024 Presidential election: “I Think that companies should do more, but tech is a very selfish industry. I think that is bad and it’s also one of the tragedies of San Francisco.”

The backlash against the city’s failed politics “brought tech industry money, and personalities, into the local political tray like never before. It joined the newly rich, and a newly mobilized Asian American community with the city’s dynastic family fortunes in a common front against progressive policies.”

Mark Pincus, a serial entrepreneur who once revelled in the city’s “weird ear piercings and tattoos”, expressed the new mood when it came to the city and wider Democratic establishment: “They don’t like billionaires, and you know what, we don’t like them either. So let’s not pretend that we’re friends anymore.”

Now they have all been replaced by the earnestness of peptide -fuelled AI boom, with its blind pursuit of boundless tech power and almost unimaginable riches.

Jonathan Weber saw it all up close as a reporter and newsroom leader. He offers a sweeping history of a city that rose to dizzying heights, only to be undone by the heedlessness of a tech industry it did so much to spawn and politicians who had lost the plot. Drawing on 200 interviews with mayors, CEO’s, political leaders, activists, entrepreneurs and artists, City of Edge is more than a simple chronicle of a city. It’s the story of war waged for the heart of San Francisco- one that anticipated the culture wars raging around the world. Its outcome would have an impact far beyond the city’s famed Golden Gates.

City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco by Jonathan Weber, Atria Books $32, 432 pages.