How I decided to leave Silicon Valley
Illustration by Author Elizabeth Rosenbloom
Bye bye SF: nearing the 7 year itch
“It’s like the feeling of breaking up with a boyfriend.”
I told my mom when she asked why I must leave. She laughed a little, “REALLY?” then widened her eyes when she could see the sincerity on my face.
“The love remains but I know in my heart it is time to leave,” despite the comfort of familiarity from the foundation of my adult life living here.
Living in San Francisco, the radioactive exposure to new-wave tech ideologies has permeated through my consciousness. Biohacking is a lifestyle as prevalent as dieting in the early 2000s, and corporate influence goes beyond the 9–5; suffusing its power into the diction and value systems of the average individual. Piety toward the corporate “live to work” mindset is shown by only socializing when the event is work or productivity oriented. “Optimizing for efficiency” is pillow talk amongst courting couples to set the tone for their competitive worth as a partner.
I have been the cheerleader for San Francisco up until the last year or so, when Covid restrictions finally loosened, freeing up in-person job opportunities and socializing experiences that simulated “life as it was.” What I realized was that despite the facilitated concept of “returning to normal,” cultural trends that existed pre-Covid had solidified; such that antisocial and non-neighborly behavior were the new norm. Vacancies left from the mass exodus during the pandemic were becoming filled with new tech recruits who appeared even less connected to the geography than their predecessors.
Harking to the calls of the big tech mommies, institutional loyalty began to resemble an Orwellian day dream with half the population of San Francisco seemingly replaced.
Tech Psalms
The Bay has long been fertile ground for a religious demographic shift centered around the mother-lord of machine learning. While I have soaked in the excitement of picking up technical conversations about the future with strangers, bumping shoulders with some of the world’s brightest engineers, and having my creativity sparked by the incredible innovations and drive around me, I noticed a growing fatigue stemmed from the lack of balancing forces in this machine-driven environment.
The dwindling humanities in a STEM-focused playground have reinforced a machinic desire that seems to blunt perceptual senses.
That, along with the steady stream of exposure to human suffering through endless encampments, anesthetizes pedestrians against their surroundings. I have certainly felt the relative difference of my reflexive compassion and awareness when I leave the Bay and return. The empathetic endurance required to counteract effects of overexposure to the polarity of wealth in the city often exceed the average person’s threshold. There is a phenomena I’ve discussed with other residents whereby returns from trips away alert their senses to things they normally fail to see on the day to day. For myself, I notice how deeply scenes that I previously passed on the street wear on me.
🪦🌁 = true or false?
“SF is Dead,” is a trope that has been increasing in strength over the recent years. Namely tech entrepreneurs and podcast pros like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson have identified the Bay as a hotspot for rampant crime, filth, and a place that is “unsafe for women.” As a woman, I find the number of tech-bros voicing this assessment somewhat amusing. Statistics supporting this claim are difficult to find as rates of violent crimes against women have been recorded at significantly higher rates around the country. Per 2022 crime reports San Francisco doesn’t rank amongst the top 30 most dangerous or violent cities and falls below the average rate per 100,000 residents.
However, there is reason behind the claims of concentrated crime overall. The city has maintained unusually high levels of theft and burglary compared with other major cities. I often swerve along a shimmery bike path that is littered with broken car glass most anywhere I go in the city. Tire pressure is key when you’ve experienced more than a few flats from the artifacts of property theft.
I haven’t fallen for the “dying SF,” myth: the topography and natural resources within and surrounding the city enrich it with a grandeur unlike most any other city.
Access to some of earth’s greatest biodiversity hotspots can be reached on a daily basis. A surf session at Ocean Beach could very well transform into a swimming with dolphins experience. A bike ride through the park can take you through miles of densely canopied woods with a colorful understory. A leisurely sit at Crissy Fields can turn anyone into an Audubon champ. The rich landscape and dynamic climate will continue to suffuse the city with nature-appreciating urbanites, extreme sports fanatics, creatives, and everyone in between.
Mythologies of the Tech Bro
Despite the wealth of creative inspiration and equally inspired individuals, a common complaint is the lack of hubs for these like-minded people. The increasing cultural homogenization in San Francisco is a product of its relative geographic isolation (being the little thumb-like peninsula that it is) and concentration of competitive Silicon Valley industries. There’s a reason it’s seen as the Mecca for the modern-day “tech bro.” With city living proximate to the Apple and Google headquarters — to name a few — residents of San Francisco can exercise their institutional loyalty with a mild tech-bus ride down to the valley while enjoying the perks of city living.
Apple and Alphabet contribute to almost 15% of the US’s GDP and rank as two of the four most wealthy companies in the world.
This excellent visualization of Top Billionaire Regions by the Visual Capitalist shows San Francisco in the top 10 of cities per the number of billionaires residing.
Note, however, that the actual concentration is far more extreme. In fact, SF has the most concentrated population of billionaires per capita, only behind Geneva, Switzerland, and the #1 highest concentration in the U.S.
The concentrated global economy within the 7 mile radius of SF and larger Bay Area is almost unfathomable, and is a contextual piece to the qualitative denotations of extreme wealth polarization and division. Associations of wealth and tech have made the archetypal Patagucci-sporting preppy type a target in conversations about ailments to SF’s spirit and creative capital.
Though tech culture is often at the butt local humor, there are undeniable fortifying benefits. The intellectual capital concentrated in the Bay Area contributes to a culture with a range of impressive skills and work ethics that could impress just about anyone. The experience of living in San Francisco is shaped by heightened perceptions around wealth and production, and associations with concentrated wealth have been pinned onto tech culture. The consistency of the climate throughout the year (remaining in the mid 50s and 60s) along with a liberal political environment set the stage for a larger homeless population. Contrasting with aforementioned influence of tech-related economic gain, the scathing depiction of polarized wealth becomes clearer.
WikiHow: How to Slide Into a Girl’s DM’s on IG (with examples)
Corporate oversight to “correct” social relations seems to overlap into interpersonal contact. With over a quarter of the population employed by tech, and approximately 13% employed by Alphabet and Apple alone, intensive preventative trainings to maintain streamline business relations influence a heightened stress around social interactions. I’ve personally gone through at least a dozen hours of these trainings and have no bone to pick (other than the subpar acting, if I’m playing critic). If it weren’t for the overwhelming industrial homogeny, the influence of corporate and startup culture would be titrated with customs beyond contemporary tech-related religiosity.
Dating in the Bay is like Groundhog Day at times; where wokeness is displayed by apparent submissiveness to exclusively what I want “as the woman” rather than collaborating on what we both want. The environment has branded many men with the idea that allowing the woman to choose all while acting as a purely neutral agent is a form of female empowerment.
All the while, the symbolic empowerment is a form of moral signaling that leads to inauthentic connections and strips opportunities for a foundation of friendship so essential romance.
I have met many men who have seemed right in the best ways on paper, but the cultural standard of embodying wokeness created a barrier that inhibited the scope of connection.
The Mormon Church vs. the Bay Corporatocracy
I grew up in Utah: a land squeezed tightly by the palm of the Mormon Church. While my response of my origins illicit questions about the supposed “culture shock” I must have experienced upon moving those years ago, I find an impressive amount of similarities between the two. Social niceties purified through a Brita filter, institutional ossification of an already rigid posture and prescribed ritual, all the way down to the overburdening righteousness. The solution to mitigating a herd mindset is more complex than bussing new residents to San Francisco. The swing of geographic dispersal into different hubs like Austin, Denver, and Salt Lake City (<3) has proved less sticky than predicted. San Francisco continues to be the dominant location tech business owners claim to want to start their companies.
A recent study from the Brookings Institute identified geographic trends and shifts post-Pandemic. While visible distributions of tech workers spread more widely through the country, the shift
“does not depict as massive reorientation of tech work.”
In fact, established hubs like San Francisco upped their share of the tech sector’s employment. Many theorize that local politics, social conservativeness and contracting women’s reproductive rights in “rising star” tech hubs elsewhere in the U.S. will mitigate the stream of young, highly-educated workers.
Breaking up: in sum
I identify as a sort of technophile; a nature loving one. So while I lust for my city and its romantic scapes of sea and cliffs, and embrace the curiosity and compelling capacity of tech, I will need to refresh my perspective as I journey to investigate the bounds and limitations of culture outside of “big tech.” I will chronicle my personal exodus from San Francisco as I travel and work in Uruguay and lands beyond the start-up Mesopotamia.
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