Save San Francisco’s Soul: Jonathan Weber on Technology and Politics in the City By the Bay

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. As always, I'm broadcasting from San Francisco, in fact, up the road from Mount Olympus, which is the geographical heart of San Francisco. And yet San Francisco has always been a city on the edge. That is at least the title of a new book, a very interesting and important new book about the technology and politics of San Francisco, indeed the soul of San Francisco, by my guest, Jonathan Weber, who knows the city inside out. Jonathan, congratulations on the new book, City on the Edge.

**Jonathan Weber** (1:08)
Well, thank you very much, Andrew. Pleasure to be here.

**Andrew Keen** (1:11)
This, shall we say that the fetish of the edge, Jonathan, you're a veteran tech guy, has always been something that's obsessed the tech community. I assume that the title of the book, City on the Edge, refers to this obsession the tech community have with the idea or the promise of the edge.

**Jonathan Weber** (1:33)
Yeah, that's certainly fair.
It has several meanings, I think, in the title. So certainly, cutting edge, tech on the cutting edge, and the obsession with that that you refer to, that's certainly part of it. San Francisco is physically on the edge of the continent, which is part of what's shaped its identity. You could say that the city and tech is sort of on the edge of the future, in a sense, so that's also part of the meaning. So yeah, so it works in several different ways.

**Andrew Keen** (2:06)
The full subtitle of the book, City on the Edge, is Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco. As an old time San Francisco resident, Jonathan, I'm not sure that San Francisco ever had a soul, did it?

**Jonathan Weber** (2:21)
Well, I think it did and does. I mean, San Francisco is a very unique city, very iconic city. It kind of has a meaning bigger than itself, represents a kind of a place where you can go and be different and do something different and people aren't gonna judge you and you have a different kind of freedom and the country tilted in the nuts role to the West, right?
So, San Francisco as an idea of a city encompasses all of those things and I think a lot of people come here with an idea of San Francisco as a special place.

**Andrew Keen** (2:59)
And yet, maybe the mythology of San Francisco is that it always used to have a soul and now it doesn't. One of my favorite scenes from certainly my favorite movie about San Francisco, Vertigo, is in the San Francisco shipyards when Jimmy Stewart is about to be set up by the villain in the movie. And this villain points to an old photo or an old painting of San Francisco and said, well, that's the old San Francisco. The new San Francisco isn't what it used to be.

**Jonathan Weber** (3:33)
Is that a feature?

**Andrew Keen** (3:35)
I mean, your new history of San Francisco really begins in the 90s with the internet boom. But is San Francisco a place almost in a structural sense of nostalgia of always looking back and thinking, well, in the old days, things were better?

**Jonathan Weber** (3:49)
Yeah, I certainly think there's a bit of that. I don't know if that's uniquely San Francisco thing. I mean, we currently have a presidency which is built on the idea that things were better in the 50s or something. So I think there's a kind of a natural human instinct around nostalgia sometimes and loss of great things in the past.
So certainly, in the city is a place where people come with a certain idea of what it is, and that idea can be pretty fixed over time. And so then eventually, of course, it's going to be not that place because it changes. So I think that perhaps that nostalgia is a little stronger here, almost because of the high hopes and expectations that people have when they come here.

**Andrew Keen** (4:41)
You begin your book in the 90s, this tech history of San Francisco. Back in 1992, you say in the book, only 2% of people in San Francisco worked in tech. By 2019, it had gone up to 35%, an astonishing rise. What was San Francisco like before tech?

**Jonathan Weber** (5:03)
Well, if you go back, so before tech, say in the early 90s, late 80s, I mean, the city was economically troubled. It was unclear what was really going to drive the economy in the future. It was very dependent on banking and financial services, some of these downtown companies. But a lot of those companies were starting to move to the suburbs.