Ross Bleckner, Falling Birds, 1994Housekeeping: if you’re interested in the kinds of conversations we have on this Substack, I’m doing a workshop on conflict and friendship in SF in exactly one week (!!) on May 18th. ​We will explore our personal relationship with conflict, experiment with initiating and receiving conversations that invoke conflict, and learn together about how conflict brings us towards better relationships. I would love to see you there :)At dinner last night, B asked me if I was sure I would keep living in the Bay Area. I said yes. He said that he himself was feeling uncertain, since he wasn’t sure if he would continue working in tech. He asked if becoming a writer had similarly affected my desire to stay in San Francisco. When I first moved to San Francisco at 19 I thought it was for the technology industry, but I’ve since realized that I’m in fact just interested in the type of people who tend to be fascinated with technology, or at least some subset of them. My friends are all pretty anti-authoritarian, willful, dogged, and cheerful—as B said, “The type of people who believe they can fix the world’s problems through sheer force of will.” I think my favorite thing about them is that they’re all very creative. In the literal sense that many of them write and make art, but also in the sense that they’re very good at solving problems in unorthodox ways. I lived in New York from 2021 to 2023, and one thing I noticed that is San Francisco, or specifically tech, is viewed with both fascination and disgust. Thanks to media portrayal of the 2010s (I’m looking at you, The Social Network)—San Francisco lives in the public consciousness (or at least the public consciousness of coastal elites, haha) as a mishmash bizarre new technologies, nerds wearing hoodies, evil tech billionaires, men with money who sleep on mattresses on the floor, and group houses. It’s exciting, because there are self-driving cars and lots of money. But it’s bad, because Big Tech is