“There’s a hole. Smack in the middle.” Mark Dietrich pointed at a brown garage door across the street. Someone has taken a hand drill to it, just above eye level. “They reach through with a wire or a coat hanger, and then there’s a little red handle. As soon you pull that red handle, the garage [door] goes right up.”
Dietrich is an analytics executive and San Francisco anti-crime activist, with a bike rider’s build and a close-cropped business haircut. We were walking around his Inner Richmond neighborhood, a lovely place with modest homes that cost millions of dollars. It does not look like it has a crime problem, but appearances can be deceiving. “I don’t think there’s a business here that hasn’t been broken into in the past two or three years,” he told me. “Maybe the bank?”
If you’ve paid attention to the media in the last couple of years, you’ve probably read an article that begins a lot like this one. It probably went on to inform you that San Francisco is dying horribly, the once-great metropolis destroyed by progressive policy madness. Tent encampments fruit like mushrooms upon its rotting corpse, and the addicts who crouch within them purchase fentanyl at what the Hoover Institution described as “an opioid version of Costco.” The streets are paved with needles and human excrement, while roving gangs of criminals steal everything in sight. The Washington Examiner compared it unfavorably to Planet of the Apes. The Atlantic called it “a failed city.” In 2023, Michael Moritz, a former journalist turned billionaire venture capitalist, wrote a guest editorial for The New York Times entitled “Even Democrats Like Me Are Fed Up With San Francisco.”
“SF has a drug problem. SF has a cleanliness problem. SF has an education problem. SF has an anti-tech problem,” venture capitalist Garry Tan said in a taped speech entitled “Fixing San Francisco” at 2023’s Network State Conference. “SF has a fundamentally political problem. So the question is: How do we solve it?”
Tan, Moritz, and others involved in the city’s self-described moderate movement believe they have an answer. They have founded or sponsored groups with generically liberal-sounding names like Grow SF (Tan), TogetherSF (Moritz), and Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and have poured millions into local politics to advance solutions they often describe as “common sense.” Though the real estate titans, conservative philanthropists, and tech bros who fund these projects don’t see eye to eye on everything, they share a common and often obfuscated goal: to create a centralized political machine powerful enough to transform the city into a regulation-free, heavily policed paradise for the wealthy.
Twenty years ago, many people recognized these ideas as reactionary. After two consecutive election cycles in which Democrats primarily ran on a platform of not being Donald Trump, however, ideas and governing philosophies have taken a back seat to questions of loyalty. The tech elite in San Francisco aim to redraw political lines so that conservatives can feel at home on both sides, and progressives are boxed out of politics as dangerous communist radicals. But progressives aren’t the actual radicals in this story. That moniker belongs to some key players at the top of this “commonsense” movement—those who yearn to replace nation-states with anarcho-capitalist “startup societies” ruled by philosopher-king CEOs. The impracticality of such pipe dreams does not stop them from pouring resources into the project, and the results are painfully real.
I recently visited San Francisco in search of the failed city I’d heard so much about. Aside from a few awful blocks in the Tenderloin district, most of its streets looked clean enough to eat off, at least in my New York City eyes. The tent encampments I’d been promised largely failed to materialize, and I braved BART and Muni without a single unpleasant experience. San Francisco has the highest retail and office space vacancy rates in the country, but also had the highest rate of remote work in 2021, at 35 percent. Today, it stands at 20.5 percent, still far higher than the national average. Most departing businesses cited either this trend or downsizing, not crime, as the reason for their exodus—and the AI boom has started to fill the space they left behind. Tourists and residents walked without fear in the warm September sun, and, statistically speaking, they were correct to do so; San Francisco has a significantly lower rate of violent crime than the national average for large U.S. cities.
But the city is not paradise either. Nearly a quarter of San Franciscans pay more than 50 percent of their income to keep a roof over their heads, placing them one emergency away from eviction. Nearly one of every hundred residents experienced homelessness in 2022. Drug overdoses are far higher than the national average, and while I did not find any fentanyl farmer’s markets, I did find curated human misery at the heart of the Tenderloin. People with nowhere to go stood in line, or sat on the curb, or lay on the sidewalk in a stupor. Several openly smoked fentanyl using foil and a straw—something I’d never seen before, even in New York.
“The people lying on the ground passed out from fentanyl, that’s new,” Jim Stearns, the political consultant who worked on progressive mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin’s campaign, told me. “It really makes you feel like there’s something wrong with the world, when you see that.”
The city also has an extremely high property crime rate: 41 percent higher than the national average as of 2020. Dietrich believes this number is probably low. Stearns agrees. “My girlfriend had her car window smashed three times since she moved in with me a year ago, and we’re not reporting that. [The statistic] going up or down is accurate. But what is being reported as the absolute amount of car break-ins is probably nowhere near accurate.”
Back in Inner Richmond, Dietrich and I popped into what is known as the most shoplifted Walgreens in the country, before circling back toward his house. “The CNN narrative or the Fox News narrative [is]: San Francisco is a hellhole. And as residents, we’re so torn,” he told me. “Is this a hellhole? No. It’s beautiful. But at the same time, is the crime real, and is it way worse than it’s been? Yes.” He pointed across the street. “There’s a garage that’s been broken into. You can see it’s been boarded up.”
The problem is real, but is it worse now than it has been in the past? Property crime rose steadily in Richmond from 2020 to 2022, but last year rates fell to the lowest they’ve been since 2017. By 2023, this neighborhood still had one of the lowest property crime rates in San Francisco. Then again, statistics like these mean little to those on the wrong side of them, and visible crimes leave visceral impressions. People remember a boarded-up garage, a smashed car window, or thieves breaking into businesses by driving a car through the front windows, as happened to a bank in Outer Richmond in January and a Central Richmond cigarette shop in June. Numbers and percentages are abstract. Battering-ram robberies stick with you.
Dietrich’s own garage feels a bit like Fort Knox for bicycles—he’s an avid rider and owns several. He’s reinforced the grates on his garage door so no one can kick them in, and a small plastic shield protects the red emergency tab from wayward coat hangers. Two dead bolts on either side of the door snap shut as soon as the door lowers. And if all else fails? “When you pull your car in, you park it close to the back. When you lock up your bikes, you use a New York City level bike chain.”
This isn’t the only vehicle vault on these blocks; Dietrich has helped many neighbors secure their garages over the years. He’s not afraid to confront people on the street, either—Dietrich recently made the news for filming a break-in and enduring a barrage of Brazilian heavy cream for his trouble. He is, as one might expect, a prominent and polarizing figure on Nextdoor. “Remember Bewitched? I’m kind of a Gladys Kravitz type. I’m like, what’s going on?” he says. You could call it nosiness, but you could also call it community-mindedness, and it’s an impulse that extends beyond his immediate neighbors. A popular form of property crime in San Francisco (dubbed “bipping” by locals) involves breaking windows of rental cars by Fisherman’s Wharf, stealing tourists’ luggage, removing anything with resale value, then dumping the remainder off the first highway exit—which leads straight into Inner Richmond. “That’s somebody’s stuff, somebody’s vacation,” Dietrich said. “Eighty percent of the time, there’s passports in it. I’ve met people from all over the planet just by returning their stolen luggage.”
These are real problems, and understandably distressing to the people who live here. And yet, it does not explain why one of the safest major cities in the country manifests as an irredeemable hellhole in the national imagination. Every city has a Tenderloin to some degree. Of America’s 25 largest cities, San Francisco had the fourth-highest rate of property crime and the highest percentage of unhoused people in 2022, but people experience homelessness and crime at high rates across the United States. Nashville had approximately the same overdose rate as San Francisco in 2022, and its violent crime rate was nearly three times higher. And yet when was the last time you read a national article about the failed city of Nashville? San Francisco’s real and serious problems cannot explain its place within 2020s American mythology. Who, then, are the mythmakers?
It is 4 p.m. on the last Saturday in September, and Folsom Street is already beginning to transform in preparation for its infamous street fair the following day. I pass twinks in leather puppy masks walking alongside—or being walked by—bears in harnesses. A large man in assless chaps stands on a street corner.
I am not wearing chaps, assless or otherwise. I am wearing a Day-Glo vest and holding a large orange bag in one hand, a trash picker in the other. This is Refuse Refuse’s weekly trash pickup in the South of Market neighborhood, one of several weekly cleanups across the city. You can find these events on Refuse Refuse’s website, but the sign-up links lead to a website run by TogetherSF, where I dutifully registered.
We pick up trash in pairs. My partner in cleanliness is an older man with a British accent. He does this around his own neighborhood, too, he tells me. When he sees people doing drugs in public, he politely asks them to go somewhere a bit more private. They usually listen. People just want to be treated like people, he says. We discuss the ways that lack of permanent shelter compounds mental illness and drives people deeper into addiction (or starts them along that path in the first place). I am moved and inspired by his compassion.
But a few days later, I began to receive emails from TogetherSF that pushed a very different narrative. The emails urged me to vote for the organization’s chosen mayoral candidate, Mark Farrell, whose platform includes sending armed National Guard members into the Tenderloin and relaxing affordable housing requirements. The missives included an invitation to door-knock for Farrell, a voting guide that promised to “fix SF,” and a robust defense of Farrell against several accusations of campaign finance fraud.
I didn’t need the door-knocking invitation; I’d already attended a weekly canvassing, jointly hosted by Farrell’s campaign and TogetherSF Action, the organization’s 501(c)(4) lobbying arm. The canvassers knocked doors both for Farrell and Prop D, TogetherSF’s pet piece of legislation promising to streamline bureaucracy by eliminating redundant commissions. The kickoff did not mention that Prop D would also give the mayor near-total control over the remaining commissions, at the expense of the Board of Supervisors.
“My super-quick pitch: I think San Francisco can do better,” said Terry Whalen, the canvasser I shadowed, after exchanging pleasantries with the woman who answered the door. “We need a new sheriff in town. Part of that public safety, you know?” The woman listened with some interest as Whalen briefly summarized Farrell’s background—served on the city Board of Supervisors for seven years, went into the private sector (“to make some money, like a normal person”), then returned when the city began to fall apart. “I’ve known him for a long time. We sent kids to the same school,” he said. “I’m voting Farrell number one. And then, we have to do ranked choice, so I’m voting [Daniel] Lurie number two, because I think Lurie could also be good.”
The mainly self-funded eventual winner, Lurie, philanthropist and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, was one of three self-declared “moderate” candidates in the race, along with Farrell and incumbent London Breed. Thanks to ranked-choice voting, splitting the moderate vote wasn’t necessarily a death sentence for “commonsense” governance. The important thing was to thwart the mayoral ambitions of longtime city supervisor and small-donor-funded Aaron Peskin—or “Poison Peskin,” as Whalen called him.
Whalen is an affable man who lives just down the street from Dietrich—in fact, Whalen’s the one who introduced us. He’s new to political activism; with his kids in college, he now has more time to get involved. Like everyone to whom I spoke for this article, he wants his city to be safer, cleaner, better. Farrell’s solutions seem like common sense, while progressive policy strikes him as “bizarro world”—both incomprehensible and dangerous. The policies that worry him include defunding the police, a refusal to arrest drug dealers, and the elimination of middle school algebra in the name of social justice.
I was skeptical of that last claim, but when I googled it, there it was: The San Francisco school board really did banish algebra from middle schools in 2014 in the name of closing a racial achievement gap. Not only did that gap remain, but private schools that offered middle school algebra widened the gap between the wealthy and merely affluent. The school board approved the restoration of eighth-grade algebra in 2024.
The policy is enough to make any parent apoplectic, but does not explain the timing of the backlash, which started seven years after the algebra measure passed. The statewide law that reduced penalties for property crimes and drug infractions also passed in 2014. Car break-ins began to spike in 2011 and reached their peak in 2017. Overdose deaths first soared above the national average in 2018. And yet, San Francisco’s doom loop narrative didn’t take hold until early 2021. Why?
Covid, not algebra, sparked the San Francisco school board recall, which many also regard as the beginning of the city’s political pendulum swing. By 2021, most private schools were back to in-person learning, but public schools were not. Rather than working on a plan to safely reopen, the school board voted to rename 44 schools named for people whom a slipshod, Wikipedia-based study declared problematic: people like Paul Revere, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Dianne Feinstein. The timing could not have been worse.
A few weeks later, Autumn Looijen and Siva Raj began to organize a recall campaign against three school board members and found allies in two recently created organizations: GrowSF and Neighbors for a Better San Francisco. The latter group contributed nearly $470,000 of the campaign’s $2 million war chest. David Sacks, a Republican tech billionaire who supports both JD Vance and Trump, gave the fifth-largest donation, at $75,000. Between parental frustration and being outspent 22 to one, the incumbents never had a chance. On February 15, 2022, San Franciscans gave all three members the boot.
“There was an authentic populist revolt,” Eric Jaye, a San Francisco political consultant who’s worked for decades with both progressive and moderate candidates, told me. “They were just parents asking the question, ‘Why are my kids not back in school?’”
Next in moderates’ crosshairs was District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was narrowly elected in 2019 on a platform of harm reduction and judicial reform. Like many cities, San Francisco stopped jailing people for low-level offenses during Covid, and Boudin kicked off a program that allowed some offenders to undergo supervised treatment and classes as an alternative to jail. Research indicates that these types of diversionary programs are more effective than incarceration at preventing recidivism, but Boudin’s opposition used the $7 million in their coffers to paint him as more sympathetic to criminals than victims. Two-thirds of that money came from Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, whose $4.7 million donation vastly overshadowed the second-largest contributor, a real estate PAC that gave $250,000. Boudin supporters raised $3 million to push back against the narrative, but voters decisively fired him in June 2022.
Thus emboldened, anti-progressive groups pivoted from the Boudin recall into the November 2022 Board of Supervisors elections. TogetherSF launched a “voter’s guide” and began to host house parties on behalf of its chosen candidates, especially the victorious Joel Engardio, who had helped organize the school board recall and served as executive director of Stop Crime SF, a group that advocates for tougher sentencing and against “lenient” judges. That group received $750,000 from Neighbors for a Better San Francisco in 2021.
Going into 2023, the anti-progressives were not only three for three at the ballot box, but they were exerting indirect policy pressure, too. Then-Mayor London Breed, who called for defunding the police in 2020, began calling for increased police presence and incarceration for drug users. And yet, tales of San Francisco’s imminent demise became even more commonplace. Nine major “doom loop” articles were published that year. San Francisco was still failing, and progressives—in control only of the Board of Supervisors—were still completely at fault. The narrative (along with funding from the Abundance Network) helped fuel the March 2024 takeover of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, or DCCC—a quiet but major victory for anti-progressives that allowed them to bestow the official party endorsements for candidates and ballot measures going forward.
Through it all, the anti-progressive groups have pushed a “normal versus bizarro” framework that has proved useful in painting progressives not as fellow residents with different ideas, but as dangerous wackos outside the bounds of acceptability. It’s the kind of thing that short-circuits discussion, a good-versus-evil battle that feels all too familiar in American politics writ large. “If you call yourself progressive, it’s almost a dirty word. You’re putting yourself in a category which is politically outside, because it’s been dehumanized,” Jeff Olsen, an IT security expert and native San Franciscan, told me over coffee. “That was not the case eight years ago, or five years ago.”
Apart from being incredibly unpleasant, such rhetoric actively hinders efforts to fix things. In 2022, for example, Mayor Breed launched the Linkage Center in the Tenderloin, a facility intended to connect unhoused people with shelter and treatment options. Drug users could smoke or inject within the facility, where medics stood by to intervene in case of overdose. “Four hundred people a day were coming in,” then-Supervisor Dean Preston told me. “Zero people died in 11 months, and all overdoses were reversed. Absolute success.” But not everyone felt that way. While over a quarter of the 124,000 people who visited the site received some form of assistance, almost none of that involved help with mental illness or addiction, partly because harm reduction opposes pushing treatment before users are ready, and partly because of the city’s chronic shortage of treatment facilities. Critics claimed the center was more interested in facilitating drug use than in helping people get clean.
The city’s 2022 overdose prevention plan, endorsed by the Board of Supervisors and (sometimes) Breed herself, called for expanded treatment capacity and “wellness hubs” in several other neighborhoods. By 2023, under immense political pressure, Breed shut the facility down, refused to open a replacement facility, and called for a pivot toward incarceration. “No serious public health or policy person thinks that running around and arresting people … is a sensible way to address drug addiction,” Preston told me. “Arresting them does nothing. It makes them more likely to die from an overdose when they get out.” Studies back this up, and so did results in San Francisco. The city’s overdose rate reached an all-time high in 2023, even as the national rate went down.
The bizarro-world strategy wasn’t so crazy after all, it seems, even one imperfectly implemented. Preston had hoped San Francisco could implement the Zurich model, with its four pillars of prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and enforcement, adding, “I’m not against having a law enforcement component to this.” But the city’s commitment was temporary and incomplete. “What you’re really seeing is a lack of consensus around executing a holistic plan. Instead, you have government operating by press release—you get whiplash.”
Preston is the first Democratic Socialist to serve on the Board of Supervisors in nearly 30 years, and the anti-progressive movement’s public enemy number one. And yet Mark Dietrich, who wants to increase both police presence and arrests, also believes harm reduction is necessary, as part of a larger program. “You have to get people into the help they need to save their lives. If you’re going to have injection sites, their whole mission has to be to get people into treatment and recovery,” he told me. “That hasn’t happened at all.”
Dietrich and Preston don’t agree on everything, but they agree on enough to have a conversation. Nevertheless, in a climate in which invective triumphs over nuance, it seems unlikely they’ll have it. “I think it’s part of a concerted strategy to divide San Francisco politically,” Olsen said. “This is a sophisticated and time-tried strategy of the Republicans to marginalize and divide.”
The anti-progressive movement has exploited wedge issues and fostered a climate of distrust, and one of the most prominent of the “moderate” groups, TogetherSF, makes this strategy explicit—at least behind closed doors. Internal documents leaked to local progressive watchdog organization Phoenix Project, and reported by Mission Local, lay out a four-part plan for “growing an engaged (and enraged) community.” The current phase calls for building engagement through events like holiday celebrations and trash pickups—often run by partner organizations to decenter TogetherSF’s involvement—while its lobbying arm works to “grow and sustain [a] movement of community dissatisfaction” in order to garner support for its ultimate agenda—“changing the structure of SF government.”
“They’re [just] getting started, but they’re learning fast,” Julie Pitta, president of the Phoenix Project, told me. “It’s interesting to watch.”
In early 2024, Pitta launched the Phoenix Project—which, like many of these groups, is a 501(c)(4)—to track the anti-progressive organizations pouring unprecedented millions into local politics. Its research reveals an extensive network of advocacy groups, nonprofits, PACs, affiliates, and community organizations backed by a handful of tech and real estate magnates, all with ties to at least one of the four groups at the center of what they’ve christened a Big Four “astroturf network”: TogetherSF, Grow SF, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, and Abundance Network. These groups work toward a shared goal of transforming San Francisco into a city that more closely resembles a corporation than representative government, with the mayor as CEO and citizens as shareholders. In a statement to The New Republic, GrowSF said it was “pro-outcomes and anti-dysfunction, not anti-progressive,” and claimed that it works independently from other groups. Neighbors for a Better San Francisco executive director Jay Cheng stated that the group “focuses on backing organizations and candidates that share our priorities and vision.”
“At first, when we were talking about it, it sounded very conspiratorial,” Phoenix Project executive director Jeremy Mack told me. “But then, as you start showing the money … it became a very clear line of: Oh, this is all coming from these like two dozen billionaires.”
I wrote about those plutocrats in November for The New Republic: the interlocking donations, the massive amounts of dark money, and the donors with a history of supporting Republican candidates and causes. At least one of them supported Trump in past elections, but many more are Never-Trump Republicans—which may explain why they’ve successfully passed themselves off as moderates. If arch-neocon and warmonger Dick Cheney has a seat on Team Blue, why not William Oberndorf, the billionaire behind Neighbors for a Better San Francisco who also chairs Betsy DeVos’s school choice advocacy organization and donated $2.5 million to Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund? Why not John Kilroy Jr., the real estate magnate who gave $1 million to Neighbors for a Better San Francisco (and also sat on the board of California’s largest Republican PAC), or William F. Duhamel, who donated to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2023?
Real estate developers and organizations—not known for being particularly supportive of Democratic policies—also fund the “moderate” movement. The astroturf network is rabidly pro-YIMBY, and, at first glance, the movement seems like a no-brainer: San Francisco has a housing shortage, YIMBYs want to build housing—win/win, right? But these YIMBYs want the free market to determine where and how they build. In practice, that often means an increase mainly in luxury housing, which lowers rent very little for poor families. It also enriches real estate developers. “This is the most valuable real estate in the country,” Jaye said. “If you put a multiplier on it, you’re making hundreds of billions of dollars. So what’s a few million?
The ultrawealthy pouring money into pet projects and buying politicians is hardly breaking news. But the network goes beyond specific policy. “They are putting the organizations in place to sustain power after an election and through multiple elections,” Stearns, the progressive consultant, told me. “I think that they are truly trying to create a moderate political machine that has a grassroots base.”
After just four years of organizing, that machine is already large and complicated. I found at least 31 groups, past and present, with robust ties to the Big Four. Some existed for years or decades before the astroturf network popped up, but now receive significant funding from it and/or parrot its talking points. Other groups popped up, funneled money to a specific candidate or ballot initiative, then vanished. ConnectedSF, which received over $1 million from Neighbors for a Better San Francisco between 2021 and 2023, astroturfs neighborhood groups in all 11 city districts. It also participated in a bit of gerrymandering, according to Neighbors president Nick Podell; a note obtained by progressive outlet 48Hills.org brags that the group “[led] the Redistricting drive to capture moderate majorities in Supervisor Districts which will ensure moderate centrist candidates are elected in the future.”
The network astroturfs good PR as well. In 2023, for example, the nonprofit Paint the Void commissioned local artists to create murals on boarded-up storefronts. Only after they accepted did some artists discover Paint the Void’s relationship with TogetherSF, which used the project to produce branded promotional materials—and that finishing the murals was optional. (Paint the Void says the affiliation was always public and confined to promotion.) One artist decided to finish her mural with enormous bubble writing: “Ethical Billionaires Don’t Exist.”
TogetherSF and Grow SF deny overarching coordination based on a handful of endorsement variations between groups. These organizations aren’t all part of a lockstep top-down conspiracy, which is kind of the point. They’re a loose collection of local concerns that receive funding from a particular set of millionaires and billionaires with a long-term agenda, and who use them to advance goals from several angles.
Broadly speaking, those goals include more government power and greater law enforcement; this network and its sponsors often support increased surveillance, decreased police oversight, and drug testing for welfare recipients. TogetherSF advocates holding at-large elections rather than allowing neighborhoods to pick their own representatives on the Board of Supervisors, a sentiment echoed by GrowSF co-founder Steven Buss Bacio on a podcast, along with a desire to merge San Francisco and the moderate areas that surrounded it to create “Bay City.” Despite employing strategic us-versus-them politics, the leaked TogetherSF document lists “political infighting” as a structural problem. Ideally, it states, “the Board of Supervisors would effectively check the power of the Executive, but would be ultimately aligned in values.”
However, disagreement within a democracy is the system working as intended—and most of the people behind the Big Four aren’t politicians, officeholders, or community organizers. They are venture capitalists and founders immersed in startup culture that prizes efficiency above all else, and a wider conversation about governance in a world undergoing near-constant technological transformation.
Misha Chellam, co-founder of the Abundance Network, thinks of himself as an “Abundance Progressive”—part of a movement that correctly identifies problems with gridlock and efficiency, then embraces its diametric opposite, a results-driven approach that does away with roadblocks like environmental impact review and court injunctions. It also seeks to eliminate the power of “narrow interests”: a broad category often illustrated with groups like teachers’ unions and police reform advocates. They hope to create an Abundance Faction within the Democratic Party.
Others have more extreme ambitions. Garry Tan, the president and CEO of the venture capital firm Y Combinator and a GrowSF board member, describes himself on his X profile as an “e/acc,” or effective accelerationist—that is, a believer in an all-gas-no-brakes approach to technological progress that reads like Ayn Rand on (more) uppers in space. “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology,” Marc Andreessen declares in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” one of the most popular effective accelerationist texts. Limitless growth leads to limitless “abundance,” Andreessen writes, which will cause “all physical goods [to] become as cheap as pencils.” Economists tend to disagree, but no matter: Any attempts to question unlimited technological development are not just misguided, but morally repugnant. The manifesto fantasizes about “becoming technological supermen” and paraphrases Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian Futurist who co-wrote The Manifesto of the Italian Fasces of Combat, commonly known as the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919.
Andreessen also cites Nick Land’s techno-capital machine as inspiration. Land is the father of traditional accelerationism, which holds that unlimited technological development will lead to social collapse, but that this collapse is necessary to create a better society. Land, along with fellow neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin, envision “mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation.”
The idea resembles Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State concept, which Gil Duran has covered at length for The New Republic. Balaji, who goes by his first name, believes that crypto-fueled sovereign city-states run like corporations—with their own laws and a CEO calling the shots—can best facilitate abundance. Tech bros have attempted several such “startup societies,” but all are a long way out from sovereignty and self-sufficiency, which may explain why Balaji also fantasizes about taking over San Francisco. The plan: Create in-person meetups for the tech community (“grays”) that already exists online, then ally with law enforcement and the “reds” to physically expel the “blues” from the city.
As explained by Duran, Garry Tan himself is a vocal supporter of the Network State movement. His taped speech at Balaji’s 2023 Network State Conference revealed an agenda that goes far beyond electoral politics. “Voting is important,” he said, “but on its own it just replaces the elected officials. We need to replace the unelected parts of the system as well. Building parallel education, nonprofits, media, unions; that’s what the Network State Conference is about.”
In 2022, Tan described Y Combinator as “a prototype model for what [Balaji] talks about when he says the Network State.” And it’s definitely fostering a network of some sort: Affiliates include GrowSF co-founder Sachin Agarwal, Abundance network co-founder Zack Rosen, and TogetherSF backer Michael Moritz.
Moritz is also a major investor in California Forever, a project that seeks to build a privately owned walkable city in nearby Solano County. According to a note obtained by The New York Times, Moritz pitched the project to a prospective investor as a way to experiment with new government structures. California Forever denies any association with the Network State movement, and yet a speaker at the aforementioned Network State Conference featured a conceptual drawing of California Forever in his slide deck, alongside the text, “I interviewed many startup city founders.” One month earlier, Duran points out, Balaji referenced California Forever on a podcast. “The Network State … is already being tried. You’re seeing it in Northern California, you know, this thing, this project. You’re seeing it with Creator Cabins and Culdesac and Praxis.” These latter three are network states; California Forever is the only project in Northern California that even approaches Balaji’s description.
This tech-bro dark enlightenment fantasy has never had so many friends in high places. Donald Trump spoke about “freedom cities” during his campaign. JD Vance, a venture capitalist and former Peter Thiel employee, is a heartbeat away from the presidency; at time of publication, Elon Musk is still “First Buddy.” In September, Tan spoke at “Reboot,” an accelerationist conference with a sponsor list that included Uber, Yelp, and the Heritage Foundation. “After decades of pretending that Washington didn’t exist, Silicon Valley has woken up to politics, recognizes the stakes, and is playing to win,” the website declares.
“We could be here for five hours talking about how broken this city is, but that’s why I think it’s so important for us to fight here,” Tan told his audience at a small e/acc event. “If we can build here, we’re going to take over the whole country. We’re going to take over every nation in the world.”
San Francisco’s local elections alone generated $72 million, much of it either directly from tech titans or funneled through the astroturf network. As it turns out, though, that money bought them very little. In the election’s most expensive Board of Supervisors race, Dean Preston narrowly lost to anti-progressive choice Bilal Mahmood, but the Democratic Socialists still have a seat on the board—Jackie Fielder won decisively in District 9. Ultimately, the anti-progressives managed to flip just two of the six supervisor seats. TogetherSF’s Prop D went down in ignominious defeat, as did Mark Farrell’s mayoral campaign; one day before the election, Farrell agreed to pay the largest ethics fine in city history after using money raised for Prop D by TogetherSF as a campaign slush fund. And in an ironic twist, Supervisor Joel Engardio—of school board-recall fame—is himself facing a potential recall over his support for Measure K, which creates a park and closes a roadway in his district, and which passed a citywide vote over the objections of his constituents.
In the end, however, the millions bought enough. Moderates now hold a slim majority on the Board of Supervisors and, in the largely self-funded Lurie, the mayor’s office as well. (Lurie quickly added OpenAI’s Sam Altman to his transition team, despite the latter’s lack of political experience.) “The election results show that residents are shifting away from extreme progressivism,” TogetherSF Action CEO Kanishka Cheng told me via email; the group also rejects the “anti-progressive” label. And even if the TogetherSF brand fails to survive the Farrell scandal, it will likely reconstitute and recover before 2026. Its resources remain limitless; its ambitions vast.
Toward the end of our walk, I asked Mark Dietrich about these groups. He’s been to some events and liked much of what they had to say. “I’m not a billionaire. They’re not billionaires,” he said of his fellow attendees. “These folks I’ve met are more like me. They live here. They have kids. And they see this dysfunction that I’ve described to you.”
Most of the people who support San Francisco’s anti-progressive movement are more like Dietrich than Balaji. They’ve never heard of the Network State and don’t give a damn about e/acc. But they’re unhappy with how things are going, and they’re ready for a change.
San Francisco is not a uniquely failed city. Some of its problems are worse than average, others far better, but they are largely the same ones facing every city in America. Our decades-long national war against economic progressivism has destroyed state mental health services, slashed social safety nets, implemented mass incarceration, lowered corporate taxes, and allowed our infrastructure to languish. Productivity has soared, while real wages remained virtually stagnant, which is why a handful with limitless millions can try to make their esoteric dreams of a neo-Spartan cryptostate a reality, while hundreds of thousands cannot afford basic food and shelter. Some progressives fight for structural improvements, yet far too many liberals cast themselves as defenders of the status quo, expending more energy assuring us that things are OK—and worse, take up counterproductive au courant causes like banning middle school algebra—rather than asking the hard questions that tech bros are answering so confidently, yet poorly. As long as the conditions that accompany widespread poverty endure, there will be an opening for a slick salesman with an anodyne name to take advantage of our misery to first divide us, and then rule.
