What Will I Find in San Francisco?

Thoughts on cities that loom too large 🌉

Souvenir booklet for the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (1915)

Imagine that you lived in the Mediterranean world in the 5th century BC, a contemporary of Pericles and Socrates — and you didn't visit Athens. Imagine you were a wealthy, intellectual-minded noble in a small, random 1400s Italian city-state, when Lorenzo the Magnificent and Michelangelo were active in Florence — and you just never left your random city-state to visit. It would be missing out, big time.

(Or, as Scott Alexander puts it, “Imagine living on Earth in 65,000,000 BC, and being anywhere except Chicxulub,” but I’m not aiming for an apocalyptic tone.)

Is San Francisco the 21st century equivalent of Athens and Florence? Is it the city from where the golden age is being brewed as we speak? The place where the brightest congregate to bring about the dawn of a new era?

I don’t know, but I’m in an airport as I type this, so I guess I’m about to find out.

Well, maybe. A curious property of this trip is that I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’ll visit some friends as well as colleagues. I’ll see some of the sights, I suppose, though I can’t say I care very much about that. This is not a touristy trip, nor is it a business trip. I guess you could call it a spiritual trip, a pilgrimage, but that sounds pompous as fuck.

I think the less pompous, more mundane way to put it is that in the (virtual) spaces I inhabit, San Francisco and its Bay Area simply loom large. When I discover anyone interesting online, there’s like a 50% chance they live there. Any interesting groups of people — subcultures, companies — have like a 50% chance of being centered there. I know the subtleties of San Francisco’s politics or housing situation, even though I haven’t set foot in that city since late December 2002, when I was 11 years old.

This is kind of absurd. My trip is an attempt at fixing this absurdity.

What, exactly, will I find in San Francisco?

I can hazard some guesses. I’ll meet some people I know well, but for the first time I’ll see them in person. They’ll be lovely and not too different from what I know of them, but the new way to interact will make everything different in a strange, delightful way.

I’ll get a new appreciation for the geography of the Bay Area. I always think in terms of geographies — I constantly have to resist asking people “where are you from?” too fast, but I do always want to ask it, because I think of people in more concrete terms when I know where they are and where they used to be. Sometimes a broad answer like a whole country suffices, though I also tend to ask people “cool, so where in India / France / Mexico / etc. exactly?” For San Francisco, just like for New York City or other metropolises that loom large in my imagination, knowing someone’s from the metropolitan area is not sufficient. I need to know if they’re in SF proper, or Oakland, or one of the string of cities that form the Silicon Valley. But it’s hard to really grasp a geography without having been there.

I’ll get — at least, I hope I get — a taste of the vibes of the city. Some say it is a hellhole, full of criminals who for what seems like dumb political reasons don’t get prosecuted. Others say it is a magical place like no other. Certainly some of the vistas with the Golden Gate Bridge and the sky over the Pacific are magnificent. They even made not one, but two emoji for it: 🌉 and 🌁. Almost no cities get emoji, I think it’s only Tokyo and New York — and San Francisco gets two.

But the vibe is mostly the people. The people in San Francisco, they say, are building the future. Will I feel that? I would like to. Will it perhaps even inspire me into building it in some more concrete way than writing essays about it? At some level I hope for that. My ambition has never fully recovered from the collapse I noticed in the middle of 2022. I never feel like I have sufficiently good ideas to start a grandiose, fun project. I would be thrilled if I came back from San Francisco with a concrete idea to improve the world. Start a company. Get rich, maybe. Make something.

Perhaps that’s what I’m truly after. Does that qualify as a spiritual goal?

I shouldn’t have such high expectations. I might only find disappointment.

I once wrote a short story — this one, but it’s in French — in which California crushed people’s dreams time and time again across history. In the 16th century the Spanish explorers thought it was an island and the location of an earthly paradise. In the 1510 novel Las sergas de Esplandián, Rodriguez de Monvalvo wrote:

Know, that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons.

But California was neither an island nor a kingdom inhabited by black women. It was not a paradise, but did have gold, and therefore a gold rush: a source of fabulous wealth for a few and a disappointment for most. That description would fit Hollywood, too. Maybe the oil boom. And today, perhaps, Silicon Valley.

More prosaically, there’s certainly a high chance that the small sample I get to taste of the city has none of the special ingredients I’d like to try. You could visit Athens in 425 BC and not be invited to Aspasia’s salons. You’d walk around the agora and “feel” the city but you would still be missing out. Well, maybe you’d get interrogated by Socrates anyway. Maybe I’ll get interrogated but some annoying but strangely wise homeless person in SF anyway.

In a way, though, that would still be a good outcome. If California is this fake mythical place, then I do want my illusions to be shattered. No place should loom this large in anyone’s imagination. I already know, though imperfectly, the reality of New York and Paris; I have destroyed their mystique, and I am the better for it. I don’t want to suffer from Paris syndrome.

I am sitting at the boarding gate. People are milling about. Normal people. They’re headed for San Francisco, but there’s no indication that any of them are going for unusual reasons. They’re visiting family and friend. Being tourists. Doing business. I ran into one of my neighbors in the border control queue: she’s headed to SF as part of her job working for a multimedia artist. She might let me in at the performance for free. What were the chances?

None of these people are going to see the city that will destroy the present world. Sorry — I said I wouldn’t be apocalyptic, but I can’t deny that such thoughts are on my mind. There are arguments against normalcy bias: the fact that things are in a seemingly normal state right now doesn’t mean that they won’t change, perhaps dramatically.

And yet — I suppose that’s what I hope to find in San Francisco. Just old, boring, normality, to be enjoyed with friends.

The Great Scintillator at San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition