Jonathan Weber: How Tech Remade San Francisco, for Better and for Worse

Beginning in the early 1990s, the rise of the internet industry in San Francisco — as opposed to
Silicon Valley down south — brought a wholesale transformation of the city’s economy, politics and culture. It happened gradually through the 1990s and 2000s, and then suddenly beginning in the 2010s, and continuing today with the AI boom. The influx of people and massive amounts of money was a boon to the city in many ways, and made it the envy of metropolises around the world. Yet it’s also had a corrosive effect on the freewheeling creative culture that’s long defined the city, and brought fresh political strife. Can San Francisco find a way to be the tech capital of the world and still hold onto its soul?

Jonathan Weber was named the Los Angeles Times’s first-ever Silicon Valley reporter in 1990. He was later editor in chief of The Industry Standard, which chronicled—and lived—the first dot-com boom. He served as editor in chief of The Bay Citizen, a local news non-profit, and oversaw West Coast news and global technology coverage for Reuters. He was most recently the founding editor in chief of The San Francisco Standard. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Wesleyan University.