megablob friend group

on becoming a person in San Francisco

I’m often strangely soothed by the idea that I appear to others as a youngish woman of indeterminate age and indeterminate means—hard to place. I really enjoy being anonymous, pseudonymous. I’m secretive to the point where even close friends have, at various points, been confused by my occupation, my location, my marital status, my romantic relationships or lack thereof. The desire to be seen, to be known, of my adolescence has been replaced by a rabid desire to remain hidden.

I’m not sure where my intense desire for privacy comes from, but I think it must be partially influenced by the environment I grew up, which is one of almost unbearable intimacy. I left school at 19 for a community of young technologists who lived in the same seven by seven mile city, at that point of my life mostly in SoMa, the Mission, and Hayes Valley. They were almost all founders or working at tiny startups. I saw the same 200 people every weekend—some of them multiple days at week—for years on end. There were my close friends, who’ve mostly remained the same with some additions and subtractions, and there were my less close friends, and then there were acquaintances. Everyone dated in pretty much the same pool, and for a while it felt more or less like a game of musical chairs. X, who you dated, is now dating Y, who used to date Z, who asked you out three months ago…. If you had conflict with someone, you were highly incentivized to get over it, because you were going to see them at the same house parties for years on end.

It’s been nearly eight years, so you would think that things have changed. And yet I had dinner tonight with a friend I met when I was 19. We were both Canadian, that was the original connection, though he’s from Toronto. We went to Che Fico and then we headed to another friend’s coworking space 8 minutes away. At the coworking space were six or seven other people, all of whom I’d also first met when I was 19 or 20. They were mostly still living in the city, mostly still working on startups. Things change… but they don’t.

When I first arrived in San Francisco I was still a teenager. I moved into a 50-person group house in SoMa named after an Israeli desert. The furniture was always slightly sticky because they had massive parties on the weekends that I never went to that shook the thin walls. The bathrooms were communal, like in college. The rent was not inexpensive. I brought a guy home to my bedframe-less room once, a 30-year-old who was a product manager… somewhere, and he said, “I want to rescue you.”

Did I need rescuing? I cannot overstate how much I did not know what I was doing, back then, professionally and romantically. I was ostensibly working on a startup. I was ostensibly dating someone who was smart and cute. Both of these activities were pretty much the paper mâché version of the real thing. I was extremely lost and confused and anxious. Back then, I thought life was an escalator that progressed upward at a set pace, and if you didn’t get on at the right time you were left behind, so it seemed disastrous to me that I clearly was failing at life. I spent probably three years in a blind panic.

We tried one version of the startup that didn’t work, and another that also didn’t work. I had serious visa problems and was shut out of the country for months at one point. My cofounder, who was my best friend since I was 13, decided he wanted to finish college and head to grad school. He blamed me for the whole thing—the startup not working out, his regrets about moving to San Francisco. He loved me deeply; he also resented me. Our friendship fell apart soon after we stopped working together. In those years, I was dating people who were perfectly nice to me and also decidedly not interested in helping me figure things out. They were so functional and reasonably put off, I think, by my seeming dysfunction. I didn’t know how to explain that I just needed someone to hold my hand for long enough for me to catch my breath.

Eventually I did find someone who did that. I met someone who didn’t fight my gravity—who believed in me instinctively, unquestioningly. It was so cool. Before that I had felt like I was stuck in limbo, a kind of forcibly extended adolescence, but the year I was 22 everything started snapped into place really fast. I tried shrooms for the first time. I started writing. I got a green card.

Around that time the pandemic started. I left San Francisco for two years, and this year I came back. There was an AI boom when I first arrived in 2015, and there is an AI boom now. I have a few new friends, but most of my close friends are people I have known since 2015. SF is slightly less claustrophobic because a few people have moved to the predictable places—New York, South Bay, East Bay. But to tell the truth, it’s still pretty claustrophobic. I look pretty much the same physically as I did when I arrived. But I became a Real Adult during these eight years. I cried, screamed, walked around the streets, stepped over human feces, admired the sunsets. I developed a sensibility, learned how to dress myself. My prefrontal cortex punched me in the face when it arrived.

I certainly have brain damage from being here for so long. I have talked to other people about this sense of growing up in such a weirdly intimate context and how it has changed us. S calls it a “megablob friend group.” I’ve often referred to it as the feeling of being stuck on the TV show where the cast is not allowed to quit. There are different arcs each season, of course, but you see mostly the same faces. New protagonists and villains appear, hired by the showrunners. Some villains reform.

Last week I was at a talk where my friends discussed narratives about technology. Specifically, about how many people in tech are bad at writing their own narratives. Instead we’ve let Aaron Sorkin and the New York Times and Twitter do it. Tech had already become powerful by the time I was 18, the axis upon which the world rotated. It was already wildly unlikable. I noticed that people who wrote about tech from the outside always said they were interrogating power. But can you successfully interrogate that which you don’t understand? Specifically, an insular, secluded community that has its own conventions, rules, religions? Some people would say yes. But not the people I know.

I believed early on that by becoming a technologist I would forfeit ever being sympathetic. But it was hardly a conscious choice. By the time I was 18 I was possessed by the belief that technology was what would make or break the 21st century. Software ate the world; software ate my mind. I felt that Adam Curtis was correct, that by the 80s politicians had ceded power to financial institutions, and that corporations were the ones who ran the world as we knew it. I wanted to know why things were the way they were. I wanted to study them up close.

It’s always been striking to me how various tech sects—whether it be effective altruists or e/acc—provide the some of only optimistic narratives that exist in our society today. Are they wildly mistaken? It’s very possible. But people in this city are also the people who make the small glowing devices, the social media platforms, the subscription platform services, that other people criticize them on. Life happens on the Internet now. Reality is evidently not where it used to be. That means something; what does it mean?

San Francisco has been a gold rush city for a long time. Money is as plentiful in California as the redwood trees. There’s a specific kind of grief to pledging your devotion to a mining town, but nevertheless. When I examine the contradictions of my own personality—the desire for secrecy paired with the inherent exposure of writing in public, the introversion paired with the belief that friendship is the whole point of life—it’s obvious that it has been formed by the city I’ve spent my young adulthood in. I became a person here. Risen and baked in the oven of my megablob friend group. It turned out to not matter that I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in the right place at the right time. Before I had the presence of mind to recognize seduction I had tipped deep into love. Love of California. Love of its people. It’s still not clear that either has any affection for me in return, but I’ve been told that it’s a gift to be the one who loves more. I still like to joke that in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of technology.