Two parts today. Up top, a San Francisco round-up. Then, it’s Twitter’s fun and flirty rip-off products, a classic industry dilemma, and the future of the social internet. As ever, choose your own adventure.

This park is not for amusement. I’ve been dragging my feet on a dispatch from San Francisco because, I’ve got to be honest, I’m starting to find the subject more depressing than I do surprising, and that depression is exhausting. But it’s been one Hell of a winter, and I do think a quick summary of our city’s ongoing collapse worthwhile. As must come as no surprise to anyone, our local government’s push for self-destruction continued apace these last few weeks, but while there were many notable players none so greatly contributed to the insanity as the Board of Education.

With the concept of merit now officially determined racist, the roughly 80% minority student body of San Francisco’s Lowell High School will be the last class determined by academic achievement. Henceforth, admission to every school in the city will be determined by lottery (excepting, of course, admission to the public performing arts school where the vice president of the Board sends her children). Lowell’s activist cancellation arrived in the middle of what was already a media firestorm, catalyzed in large part by the Board’s decision to rename 44 of our schools, including Lincoln, also on grounds of racism — with explicitly the opinion that Abraham Lincoln was racist — while the schools themselves remained closed despite all public health guidelines and tremendous pressure from parents. Criticism of the Board: also apparently racist. It was in this environment, with so much to answer for, that the Board convened one of its regular public meetings and spent two hours debating whether a gay dad of mixed-race children was “diverse enough” to serve on a parent advisory group. Ultimately, it was decided he was not.

Public anger with the Board of Education, which has rivaled even what our local pro-crime District Attorney has been able to evoke, reached a fever pitch two weeks ago. The Board earned its very own recall effort, the hottest new trend in California politics, and finally paused for a tiny bit of self-reflection. In an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle, Board President Gabriela López announced the renaming of our schools, at least, would be placed on hold while she finally focused on actually opening them. In keeping with the local culture, it’s five steps to the edge of the cliff, and one superficial step back. A compromise!

Beyond the world of education, San Francisco’s Gotham vibes intensified. Rates of assault, arson, and auto theft all increased over the last year. Now, a spike in commercial burglaries is pairing like a fine, Sonoma wine with a terrifying spike in home invasion. Word from our city officials? Mixed. While a couple supervisors up for reelection in 2022 have finally, bravely taken to voicing the locally controversial opinion that crime is not necessarily — in all cases, at all times — a good thing, there has been notable disagreement on the matter. Take for example these sage words from one of our police commissioners, who recently took the time out of his presumably busy day to make fun of a burglary victim:

The reaction to this apparent sociopathy was predictably furious. There were no consequences.

Meanwhile, District Supervisor Dean Preston, the card-carrying “socialist” millionaire who represents my neighborhood, took a break from doing everything in his power to block a housing project for hospital workers, and came out firmly against the presence of a Ferris Wheel in Golden Gate Park.

“As one constituent said to me,” Preston told the San Francisco Chronicle, “‘this is a park, not an amusement park.’”

The experience of some hypothetical future human joy, it seems, was too much for the millionaire Marxist to bear. He rolled up his sleeves, and he fought for his values. Are these values confounding? Yes. Are they typical of our local government? Also yes. But we’re just treading water at this point, and I’m starting to almost not blame these people. While a few of our local politicians are clearly acting out of some apparent malice, most really do just seem to be operating at their mental limit. This isn’t much of an excuse, but the fact remains these people are only in power because the most capable Americans among us refuse to lead. Then, there’s also the question of media coverage, and I do think it’s worth asking why the ongoing collapse of a vital American city is so often bound up in the endless tech press culture war.

A little over a week ago, from this incredible winter of rot, there came a spectacular gem from the New Republic. As San Francisco deteriorates, and our city leaders oscillate between blaming the technology industry for their many failures and gaslighting the public with a shocking refusal to admit anything is presently wrong, Jacob Silverman helpfully took the time to make fun of tech workers for moving to Miami.

In the first place, Jacob argues, this (literally his story) isn’t a story because the trend isn’t real (and yet here we are). No one is even moving to Miami, Jacob insists. But if the trend were real, and by the way, flows the argument, a few tech people I don’t like actually have moved to Miami!, it would be extremely stupid because the city of Miami is sinking. Welcome to climate change, morons, ever heard of it? Crises of fentanyl addiction, mental illness, public sanitation, and homelessness? Endemic government corruption, and mismanagement of city resources to the point of infrastructural failure? Effectively legalized crime, including home invasion? City representatives who laugh at you when your home is burglarized? The gutting of local businesses? The closure of our schools? What appears to be an actual push to drive technology companies out of the city? Most of this is not even worth mentioning, let alone entertaining with any degree of thoughtfulness, because global warming is going to destroy Florida. Okay.

Who knows, maybe global warming really is the only thing an intelligent person should be optimizing for when he decides where to live. Anyway, Jacob is based in Manhattan.

That so many tech writers and reporters continue to publish pieces like this in the middle of a local crisis, itself nested in a national crisis, itself nested in a global crisis, is at this point honestly just fascinating. I appreciate the allure of pettiness, and am not anathema to a little pettiness myself. But at the expense of survival? As we stand in the middle of crumbling, once great cities like museum guests, is there really nothing more important to write about? “Tech bros are not in Miami, but if they were, and they kind of are, that is stupid because flooding” — really, a vital American industry goes mobile for the first time in history and this is your take?

I’ve never had a problem with critiquing the technology industry. What continues to frustrate me is the quality of the critique, which is often dishonest, and almost always too personal. What is the New Republic’s actionable point here? Jacob seems to imply “tech bros” aren’t interested in climate change. Is his argument the technology industry should be focused more acutely on global warming? Lovely, I eagerly await his glowing review of Tesla, and the New Republic’s thoughtful pitch for nuclear power that will maybe happen when Hell freezes over, but likely not before Jacob takes up residence in a houseboat some few blocks south of what was once Union Square.

Some of our terrible media is driven by tribalism, and some of it is driven by class. But do you ever wonder if these people truly just can’t help themselves? My sense is a lot of terrible media coverage is simply driven by the warped reward system many in the technology industry inadvertently designed. Here, I should note a class of tech criticism I do appreciate tends to focus on the incentives that drive our national discussions, which themselves shape our culture. Fortunately (maybe?), everything is about to change.

Web 3 Point “Oh, Shit” has arrived.

Social Media: The New Class. Last week, Twitter finally unveiled the “Super Follow,” and made clear its ambition to integrate every recent influencer trend under the firm and loving grip of a single, censorious Death Star.

On platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and most recently TikTok, a relatively tiny handful of users create most of the content and drive most of the traffic. From the earliest days of social media, we’ve called these people many things: power users, creators, stars. The phenomenon, newly amplified by the scale of a mobile, social internet, is as old as time. More familiarly, we call it popularity, and in an age of mass media popularity became celebrity. But in a world of social media, celebrity accrues real power, and the most popular people alive have yet to reach their final form. While little has been done by the dominant social media platforms to meaningfully help — which is to say meaningfully pay — the most generative people on their platforms, startups have been building seriously in this part of the ecosystem for years. Now, with tools for monetization, reach, and cancel-proofing, in a world where the most popular people alive could conceivably not need the dominant social media platforms for much longer, we’re approaching a world of something new: the sovereign influencer.

Over the last decade, companies that focused on things like creator monetization, creator control, and certainly any kind of alternative, cancel-proof social media all generated trivial amounts of revenue by comparison to the social media giants. They still do. But companies focused on the dominance of sovereign influencers are riding the most important trend in media, while social media incumbents are almost incapable of capitalizing on the trend without disrupting their own dominance. In the technology industry, the dynamic at work here is legendary. A decade ago, when I first learned “Silicon Valley” was an actual place, rather than a metaphor, and began my journey with Founders Fund, I picked up a book called the Innovator’s Dilemma. Long, fascinating story short: large and powerful companies are pressured by the market into obsessive focus on their core business, even when leadership is cognizant of new and important technology trends just outside their company’s core competency. A few of these trends become tidal waves that reshape our world, and smaller companies better equipped to capitalize on new trends ride the waves to new and more significant markets. By the time a dominant incumbent fully commits to the new game in town — because it finally has to — it’s too late. Congratulations, you’re the foremost purveyor of film in a world of digital photography.

Patreon and OnlyFans, subscription services for creators, represent the first wave of companies that meaningfully monetized influencers, and decoupled them in some critical sense from the dominant social media platforms. But Patreon loves a wrongthink cancellation, and OnlyFans is a platform as well as a tool for monetization. While losing either monetization or a platform will harm a creator, the ability to distribute is critical. Substack, with email subscription baked into its DNA, represents the cancel-proof second wave. With a slight hiccup while they find a new tool for monetization, a writer could conceivably leave Substack and continue sharing content with their followers. In other words, we trust Substack because we don’t have to trust Substack. Elsewhere, Discord walked so Clubhouse could run. Interactive voice chat may not be helping creators monetize (yet), and Clubhouse has way too much attack exposure to ever cancel-proof a user — though they’ve admirably resisted the New York Times thought police — but these are mixed social platforms. Partly they enable groups of people who know each other to chat, but they’re also broadcast platforms for sovereign influencers. This is the future. Every successful new company in media and social media exists in sync with this future.

Twitter’s new Super Follow is explicitly intended to be a subscription-based complement to Twitter, helping creators monetize, with a newsletter function like Substack, helping creators publish in longer form. A couple months ago, Dorsey unveiled Twitter Spaces, its Clubhouse clone. First cut, this all makes sense. I’ve been asking Twitter to let me reward a good tweet for years — and for what it’s worth I still believe a ‘mega like and pay’ button would be absolute fire. Dorsey is living in the future. But I can’t mass message my followers on Twitter. I can’t walk away with a list of my followers. I have no sense whatsoever of the Twitter algorithm, who exactly sees my content, or why. There are an endless and evolving array of topics, ambiguously-defined by an ambiguous leadership, that I’m not allowed to discuss on Twitter. And then sometimes, at random intervals, for what often feel random reasons, influencers are vanished from the platform. Overnight, a writer can lose everything they’ve built — for Jack Dorsey, for free. On what planet would an empowered person with reasonable alternatives give this company more power over their life? This is not the future.

Twitter can implement new products, but in a media landscape increasingly centering creators it will never become a creator-centered company. This is not because the leadership of Twitter doesn’t understand what’s happening. Twitter won’t fundamentally change because it can’t. No dominant social media platform can refocus on the sovereign influencer without necessarily diminishing its own power. That’s the dilemma. People tend to think of tools like Substack as a threat to legacy media companies. But, more significantly, these tools are also threats to dominant social media companies.

We’re approaching a world of single-man media juggernauts. Where will they bring their audiences? Wherever they want. Companies that challenge the trend will lose. In a world that has fully blurred the lines between celebrity and politician, entire nations that challenge the trend could lose. The question is no longer whether sovereign influencers will exist. To a certain extent, they already exist. The more interesting question is what will a world look like where a small handful of media celebrities finally control the memes of production. Surely, it’s a gift and a curse, and maybe one day we’ll all wish Jack Dorsey was our president again. But probably not.

In any case, another problem for another day.

-SOLANA