In 1990, at the dawn of the internet age, reporter Jonathan Weber was tapped as the LA Times’ first Silicon Valley correspondent. Taking up a perch in San Francisco, where he went on to become one of the city’s leading journalists, Jonathan over the next three plus decades had a front row seat to watch how tech innovation – closely followed by growing pyramids of tech money – transformed an economically down-at-the-heels but funky, counter-culturally adventurous, egalitarian and welcoming city into the affluent but sharply unequal global tech hub that San Francisco is today.

His colorful new book vividly telling the story of that transformation, City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco, has just been published. So we invited Jonathan onto BCB to recount both the gains and the losses for the city from its odd couple marriage with what, from humble and unlikely origins, rapidly became San Francisco’s Big Tech-driven economic engine.

Weber recounts how early internet culture was shaped less by the pursuit of wealth than by countercultural ideals of openness, experimentation, and community. As venture capital flooded into the city during the dot-com boom that began in the mid-'90s, those ideals gradually gave way to enormous wealth, rapid gentrification, and intensifying political conflict. Housing pressures led to rising rents, skyrocketing evictions, and displacement and resentment among longtime residents who did not share in the prosperity the rising tech economy created in the city. Beyond economics, many San Franciscans came to feel that their neighborhoods were being culturally transformed by newcomers with different values and lifestyles.

Our discussion goes on to explore how San Francisco's political leadership – mayors Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, Ed Lee, and London Breed – struggled to manage the tech boom and its attendant growth, and failed to fully capitalize on the enormous wealth being created in the city. We also delve into how, more recently, progressives spectacularly mishandled issues like homelessness and public street disorder, and how relations between the tech industry and blue-city politics have become increasingly strained. With the city now benefiting from another boom driven by artificial intelligence, Weber praises current Mayor Daniel Lurie for reversing the city's pandemic doom-loop vibe, but laments that San Francisco has lost much of the artistic, experimental culture that once made the city so distinctive.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Jonathan Weber, City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco, Simon and Schuster (2026).

Survival Research Labs, "Illusions of Shameless Abundance" robot battle video (1989), YouTube.

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Jamie Paul, a former managing editor of Queer Majority and a contributing editor at Bi.org, is the founding editor of the American Dreaming on Substack, where (among his other writings) he has set out to provide a comprehensive catalog of the authoritarian excesses of the woke era of progressive cultural ascendency. At 11 extensively researched and sharply written installments (so far), Paul’s “Memory-Hole Archive” seeks to preserve for posterity the almost hallucinatory lunacy of what came to be the cultural currency and conventional wisdom in cosmopolitan America in the years between 2014 and 2023.

Paul argues that now that the woke era is behind us, the progressive left is collectively working to deny or deflect its overreach rather than learn from it, and he seeks to force a reckoning on the left of what went so wrong in the period when it monopolized cultural power. “If the innumerable left-wing overreaches of the past decade are not remembered, acknowledged, and learned from, we risk going down that same road again and perpetuating this cycle in which the political culture violently swings between the far left and far right,” he writes.

We are hugely impressed by the scope and scale of Jamie's accounting, and by his insightful and unsparing commentary on the left’s errors, and we agree with his contention that coming to terms with the failings of woke is necessary for the Democratic Party and liberal institutions to regain public trust, so we invited him to join us on this episode of BCB. In our conversation, we discuss how progressive institutions became increasingly intolerant of dissent during the late 2010s, and how the resulting backlash helped strengthen the populist right. And we also discuss how the right, now in the ascendency, exhibits its own dangerously authoritarian tendencies, backed by the power of the state.

Over the course of the discussion with Jamie. we dig into trigger warnings, safetyism, the privileging of lived experience, cancel culture, speech policing, the fixation on trauma and the power of therapy culture, identity politics, and progressives’ turn towards racial essentialism.

“There was a period during the 2010s where a lot of people on the left thought that they didn't need to play by the old rules, which were you convince people, you change hearts and minds, you build the foundation, and then you build atop that,” Paul explains. “They thought they could build a third story where there was no first or second story, and it just came crashing down, because you know this isn't Looney Tunes, so now we're in this position where we have to win back trust.”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Jamie Paul, American Dreaming, Substack.

Jamie Paul, "How Trans Activism became So Radical," Persuasion, March 13, 2026.

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Maia Szalavitz, a prominent neuroscience journalist and progressive drug reform champion who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Salon and other publications, is the author, among other books, of Undoing Drugs (2021), a stirring history of the harm reduction movement.

A former cocaine and heroin addict, Szalavitz is one of the country’s foremost journalistic critics of the war on Drugs era, and she remains a fierce proponent of non-punitive approaches to addressing addiction. We invited her on to this latest BCB episode to make her case that harm reduction remains the right way to handle the spread of fentanyl addiction, homelessness and open air drug markets in cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

Szalavitz forcefully argues the War on Drugs never really ended, and that efforts to criminalize drug use have always been shaped more by politics, race, and social control than by science. She argues that American drug laws have historically targeted marginalized groups such as Black Americans, immigrants, and the poor, while legal substances like alcohol and tobacco remained socially accepted despite causing greater harm. She further contends that criminalization has failed by virtually every measurable standard, citing America's simultaneously high incarceration rates and overdose rates.

The earlier part of our discussion focuses on the emergence of the harm reduction movement during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Szalavitz recounts how activists in the Netherlands, Britain, and eventually New York pioneered needle exchange programs to prevent HIV transmission among injection drug users. She argues that these efforts demonstrated that treating drug users with dignity and providing clean syringes dramatically reduced disease transmission without increasing drug use.

Later in our conversation, we press Szalavitz on what we see as the limits of the harm reduction ethos in its present, expansive form, questioning policies common in blue cities like handing out foil and pipes to drug users, and suggesting that the current fentanyl crisis may require stronger interventions than previous waves of heroin use. We point to the enormous suffering created by today's open-air drug scenes and the social harm addiction creates in impacted communities, asking whether there is a place for greater "friction" or limited coercion in public policy.

Szalavitz rejects that premise, maintaining that evidence consistently shows voluntary treatment, housing-first policies, medication-assisted treatment (methadone and buprenorphine), supervised consumption sites, syringe exchanges, and social services outperform coercive approaches. She repeatedly emphasizes that there is little evidence that harm reduction increases drug use, while she contends that substantial evidence shows it keeps people alive long enough to eventually seek treatment.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Maia Szalavitz, Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction, Balance (2021).

Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, St. Martin's Press (2016).

Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories form a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook, Basic Books (2007).

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