The LED display is so so ugly. And it reflects this whole new-money no-bitches ethos that is ruining the Bay Area. I'm sick of looking at the skyline and seeing a 50-foot leg in Marvel-colored LEDs. I don't care if it's a gay leg, it's bad art. Stop making apps and engage with the world. It has a plug somewhere, and I'm gonna unplug it.
Fuck your startup.
01 / New-money no-bitches
One big issue underlying all this is that the new-money individuals in the Bay Area don’t look particularly good or do cool stuff. In other major cities (NYC, Miami, LA, Houston, Atlanta), people who make a lot of money dress well, have nice things, drive nice cars, and live enviable lifestyles. Women, like other people, are drawn to people who live cool lives. Women in turn improve the conditions generally. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial to say.
The problem here is we have new-money individuals who are making $250k at 30 years old and have no drip whatsoever. They are eating slop and wearing camping gear, at best. They think edgy is Burning Man and Tesla. Obviously, women are not drawn to this environment. And then these sexless fucks get more influence, more money, and still no sense of place. I think this is how we got a giant light-up dickhead in our skyline. It is not hard to be cooler than this. We just have to use our eyes and brains to look at the world and think about what things mean.
02 / AI B2B SAAS that goes dancing while you sit at home
You cannot work in a cafe in this city for more than five minutes without hearing someone working on a new start-up. We have ai to ai your ai. B2b saas to connect your b2b saases. What is being accomplished in terms of actual human quality of life? Have we solved the problems human people have? I am beginning to suspect they are all just passing around a bag of VC money hot-potato style until the bubble bursts. This isn't good, right? I don't mean to be preachy, it's just, certain actions rot your soul. My testimony is you will not be happy to have spent your youth turning protein bars into lines of code for some metaphorical sociopath who sucks the weiners of literal sociopaths for funding. My testimony is self-awareness will not save you.
03 / Public Space
Back to the tower, the issue is who gets to decide what this city looks like. Who gets to say, "hey maybe putting one million LEDs in the sky and using them like a low resolution screen will look like shit." I don't think Benihoff is the worst or anything. Lurie is having that thing happen from Roald Dahl's "The Twits" where he thinks ugly thoughts and it comes through to his outsides. This isn't a policy paper its a manifesto. Nonetheless.
The skyline means something. The light pollution, the dizzying animations, the elevated-frat-living-room of it all, offends the senses. It blinds the eyes and obscures the heart. Every day, SFPD arrests homeless people for obscuring the sidewalk. Meanwhile the sky is burning magenta and lime green. Whose Space is it Anyway? I want to see the sky. It's my sky too.
04 / Be still my beating future
We have to imagine a future that is not horrible and ugly. A future where people with power and influence try to do things that are cool. Or at least help people. Or at least throw good parties.
The goal is still equal power. I think we need beauty to get there. Throw your Oura ring in the ocean, yoga woman with the four hour screentime. Buy a homeless guy a bagel, mustached techie in the gentrifier Mission coffee shop. You can stay polyamorous if want but you don't have to make it such a big talking point. The future is growing tendrils in the soil all around you. Can you feel it? Will you join us, if it costs you your ego?
05 / Where there's a light there's a plug
In conclusion: to the best of my understanding, things that use electricty always have a plug. And if something has a plug it can be unplugged.
The salesforce tower LED display certainly uses electricty. I'm thinking the plug must be really big, but a bunch of us together can probably pull it. That's not a specific actionable threat it's ideological speculation. I don't know everything about how this works yet, I'm just some guy with textedit and an adderall prescription. But I think we should definitely start this conversation, and we can probably work from there.
Get in nerds, the water's fine
Want to see the LEDs
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