San Francisco's Billboards Aren't For You

I finally got around to writing something about the weird tech billboards of this city

Hi! It’s been a full six years since I’ve last written anything on this Substack, wow. I’m not really resurrecting it, because the original purpose (sharing the efforts of my writing-every-day-in-2019 challenge) is long dead, but since I have this list anyway I figured I’d share some things I’ve been working on in the meantime.

An ongoing column on SF’s weird tech billboards

For Bay Area Current, I will be writing an ongoing column about billboards, which has been an obsession of mine for years. If you’ve talked to me in person at all in the last few years you’ve probably heard my rant. I have a giant photo album on my phone that is just photos of billboards, collected over the years.

Anyway, I finally got around to writing something about this. The first piece just dropped, and it’s about the broader phenomenon of B2B Slop, or, ‘billboards that aren’t for you’. I also made a graphic for it, based on real billboards I’ve seen.

San Francisco’s Billboards Aren’t For You — Bay Area Current

The starting point for my analysis was to ask myself, what would Mark Fisher say about these billboards, if he were here to witness this. I was deeply influenced by his blog post on the 2012 London Olympics, in which he writes:

The point of capital's sponsorship of cultural and sporting events is not only the banal one of accruing brand awareness. Its more important function is to make it seem that capital's involvement is a precondition for culture as such. The presence of capitalist sigils on advertising for events forces a quasi-behaviouristic association, registered at the level of the nervous system more than of cognition, between capital and cultural. It is a pervasive reinforcement of capitalist realism.

My next piece will be about Artisan, that company behind those really annoying ‘STOP HIRING HUMANS’ ads that have been sprinkled all over the city. These ads are especially annoying because the product itself is barely anything. Like it helps you send cold emails more efficiently, that’s about it. But these ads are able to capitalize on the current AI hype cycle in a way that I think is both utterly disingenuous and sadly quite effective. Look out for that sometime next month. And also check out the rest of the writing at Bay Area Current, especially this piece by the always brilliant Veena Dubal on the torching of Waymos.

Speaking of Waymos

Everybody’s so worked up about the Waymos! I spoke to Steven Zeitchik of The Hollywood Reporter about what a torched Waymo might represent. To be clear I have never burned a Waymo myself and I don’t think I ever will. I am a peaceful person, maybe to a fault. But I think there’s a historical precedent for this kind of thing and that future historians will see it as a powerful and apt symbol of our times.

Revisiting The Social Network (2010)

I made my second guest appearance on Michael & Us, which is one of my favorite podcasts of all time, to talk about the 2010 film The Social Network and also about how much the tech industry has changed since the 2010s. It’s a paywalled episode so you’ll have to either subscribe or content yourself with the preview. But even if you don’t listen to my episode (which I will forgive, in time), you should check out the rest of the podcast. I’ve never been much of a Sorkin fan but if you ever had a Sorkin phase that you’re embarrassed about today, I think you will really enjoy their episodes on The Newsroom & Studio 60.

Should I write an essay about my nemesis?

For a while I’ve considering writing an essay about someone who I think of as my nemesis, mostly for dumb demographic reasons — similar age, similar ethnic background, similar educational/career choices, up to a point. I also kind of think of her as my Waluigi, mostly because of this canonical essay, Critical perspectives on Waluigi. The Waluigi comparison I cannot really back up on theoretical grounds and will not even attempt to, I’m just telling you what’s in my head.

But so anyway this is someone I have been vaguely aware of for almost a decade, because we had similar-ish startups, and so she was my competition both in a business sense but also in a weird personal sense. This is obviously really stupid and embarrassing to admit but I remember feeling threatened any time I encountered another Asian woman startup founder with a technical background, as if there was only room for one of us in this world, or something.

But okay so this person, this Waluigi of my soul, has recently been anointed the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, beating out Taylor Swift for that lofty title. IYKYK. So now she’s not just my own personal evil doppelganger — now she’s everyone’s problem. It’s been interesting for me to follow her success because even though we’d had this brief moment of near intersection with our respective startups, we followed opposite trajectories. Mine failed with a whimper, leading me to swerve onto a completely differently path, whereas hers went to become incredibly successful, buoying up her personal net worth to astronomical levels even though she has not been actively involved with it for years. And now she’s gone on to start a new company, a competitor to OnlyFans that was recently sued for alleged child pornography.

It’s hard to think of a more worthy nemesis, really. She’s such a valuable avatar for me because she represents all these traits/values I want to define myself against, that I maybe didn’t even realise until I saw them embodied in her. To me, she represents both of the enclosure of the commons as well as the exploitation of labor to the most abject degree. She is the girlboss extraordinaire, a modern-day Jay Gatsby, a self-identified entrepreneur who glorifies hustle culture in the form of doing back-to-back-to-back sessions at Barry’s Bootcamp on Thanksgiving. She wears Shein, apparently. She loves Coachella.

So anyway my question is, should I write this essay? Is it worth the risk of getting sued? If so, where should i try to pitch it? Any and all feedback welcome.

Thanks for reading. Love you all <3