In between gods, looking for work

My new piece in the SF Gazetteer on AI salons, underground clubhouses, and the privatization of hanging out.

Last week I published a long feature that I’d been working on since the summer about AI salons, the tech class’s search for purpose and belonging, and the privatization of hanging out. It follows three main characters from three overlapping organizations concentrated in the San Francisco neighborhood nicknamed “Cerebral Valley”¹: A members-only, underground clubhouse called The Commons, a semi-academic event series called the AI Salon, and an AI philosophy collective called Superhuman Society. The piece, which I titled “In between gods, looking for work,” was published in the Gazetteer, a new local publication that was recently covered in a New York Times article about San Francisco’s unusually lively journalism scene.

Before you read this blog, I highly recommend you go read the article! I’m about to spoil some of my conclusions that the feature builds up to, and it just hits harder than this blog I’ve written in 20 minutes.

Read the piece here.

Okay, did you read? Great! That’s mostly what I wanted to say today. But since you’re here, I also wanted share some things I’ve been thinking about throughout the reporting, writing, and editing process, which, despite having published in a few other places this year and in the past, I hadn’t done in such a rigorous way in a while, if ever.

Even before I’d interacted with anyone on the staff, I already had a feeling that the Gazetteer would be a good place to publish this kind of winding, open-ended culture journalism: The staff was small but serious, with three (now four) full-time reporters, one extremely capable editor, and an owner to keep the lights on, who otherwise seems more or less hands off. (At least, I never interacted with the owner and didn’t get the sense he was in the weeds directing content choices.) Since I first became aware of it, what intrigued me about the Gazetteer is that it seemed experimental and unentrenched, as I said in this blog from June, and that turned out to be true to just the right degree. The editor was down to let me write non-news, narrative journalism but carefully balanced with it the rules and practices of traditional reporting, which removes a lot of ego from first-person writing in favor of clarity, concision, and readability.

In other words, writing “In between gods”—which required getting my arms around a large, unwieldy story, the boundaries of which I had to draw subjectively (because at every turn, I could’ve followed an infinite number of threads, down and down into the scene forever)—reminded me how important it is to not only be edited, but also to work with people both different from me and better than me at craft, by which I mean structuring a piece, breaking it apart, moving things around, catching and cutting superfluities. Being edited is such a collaborative process that by the time you publish, there’s just no way you can look at that piece and think it’s all yours, which is good for several reasons. You can’t be precious about your favorite lines, which, for me, are always the ones that embarrass me later, because they’re indulgent, and it vets a piece for potentially big professional blunders, which is extremely important when publishing anything even a little risky, which means anything interesting or important at all. Being edited is sobering and rewarding, and out of it you get a valuable network of people you can go to for advice, support, jobs, whatever.

Considering the feature itself is about a response to widespread isolation and the loneliness crisis, it’s not lost on me that my own personal realization after writing this story is actually very similar to that of my sources. In both cases, it all boils down to the truth that people need people, and that it’s good to work in collectives. So despite the fact that my review of The Commons and its peer organizations is generally critical, I do have a lot of empathy and understanding for the all people I interviewed for the story (many more than the people quoted in the final draft). I think (I hope) that comes through in the tone, which I took care to not make snarky, unlike a lot of tech-skeptical reporting, because that’s simply not how I felt while I was in these spaces. I actually really like a lot of the people I interviewed. They’re whole people, and I like people. That said, the trouble I found with the Cerebral Valley scene, which you’ll see if you read the piece, is that friendship, community, and purpose are not things that can really be institutionalized, and they certainly can’t be corporatized. In the case of journalism, for example, the primary project is the content, and the social rewards are organic byproducts for those involved. But it doesn’t flow the other way. When the project, the sellable product, is “community” itself, you get these uncanny social clubs where everyone feels weird and lost. When those intangibles get commodified, they become something else that I don’t have a name for yet. Not everything can be a company or solved with a product, and right now, that’s what’s in vogue. I’ll be keeping tabs on how economic and political forces shape people’s responses to social needs over the next several years. More stories to come, surely…

After you read the article, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this phenomenon and if you’ve seen organizations like this pop up in your city. There are so many weird little details I wish I could’ve kept in the piece that got cut for one reason or another, so if you have questions or want to know more, please lmk and I’ll see if I can answer them without crossing any ethical lines.

Thanks as always for reading <3

https://sf.gazetteer.co/in-between-gods-looking-for-work

1. The real name of the neighborhood is Hayes Valley. When I use the moniker “Cerebral Valley,” I’m using it as shorthand for the physical zone of Hayes Valley plus the new age, techno-philosophical mindset/lifestyle that concentrates in that area.