Well, it’s another perfect day in New San Francisco, the new Bay Area city brought to you by the fine, fine folks at Flannery Associates, a subsidiary of California Forever, LLC, all rights reserved.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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As I woke up today, October 5, 2065, the Neuralink 4.0 implanted in my brain during the first term of the Zuckerberg presidency informed me that the Air Quality Index was only 312. What a day—the sun is dim and orange, the way it’s supposed to be, shining just for our city of disruptors and innovators hard at work innovating, disrupting, and disruptovating.
Regular Neurareaders of this column will know it’s been a while since my last update! Sorry about that. It’s been a busy month, what with the wildfires, the AI-grid shutdowns, and the third crypto crash of the year. So, with so much news to catch up on, let’s jump on our metaphorical scooters and scoot right in.
First off, our fair city celebrated its 30-year anniversary this month. Yes, it’s been 32 long years since the fine, fine folks at Flannery Associates, a subsidiary of California Forever, LLC, all rights reserved, were forced to go public with their plans to build a new city in Solano County, a region formerly known as the largest brackish-water marsh on the West Coast.
(I can’t believe people are still complaining about this, but once again—no, it wasn’t a secret land grab lifted directly from There Will Be Blood. It’s normal in the tech industry to operate in stealth mode. Remember how long Clearview AI secretly let police track your face before anybody found out? And, besides, there’s not that much oil in the North Bay anyway—so who really drank what milkshake?)
Thirty whole years of indoruption.
To celebrate that anniversary, a parade of luminaries came to town. California governor Meghan Markle was here in person, on her way to the next hearing in her divorce proceedings. President Zuckerberg was here virtually, and this Metaverse user, for one, is happy to report that his legs looked incredibly human. Totally normal human legs, perfectly smooth. And so, so ripped. Like a Ken doll. Which reminds me, we had celebrities here too, including E-41, the upgraded hologram version of E-40, the preserved head of Marc Benioff, and, of course, Jerry GarciAI, the LLM trained on the music of the Grateful Dead, jamming with John Mayer, who hasn’t aged a day since he received the Nobel Prize in 2041.
And what a party it was. Double Soylent rations for all! An extra round of Powerwall charging! A 15 percent discount on all Lyft Scooter rentals in qualifying areas (some conditions apply)! New San Franciscans who work for Amazon even received a bonus bathroom break during their work shifts, bringing their total number of daily bathroom breaks all the way up to one.
We weren’t just celebrating the anniversary. In fact, we were also celebrating something very momentous. The fine, fine folks at Flannery Associates, a subsidiary of California Forever, LLC, all rights reserved, have announced that thanks to an out-of-court settlement on the remaining CEQA lawsuits, our city will soon be doubling its size. That’s right. We’re going to be constructing a second building to go alongside our single, 100-story arcology.
Just imagine: right at the corner of Andreessen Avenue and Horowitz Ztreet, there will be two whole buildings. And they said it couldn’t be done. Who’s the disruptoventor now? We drink your largest brackish marsh. We drink it up!
Now, to be fair, our new city doesn’t look anything like the walkable, New Urbanist, solarpunk artwork that the fine, fine folks at Flannery Associates, a subsidiary of California Forever, LLC, all rights reserved, showed people way back in 2023. But that’s OK. It’s not a bait and switch; it’s a pivot! Nintendo started out making playing cards. Slack started out as a video game. Starbucks started out as a coffee shop. That’s progress!
Sure, the pace of construction might not be as fast as with the invite-only Mars colony built by the most passionate followers of the Muad’Dib, Elon Musk, or those seastead Margaritavilles in the flooded parts of Florida overseen by Disney and Ron DeSantis (who would’ve guessed those two would team up?), but this is California, after all. It wasn’t built in a day—it was built over hundreds of years on stolen Indigenous lands by exploited Chinese and Mexican laborers. Besides, two buildings in three decades isn’t that much slower than the pace of building in Old San Francisco.
That was the big news of the month, but that doesn’t mean it was the onlything going on. Here are some hyperlocal news snacks to fill your news holes:
- The hologram sheep that bound across our city’s fields should get fixed by the end of the week. It seems that some of them had begun to develop rudimentary sentience, so the city’s engineers had to delete them. Can’t take chances. If we let the holograms develop intelligence, it won’t be long until they found their own startups.
- The polycule on floor 23 is asking for new human test subjects for its DMT explorations. Payment can be arranged in more DMT.
- The fine, fine folks at Flannery Associates, a subsidiary of California Forever, LLC, all rights reserved, have announced that rent is now going to be gamified. Every time you pay rent, you’ll earn California Forever Points that can be redeemed for exciting perks, including rooftop pool access (AQI permitting), fractional shares of Golden State NFTs, and personalized video messages from our luminous founders that will be sure to encourage you to innodisruptivate at a 10X pace. Check out the rent leaderboard in the money-laundering room today.
- Fun fact of the month: when cities in ancient Greece got too big, they sent out colonists to build new cities somewhere else. Drop that knowledge on somebody the next time they make fun of you for living here.
- Fire season is upon us, and our local fire department asked me to pass along the reminder that all personal rocket launches should be cleared with proper authorities thirty (30) days in advance.
- The southern vertical Hyperloop is out of service. Please use the northern one or the stairs. Associates of Muad’Dib Musk tell us they should have repair crews arriving by CyberTruck…eventually.
- Nominations for the homeowners’ association board are due. Applicants must submit a CV, a credit check, a slide deck, and an answer to the following prompt: “For a given unsorted array ‘X,’ consisting of nonnegative integers, write a code to find the contiguous subarray that adds to the sum ‘S’ of nonnegative integers in the array.” To improve the diversity and inclusion of the board, applicants from lower-ranked schools, including Stanford, will be given precedence.
Well, that’s about all for this month.
If you’ll permit a moment of personal reflection before I sign off, I’ve been feeling quite misty-eyed lately about our fair city, and not just because I was one of the users affected by those faulty Apple Vision Pro eyeballs.
To think that when we started, op-ed columnists and NIMBY naysayers said that the fine, fine folks at Flannery Associates, a subsidiary of California Forever, LLC, all rights reserved, were paving paradise to put up a parking lot and the world’s biggest, carbon-spewing cryptocoin mine. Well, the joke is on the haters, doubters, and losers formerly known as Blue Checks (deep cut for all the 2020s kids). New San Francisco isn’t a parking lot. It’s a multiverse-ready, omnichannel, just-in-time, Web 5.0, 17G, crypto-social parking lot experience working at the speed of business thanks to our best-in-class Salesforce integration.
And we have a cryptocoin mine too.
Just goes to show that anything is possible when you believe in disruptfluencability.
See you next month, unless the new Apple Vision Pro eyeballs are still blasting a megawatt’s worth of laser energy directly into my eye sockets. Then I won’t be seeing much of you for a long time!•
Scott Lucas is a writer living in San Francisco who covers politics and technology. He has written for publications including San Francisco magazine, The Information, and Politico.
