Live Podcast Panel: How Big Tech Remade Seattle and San Francisco

A panel discussion and live podcast taping: 

“Two Cities, One Industry: Big Tech, Power, and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco”
A co-production of the Blue City Blues and GeekWire podcasts
National Nordic Museum
Tuesday, Sept. 29 6-7:30 pm
Tickets available here.

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 (most recently he did a stint as the editor in chief of the San Francisco Standard), Jonathan has 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. 

In his colorful new book telling the story of that transformation, City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco, Weber recounts how early internet culture was shaped less by the pursuit of wealth than by countercultural ideals of openness, experimentation, and community. But as venture capital flooded into the city during the dot-com boom, those ideals gave way to enormous wealth, rapid gentrification, and intensifying political conflict. Rents rose and resentment bloomed among longtime residents who did not share in the prosperity the rising tech economy created in the city. Meanwhile, the city’s political leaders struggled to manage the tech boom and its attendant growth and failed to fully capitalize on the enormous wealth being created in the city.

Sound familiar? As all locals know, Seattle experienced a similar trajectory. We were cool in the ‘90s –- grunge put our once backwater burg on the cultural map –- but as the dot com bubble inflated, we began to experience the fallout from a massive tech-driven “prosperity bomb” (to borrow Danny Westneat’s evocative phrase). The attendant problems meant that relations between the tech industry and Seattle’s increasingly progressive political establishment grew increasingly strained, particularly as those progressive elected officials failed in their efforts to curtail homelessness and public street disorder. 

All of which is to say that the way Big Tech has fundamentally remade Seattle and San Francisco, the good, the bad and the ugly, the similarities and the differences, is ripe for an unpacking. So the Blue City Blues and GeekWire podcasts have jointly invited Jonathan Weber to come up from San Francisco on Tuesday, Sept. 29 to join an all star panel discussion with UW historian Margaret O’Mara, author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (Margaret has also written extensively about technology’s impacts for the New York Times’ opinion pages), and GeekWire co-founder and publisher John Cook. The discussion will be moderated by Blue City Blues co-hosts David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik. 

For those interested in attending, tickets are available here.