Steal this future

I had to blow up San Francisco to give it a future I wanted to live in. The City’s problems—from dwindling affordable housing and ongoing political corruption, to a bizarre lack of trash cans and funding for public transit—seem so insurmountable at this point that I started fantasizing about what would happen after a complete reset. That’s how my forthcoming science fiction novel Automatic Noodle began to take shape.

It’s set in San Francisco, five years after California wins a war of liberation against the United States. The city has been flattened, the backs of its bridges broken, but is slowly coming back to life.

Though I have lived in San Francisco for most of my adult life, and covered it as a journalist, I have rarely written about it in fiction. Until now. I can’t stand by while venture capitalists and their dark enlightenment philosophers attempt to colonize our imaginations.

These self-appointed futurists are forecasting that AI will take over everything from the economy to our bodies. Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken, researchers at AI company Anthropic, claimed recently that humans will become “meat robots” for AI, mere drudges who carry out the will of tech superintelligences. OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s business plan for ChatGPT is to replace doctors and other skilled professionals with chatbots. Meanwhile, VC thought leader Balaji Srinivasan recommends that we do away with democracy and embrace a blockchain-enabled “network state” run by tech billionaires.

Politics always contains an element of science fiction, especially here in San Francisco. For more than 150 years, the city has embraced science and industry, often blindly; we’ve also been home to future-minded activists who pushed for a sustainable future.

In the mid-twentieth century, that meant San Francisco was on the cutting edge of the environmental movement. Activists with Save the Bay and the Freeway Revolt prevented a future where the Bay was filled in with concrete, a massive freeway tunneled through Russian Hill, and another one ran over Golden Gate Park. Those movements are evidence that the future is never set. We can take direct action to change it.

Once again, it’s time to push back against tech elites trying to bulldoze the future of San Francisco.

Last year, San Francisco hosted the first “Deep Tech Week” conference, where techno-prophets mingled with crypto, AI, and defense workers. Balaji was a featured speaker. Attendees were asked to imagine San Francisco witnessing the unfolding of an exciting cyberpunk future.  Perhaps it should not be surprising that cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction that explores dystopian corporate hellscapes.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which came to define the cyberpunk aesthetic, is about a world so horrible that even the AI minds that corporations invent decide to leave the planet in search of something better. And yet this is the future we’re being sold in San Francisco right now.

One speaker at the conference, Andrew Cote, claimed to be an expert in “the sociology of San Francisco;” he wrote afterwards that his “political preferences” are whatever leads to a world full of gigantic military robots draped in the American flag.

Despite what you see on social media, not everyone has accepted the inevitability of an AI slop world where oligarchs rule over private cities and our economy is a teetering pyramid of crypto scams.

In Automatic Noodle, I wrote about four AI-powered robots who survive California’s war of independence, and have found each other in the rubble. Our new nation has granted a few lucky robots citizenship. But robots do not become our overlords. In fact, they quickly learn that the state has granted them freedom largely to take it away. Bots have the right to work where they please, but they can’t join unions, open bank accounts, vote, or own property. My four confused bots just want a little money and a place to call home. But they can’t do that and work within the system. So they exploit a legal loophole to open their own noodle restaurant.

I wanted to point out how quickly the oligarchic fantasy of “AI overlords” falls apart when confronted with the reality of actual people, however artificial, who demonstrate their general intelligence by demanding rights.

The United States responds by continuing to enslave AI robots. California severely curtails their rights. And shitty robophobes start a review bombing campaign of our characters’ restaurant, trying to drive them out of business. Still, despite this adversity, our heroes fight to create a community space for humans and bots, by selling delicious biang biang noodles.

My future California is not Utopian. It’s far from perfect. But it is a sharp rejoinder to the idea that technology and its robber barons will rule our future. The people will resist, whether by violent revolution or small acts of nourishing kindness. Most likely, both.

Right now, Mayor Daniel Lurie is doing his best to make Altman and Balaji’s tomorrowland fantasies come true. He refused to allow the trans flag to be flown at City Hall during Pride. He created a city budget designed to appease billionaires and crush the unhoused. Truly, Lurie is down with the cyberpunk program.

Most of us are not.

I’m just one of many creators who is imagining a version of the San Francisco Bay Area where the oligarchs lose, the people rise up, and things become beautifully weird. There is Chana Porter’s gentle alien invasion in The Seep, and Khan Wong’s vision of psychic repair in Down in the Sea of Angels. Across the Bay, filmmaker Boots Riley offers us revolutionary absurdism in Sorry to Bother You. Robin Sloan shows us a San Francisco full of magical community in Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and Mike Chen’s A Beginning at the End is a beautiful evocation of the city recovering from a pandemic far worse than COVID.

What connects these stories is their insistence that the city’s future depends on communities who come together in mutual aid, whether they are humans, aliens, robots, wizards, or something even stranger. As adrienne marie brown has said, all activism and organizing are a form of science fiction. They are a way of asserting that another world is possible. To steal our future back from the oligarchs, we must dream up something better.

Come to the Automatic Noodle launch, sponsored by Noe Valley Books, on August 3, 3pm, at Bethany United Methodist Church at 1270 Sanchez Street. Annalee will read from their book and be in conversation with AI researcher Alex Hanna, co-author of The AI Con. It’s free! RSVP here.