As Good as He is Beautiful: John H. McCarty and the McCarty Wireless Telephone Company

John Henry McCarty, 1855-1924?

“Hello! Hello! Is this Mr. Seidenberg? Is this Mr. Davis? Is this Mr. McAlfrey? This is McCarty at the Cliff House.” ¹

My cousin Francis Joseph McCarty occupies an interesting place in the history of emerging mass communications technology in the early 20th century. Francis is credited with manufacturing and demonstrating the first wireless telephone in San Francisco, and founding the first wireless telephone company on the west coast, making him an unlikely forerunner of today’s tech bros and their famously disruptive culture. 

He was only able to invent one thing before his death at the age of  17 in 1906, but that one thing — a patented wireless telephone—had an immediate impact. The bulky device spawned two more wireless companies, both short-lived, a silent movie, now lost, and a starting point, not the basis, for the founding of the Federal Telegraph Company in Palo Alto by Cyril Elwell, who launched a new generation of wireless voice transmission.  

I was in my thirties when I met my cousin posthumously because of a writer’s inadvertent biographical error. In the AWA Review article “Wireless Comes of Age on the West Coast”, writer and California Historical Radio Society member Bart Lee mistakenly identified Daniel “Whitehat” McCarty as Francis’s father.  I’m grateful to Lee for this excellent article, and happy about the error. Researching anyone named McCarty in San Francisco is tough work, however, Whitehat acts as a sort of indicator species for our family—when his name appears in a newspaper article, you know you’ve found the right McCarty. Too, there’s been on-going confusion about who did what wirelessly, with more than one writer accepting the origin story put forth by Francis’s older brothers, Ignatius and John, who, riding hard on Francis’s coat tails, identified themselves as the founding inventors of the telephone, as each man tried, and failed, to continue their brother’s work.

Francis probably wouldn’t have been surprised by the idea that his Whitehat was his father, whose zany notoriety attached itself to anyone in his orbit. His connections with city hall and San Francisco’s high rollers made it easy for Francis to court media attention for his device, then, as now, an important strategy for attracting investors.  But Whitehat was not Francis’s father. 

That honor belongs to John Henry McCarty, Whitehat’s jealous younger brother, who lived a pale life in his brother’s exuberant shadow and in the aftermath of his son’s invention. Francis’s paternity was uncertain, not because he didn’t know who his father was, but because as far as we can know, his father didn’t appear to care that he had a son. John began to leave his family sometime in 1904, depriving his wife and four young children, including Francis, of a source of income, and a crucial skill: the ability to handle a horse. 

John had been absent for years before he actually left, according to Mary Eunice McCarty, Francis’s younger sister, a screenwriter in Hollywood, and the sole source of information about the interior life of the McCarty family.  Mary was a redoubtable woman, once called the “Joan of Arc for the Democratic party” for her impassioned campaign on behalf of Al Smith, the Democratic candidate in the 1928 Presidential election. She wrote at least 13 screenplays, and two books, one of which was a biography entitled “Meet Kitty”, about her high-spirited, resilient mother, Catherine “Kitty” Lynch McCarty. 

Kitty Lynch arrived in San Francisco in 1867 as a nine-year old with her Irish immigrant parents, and married John, a blacksmith and farrier in 1878. Two years later, the McCarty family was living at 3 Rausch Street in the South of Market. John and his brother James, who lived with the family, were both horseshoers, then the official family business. John, who once pointed a gun at a crowd of angry men from the horseshoer’s union in front of his forge on Golden Gate Avenue, was not a nice man or a good father, according to Mary.

“It is impossible to be temperate in describing John Henry McCarthy,” wrote Mary. “There are not enough words in the English language to give him the full measure of condemnation.” 

Mary Eunice McCarty/McCarthy*, 1899-1969, screenwriter and author.

The exact source of John’s discontent is lost to time. John, who left Bedford, Massachusetts after 1870, and followed his siblings west, carried an enormous chip on his shoulder, and liked to throw it at other people, especially his tiny wife, who weighed less than 100 pounds and survived 14 pregnancies. Eight of her children grew to adulthood. 

Mary thought that John’s problem was easily explained: he was an envious, status-conscious man who was more defined by his relationship to his brother Whitehat — and later his dead son—than he was for anything he did. 

“Practically every book written about San Francisco devotes pages to Whitehat,” she wrote.  “His brother is not even mentioned.” 

John and Whitehat did have a lot in common, namely bad habits that ballooned into big problems. They gambled on everything: horses, mostly, and once the outcome of the 1888 Presidential election. They made extravagant “gold-flinging” gestures of bonhomie that they could not really afford in establishments like the Palace Hotel, and the Poodle Dog. Neither Whitehat or John seemed to be concerned with the future—gamblers tend to live in the moment— or could have predicted it as clearly as Francis did, who often spoke of a time when voices would be transmitted by tiny devices.

But at least one of the brothers was smart enough to see that the McCarty Wireless Telephone Co. could be a springboard to wealth and fame. Whitehat was an early investor in his nephew’s start-up. John seems only to have become interested in it after his son’s death.

Hey! Here comes John Henry! 

John did try to make his mark. “My father…accomplished something that Whitehat never attempted,” wrote Mary. “He was elected to the California State Legislature.”  In 1889, John H. McCarty served as the California State Assemblyman from San Francisco’s 39th Assembly district in the 28th session. This should have provided him some sort of distinction, and yet, as Mary remarks caustically, “…the spotlight eluded him. No one ever said, Hey! Here comes John Henry!” John’s single term in the State Legislature failed to make any lasting difference to his life, perhaps making his already large chip even bigger. 

In 1888-89, San Francisco’s 39th Assembly district encompassed the 8th and 11th wards in the Tenderloin, Civic Center, and South of Market neighborhoods. These crowded districts were home to laborers, sometimes skilled, and sometimes not, often from immigrant Irish backgrounds. John first owned a horseshoeing business with his brother James, and later with another Irish-American blacksmith, Francis O’Neill in the Civic Center, the perfect locale to meet and mingle with ward bosses and city supervisors. 

Like his nephew Edward Creely, John took his political cues from where he was at: a dense, socially intertwined neighborhood where the electorate were met at the polling place on election day by a prepared ballot, or ticket, and a ballot box guarded by “…the watchful eye of party workers”.

Which party they voted for was a question. In the fall of 1888, there were plenty. This was the era of the independent party in San Francisco. In the excellent book on San Francisco politics entitled “San Francisco 1865-1932: Politics, Power and Urban Development”, historians William Issel and Robert Cherny describe the electoral system as “unregulated” and vulnerable —or responsive depending on one’s perspective— to the ambitions of electoral entrepreneurs who, seeking a path to power, founded new political parties if they commanded a sizable constituency, could pay for ballots, and deliver votes.  

The ephemeral nature of political clubs in San Francisco at this time is head-spinning and hard to document 135 years later, but there was one consistent theme in the fall of 1888: the exclusion of the Chinese and the passage of the Scott Act, which expanded the powers of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by barring resident Chinese laborers who had traveled back to China, from returning to the United States, even if they had certificates allowing them to return. 

The Scott Act was signed by President Grover Cleveland in October 1888, just eleven years after San Francisco’s Chinese community was subjected to the terrifying Sandlot riots in 1877. Bellicose speeches delivered by Charles C. O’Donnell, and later Denis Kearney, whipped up mobs of white laborers who swept through the city’s east side, destroying Chinese-owned businesses and killing four Chinese men. The riots coalesced into the Workingmen’s Party of California, led by Kearny, which left an indelible stamp on city politics, and cadres of men eager to continue the business of the WPC, long after its end by 1881. In light of John H. McCarty’s brief legislative career, one wonders where he was during the Sandlot riots. It’s a fair question. 

It was this tradition of immigrant nativism that swept the “horseshoer”, as McCarty was described, into office as the candidate from the newly formed “Foreign American Independent Party”. John was nominated on October 11th, 1888 at the Thirty-ninth Assembly District Democratic Convention. 

Patrick A. Dolan headed the new party, but the party actually had two daddies, the other being the former Sandlot orator, Charles C. O’Donnell, a physician, and former head of the Sarsfield Rifles, a National Guard company.  “Dr.” O’Donnell, as he was mockingly known (historian and author Beth Wingarner delves into his sideline occupation as an abortionist here), frequently appeared on the sandlots to shout that the Chinese must go. O’Donnell himself isn’t mentioned in the lists of the officer’s names of the Foreign American Independent Party, but it bore the imprint of his sinophobia so firmly that the candidates were called “O’Donnellites” by the Daily Alta. 

This was John’s ticket into government: populist bigotry and nativist rancor. How horribly ironic that its first meeting was held in the huge Irish American hall of San Francisco². 

Cleveland’s Anti-Chinese wall

On November 3, 1888, three days before the election, the democratic clubs in San Francisco organized a parade to show support for the presidential incumbent, Grover Cleveland, tariff reform and the Scott Act. The massive march was designed to rouse the voters and strike terror into the hearts of the city’s Chinese residents, who were treated to a display of 15-20,000 white men walking in military formation dressed as Zouaves, Vaqueros and “Iroquois”, complete with guns, torches, and incendiary devices. The march started from Montgomery and Kearny Streets and proceeded down Market to Franklin. 

The Daily Examiner reported on the spectacle with pleasure. “The city of 400,00 white people got its 6 o’clock dinner over as quickly as possible, sent its servants about their business, locked up its house and started for the streets”. Spectators lined Market to watch the procession of Democratic clubs, and their assembly candidates make their way down Market Street. 

McCarty’s future colleagues Henry C. Dibble, Thomas Seary and Thomas Brannan, all from neighboring districts, walked in the parade. John joined the other members of his trade, the Ironworkers of the city, on a horse drawn wagon.  The boilermakers’ exhibit featured a huge boiler being riveted by workmen, whose brawny muscles stood out in bold relief under the glare of the furnaces.  McCarty, the nominee from the 39th district, struck a pose atop the float with eight other men, “lustily” pounding out a horseshoe on an anvil. 

“Cleveland’s Anti-Chinese wall” San Francisco Daily Examiner Saturday morning, Nov.3, 1888

There were other floats, too. One, captioned by the Examiner as “Cleveland’s Anti-Chinese wall” featured a wall, encased in a wooden box with the words “Harrison’s Idea of Protection” and “Indiana, sure you bet” painted on the side.  Two figures were painted on the banner sitting on scaffolding. The digitized images available online have lost some detail, but one of the figures appears to have a queue hanging down their back. Taken in the wider context of its appearance in an anti-Chinese parade, the message seems clear. 

The red glare from the torches, and the fiery trails of mortars fired into the air lit the upturned faces of the spectators who were transfixed by the fantasy spectacle of the whites-only march. In an adjoining story, the Examiner stated that their “canvassing corps” had polled over 3,000 people to discover the mood of the voters. “The results of yesterday’s canvass shows that among the working people and those of small capital the Chinese question seems to overshadow all other issues.” 

Polls, as we know, can be wrong. The canvassing results may have given Cleveland the edge, but to no avail. Benjamin Harrison won. Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote. It was a bad day for the Dems at the federal level; however at the city level, things went well for John and his Foreign American Independent party confreres. The party won 15 out of 20 assembly seats in San Francisco.  Out of 2,715 registered voters, John won 1,249 votes against his republican opponent J.H. Goldman, who secured 1,141 from registered voters, all of whom began voting “unusually early” (Daily Alta Nov 6, 1888) Of the 19 assemblymen sent from San Francisco to Sacramento for the 28th session, fully half were first-generation Irish Americans.

“We have the Chinese locked out …,” said the Daily Alta, “and we want them to stay locked out.”  

The Hibernian Parrot

John was promptly appointed Chairman to the standing committee on Chinese immigration and Emigration. Joining him was Thomas Seary, J.A. Mullaney, Hamilton H. Dobbin, E.C. Tully, M.C. Chapman, C.H. Porter, H.M. Brickwedal, and Philo Hersey. The remit of the Committee was to “take into consideration all propositions relative to the tendencies of Chinese labor upon the political, social, physical and moral conditions and affairs of the State.”

John started off promisingly enough. Dubbed “the learned blacksmith”, he was praised by the Sacramento Daily Union as “…one of the prominent statesmen on the Democrat side of the house. As Chairman of the Committee on Chinese Immigration and Emigration, he strikes terror to the pagan hordes who seek our shores…. Mr. McCarty is a bosom friend to the leading millionaires who frequent the Palace Hotel, and it is understood that he aspires to some of the highest offices within the gift of the people. And well he may, for he is as good as he is beautiful³,” proving the adage that beauty is ever in the eye of the beholder. 

On January 25th, 1889, John and other committee members visited San Francisco’s Chinatown, ostensibly to report on the living conditions of the area, but in reality to push for the full enforcement of the Scott Act. In his February 11th address to the Assembly, he wasted no time leveling the Three F’s of nativism at the Chinese: filth, foreignness and fecundity. 

“The Chinese are foreign to our living, race and language,” said McCarty “They have little regard for morality, decency or law. They are an ignorant and superstitious race.”⁴ He concluded his speech with a forceful plea for the Scott Act to be fully enforced, stating that only when the “Oriental invader” was barred from entry would the “sweet voices and joyous laughter” of happy children ring out. 

This speech, a fine example of the Irish becoming white (it’s very possible he attained fluency in the language of exclusion, growing up as a child of Irish immigrants on the East Coast) may have been the high point of his legislative career. Other than this report, and two bills, which were just resolutions, he seems to have fallen back to earth. After being described as “beautiful”, the media adulation stopped. A journalist with the Sacramento Bee mocked both his national origins, and his lack of independent thought by dubbing him the “Hibernian Parrot”. McCarty earned a reprimand from speaker Robert Howe after wiping his feet on the top of his desk. “McCarthy is not used to being among gentlemen,” the Sacramento Bee concluded. Later that year, some wag nailed John’s hat to his desk. 

Either the fickleness of the party (which seems to have evaporated), or perhaps his personal shortcomings prevented him from gaining the nomination a second time. The 28th session of the California state assembly only met from January to March that year.  In late 1889, Charles S. Arms, who went on to become the State Senator from the 23rd district, replaced McCarty in the 39th Assembly district. 

For a man so profoundly fond of “the sweet voices” of children, it’s likely he didn’t hear Francis’s voice very often, who was less than a year old when his father invoked the happiness of children as a reason to harrass and exclude the Chinese. After his brief success in electoral politics, John filed for bankruptcy in 1891, and worked as a horseshoer for the next decade. 

The Boy who Died

On May 8, 1906, 20 days after the San Francisco earthquake, Francis lost control of his horse on the corner of Fourth and Broadway Street in Oakland, where he had relocated the McCarty Wireless Telephone company. He was thrown headfirst from the cart he was driving, into the concrete curb. He died three days later of pneumonia after sustaining compound fractures in his jaw and broken ribs. His mother was inconsolable. His father’s reaction was more pragmatic. He sold the patent on his son’s invention, and, taking the proceeds with him, finally moved in with his inamorata, a woman named Minnie E. Douglas.

John spent the next several years ducking child support, allegedly with the help of his mistress, and constructing a series of hastily improvised identities. He claimed that he was just a poor chauffeur when Kitty finally hauled him into court for child support in 1907. Kitty, who sought $200.00 a month for herself and her four children, told the judge that with the connivance of Ms. Douglass, that John was hiding at least 50,000 dollars, and probably more, in a dummy corporation called the “National Vulcanizing Rubber Company”⁵ that included an interest in his late son’s estate valued at $40,000 dollars. John Henry got thrown in jail, but “aided by his own glib tongue and an expensive lawyer”, he never paid a cent in child support. Later, he described himself to the press as the “president” of the “Universal Wireless Telephone Company”, an abortive attempt by McCarty Sr. and his son, John P. McCarty, to cash in on Francis’s invention. By 1914, father and son concluded there was nothing more to wring out of Francis’s invention. Both moved to Los Angeles.  

J.P. McCarty stayed in mass communications by becoming a film director in the growing entertainment industry in Hollywood. In 1914, he made a silent movie entitled “The Wireless Voice” starring himself and a wireless apparatus, perhaps of his brother’s design (it’s unclear whether J.P ever built a wireless telephone himself.) His sister Mary and brother Henry A , both screenwriters, enjoyed moderate success. Mary wrote “Theodora Goes Wild”, a comedy starring Irene Dunne, who won an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

John Patrick McCarty/McCarthy, film director and occasional actor.

It’s not clear what happened to John in the last decades of his life. Probably not a lot. In 1921, as a 66-year old, he lived with his son J.P., at 7521 Emelita St in North Hollywood. He was alive in 1924, when he was mentioned in his brother James’s obituary. But after that, nothing. No death notice, no loving obituary, at least none that I can find.

It’s hard to write about the son without writing about the father and in Francis’s case this is especially true. Much of what he accomplished was in spite of what he didn’t have: money, a lengthy formal education, and a father who was also a parent. 

Retrospectively, John’s absence seems to be the most glaring on the day of his son’s death. It’s unfair to blame John for the road conditions (the culprit was the consequence of a horse sharing the road with cars) but it’s hard to wonder what might have been if he’d been around more. Would Francis have been able to control his horse? They were the family concern: Mary attributes her father’s stint as Leland Stanford’s ranch manager in 1887 to his “expert knowledge of horses”, an expertise shared throughout the McCarty-Creely family. Did John teach his son the art of horsemanship? Or did he mostly slap him away “for his importunate questionings”, as he once admitted to a reporter?

Francis will always be the Boy Who Died. If the details of his life had been reworked into a work of science fiction with the same sad ending – Boy Wonder Projects Voice Through the Air! Boy Wonder Dies! – then surely a work of fan fiction would have emerged, too, one with an alternative ending, in which Francis did not die, but lived long enough perfect his wireless telephone, grow his startup and maybe as a very old man, get a glimpse of the era he knew was coming- a time of tiny phones, small enough to sit in a pocket, and powerful enough to effortlessly transmit voices through space and time. “We have had to fight the hard knocks of disbelief all the time,” he told an Examiner reporter in the fall of 1905. It was a very hard knock that killed him; the disbelief he encountered, including his father’s, he survived. Aside from inventing his wireless telephone, this is perhaps his greatest achievement. Rejection has disabled more than one would-be Great Innovator. Francis died with his sense of purpose intact. That is heroic. 

 

Francis J. McCarty, 1888-1906. Founder of the first wireless telephone company in San Francisco

 

 

 

*About the name: it’s spelled McCarty. The Hollywood McCarty’s used the extra “H”, probably because they got tired of correcting everyone. I’m very sorry I never met Mary. She deserves some ink spilled on her behalf.  Her book “Meet Kitty” is as much about rejecting her father’s anti-Chinese bullshit, as it is about telling the world about her fabulous mother. Watch “I Hate Women”, a baldly titled B-film that Mary wrote in 1934– it’s got some snappy dialogue in it.
Written with love to Kitty Lynch McCarty, who clapped back at the limits of tolerance when it mattered, and to my boy-genius cousin, Francis.

Thank you to Beth Winegarner, whose book “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” is a must-read. And big, big thanks to Bob Rydzewski and the crew at the Bay Area Radio Museum in Alameda. Without their care and attention to the story of the McCarty Wireless Telephone Co. this tiny tale of early San Francisco tech might not be as well known. I am grateful.

 

 

The McCarty Wireless Telephone station, built sometime after April 3,1906 by Thomas Lorenzen, and erected on the NE corner of 45th and Lawton in the Sunset District of San Francisco. https://www.sowp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/LR-The-McCarty-Wireless-Telephone.pdf

 

 

1. “Talks Through the Air without Wires” San Francisco Chronicle, Sept 3, 1905 ↩︎
2. September 21, 1888 (page 6 of 8). (1888, Sep 21). Daily Examiner (1865-1889) Retrieved from https://www.ezproxy.sfpl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/september-21-1888-page-6-8/docview/2132264028/se-2
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3. Sacramento Daily Union, Volume 61, Number 5, 27 February 1889 ↩︎
4. California State Assembly Journals 1889 Session,https://clerk.assembly.ca.gov/historical-information/archive-list/california-state-assembly-journals-1889-session?field_archive_type_value=Journals p. 345
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5. San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, California), September 19, 1908: 14. NewsBank: America’s News – Historical and Current. https://infoweb-newsbank-com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/apps/news/document-view?p=AMNEWS&docref=image/v2%3A142051F45F422A02%40EANX-NB-14DC40A41A695CF8%402418204-14DA452198CDEFC6%4013-14DA452198CDEFC6%40.
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Scooters, e-Bikes and jet packs: Mobility tech’s big moment.

A Bird scooter lays submerged in a lake in Golden Gate Park, April 2018

Fair is foul and foul is fair, say the witches in Macbeth, warning that what seems to be appealing will seem less so as the plot grinds to an end. This is how I feel about the scooter situation and the onset of for-profit mobility companies who are in perpetual launch mode in this city, arriving daily with mobility vehicles tucked under their arms (figuratively speaking). “The next idea that comes along, I’m not even going to try to speculate what it is,” said Jeff Hobson, deputy director of planning at the SFCTA who spoke of “dockless jet packs” as a real possibility. The hyper activity of the mobility industry is no joke. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I saw someone land in the middle of Mission street with a jet pack strapped on their back.

It’s been a busy month. Like the last twenty minutes in a Marvel movie, everything seems to be exploding and heads are twisting this way and that, trying to keep track of the action. Staff at city and county transportation agencies have spent a lot of time pulling together an emergency pilot program for the scooters and drafting an 80-page report detailing how Bay Area transportation agencies plan on dealing with the onslaught of mobility tech.

The 12-month scooter pilot program comes with a permitting system and fee schedule that allows five scooter companies to operate in San Francisco. There’s a non-refundable $5,000 fee to apply for the permit, a $25,000 annual fee to operate the scooters in the city, and a $10,000 “endowment” from each company to deal with the inevitable scooter detritus. In the first six months, up to 1,250 scooters will be allowed to operate. Thereafter, if all goes well, up to 2,500 will be allowed.

Thus it is that the scooter users may contribute $200,000 to the SFMTA budget (I personally feel it could be a bit more) something I feel certain is not on their mind. They’re too busy having fun, gleefully whizzing by with their feet in a modified fourth position, hair ruffling in the breeze.

The scooters were dumped in April, appearing on a part of the sidewalk I call the littoral zone. In marine ecology, this is the place on a beach where debris washes ashore: seaweed, plastic bottles, small dead animals. When I saw the first scooter, and then the second, and the third, and the fourth forming this sort of tidal line down Harrison Street, with no one minding them, I thought maybe the rapture had happened. Where were the owners? On their way to meet Jesus?

Well, no. The scooter-user was on the next leg of their busy day, leaving the scooter behind. If it was a Lime scooter, it was often tipped against a bike rack. It turned out that the scooter-users were just following the directions from the folks at Lime.

A Lime scooter using a bike rack on Potrero avenue in San Francisco, May 2018

Because of this, it’s not unusual to find bikes racks coated with scooters, especially downtown. This has put me in the weird position of sympathizing with car owners: I now know how it feels to lose a parking space. After a frustrating experience thrusting aside scooters so that I could lock my bike, I wrote an indignant Facebook post, pointing out that even though 5,200 bike racks seems like a lot, they’re used by at least 10,000 bicyclists.

“LOL,” scoffed some guy named Tyler, an avid Scooterite. “Why not move them?”

I didn’t tell him I had. “Because, Tyler,” I answered, “I didn’t put them there.” (In San Francisco, it’s still traditional to pay for labor. ) The real problem is how effectively the scooters block the sidewalk and access for the elderly and the disabled population. A friend of mine had to remind Mr. Tyler that some people can’t move the scooters, or use the sidewalks, under the conditions created by the scooter dump.

The scooters are, by design, non-ADA compliant. And they’re litter—large objects left lying about with no natural home. Many of them ended up in singularly undignified positions: knocked over, hanging from branches, dumped in trash cans, stranded in the Broadway Tunnel, broken in pieces and left as litter on public lawns, or submerged in Stow Lake. Both bikes in the latter two examples were Bird scooters, a company that has already failed to honor its own anti-dumping pledge. “We have all seen the results of out-of-control deployment in China,” it reads. “Huge piles of abandoned and broken bicycles, over-running sidewalks, turning parks into junkyards and creating a new form of pollution—and new problems for cities.”

I’ll say. By the way: I’d bet dollars to donuts that this document was written after Bird was fined $300,000 by the city of Santa Monica for creating public hazards and unwanted litter.

A shattered Bird scooter lies on a lawn at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, May 2018

When I pointed out in another Facebook post that Bird scooters had become the industrial litter the company expressed such horror at, I was taken to task (not very effectively) by Bird’s social media person, who in a series of badly written and enigmatic posts tried to argue with me. “Dear Elizabeth,What is your position on this issue – it is unclear.”

I’ll tell you what’s unclear: how many scooters got dumped and how they’ll perform on our bumpy, hilly streets. There’s a rumor going around that the scooters are only good for about 1,000 miles. I called Bird and asked if the manufacturing specs were available on the website. There was a pause.

“Um. We don’t have the info on our website,” the rider support person told me. I persisted. “Do you make the specifications, like how long they are supposed to last, public?” He said no. I emailed their press person, Nick Samonas, but made no headway. “Hi Elizabeth,” Nick wrote. “Thanks for reaching out. We have worked with a manufacturer to get Birds that meet our needs and standards. Beyond that we do not discuss Bird specifications.”

Happily, an article on Cnet identified the scooter as a Xiaomi Mi Electric Scooter. (By the way, if you’ve considered vandalizing the scooters, I sympathize, but please don’t. You’ll just create some nasty source-point pollution. Lithium is bad for water and God knows this planet doesn’t need more e- waste.)

No one, including the city, knows exactly how many scooters were dumped. A safe estimate is somewhere just south of 3,000. In a meeting with the SFMTA, Lime said they “placed” 1,600, but why take the word of an industry which rather not say? It’s so much easier to disrupt if the public doesn’t know you’re up to.

DDND: Disruption depends on non-disclosure.

It also makes the other big “D”, dumping, a lot easier. Dumping is in the company DNA, thanks to the founder, a man named Travis VanderZanden whose surname spell checks to “underhandedness.” Travis follows the motto of all Scofflaw-Bros: Do what thou wilt is the whole of their law. Travis understood how to position the scooters as a cavalry that’s arriving—just in time!—to decongest this city, because Travis oversaw the catastrophic growth of Uber, which was so rapid as to resemble dumping, as the Vice President of Global Driver Growth at Uber from 2014 to 2016. Before that, he was the COO of Lyft.

A re-cap: In November of 2016, the Treasurer of San Francisco announced that 45,000 Lyft and Uber drivers were driving the streets daily and sent those drivers letters, requiring them to register with the city. Only 21,000 Uber and Lyft drivers responded, and only about 6,000 of those drivers said that they lived in San Francisco.

The letters were an attempt to quantify the obvious impacts of ride-hailing on traffic congestion in the city. This was difficult because neither Lyft or Uber would provide data to help the city study the problem. Weirdly, and unfortunately, neither would the California Public Utilities Commission. The CPUC regulates ride-hailing and collects data from them. They’ve “declined” to share their data with the SFCTA and the SFMTA. (I’m trying to find out why.)

Fortunately, the City Treasurer and transportation planners were able come to grips with the proliferation of UberLyft driver-partners without the help of anyone named Travis. In 2017, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, working with the 45,000 driver figure, created a report entitled “A Profile of San Francisco Transportation Network Company Activity.” This report, which was recommended to me by Paul Rose, spokesperson at the SFMTA, is a snapshot of the impact of Uber and Lyft on San Francisco. I encourage you to read it. It shows that Uber tripled its trips inside San Francisco in 2015, during VanderZanden’s tenure as VP of Global Driver Growth. Because of DDND it sheds no light on how many people share rides: “No information on TNC [transportation network company] vehicle occupancy or traveler demographics is available.” This matters. One person in one car at a time isn’t remotely environmentally beneficial.

Don’t have a car? Getaround can help with that!

Neither is getting people to buy or lease new cars to become drivers.  This is now a standard practice at Uber, who were described in a CNBC article as “a major player in the auto finance market.” Uber’s car leasing program ensures that people who didn’t have a car, could get a car. This is no surprise to transportation planners: they’ve long known about the coziness and shared financial goals between the mobility and automobile industry and had to grapple with this as they reconsider terms like car-sharing. Consider Getaround, the supposed successor to the quasi-municipal car sharing program, City Car Share. They partner with Audi.  

Late-breaking edit: Neither Lime, nor Bird, nor Spin (the other scooter company) have repair/charging facilities in San Francisco. As this Salon piece makes abundantly clear, all three pay (barely) contractors to collect and charge the scooters. This means cars on the road in search of scooters to be charged. Aside from the issue of creating unprotected labor pools, it’s hugely self-defeating if you really want to get cars off the road.

Neither Travis nor his scooters are going to solve the problem he and his colleagues at Uber and Lyft created: record high levels of auto congestion in the Bay Area. To do that, you need actual transportation advocates. And a good plan.

Here’s one: the city’s official 45-year old Transit First policy a magisterial and magnanimous gesture the city made in 1973 to give the good people of this city a functioning public transit system. When it’s pressed into service by community-based organizations like Walk SF and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, the transportation situation in the city improves. Both organizations have organized, reasoned, argued, cajoled and lobbied city officials, merchants, neighborhood groups—anyone and everyone—to accept bicycles and walking as legitimate forms of transportation and to cross-reference these modes with BART and MUNI and other mass transit systems. (I remember when I couldn’t bring my bike on BART.) In the way of all resilient ecologies, space was created painstakingly and always in relation to the existing space for mass transit and cars. The amenities that pedestrians and cyclists enjoy—pedestrian bulb-outs, wider sidewalks, longer crossing times, and our semi-contiguous bike network, composed of sharrows, painted lanes, and in the last decade, some set-aside bike paths, are traceable to this policy and these communities.

It was and is vastly disruptive. But, in contrast to the mere non-compliance of the mobility industry, and the fast and furious profits their VC funders demand of them, it has been transparent: disclosed.

And very experimental. Take the super-bike-highway, the Valencia Street bike lane. People striped Valencia street with DIY bike lanes to convince merchants, and the city, that bike lanes were needed and were a benefit. The hugest experiment of all was convincing San Francisco that the terrain of this city, with its 48 hills, was entirely suitable for cycling and would in fact benefit this place by decongesting our aging macadamized streets.

Mary Brown (1969-2015), San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Membership director, and later city planner and preservationist, watches the Valencia street bike lanes get striped in 1999.

There have always been and will always be dynastic struggles among competing forms of transportation in this city: horses and drays co-existed with steam trains, and for a short time electric street-cars and automobiles. By 1928 there were 122,808 cars in San Francisco. A century later, there are at least 496,843. The biggest problem is (still) cars. Scooters may have their place in the city. I know people who own them, and use them. But gimmicky single-occupant mobility systems will only ever be a tactic, not a solution. We need solutions.

Yesterday, I walked to my friend’s place, at the base of Mount Sutro. I was supposed to be there by 3:30 or 4. Leaving a bit late, I checked the time as I began to walk up 17th street. Ah, shit, I thought, and broke into a walk-jog up the street’s steep grade. It was hard. It was strenuous.

All around me were a flock of curious tourists out to explore the city using a variety of options: scooters, bikes and e-bikes. At the intersection of Corbett and 17th, where the grade increases, the vehicles faltered and fell back. Their battery was no match for the hill. Sweating profusely, but with a spring in my step, I planted my feet solidly on the unyielding earth and felt liberated from its surly bonds by the sidewalk, unobstructed and plainly grey, carrying me up, up, up, as far as my eyes could see.

 

Written on May 6th, 2018 in San Francisco, California, city that has definitely known how.

The Mission, marketed: the Glossier pop-up at Rhea’s Cafe.

The large pink wall on the side of Rhea’s Café can be seen from the intersection of Bryant and Mariposa. I’m near-sighted, so the fact that I can see a pink wall three city blocks away means something, mostly that the marketers at Glossier, which is staging a pop-up cosmetics store in Rhea’s Cafe until April 15th,  got what they wanted. Visibility. Some local outrage probably helped with that, too. A Missionite posted on Nextdoor that she wanted the sign “legally” removed. Half the posters on Nextdoor sympathized, half told her she was being ridiculous, some informed her that they’d be heading over to the pop-up. The argument moved from there to No Eviction Mission, a Facebook group, where it continued inconclusively.

As I walked down Bryant, the pink blob resolved into the image of a pink rose. At least fifty people were queued up along the wall. Well, that’s an invitation for a blogger if there ever was one, I thought. People who stand in lines are sitting ducks for writers. I moved in.

A  man with a funny look on his face—was it guilt? sheepishness?—loitered underneath the street sign. “What do you think of all this?” I asked him. He shrugged and smiled. “I’m waiting on my girlfriend,” he said. “She’s in line.” He told me they had driven from Sacramento for a day in San Francisco, which included a stop at the Glossier pop-up.

“She read about it,” he said. “Got really excited.”
“Don’t you want to go in? You drove all that way!” I said. He looked horrified.

“It’s not really my thing,” he said.

Glossier, so you know, is a venture capital backed, online cosmetics company, valued at millions of dollars, which has been described as the “Estee Lauder for Millennials”. It makes low-coverage makeup for a wide range of different skin tones. In contrast to the vividly-hued makeup I spent many hours applying to my face in the eighties, the Glossier brand is diffident, almost introverted. The names are the tip-off: not eyeshadows, but “eye glows”. Not blush, but “seamless cheek colors” inspired “by gradient pink NYC sunsets”. And Boy Brow, which is kind of like mascara for your eyebrows, but less brash, almost undetectable.

What caught me off-guard, when news of the pop-up broke, was the weird combo of make-up and food. Rhea’s cafe is famous for their chicken sandwiches, but in my experience, chicken sandwiches and lipstick don’t go together.  My shock was complete when I saw the re-design: the interior looks like a big seashell, and a distinct scent of rose absolue wafts through the air, outside. How did you do it, Glossier? I didn’t see any diffusers , but I’m not the only one who’s noticed the scent. Jim on Nextdoor  did, too. He thought it was “nice.” And about those “gradient pink NYC sunsets”—what colors might Glossier be inspired to use as a result of its stint in the Mission? It’s really more about smell here: how about a new scent?  Any suggestions, readers? Take your bright ideas to the pop-up. You have five days to let them know.

The spectacle of the Glossier pop-up is the most attention this locale has had since July 1917, the year that the Wickersheimer Brothers saloon, which occupied the building 100 years ago, was targeted for robbery by the “White Mask” gang, a group of Irish-Americans who had been robbing saloons in the Mission District. William King and James Kennedy entered the Wickersheimer saloon, pulled out their guns and tried to get down to brass tacks. Joseph Kraus, the president of the Anchor Brewing company, who just happened to be in the bar, enjoying an after-work brewski, pulled out his gun and shot Kennedy. The robbers stumbled out of the saloon, King dumping Kennedy on the corner of 19th and Bryant, before running back to their flat. Kennedy was arrested and taken to General Hospital. Later, the police arrested King and their molls—Agnes Sullivan, Hazel Moran and Florence Cumming, plus another accomplice, a man named Henry Starkey.

Things have been quiet since then. A series of restaurants popped up in the building: the New Bryant Restaurant in the forties, the Home Plate restaurant in the sixties and Hazel and Jim’s restaurant, which lasted until at least 1980. And now it’s Rhea’s, run by James Choi, who opened it to great fanfare in 2013 and reportedly has had a struggle staying in business.

“James listed this space on Craigslist,” the Glossier “showroom editor” minding the line told me. She meant James Choi. (Glossier calls its salespeople “showroom editors”. Glossier really loves playing with language.) She was good-natured and answered all my questions.

“How much are they paying you?” I asked. “Minimum wage?”

“More,” she replied and then whispered conspiratorially: “sixteen”. They were paying her 16.00 an hour. She was wearing a pink coverall, like a repairman. This puzzled me. Did Glossier want people to think that she could spackle a wall if need be? Or that makeup equaled repair? And why pop-up at all?

“They don’t really have a store,” she said. “That’s not their thing. They open pop-ups from time to time. This is the longest one they’ve done,” she added.

“How many of these people are from this neighborhood?” I asked her. “Can you tell?”

“There’s definitely been neighbors who came and checked this out,” she said. “There’s a lot of locals, but also right now there’s a lot of people from Southern California. It’s spring break.” She turned around and smiled sweetly at the people queuing obediently along the pink wall. “You can go in now,” she told them. Turning back to me, she said “We’re trying not to get too crowded in there.”

“But food and make up? How does that work? What does one have to do with the other?”

She laughed. “Everyone says that,” she said. “But it’s worked out. You know, the owner said he was having trouble staying open…they had weird hours, like 11 to 3, I think? So he posted an ad on Craigslist looking for partners and Glossier was like, ok!”

“Are there always people in line?” I asked.

“Mostly. When we opened there was a huge line. Went down the entire block.”

“Have there been any …conflicts?”

“No,” she said. She knew what I meant. “It’s been quiet.” She liked working for Glossier. “We have a diverse staff, and people like that: they really notice it. Glossier has a range of products intended for all skin tones.” She repeated: I really like this company.

We chatted some more. She was a nice twenty-something, with clear skin and well-groomed eyebrows (Boy Brow!). She lived in the Mission District above a noisy restaurant and was having a hard time with the noise produced by the construction across the street from her apartment. The hard concrete walls effortlessly lobbed noise around her neighborhood. “Oh my god, it was earsplitting with the jack-hammering but now, after two years of construction, it’s gotten even louder.” The large underground garage made everything echo, she told me.

I got a quick psychic hit of her, sitting in her apartment, trying to contend with the unfamiliar sounds of a growing city; the hardness of the new Valencia Street, that has more concrete walls than before. There is a history of sound in all places, and that history has changed in the Mission. The acoustics I encountered at the age of twenty-five on Valencia Street in the nineties were softer. There was more weathered wood and fewer hard surfaces and more room, in general, for sound to travel and dissipate. The fog, which used to roll in regularly, muffled everything: car horns, people talking. The Mission could, at times, almost be inaudible.  It’s not like that anymore.

I thanked her and got on my way, walking past the line of Glossier fans who were busy taking selfies, and doing that thing they do when they crook their knee, sling their hip to the side, and smile guilelessly up into their phone. My upstairs neighbors Chava and Nick walked by and saw me taking pictures and tapping notes into my phone. Chava laughed. She knew what I was doing. “You don’t want to know, Elizabeth!” she said. “You don’t want to know.”

I kinda don’t. “Gentrification” has less to do with how things look, and more to do with what things—lip gloss, chicken sandwiches, dwellings and wages—cost. Neighborhood-serving businesses like laundromats, dry cleaners, repair stores, small restaurants like the Sunrise café on 24th street, constitute some sort of affordable consumer normalcy, a long tradition in the Peterite village of the Mission District. There’s something creepy in the way that pop-up’s like Glossier appear out of the blue –the pink?–luring people into its rose-scented store. They’ll vanish into the ether on April 16th,  taking their business with them. None of that money will circulate through the Mission.

Except for the wages that the showroom editor takes home. Boy Brow* is $16.00 for a little more than a tenth of an ounce. For $16.00 an hour, Glossier gets a human being to sell that item. For $16.00 an hour, our neighbor, the Glossier showroom editor, pays her rent, buys her food, and does all the things one does with wages. She probably doesn’t save much. But more importantly, she costs Glossier $16.00 an hour. I wonder if Glossier, which prefers the ephemeral to the enduring, will extend this preference to their employees. How close are we to robots who monitor lines, speak clearly and pleasantly and function without the requirements of health insurance, rent, food and the regulations of the Occupational Safety and Health Agency?

A 2013 paper by Oxford scholars Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne entitled “The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?” wastes no time in informing the reader that fully 47% of “total US employment is at risk.” The low-wage and low-skill jobs that they say will vaporize under the impacts of computerization, and AI, too, undoubtedly, perfectly describe the job of the Glossier showroom editor. The next time Glossier, or any other structure-eschewing business decides to pop-up in San Francisco, their staff may be REALLY diverse.

It’s true that online undertakings which flirt with, monetize and cheapen the 200+ years of history and culture** in the Mission are obnoxious. But I’m anxious about the showroom editors of this world. Five years ago, it would have been hard for me to write that last paragraph: my fear of laboring robots would have seemed like credulous paranoia. Now it’s not only plausible—it’s in play. Why, then, must we be human? How can our simple hands keep pace with the arid efficiency so treasured by the designers of robotic labor?

I’m late to the game. But I had to think this issue through.  I was less upset by the silliness of the pop-up, and more pre-occupied by the showroom editor: her existence in this city, and the entirely human way she subsided into silence and leaned against the wall, after I stopped asking questions, looking weary as she waited for the end of her workday.

 

 

*(hint: you don’t have to spend 16 bucks to tame your brows. Combine a dab of Vaseline & your preferred mascara, or eyeshadow to hold your brows in place. Don’t use shades with a warm undertone- go for a cool taupe brown. Play with the exact amounts, and you’ll get more or less the same results. )

** I’m using the founding of the Mission. Which date am I supposed to use?  You can argue with me if you want. I had to start somewhere.

 

Finished on April 11 at 9:32. It’s never too late to read Rilke’s Duino Elegies, no matter how many Zen workshops & self-help sessions they’ve endured.  Here’s to Jupiter in Scorpio and the deep up-welling of secrets and treasures.

 

From the 22nd Street Crossroads: Robot Wrangling in the Mission District

I saw the robot before it saw me: it looked like a cross between a Travel Pro 3-Wheel(™) mobility scooter, the kind my elderly cousin uses, and a mini-fridge. Upon closer inspection it appeared to be a hastily assembled, somewhat jerry-rigged robot: not top shelf, really. More bargain-basement. A man was trotting along after it, in the way of a pet owner chasing his unleashed dog.

I biked up to the man. “Can I ask you what that is?” I asked, knowing which answer I’d get. This is the New Mission: no one talks about their business, particularly if it’s funded with venture capital. The man, who had long, slightly stringy brown hair and brown eyes smiled. “I can’t tell you,” he replied. “Sorry.” I smiled back at him. I wasn’t surprised. The Mission District is in the grips of a massive Non-Disclosure Agreement these days: automated cars and robots are common sights on sidewalks and streets, and yet no one can or will tell you what they are or what they are meant to do.

“Can I follow along and ask you some questions?” I responded. The man winced. I was on my bike, so it was easy to shadow him and his pet-robot as they traveled down Alabama Street. The man, who also couldn’t tell me his name, said he was from New Jersey and that his company’s headquarters was in the Mission. “But I can’t tell you where. I’m not sure I could, anyway. I’m new here,” he said. “I don’t know San Francisco yet. We’re close to Potrero and some street named after a state.”

“York? Hampshire?” I asked.
“Yeah, maybe one of those. But really: I can’t tell you,” he said.

I’d been primed for this encounter by a Mission Local story written by journalist Laura Wenus about a “Carry” robot—a different one than the one I was looking at— that she encountered on Valencia Street. Tech companies are routinely using streets and now sidewalks to test and develop and profit from their technology, and yet none of them will disclose what they’re doing.

I flashed back to a New Yorker story about Jim Dyson, the millionaire design engineer who invented the Dyson Supersonic hair dryer. “No humans, completely automated,” he said, about the making of the hair dryer. “Can’t have any humans.”
“This is meant to be a delivery system, right?” I said, adding “Bye-bye subsistence capitalism!”
He laughed uncomfortably. “Yeah, right. This will definitely take someone’s job. Well…” he shrugged his shoulders. What are you going to do?

“How do you feel about tech firms using public space to develop their technology?” I asked.

“Well, we have to worry about competition,” he explained. “If we talk about what we’re doing—what this is”—he jerked his chin at the robot—“we run the risk of competitors stealing our ideas. I sympathize with people’s need to know, but I just can’t tell you anything. But I can say this is meant to help people, and that I would never work for a company to didn’t intend to help people. I wouldn’t be a part of that.”

We were having this discussion on Alabama street, which has the distinction of having some of the oldest houses in the Mission District. A PG&E serviceman was kneeling on the sidewalk in front of a cottage built in 1862, attending to some subterranean problem. The robot zoomed gaily ahead. “You gotta be careful,” said the man. I realized that he was talking to someone else.

“Are you controlling this thing?” I asked.
“No. Someone back at headquarters is,” he said.

The worker saw the wheelchair-mini-fridge contraption coming his way and sat back on his haunches. His eyes widened.”

“Whoa!” he said. “Is that a robot?”

“Yes it is,” said the man, whom I had started to think of as the robot wrangler.
“Do you want to know what this is?” I asked the worker. “Ask him.”
“What is it?” asked the PG&E repairman.
“I can’t tell you,” said the wrangler, who looked a panicked. I could see him wondering about my persistence. When is she going to leave me alone?

The robot moved confidently down 23rd, turned right on Harrison and made a beeline for the intersection of 22nd and Harrison. “That’s quite a curb,” the man muttered into his headset. The robot made its way into the crosswalk and, tottering a bit, managed to mount the curb cut. It veered around the woman who sits on the corner selling oranges. She eyed it with calm suspicion.  “Naranjas?” she asked to the robot wrangler as he herded it across the intersection.

“Do you think that companies that use public resources should pay for the privilege of using public sites to develop their technology?” I asked the wrangler.

“Well,” he said, “I think that fact that we’re providing some kind of benefit,” he said breathlessly (it was clear that he wasn’t used to all this running; he had the hunched posture and pallor of an tech engineer)—“to people …I can’t tell you what that is but I can say that this will provide some kind of benefit. So I dunno. If we had to pay a special tax we might want to go somewhere where we didn’t.”

I wasn’t surprised by his answer: this is the era of the Libertarian New Deal which has evolved a formula exactly opposite to the three R’s: instead of Relief, Recovery, and Reform, it’s Deny, Deconstruct, and Dissemble. Small “l” Libertarianism, as I’ve seen it practiced by start-ups in the Mission District, is avoidant, anonymous and prefers to to create things—cars and miscellaneous gadgetry—that make more private space.

This is how I view “innovations” like automated vehicles; the self-driving cars Cruise Automation has spent the last two years test driving around the Mission (and I do mean around, and around, in dizzying regularity) function like private BART cars. Included in this avoidance of common space is a suspicion of public safeguards, permits, in other words.

Uber’s decision to place their driverless cars on San Francisco streets in defiance of California’s entirely reasonable vehicle permitting laws is a perfect example of the tantrumy we’ll-do-what-we-want-to-do-you’re-not-the-mother-of-me reaction to public safety laws.  I asked the robot wrangler if the anonymous tech company had checked in with the city or sought any sort of permitting. “No,” he answered.

I recounted this conversation a day later to Nicole Ferrara, Executive Director of Walk SF who said immediately: “They are not legal. They are not permitted to be on the sidewalk.” She’d read the February 21st Mission Local story about the “Carry” robot, and thought I had seen the same robot.

“This was a different robot,” I told her. “It looked like a mobility scooter.”

She sighed. “We’re concerned that this is the beginning of the era of Wall-E. More and more public space is being taken away. People that live in the city enjoy the fact that they can walk places, like the grocery, for instance. Maybe you bump into a friend on the way. Sidewalks form social spaces and are part of the fabric of urban culture. To stop that culture from unfolding is detrimental to urban life. And it has an impact on the elderly and disabled population.” I asked her if they had a plan to deal with scofflaw robots. “Yes,” she said. “We’re working on that.”

The robot and the wrangler crossed the street and entered the crosswalk. I decided it was time to stop talking and start documenting. I laid my bike down next to the woman selling oranges and grabbed my cell phone.

“I don’t want to be in the picture,” said the wrangler.
“I can crop you out,” I said and then thought wait a minute. He’s walking around with this thing on a public sidewalk. Sorry, guy. The robot vroomed past me and churned down Harrison street. The conversation with the wrangler was over. He was nice, but I knew there was nothing for me to know; all I was required to do was watch the spectacle of a robot, zooming through my neighborhood.

But I followed them, anyway. We came to the corner of 23rd and Harrison.  A nattily dressed man wearing a porkpie hat stood on the street corner. His eyes lit on the robot and his eyes widened.

“Woah! Is that a robot?” he asked.
“Yes!” I said, answering for the wrangler, who was busy running after the robot.
He looked happy. “Is that like R2D2’s great-great-great-great Grandfather?” he asked gleefully. His name was Eric Peralta. “I’m a furniture designer and sci-fi geek,” he told me. He was enchanted by the robot.
“Do you want to know what that is?” I asked Eric.
“Yeah! Hey! What is that?” Eric called after the wrangler.

“I can’t tell you,” answered the wrangler. He and the robot zoomed off. Eric’s eyes were alight: the future was all around him in the Mission and it was awesome. Eric, a self-identified extreme-Left-Libertarian didn’t see a problem with the robot’s developers using the sidewalks and streets for product development or financial profit. “That’s what most companies do, right?” Neither did he mind the secrecy of tech culture. “When you’re working on sensitive technology, you need to be able to protect your design to keep your work from being stolen.” Who’d want to steal that thing? I wondered. What evil tech competitor would be interested? It looked so slapped together a Jawa might have second thoughts about scavenging it. In comparison, the “Carry” robot that Wenus encountered looked sleek, definitively high-tech and convincing in its role as the delivery person of tomorrow.

Eric looked thoughtful as he gazed at the rapidly vanishing robot. “It’s strange to be alive in this time. I can remember when computers were barely a thing…they fit in closets, not people’s hands. I grew up in the forest and love nature, love the environment. But the earth has become a human sphere. We are changing it.” He seemed to think that the future was upon us, in all its glory, unmovable, unchangeable and suddenly just present. I felt differently, of course: the future that tech companies seem to be building seems to be concerned with banishing the quotidian in favor of a future free of human activity and monopolizing my environment with a monoculture of non-disclosure and anonymity. Gee, no thanks. Like St. Joan of the Stockyards, I Want To Know.

What seems to be at-large in the streets of the Mission district (aside from unpermitted robots) is a culture that is at once voluble, and cagey: the public humble-brag and carefully scripted candor of the tech community when it speaks of the future at tech conferences vanishes when you encounter tech engineers roaming around the Mission District sitting inside self-driving cars or running after robots. They are legally and culturally tongue-tied. When asked what they’re doing, and what the things they’re developing will do, they can only say I can’t tell you. This is probably the truth. They probably don’t know.

Which is weird. An opaque, undisclosed future is at odds with the kind of Futurism I grew up with. It took delight in explaining everything: there will be ansibles, veldts, holo-decks. There will be genderless societies, black obelisks, undiscovered galaxies far, far away, monsters made from cadavers who need to be loved, tiny green people in elongated spaceships that either want peace or to destroy us. The authors and writers of the movies and the books I love (I’m a sci-fi geek, too) are in the business of description: new worlds, relationships, and environments. Some of the stories were cautionary. Some were frightening. But the makers of these scenarios wanted me to consider, to anticipate, to know.

The tech community of the Bay Area do not. They only ever show a bizarre mix of squeamishness and surprise—You’re only here to witness. We Can’t Tell You— as they develop an undisclosed future on the streets of my neighborhood.

Written after a long time of not writing. The Moon is brand new and in Pisces. Venus is in the evening sky these days: go ahead and blow her a kiss.
Here’s to unsettled exoplanets!