Not having lived in the Bay Area in this millennium, I have no idea how accurate this is, so I would be curious to hear from any current Bay Area residents.
Living here for twenty years, and having now filled my dance card with every compass direction of the bay, I laughed in familiarity at a bunch of the anecdotes I read. Three notes.
First, I think that the Bay Area tech-like cultures are described accurately — but that the Bay Area non-tech cultures, as in those who are neither within it nor modeling after it, deserve separate consideration. Certainly every local culture I’ve interacted with that is tech-primary or tech-derived has been defective as described, while I also see evidence of thriving non-tech cultures.
Second, no one understands how to bait and tease and flirt other, which certainly aligns with the anecdotes reported by the author about ‘not enough bullying’. I’ve had to exit multiple communities because they’re so intent on putting safety bumpers on every single sharp corner that has ever affected anyone, that I get so dizzy from all the bumpers just in trying to say Hello You Look Nice Is That Wool that I Just Don’t Bother Trying Anymore. I held three long-term relationships spanning two-thirds of my time here and I have been forced to developed a fascinatingly competent filter for people who expect their needs to be discovered and fulfilled without having to bully the world. Local kink is the worst of all worlds: permission required to be flirt, focused on promoting long-term poly and poly-adjacent relationships, and saturated with ‘pillow passive’ subs who assume that service is due them.
Third, the local culture feels like a corpo descendant of the third-wave secular cults such as Landmark or Oprah. It can be distilled trivially into the Three Laws of Bay Cultists, but these are present everywhere in the U.S., but focused into explicit acceptance and preference here. They are:
1. What advances one’s goals is ethical.
2. What hinders one’s goals is unethical.
3. What has no bearing on one’s goals is exempt from ethical consideration.
So, yeah, don’t move here unless you’re forced to. I’m due to leave later this year and it’s not like the local scenes will notice or regret the loss of a ex-tech woman who isn’t interested in talking tech or calendaring poly.
On one hand it often feels like the tech industrial complex is all consuming here. When you fly you can sit and watch 12 different billboard ads in a row for different companies all claiming to be the "foundation of enterprise AI". All the money is there. On the other hand objectively most people are not tech bros. Even if literally all office workers were (and they're not), people need to eat, get around, shop, get their plumbing fixed, their teeth cleaned, etc etc. Your perception of the normalcy is probably mostly dictated by your willingness to engage with normal people activities, and perhaps your command of Spanish.
