https://www.falter.at/zeitung/20250401/was-trump-und-ki-mit-der-tech-szene-machen-spoiler-nix-gutes

This article appeared originally in German on April 2nd 2025 in the Austrian weekly Falter.

Report from San Francisco: While Elon Musk and Co. have defected to Donald Trump, their would-be successors are brooding over the next revolution – the machine that replaces humans. And drug deaths are going around on the streets

by Tessa Szyszkowitz

FALTER 14/2025, 01.04.25

X has moved. In November 2022, Elon Musk carried a sink into the lobby of 1355 Market Street, a massive office building in downtown San Francisco. The short message service Twitter had its headquarters here. Musk had just bought it. He posted a photo of himself and the sink with the words "Let this sink in". A play on words. The washbasin is called "sink" in English. Musk's message: Finally get it, I'm the new boss.

A good two years later, the lobby is empty. No Musk. No sink. A coffee kiosk without customers. A security guard who shrugs his shoulders: "X is gone. They're all in Texas now."

In the next block, the porter wordlessly hands over a piece of paper with an address – the new one from Uber. The taxi company has also moved. Like Block, Reddit, WeWork. High rents, tax restrictions – tech entrepreneurs are flexible, they grab their laptops, and they're gone.

The big software companies were founded in garages about 30 years ago: Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, Google in Menlo Park, Apple in Los Altos. Later, Market Street was the urban center of Silicon Valley. Today, the tabloids have more homeless people than oligarchs. Glamour and gutter coexist in a confined space here in downtown San Francisco. Bent over, people in soiled winter coats sit on the street in the Tenderloin district. Almost all of them are black. One screams in the drug mania, he rolls onto the road. Cars drive past him slowly.

The opioid crisis still has a firm grip on the U.S., although the numbers are falling. Between 2019 and 2021, 814,000 people died of a drug overdose, or around 270,000 per year. Currently, there are still more than 100,000. The drug pandemic began with the extremely addictive painkiller Oxycontin. The cheaper addictive drug fentanyl has replaced the more expensive painkillers.

At the corner of Mission and 16th Street, the messenger app Signal is said to have been developed in 2014. Today it smells of piss and pot here. A stoned young, slender black man runs after his skateboard, which has escaped him. Across the road. A car stops at the last moment.

A moment of chaos in the analogue life of Silicon Valley. There are enough of them in cyberspace: At the center of the latest scandal is this messenger service Signal. Signal is considered the most secure, encrypted means of communication among the freely accessible apps. Since Donald Trump's security adviser Mike Waltz mistakenly included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, in a Signal group on March 11, in which half the government chatted nonchalantly about planned bombing attacks on the Yemeni Houthis, tensions between politics, the media and the tech industry have exploded.

Signal gate instead of Golden Gate. The scandal has been occupying US media around the clock for a good week. "Signal is secure," says Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker. She has to take to social media to defend her channel because it is being insulted by Trump's administration. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is looking for culprits instead of firing the real culprit: Mike Waltz, who had set up the chat group. Or himself. After all, a defense minister is responsible for ensuring that classified material does not simply end up on mobile phones.

This is because other apps installed on the devices are less secure than Signal and can be infiltrated more easily. Until Trump's new ministers, this has apparently not yet been discussed. The service Whatsapp, which belongs to the Meta Group, for example, now uses the secure Signal protocol, Meredith Whittaker said in  an interview with Falter almost a year ago, but: "The Signal protocol is only a small part of the software stack. Whatsapp protects your chat, but nothing else. Not your address book, not your personal information on your profile. All this metadata, when who talks to whom and how often, is not private." A found fodder for Russian or Chinese intelligence services, which can be happy about the bungling of Trump's top team.

The Signal Foundation is no longer at home in San Francisco. Here, the new start-ups are growing like mushrooms out of the ground. In the districts of Marina, Pacific Heights or Russian Hill, the average age is 27, there are more dogs than babies and instead of pharmacies and funeral homes, hipster cafés and yoga studios. In the evening sun, joggers plunge into the cold waters of the Pacific on the city's sandy beaches to cool off. Without exception, everyone in the trendy districts seems to be "fit as a fiddle".

The streets are often lined with witty townhouses with styles ranging from Victorian, Spanish eclectic, and Art Deco. Lots of wood and paint with piled up roof ornaments. The three-storey wooden houses survive the frequent earthquakes better than skyscrapers. In the front gardens often opulent plants. If you don't have your own palm tree in front of the hut, you're a loser.

In one of these houses on Francisco Street, a small team is developing the revolution of tomorrow: code editing. The start-up Cursor is a high-flyer among start-ups. This has advantages and disadvantages. It means nothing less than that the programmers are currently abolishing themselves. The new tools will be equipped with artificial intelligence, which can program better, faster and more innovatively than a human. ChatGPT can already do that today. But the companies specifically geared towards these AI functions are speeding up the process enormously.

Venture capital firms that specialize in artificial intelligence in San Francisco are watching the market and trying to guess what the next big thing will be. The iPhone of tomorrow, so to speak. Even what is still being developed around Market Street is already being traded: AGI. Artificial general intelligence means nothing less than that the machine will be at least as smart as humans. Equipped with the power of deduction and creativity. Maybe also feelings. AI is still inferior to humans in the "Theory of Mind". But in Silicon Valley, they think it's only a matter of time. Nothing is unthinkable anymore.

The entire Bay Area around San Francisco is gripped by this fever. This must have been the case at the time of the gold rush in the mid-19th century, when thousands of people in California tried their luck as gold diggers. In addition to AI and the run on AGI, the defense industry is also booming here – especially Elon Musk's SpaceX. The established big tech companies are also participating in the race today. An hour away is Mountainview, home to Google's headquarters. Colorful bicycles are neatly parked next to each other here so that happy people can ride through the brave new world.

And how beautiful it is. Well-kept flower beds, state-of-the-art architecture for office buildings that automatically block out the sunlight, of which there is an outrageous amount here. Google's HQ is growing steadily, and in addition to Mountainview, there is Sunnyvale, which houses cloud and AI teams. Google Cloud helps businesses with digital transformation.

So that no one has to leave the area during the day, Google offers free lunch. Not just any business lunch. The salad buffet is divided into three stalls, next to which a cook cuts open a freshly roasted leg of lamb. There are also classic burgers and further back the homemade gelato. And espresso, of course. If you work at Google, you also get massages in-house. On a flat roof is the herb and vegetable garden, where artichokes grow. A working idyll.

Especially since Google has a reputation for offering pleasant working hours. Nine to five, the classic eight-hour day once demanded by the American trade unions and introduced under Henry Ford in the 1920s.

Nevertheless, the mood at lunch is depressed. Because the ideal world of Silicon Valley is broken. The US tech industry, which had developed innovations at full speed in a left-libertine biotope that had guaranteed the US economy dominance in the world, has reached its limits. "It's terrible that we now had to see our boss at the inauguration of Donald Trump," says a Google employee, who does not want to be named. Sundar Pichai sat next to Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jeff Bezos of Amazon at the ceremony on January 20. The free lettuce leaf tastes bitter.

Elon Musk was of course also present at Trump's triumph. Musk is everywhere. He appears in the White House, on his medium X, but also in every discussion in Silicon Valley. Like a zombie, a revenant that almost everyone now dreads, but which seems to be unstoppable. The 53-year-old billionaire was the idol of all emerging talents in Silicon Valley for two decades. No one built cars like their Teslas – better, more innovative than the European suppliers anyway. His AI company xAI, his space company SpaceX, his satellite company Starlink – the man is a jack-of-all-trades.

But some are horrified when Musk gave the Hitler salute at Trump's inauguration. Musk also supports the far right in Germany and Great Britain, he is currently damaging America's institutions as head of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. He fires thousands of employees, he closes state agencies and: He still hasn't fallen out with Trump. However, he has just announced that he only wants to lead Doge until May.

Because resistance is stirring: "Unelected, greedy, dangerous," reads the poster of Patty Moddelmog, the founder of #TeslaTakedown San Francisco. The Pilates teacher "no longer wanted to watch this unelected, greedy, dangerous man ruin our country," she says. Every Saturday, she calls for protests in front of the Tesla Store on Van Ness Avenue: "Every week there are more."

Donald Trump has described the protest groups as "domestic terrorists". Moddelmog says that her protest group acts completely non-violently. "I saw two men with MAGA caps last Saturday trying to incite people to violence. I immediately told the police officers to keep an eye on them."

A Tesla salesman says it does happen that a brick flies through the shop window. They just had to replace another one. "But these were not the people from the protest, they were hooligans who came after the demo."

Teacher Linda Becker has also come to the #TeslaTakedown. "I taught autistic children," she says: "Elon Musk shows the same characteristics: no empathy. And nothing happens without something in return." Becker says she is old enough to remember the Vietnam War – 1955 to 1975. Better: the protest against it. "It took years to influence the government," she says. Every poster counts.

The Tesla brand polarizes. Car rental company Hertz has begged its customers in the USA to buy the rented Teslas at a knockdown price. The almost new cars are rapidly losing value.

In Germany, 94 percent no longer want to buy Musk cars. The shares have lost half of their value.

According to Bloomberg, the richest man in the world is worth 305 billion on paper. On the other hand, he is highly indebted and has to repay loans he took out to buy Twitter, which cost him 44 billion. His AI company xAI has now hastily bought X - for allegedly 33 billion dollars. The lousy numbers of X can be obfuscated in this way. And xAI can use X's AI chatbot Grok with all the data collected to train its large language models, the LLMs.

Silicon Valley is divided: Many here supported Trump's election because tech companies expect even less regulation from him. "The U.S. is more successful than the Europeans because much more is possible in America," says U.S.-Austrian journalist Patrick Swanson, who founded the media consulting firm Verso in California. Elon Musk's Cybertruck, which drives through the streets of San Francisco like proof of applied science fiction, is not allowed in the EU: if only because of the sharp edges that could be dangerous for passers-by.

Tech bro Elon Musk: still hasn't fallen out with Trump, but wants to step down as head of Doge in May.

But the techies here in their start-ups aren't just addicted to innovation – which in some cases can mean that a 22-year-old graduate of elite Stanford University becomes a millionaire if his start-up takes off. In the past, these men – women are still rare – were considered left-liberal and libertarian: they had a sense of social justice, progressive innovations, but also freedom of rules and anarchy. Like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, they were once rebels against the entrepreneurial world. Today they are CEOs. This has consequences.

Since Musk toppled and supported Trump instead of the Democratic Party, part of Silicon Valley has followed suit. Zuckerberg announced right after Trump's inauguration that he would stop fact-checking on Facebook and outsource Meta's content moderation team, which controls content on Facebook and Instagram, to Texas. On Hacker Way in Menlo Park near Palo Alto, the motto is: thumbs down for content control and regulation.

The others grumble behind closed doors, but hardly anyone from the tech scene wants to take on the US government publicly. The risk of being excluded from billions in subsidies from Washington is too high. Elon Musk's companies have pocketed $38 billion in state aid over the years. Musk can now hope for part of the 42 billion that Trump wants to spend on the expansion of broadband internet in rural areas. Biden's administration had not allowed Musk's Starlink to the funding pots.

The job of public criticism must be taken over by the local intellectuals. Rebecca Solnit, for example. She is the antithesis of the toxic manosphere at the center of which Elon Musk and Donald Trump cavort. The author coined the term "mansplaining" with her essay "Men Explain Things to Me" in 2008.

She makes herself comfortable in a beanbag that invites you to take a break in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. "California was the haven for gays and lesbians, the birthplace of the environmental movement," she says with pride of ownership. But "now we have become a global center of power, and this power is ugly and dangerous: surveillance, disinformation, the list is long. Today, Silicon Valley provides the autocrats of this world with the tools to expand their power."

The only consolation? San Francisco, the city itself. It's true that the new mayor Daniel Lurie has a big problem to solve with the homeless scene. Lurie comes from the jeans dynasty Levi Strauss – ancestor Loeb emigrated from Bavaria to take part in the first gold rush in San Francisco in 1883. The philanthropist's offspring founded Tipping Point Community in 2005 to fight homelessness. Daniel Lurie was elected for this in 2024.

Rebecca Solnit already described what the city is all about in her book "Infinite City – A San Francisco Atlas" 15 years ago. She has mapped the stories of each generation of immigrants, their kitchens, their murders and their loved ones. That San Francisco is flooded with drug addicts is a "right-wing narrative to denounce our progressive lifestyle in San Francisco." Today, San Francisco, like the rest of the world, suffers more from the "Great Withdrawal," she says – that is, from people staring at their phones instead of looking at each other.

In San Francisco, at least at the moment, all screens seem to meet in a meaningful way: Smart Screens and Sun-Screen – screens and sun protection. San Francisco has the flair of a city of the future. Innovations are tested, some are quickly discarded. But the tried and tested is also cultivated. The result: the cycle paths are broadly developed. In addition, driverless cars from Waymo, developed by Google since 2014, glide through the streets almost silently.

The white cars, equipped with an elaborate security system of LiDAR lasers, radars and cameras, have long been part of the cityscape. The machine is also polite, helpful and humorous. From greeting to farewell: "Please don't forget your mobile phone, your wallet and the pot full of gold."

The Tech Bros – and also some Tech Sisters – hope that the gold rush in Silicon Valley will continue for a long time.

In 2024, 40,000 start-ups were registered in the global tech hub Silicon Valley in California. One in five start-ups closes in the first year because it is bankrupt or displaced by competition

145,000 tech millionaires and 56 billionaires are at home in the 100-kilometer stretch of land between San Francisco and Santa Clara

The city of San Francisco counted 8232 homeless people in 2024. In the USA, more than half a million people live on the streets or in homeless shelters nationwide

This article was published on 01.04.2025 in FALTER 14/2025