About the event
At the dawn of the 1990s, San Francisco was a beautiful if troubled mid-sized city—still reeling from the AIDS epidemic and the Loma Prieta earthquake, its boom-and-bust economy stuck in a long decline. Then a band of free-thinking technology enthusiasts immersed themselves in the city's singular creative zeitgeist and helped invent the modern internet. What followed was a transformation unlike any in recent American history: an economic and cultural juggernaut that could fairly claim the title of tech capital of the world—and, in the shadows, a mounting crisis of homelessness, addiction, and a political establishment that had lost the plot.
In City on the Edge, reporter and newsroom leader Jonathan Weber—an eyewitness to these events—delivers a sweeping history of a city that rose to dizzying heights only to be all but undone by the heedlessness of the tech industry it did so much to spawn. Drawing on some two hundred interviews with elected officials, CEOs, activists, investors, and artists, it's more than a chronicle of a city. It's the story of a war waged for the heart of San Francisco—one that both anticipated and reflected the culture wars raging around the world.
Weber will be in conversation with Frances Dinkelspiel, the journalist and author who co-founded Berkeleyside, one of the country's pioneering local news sites, and wrote the bestsellers Towers of Gold and Tangled Vines. The two are longtime friends and colleagues in Bay Area journalism, and their conversation carries a personal thread: Dinkelspiel is a descendant of the Hellman family, and her cousin, the late civic leader Warren Hellman, figures in Weber's book—it was Hellman who funded The Bay Citizen, the local news nonprofit Weber led. Together they'll dig into how tech remade the city, what its leaders and institutions got right and wrong, the perils and promise of patron-funded journalism, and what San Francisco's future might hold as a new AI boom takes hold.
Your visit includes:
- A moderated conversation between Jonathan Weber and Frances Dinkelspiel
- Book signing and Q&A
- A glass of wine and good company, Book Society–style
Get your ticket here! booksociety.social/event-details/city-on-the-edge-how-tech-remade-san-francisco
Option to pre-purchase Jonathan's book at checkout. (NOTE: You are welcome to pick your book up prior to the event if you would like to pre-read!) A limited number of copies of City on the Edge and Frances’ book Tangled Vines will also be available for purchase at the event.
About the Speakers
Jonathan Weber was named the Los Angeles Times's first-ever Silicon Valley reporter in 1990. He was later editor in chief of The Industry Standard, which chronicled—and lived—the first dot-com boom. He served as editor in chief of The Bay Citizen, a local news non-profit, and oversaw West Coast news and global technology coverage for Reuters. He was most recently the founding editor in chief of The San Francisco Standard. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Wesleyan University.
Frances Dinkelspiel is a journalist and author, and a co-founder of Berkeleyside, the pioneering local news site she launched in 2009. She is the author of two acclaimed books of California history: Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller about her great-great-grandfather, and Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California, a New York Times bestseller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. She holds a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.