“Blue Ethnic Cleansing” in San Francisco?

Tech-bro fantasia and the desire for network-state colonization has culminated in a call for literal ethnic cleansing of “Blues”--people who believe all people should be equal--in San Francisco.

This is not a post about the film Demolition Man, but the story I’m shining a light on here evokes it in disturbing ways.¹

The setting is an alternate future in which San Diego and Los Angeles have merged into a utopian megacity known as “San Angeles.” Like most utopias, it’s also dystopia. Abortion and pregnancy (without license) are both illegal. Swearing is illegal. Meat is illegal. You’re surveilled at all times and ticketed for the smallest infraction. And if you’re the wrong kind of person, YOU are illegal.

In this fictional San Angeles, there’s a massive subaltern population that literally lives underground—an underclass that has organized itself to survive on its own, occasionally raiding the above-ground universe for supplies. Where San Angelenos are all well-to-do suburbanites, the underclass is depicted as vagabonds who wear dirty rags and live hand-to-mouth. They are the lumpenproletariat, masses who exist outside of the economy’s production processes. Security in San Angeles thus has two fronts: social control of all within it, and policing the boundary between the vagabonds and the San Angelenos.

I’m not going to dwell on this 1993 film, but Demolition Man presaged a shocking number of things about present-day society—an observation that many people have made.

One of those things, it turns out, is now big local news in California: A tech-bro pitch to turn a chunk of San Francisco into a real life San Angeles dystopia.

The face of the Network State movement, a not-quite-super villain named Balaji Srinivasan, wants to remake the very idea of sovereignty on behalf of those possessing wealth and tech stock options. Balaji and other advocates of the once-fringe reactionary libertarian idea of the “Network State” aim to takeover a big chunk of the heart of San Francisco and make it a “city campus” for tech workers.

That is, they want to carve out part of San Francisco and refashion it in a manner that would very much be Demolition Man’s San Angeles. They want to create basically a nation-state, but for them, by them. They want to write their own rules, free from the constraints that the modern state system—which is to say reality—imposes on them.

This kind of stuff lacks even a whiff of human solidarity, to say nothing of solidarity with fellow citizens.

And it’s even worse than that. The Demolition Man bit comes in evidence with a call from Balaji for ethnic cleansing:

Push out all Blues…Tell them they’re…unwelcome…Just as Blues ethnically cleanse me out of San Francisco, like, push out all Blues…De-Blueification is the goal…something like tech Zionism.

Totally normal, non-dehumanizing plans for political revolution in the experiment formerly known as the United States. Cool.

“Blues,” in his language, is Democrats, or people with “woke” politics. Last time I checked, that’s a right-wing identity politics way to talk about anyone who thinks that other people should be treated equally. One strand of the ongoing counter-revolution is the they’re-not-kidding “war on woke.” The San Angeles wannabes want to create a post-equality utopia as a logical extension of that war. This will create a lumpenproletariat out of anyone with the wrong political makeup if they choose (or have no choice but) to remain attached to San Francisco. This is civil war stuff. AI-enabled, of course.

And the plan to literally partition San Francisco is becoming less fringe and more real. Tech oligarchs who have long believed this stuff (and are flush with cash) are the new barons of American politics.

Before Trump came to power, Peter Thiel’s lot were investing in “seasteading,” a dystopian engineering feat to render portions of the Blue Pacific region into frontiers that would host new sovereign communities at sea in the territorial waters of still-existing colonies like French Polynesia. Trump is also currently being lobbied to convert the Presidio, a national landmark and one of the most beautiful stretches of nature I’ve ever seen in my life, into San Angeles—a space governed by tech bros, for tech bros, and to the exclusion or subordination of everyone else.

Presidio!

We’re talking about techno-fascism here. But like Demolition Man’s San Angeles, pitches for dystopia necessarily wear a utopian mask. As one advocate of the “city campus” insisted:

Our goal isn’t to exit society or build gated communities. It’s the opposite: We want to build more bridging communities.

Sure, buddy. Take a space where communities already exist, that’s already part of a nation-state, and overthrow everyone there who doesn’t behave or believe like you. There’s a name for that kind of thing, and it’s not “city campus.”

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High school Van was very into this Dennis Leary rant about freedom. It’s still funny and kind of stirring, but man, it really foreshadows one of the features of MAGA—white men wishing to live free from consequence.

1. It was one of those movies that I relished in high school—rock-em, sock-em action, A-list actors at the height of their powers, and a sci-fi story that was just dystopian enough to seem profound. Watched it many times.