Jasmine Sun

Yeah.

My name is Jasmine Sun.

I am an independent writer covering AI and Silicon Valley culture from San Francisco.

Yeah, I mean, I also describe it with other words.

I say anthropology of disruption, I like, because I'm very interested in sort of the very personal texture of like what frontier tech and change feels like.

I'm really interested in like San Francisco as a cultural phenomenon, both like, yes, the tech industry and the technologies and the companies, but also like the weird trends and ideologies and subcultures running through this place as a result of tech and its influence.

I mean, I think you kind of said it, like as a writer, as an observer, I want to be where the weird people are.

And like, I've wondered, like, is there something geographic to it?

Because obviously there's all the tech stuff, like biohacking and AI and whatever.

But even before that, like lots of political ideas were born in the Bay Area, right?

Like the Black Panthers came out of Oakland or the Sierra Club.

And so I feel like there's something about California and this sort of frontier ethic of people going West and getting as far away from

the institutions and the emperor's view as they can.

There's a Chinese proverb about basically like going to where the mountains are high and the emperor is far to be able to actually experiment with new ways of living.

And in China, they use that to refer to Yunnan, which is the southwestern province, which is their kind of hippie capital.

But in the U.S., it's probably San Francisco is where people go to experiment with it.

with new political, cultural, technological beliefs.

And they're so extreme about it.

There's no sense of moderation in San Francisco.

There's a lot of cults.