City on the Edge

Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco

By Jonathan Weber

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Welcome!

Greetings and thank you for your interest in my book! The story begins in 1990, which is also the year I was named the first-ever Silicon Valley reporter for the Los Angeles Times. I was later editor in chief of The Industry Standard, known as the bible of first dot-com boom. For most of the 2000s I lived in Montana, where I started a media company called New West, and then I returned to San Francisco as founding editor in chief of what became the Bay Citizen. I then oversaw West Coast news and global technology coverage for Reuters, and was most recently the founding editor in chief of The San Francisco Standard. I’ve had the privilege of seeing San Francisco’s remarkable, three-decade transformation into the tech capital of the world up close. I hope you’ll join me for the ride!

About the Book

At the dawn of the 1990s, San Francisco was a beautiful if troubled mid-sized metropolis still reeling from the AIDS epidemic and the Loma Prieta earthquake, its economy stuck in a post-industrial slump. Once considered to be the capital of the American West, and later the beating heart of the global counterculture, the mythic, fog-shrouded city at the edge of the continent faced an uncertain future.

But in that very moment, a band of free-thinking technologists, immersed in the creative zeitgeist of the city, were inventing the contemporary internet. San Francisco would undergo an epic political, social, and economic transformation as it claimed the title of tech capital of the world. Local politicians, including Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, advanced to the national stage. An unlikely marriage of underground culture and technological optimism gave rise to the annual reverie known as Burning Man.

This should be a happy story for San Francisco. But as the city’s tech economy roared, a host of urban ills lurked in the shadows: homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness, and a crippling lack of new housing. The city’s famous left-wing political establishment struggled to get its arms around the problems, becoming a punching bag for President Trump and the new right. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, it created new crises and laid old ones bare, shattering a “City Family” that had ruled for more than thirty years and prompting a sharp rightward turn by the once liberal tech industry.

Jonathan Weber saw it all up close as a reporter and newsroom leader. He offers a sweeping history of a city that rose to dizzying heights, only to be undone by the heedlessness of a tech industry it did so much to spawn and politicians who had lost the plot. Drawing on two hundred interviews with mayors, CEOs, activists, investors, and artists, City on the Edge is more than a simple chronicle of a city. It’s the story of a war waged for the heart of San Francisco—one that anticipated the culture wars raging around the world. Its outcome would have an impact far beyond the city’s famed Golden Gates.

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Events

July 7, 7PM

Bookshop West Portal

Moderated by Joe Menn | RSVP here

July 22, 6PM

The Portal, Mill Valley

Moderated by Tim Chang | RSVP here

August 12, 6PM

Sunnyvale Public Library

Author Talk | RSVP here

Raves + Reviews

“Enlightening… A timely, cautionary tale about what tech cannot fix.”

— PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY,

“Having spent the 1990s and early 2000s at the heart of the story Jonathan Weber tells here—working at Wired and HotWired, living in San Francisco at the peak of the dot-com boom—you can take it from me: This book is the real deal. Imbued with insider access, outsider perspective, and Weber’s prodigious story-telling gifts, City on the Edge is the definitive account of a monumental era in a mythical city and a world-changing industry that both lost their way.”

— JOHN HEILEMANN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Game Change and Double Down

“So much that happens in the nation happens in San Francisco first. Jonathan Weber tells the city’s story from the rise of the internet and the behemoth powers that followed through to the national political figures the city has spawned—with, along the way, a cast of vivid and Machiavellian behind-the-scenes players. He has made it a riveting tale and turned San Francisco into an unforgettable character.”

— MICHAEL WOLFF, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fire and Fury

“To understand the San Francisco of today, you can’t do better than Jonathan Weber’s chronicle of its recent decades of euphoria and disillusion. In his fast-paced narrative, Weber shrewdly navigates the city’s volatile juxtaposition of transformational innovation and intractable social ills. City on the Edge is a captivating story of iron-willed idealists, inventors, activists, and power players who shaped San Francisco’s contentious character, altered how we all live and work, and inflamed the most fractious political debates of our time.”

— MARTY BARON, Author of Collision of Power and former executive editor of The Washington Post

“From the beginning of the rise of the commercial Internet to today, Jonathan Weber has been in the middle of everything San Francisco–related, including technology and politics. In this beautiful book, he interweaves the two and shows how they’ve played off each other, both in positive and negative ways, in a city whose history is both fantastical and entertaining.”

— BRAD FELD, Co-founder of Foundry Group and Techstars

“A welcome history of Bay Area Big Tech, brought up to date and with plenty of object lessons.”

— Kirkus Review ,

— JOHN HEILEMANN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Game Change and Double Down

Contact

To reach the author, contact:

Jonathan Weber

jweberwrites@gmail.com

For publicity, contact:

Debbie Norflus, Atria Books/ Simon and Schuster,

debbie.norflus@simonandschuster.com