Free San Francisco

My husband is one of the founders of Current, an AI startup that raised 170 million dollars in its seed round, valued at a billion dollars. I am an artist, and an architect, and trust me that the (irony?) of marrying someone whose work threatens to render my own obsolete is not lost on me. 

Up until about one month before moving to the Bay Area, I believed that my husband and I were likely to live out the rest of our lives in the gorgeously gardened neighborhood of Shadyside in Pittsburgh, PA. There, we both enjoyed a 30 minute walk to Carnegie Mellon, where we taught (me in the School of Architecture, and him in the Departments of Mathematics and Machine Learning).

I resigned my position as Special Faculty when we moved here. It was a decision that brought some heartache and excitement, as I love teaching, and I feel that it is the most important thing I have done to date in my life. I love guiding my students and pushing them to learn more about the built environment and their agency to change it. I love watching them discover their own creative potential, and I feel a tremendous gratitude for the time I have taught in both the undergraduate and graduate architecture programs at CMU, a school I love with all my heart. I certainly hope to have the opportunity to teach again. 

Yet, right now, I feel that I need to do something else. We are at a very important moment in time. I feel it is a singularly significant tipping point, and I have a foolish, perhaps naive sense of responsibility to contribute to the ethos of creative practice that I feel is under threat by companies like my husband’s. 

I do believe that he will do the right thing when it comes to setting up his work in a way that benefits and supports humanity. I think the weight of doing this right rests heavily on his shoulders, and those of his fellow founders as well. In fact, as I sit here on this beautiful sunny summer Sunday afternoon in Beluna coffee shop in the lower Haight neighborhood, he is on a company retreat considering how to do exactly that. 

I also believe that his mind is very different from my own. He thinks by weighing the pros and cons of each decision, examining the possibilities from all angles, and in carefully pruned decision trees and logical tautologies. I make decisions as though I am fishing them out of a thick broth soup. This is not to say that I don’t consider things carefully, of course, I do. It is to say, instead, that I do not think his way of thinking, which is similar to that of his colleagues and fellow mathematically inclined collaborators, should be the only way. 

Ask most women, and you will quickly learn the value of intuition. You will learn how much you can really know outside of the scientific method. You will feel the truth of things that may not yet be provable, and understand the value of holding two opposing beliefs in your heart at the same time. 

I married my husband for many reasons, but up near the top of the list is that I love the way he thinks. I find his careful and curious rigidity very sexy, but I would feel awfully lonely and quickly depressed if his was the only way of thinking that I were exposed to in my day to day life. 

As his discipline and his practice become overwhelmingly valued, I feel very happy for him and for us because of what this means for our family. I also feel very sad and very afraid that the scales of value in our country have tipped so definitively in one direction. 

I think of our two minds, and a collective of other minds like ours, as sitting on either side of a giant teeter totter. With every ascent and descending bounce, we together power the creative force of this great and beautiful country. Our shared pump-like machinic gestures function like a primitive motor, and with both the aesthetic and the mathematical wonder in oscillating balance, we propel upwards and forward into a future that feels hopeful and bright. 

So here I am, down at the bottom of the teeter totter, looking up at his ever increasing distance, rocketing upwards towards a future that feels alien and opaque to me. I start to wonder, with his meteoric rise, if the scales will ever tip back to balance. I also wonder, given the fact that we are connected to each other, if anyone receive my work, my way of thinking, as independent of him, or will everything I do, from here on out, be seen as a byproduct of his success? 

As a (former?) teacher, I feel a responsibility to retip the scales, but paralyzed by the enormity of the task. I am like David, if Goliath were not only large, but also much much richer than me. And I’m fresh out of ammo for my slingshot. Also I love Goliath. (This is possibly a self piteous thought, and perhaps also a difficult one to relate to, but there it is, with me again.) 

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about this. My husband, Nick, calls these thoughts ‘my existential woes’. They are just that, but after spending a significant amount of time in coffee shops overhearing the conversations of strangers around me, I feel like they may not just be my woes, but those of the nation, or at least of the Golden City, during this AI spring. 

So that takes me here today. I am looking for an answer to the question I keep asking myself, ‘What can I do?”

This, a sequence of field notes titled ‘Free San Francisco’, is my attempt to find out. It is inspired by a deep love for this country, for this planet, and for the many ways of thinking and being in the world that make it such a wonderful and beautiful place to be. It is inspired by my students, who I hope will champion their own quests to balance the scales, and bring their own creative pursuits to fruition. 

Lastly and importantly, I hope it can be useful for you. This is one artists’ take on what we need. It is one shelf on the cabinet of curiosities, one effort at fishing out the golden relics of our time, our collective societal inheritance, polishing off some things I think are worth continuing to treasure, and setting them up to carry forward for those who come after us. I’d love to see what you put on your shelf, too.