Seattle and San Francisco: Big tech, political backlash and the AI boom
Source: GeekWire
Historian Margaret O’Mara, journalist Jonathan Weber, and GeekWire’s John Cook at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, recording a joint episode of the GeekWire and Blue City Blues podcasts with David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Tech remade Seattle and San Francisco over the past three decades, bringing jobs and wealth along with soaring housing costs and a political backlash. Now the AI boom is hitting both cities, before either has resolved the tensions that have repeatedly divided their communities.
That’s the subject of this week’s GeekWire Podcast, a live joint taping with the Blue City Blues podcast at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle. GeekWire co-founder John Cook joins historian Margaret O’Mara, author of “The Code,” and San Francisco journalist Jonathan Weber, author of “City on the Edge,” with Blue City Blues hosts David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik.
The tech industry’s conflicts in Seattle and San Francisco began when the industry moved out of the suburbs and into the middle of both cities.
Silicon Valley grew up 30 to 40 miles south of San Francisco, and Microsoft built a suburban campus in Redmond that O’Mara called “its own kind of bubble far away from the city.”
When Weber arrived in San Francisco in 1990 to cover Silicon Valley for the Los Angeles Times, he said, “there was essentially no tech in the city at all.” That changed with the dot-com boom, which brought the first backlash in San Francisco’s Mission District in the late 1990s.
Cont'd.
LINK:
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/seattle-and-san-francisco-big-tech-political-backlash-and-the-ai-boom/