This article is an anecdote extrapolated to something bigger: A type of lazy writing where the writer has a single social experience with a group of weird people and then writes about it like it’s the common experience in a place.
The writer went to SF for a few days and went to one party where a group of friends were into peptides. From the article, they were also particularly terrible people. Just read this quote:
> “They change your personality, it’s literally made me less shallow knowing that we can just looksmax you.” “Ugliness is just a choice now.” “I shot up a twink with ozempic who did not need to lose any weight.”
I can’t believe I have to say this, but if someone is bragging to you about injecting weight loss drugs into another person who shouldn’t be taking weight loss drugs, your response shouldn’t be “lol how quirky”. You should recognize that they are a bad person. In my experience the drug enthusiasts who brag about getting other people started on their drugs are bad news, but the ones who brag about introducing to their drugs to people who clearly should not be taking those drugs are the worst variety.
These people always exist. Go back a few years and they might be talking about nootropics or “research chemical” drugs that are analogs of methamphetamine or MDMA. Go back further and they might be bragging about doing steroids and importing testosterone from gray market sources. Go back before that and they’d be bragging about all the Modafinil they’re taking.
The thing about drug user bubbles like this is that when you’re talking to them you’d be convinced that everyone is doing what they’re doing: Taking the latest on-trend drugs in large amounts and one-upping each other on dose, stories, or drug-fueled adventures.
What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized. The party doesn’t last forever and the mindset of being able to endlessly adjust your body and/or your mood with drugs starts to turn dark after the early years where hubris makes users feel like they’ve found the secret to better living through chemistry.
If you’ve encountered groups like this you’ve also seen how the “everyone is doing it” mentality becomes embedded in their minds. That doesn’t mean everyone is importing various Chinese peptides and injecting them for “looksmaxxing” and whatever these people were on about about the “peptide party”. These are just garden variety young drug users riding the latest trend
EDIT: I replaced one instance of the word ‘journalism’ with ‘writing’ because it was becoming a pedantic distraction in the comments.
> What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized.
Lots of people from the 2010-ish era of "aesthetics" and steroids are having heart issues now in their 30s (or earlier). Pretty sad to see.
To me it's fairly clear where this comes from: ambitious people convinced they've figured out some secret cheat code that no-one else has. I'm yet to see that path end well for anyone.
> You should recognize that they are a bad person
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit but I don't really think they're bad people. Young, arrogant, stupid, unaware of the consequences of what they're doing sure... but I don't think it comes from a malicious place where they're intentionally trying to hurt others.
Your criticism is entirely reasonable despite the pedantry. Yes, these people are bad people, but I think that could be the point here. Not to mention, this is just another chapter in SF's long history of being the vanguard of drug experimentation.
You may enjoy Didion's 1967 Slouching towards Bethlehem[1], a similarly anecdotal (and substantially better-written) piece about the drug scene in SF's Summer of Love.
I don't think that's the way you're supposed to read it? I think you're supposed to read it as, the trendy extremes tell you something about a place, even if the details are silly and ephemeral. People with no filter, no shame, no interest in correctness or consequences, and no pole star except trends are like a cartoon guide to the trends and the mentality driving them.
I think the author would agree with most of what you wrote.
They did point out, with numbers, that the SF scene is a lot smaller than would ordinarily be expected. Additionally this is the party scene which is a subset of the general tech scene. These people have more time and money to spare than those who are busy working but they do form a bit of a nexus that channels information. The blog post seems to go to great lengths not to pretend that it is something that it isn’t.
I think it’s important to understand that AI, even at its current level, is revolutionary as are cheap Chinese peptides. This isn’t a crypto bubble, both of these will be world changing. I’ve been doing AI for decades and peptides for 5 years (treating an actual medical condition) so I was in this space before it was cool, happy SF finally caught up.
I started doing deep learning in 2011 after a visit from Andrew Ng, prior to that I was doing old school neural nets (RBMs), random forests, Bayesian nets, information retrieval (search engines), symbolic AI, and expert systems. It’s really only the transformer class (2017) that kept on scaling (didn’t plateau) but I think it took to 2019 before that was really widely known. I got some really good results out of squeeze and excitation in 2017 and knew then attention models were the future. I guess how long I’ve been doing it depends on your definition of AI, I think the future of AI will probably work alongside solvers and ontological reasoners which I worked on at university in 2003 though the tech goes back much further.
In what way did SF catch up? I don’t see how people taking all these peptides and transforming into accidental freaks is a step forward for anything but another reason for the state to get involved bc it’s going to be kids using next and it will create an uproar. People with legitimate medical needs will be left up a creek.
The state is already heavily involved, many gray market peptide suppliers were shut down this year, but demand just went to the black market. This would be harder to stop than the illicit drug market that the government has also consistently failed to stop. It’s so cheap that I’ve stockpiled many years supply so there is little worry about lack of availability for whoever needs it.
I turned to peptides because of how slow research has been, my medical condition (hEDS) has been known about since Hippocrates yet still no official treatments, so it’s not reasonable to expect one any time soon. Gray/black was my only option and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future.
A lot of what we know about peptides comes from athletes cheating in sports and they’ve been doing it, some of them abusing it, for decades so the long term effects are not completely unknown. And this includes the GLP1As and the various combo stacks. Some people naturally have excesses of signaling peptides through genetic variation so they’re another good source of long term effects.
Of the things gay people inject into each other, ozempic is probably one of the safer options.
This is a blog post, not journalism as such. It's someone humorously recounting their own personal experience. They have no responsibility to contextualize anything for you.
Okay? Points still stand: It’s written as an authoritative exploration of a social scene extrapolated from a few days visiting a place and attending one party.
If someone’s writing in journalistic style I think it’s fair to criticize it as journalism, even if it’s on Substack
> It is a vignette which captures the flavor of a place at a particular time.
That’s my point: It captured a specific party with a small group of friends, but the blog goes on to wax philosophically about how it’s indicative of society and tech as a whole
It’s a perfect motte-and-bailey setup where you’re supposed to read it as a big trend indicative of a place and a scene, but the second anyone criticizes the writing it becomes a retreat to arguments that we shouldn’t take it seriously, that’s it’s just a blog, that we should selectively believe it’s embellished however convenient to defuse any criticism.
I think you're on tilt with this argument now. This is a personal essay. You disagree with some of its implications. That's fine. People disagree with each other. You should just write "I disagree with this", rather than try to critique it as formally bad journalism.
I read the entire post and it isn't, at all. It's a personal story with his own reflections on a scene as he experienced it. It's no different than literally any other blog post or journal entry, and at no point does it claim to be a neutral sociological study.
"Let me tell you about the weird people in my social circle I've chosen to write about ... aren't they weird? Now I'm going to draw massive conclusions about everyone in the Bay Area based on the extremely weird group (that I self-selected)."
It's not journalism though is it, it's just someone's blog where they can tell any story they want, as has been the entire history of story telling. With that out of the way the rest of your post is just flanneling.
If the title was “I went to a single party while visiting SF and say some weird things” I might agree, but the article from beginning to end is written as if the party was a lens into society as a whole and indicative of larger trends.
There’s a motte and bailey thing going on with this type of rationalist writing where someone writes authoritatively on broad subjects and then when anyone starts responding to it they immediately repeats to “it’s just a blog” to forgive all of the problems with it.
this is likely to be the most interesting argument I will read today: is substack legit editorial journalism?
certainly there is no organized journalistic outfit behind it, but also, a lot of legit journalists want their substacks to be taken as facts of record.
You're claiming laziness because a writer gives explicit testimony to what he saw, heard and thought, without sufficient moralizing layered over the top about how "drugs are bad m'kaay?" I wish more writing was this lazy.
>Go back a few years and they might be talking about nootropics or “research chemical” drugs that are analogs of methamphetamine or MDMA. Go back further and they might be bragging about doing steroids and importing testosterone from gray market sources. Go back before that and they’d be bragging about all the Modafinil they’re taking.
The peptides and nootropics are the mildest things on the list, and yet here being compared to illegal stimulants and steroids? Those are not the same crowds at all.
I know you edited your post, but I'm actually taken aback by people trying to argue it's a blog, not "journalism". I see no real difference between this and some of the most celebrated pieces of gonzo journalism.
However, this cuts both ways. This format is how we get some of the most interesting pieces of reporting about culture and counterculture. It's someone who went to some parties or worked for some companies. What you refer to as laziness is what makes it valuable: it recounts specific experiences instead of trying to speak in generalities. And it's descriptive rather than moralizing.
In the same vein, some of the most powerful exposes about neo-Nazi movements are just raw accounts of what's going on inside, without the author constantly repeating "and by the way, Nazism is bad, these people are all bad, and here are some statistics".
The SF Bay Area culture is probably not a thing, but there are some pretty awful subcultures within it, and many of them revolve around performance-enhancing drugs and rationalism-as-a-justification-for-bad-things (Zizians, longtermism, etc). I think we should own it.
JFC, that twink thing is freaking me out. My ex, objectively hot and already too thin due to a gallbladder problem, kept bugging me to get her various GLP-1 drugs and we had screaming arguments about how her drug abuse was going to kill her (recreational ketamine, GHB, cocaine, marijuana, whatever peptide stupidity her friends just read about, probably a few I'm forgetting). Fast forward and she's not my problem anymore. I have no idea what's she's on now, but I fully expect to get a call about her having ODed.
Maybe this hits different for me because I have been to a lot of parties just like this, without getting sucked into the culture.
Thats why I wrote that if you go back several years you’d find similar small social scenes around different trends: Steroids, Modafinil (when it was new and rare), RCs like 2-FA and MXE, or psychedelics depending on the era. Each time the social scenes that emerge around these have the same beliefs that everyone is doing excessive experimentation and that it’s only improving their lives. The later outcomes are not so rosy.
I want to defend my hometown a bit: most people who live in and around SF have nothing to do with any of this crap. SF is a diverse city of many ages, nationalities, and values. It is not a “high school,” not a tech scene, not a glib bunch of online assholes.
WTF is any of this, is there some ELI5/OOTL explanation?
I work in big tech and have never heard anyone talk about "peptides". Is this a startup scene thing or just an SF thing? (I live in New York)
all of my coworkers are pretty normal, sure there are the stereotypical fitness types that are marathon training, cycling, or have a climbing gym membership but no one is talking about buying weird Chinese drugs
Wegovy/Ozempic (semaglutide), Zepbound/Monjourno (trizepitide), etc are the GPL-1 drugs sold today for diabetes and weight loss. Technically they are peptides. So if people you know how "finally" lost a lot of weight, they are likely on peptides.
Peptide manufacture is not as difficult as other drugs because they are injected.
Because the brand names cost a lot, and their manufacture is not too difficult, obviously lots of people got in on the action. Compounding pharmacies, gray market providers, and lots of cheap chinese copies. For one month cost of the name brand you could get many years worth of chinese copies. That is a pretty good hook.
Now that you are injecting one chinese peptide, and it works amazingly well, it is pretty common to check out some of the others. And it is hard to avoid since by the time you find the gray market / chinese suppliers, it is only one of the things they sell.
This pairs well with this recent article by NY Magazine: The AI Kids Take San Francisco: Brilliant, workaholic teenagers are flooding the city — and reshaping our future in their image
This is one of those things where someone writes a fun blog post about their lives and everyone concludes it's a story about San Francisco or New York or whatever. I have to say that most of my closest friends are startup executives and we've lived in San Francisco for over a decade and while I've somehow met Curtis Yarvin and Cremieux and all these people I haven't actually been to a peptide party or whatever. I have used retatrutide quite effectively for weight loss[0], so it's not like I'm unfamiliar.
People live so many parallel lives, even in a small town like San Francisco, that you can take so many paths through the scene without even going through the same points.
I think this author has a very different conception of what “sincerity” is than I do, but I guess that’s the difference between the east coast and the west coast.
> Someone once said that SF is a town of extremely high sincerity, and all of its modern and historical weirdness — the AI doomerism, the cults, the hippies, the drug use, the polycules — is downstream of people saying things and other people taking them extremely seriously.
This is a perfectly reasonable usage - perhaps not the Hallmark greeting card one but it's certainly valid.
> the difference between the east coast and the west coast.
Having lived in and visited places on both sides of the US I can safely say that there is no single "difference" between them and that treating both as culturally monolithic (or their constituent places as broadly similar) is a massive category error. Boston is not Miami is not Atlanta just as San Francisco is not San Diego no matter how many people confuse them because they both start with "San".
My issue with this article is the author writes about them in a frame that says “they are so quirky and this makes them cool / good” when really they are a bunch of degenerates.
> Every single person that I met in SF was dangerously opinionated about AI best practices. It is impossible not to be! When everyone is constantly jumping from idea to idea, trying to stay on top of the Twitter firehose, you need some kind of opinion just to stay relevant and sane.
SF-specific assumptions aside, this the most useful takeaway. Seems they're calibration and signaling costs to being in the center of everything.
Kinda wild to me that people are down with injecting mystery substances received from the other end of the world entirely outside any real medical chain or certainty of contents or recourse.
Like black market steroids except with less track record
It’s wild, but unsurprising to me. Coke, “noots”, and psilocybins were big a decade ago and the same argument could be made about their provenance and origin.
I was close to a name brand pre-workout company and the FDA would play whack-a-mole with their formulas and they were on store shelves in every US city.
> If a 14 year old says that they are going to change the world, they are being very sincere even if an ‘adult’ knows that the likelihood is low.
No, it's really a form of sincerity permitted by a sort of willfully affected naivete—adopted in pursuit of the strategy of Twain's amateur:
> The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do: and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.
— 1889, Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”
Hence why the "disruptors" so frequently, so irritatingly blast through Chesterton's Fence and/or market regulations.
Only one amateur in my portfolio need "catch" the incumbent "out".
Yeah, isn't the entire point of SF startup culture (for the last decade++) to build personal wealth through a successful exit rather than build a sustainable business that benefits society? It's a big speculative con game... Opposite of sincere.
Of course we can warp the semantics and argue that these people are "sincere" in their desire to defraud retail investors or something, but that doesn't seem to be the author's argument.
A successful exit means you've built something so useful that someone else will pay lots of money for it. Sure that gets twisted sometimes when borderline frauds (and actual frauds) sell companies through misrepresentation ... but there is similar fraud whenever and wherever money is involved!
Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow.
But ... it's also true that founders who exit successfully are like 0.001% of the Bay Area's population, but we talk about them like they're 10% ... so we should all stop talking about them so much ;)
Sometimes I have been in situations in life where I think I must be insane, because everyone else sees something I do not. I got a bit of that feeling reading this article.
Good to see the vibe hasn't changed. At least since I lived there in the 1990s, parties with heavy drugs and crazy sex have always been linked with a faction of the tech scene.
I moved to the Bay Area in 1990 after graduation to work a corporate job in the valley but quit shortly after meeting a group of eccentrics that ran a small business setting up networks for commercial clients and joined their gig. I was making startup money before the word "startup" had any significant meaning. The skillset wasn't AI any kind of coding, but pure network admin. Companies paid obscene amounts of money for us to jumpstart their IT.
I moved into an 8 bedroom mcmansion (location omitted) with a rotating occupancy of about 10-20 people at any one time. We didn't do peptides, we did X and crystal, but it was near constant. The jargon was similar. And there were several houses like this from Oakland to Novato (to LA). It was just constant drugs, sex, partying and a little bit of work to cash a huge check. People moved through houses like they owned them, showing up and crashing, then going to another house, then flying down to LA and doing the same.
I burned out after 5 years of the lifestyle but kept in touch with the rolling scene that still had the same vibe through the startup madness of the late 90's (which unfortunately I missed out on due to years-long medical issues), but I've visited every few decades and it seems nothing has changed except we're greyer and fatter, and the houses are still monstrous, but cleaner and people wear clothing more often.
So when I hear stories like this, I'm glad to hear the culture hasn't changed and the torch has been passed.
Here comes another post reminding me of the SF crowd with Peter Pan syndrome and delusions of grandeur. Maybe if they weren’t such insufferable assholes, the rest of the country wouldn’t dig on California so much.
Software is fun, but lots of people in other cities change the world without writing another AI harness. For example a group of aerospace engineers from across the country (Including Utah, Alabama, etc.) sent humans around the Moon and back. Something tells me they aren’t bragging about injecting research chemicals.
Note that this post isn't just about peptides, it's more an overview of the SF social scene in general and what has changed in just the last year. So it includes things like "Tesla FSD actually works now" and "the right is uncool again and nobody talks about e.g. Curtis Yarvin anymore" (both true, IME).
> it's more an overview of the SF social scene in genera
It tries to be, but the person writing it isn’t an SF person. They said they visited SF and went to a party and now they’re lecturing us on SF social scenes from that experience.
> Someone once said that SF is a town of extremely high sincerity, and all of its modern and historical weirdness
Not directly related to the piece but this explains so much. I’ve always seen it as high credulity. That is to say all lots of people are lying but lots of other people trust them. The missing part has been why would you take some of these people at face value. If there’s also a lot of sincere people it would then make sense that many would end up overly credulous.
20% work in tech? I think that’s gone up quite a bit since I last spent a lot of time there in 2015. I would see these articles from time to time and think, people are getting the wrong idea if they haven’t been there, when I think of SF I think of middle aged Chinese people and alleycat bike races and music venues and book stores and drug dealing and gays, though tech bros are also present (and overlapping). But damn, 20%, that’s a lot bigger than finance bros, maybe tech really is ruining the city. Shoot.
I think that’s 20% of the workforce not the population overall. That’s still a large number but its not the whole city. Also nobody is ruining the city, SF is doing just fine these days.
The citrus party fervor just sounds like dead internet theory and social media ad targeting doing it’s job. If everything is peptides and ai then a citrus party sticks out. Wow it must be really ego-fulfilling to be rich and just party all the time in SF. And your momentum is that you experiment with drugs.
This article is an anecdote extrapolated to something bigger: A type of lazy writing where the writer has a single social experience with a group of weird people and then writes about it like it’s the common experience in a place.
The writer went to SF for a few days and went to one party where a group of friends were into peptides. From the article, they were also particularly terrible people. Just read this quote:
> “They change your personality, it’s literally made me less shallow knowing that we can just looksmax you.” “Ugliness is just a choice now.” “I shot up a twink with ozempic who did not need to lose any weight.”
I can’t believe I have to say this, but if someone is bragging to you about injecting weight loss drugs into another person who shouldn’t be taking weight loss drugs, your response shouldn’t be “lol how quirky”. You should recognize that they are a bad person. In my experience the drug enthusiasts who brag about getting other people started on their drugs are bad news, but the ones who brag about introducing to their drugs to people who clearly should not be taking those drugs are the worst variety.
These people always exist. Go back a few years and they might be talking about nootropics or “research chemical” drugs that are analogs of methamphetamine or MDMA. Go back further and they might be bragging about doing steroids and importing testosterone from gray market sources. Go back before that and they’d be bragging about all the Modafinil they’re taking.
The thing about drug user bubbles like this is that when you’re talking to them you’d be convinced that everyone is doing what they’re doing: Taking the latest on-trend drugs in large amounts and one-upping each other on dose, stories, or drug-fueled adventures.
What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized. The party doesn’t last forever and the mindset of being able to endlessly adjust your body and/or your mood with drugs starts to turn dark after the early years where hubris makes users feel like they’ve found the secret to better living through chemistry.
If you’ve encountered groups like this you’ve also seen how the “everyone is doing it” mentality becomes embedded in their minds. That doesn’t mean everyone is importing various Chinese peptides and injecting them for “looksmaxxing” and whatever these people were on about about the “peptide party”. These are just garden variety young drug users riding the latest trend
EDIT: I replaced one instance of the word ‘journalism’ with ‘writing’ because it was becoming a pedantic distraction in the comments.
> What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized.
Lots of people from the 2010-ish era of "aesthetics" and steroids are having heart issues now in their 30s (or earlier). Pretty sad to see.
To me it's fairly clear where this comes from: ambitious people convinced they've figured out some secret cheat code that no-one else has. I'm yet to see that path end well for anyone.
> You should recognize that they are a bad person
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit but I don't really think they're bad people. Young, arrogant, stupid, unaware of the consequences of what they're doing sure... but I don't think it comes from a malicious place where they're intentionally trying to hurt others.
Ahh but intent to harm doesn’t mean thy aren’t doing harm. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”
Your criticism is entirely reasonable despite the pedantry. Yes, these people are bad people, but I think that could be the point here. Not to mention, this is just another chapter in SF's long history of being the vanguard of drug experimentation.
You may enjoy Didion's 1967 Slouching towards Bethlehem[1], a similarly anecdotal (and substantially better-written) piece about the drug scene in SF's Summer of Love.
[1] https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/
I don't think that's the way you're supposed to read it? I think you're supposed to read it as, the trendy extremes tell you something about a place, even if the details are silly and ephemeral. People with no filter, no shame, no interest in correctness or consequences, and no pole star except trends are like a cartoon guide to the trends and the mentality driving them.
I think the author would agree with most of what you wrote.
the last decade of journalism has taken two comments on twitter to claim social zeitgeist.
They did point out, with numbers, that the SF scene is a lot smaller than would ordinarily be expected. Additionally this is the party scene which is a subset of the general tech scene. These people have more time and money to spare than those who are busy working but they do form a bit of a nexus that channels information. The blog post seems to go to great lengths not to pretend that it is something that it isn’t.
I think it’s important to understand that AI, even at its current level, is revolutionary as are cheap Chinese peptides. This isn’t a crypto bubble, both of these will be world changing. I’ve been doing AI for decades and peptides for 5 years (treating an actual medical condition) so I was in this space before it was cool, happy SF finally caught up.
> I’ve been doing AI for decades
Considering that "AI" before 2016 or so was, in terms of results, a whole different category, this may not be the flex you intend it to be. ;)
I started doing deep learning in 2011 after a visit from Andrew Ng, prior to that I was doing old school neural nets (RBMs), random forests, Bayesian nets, information retrieval (search engines), symbolic AI, and expert systems. It’s really only the transformer class (2017) that kept on scaling (didn’t plateau) but I think it took to 2019 before that was really widely known. I got some really good results out of squeeze and excitation in 2017 and knew then attention models were the future. I guess how long I’ve been doing it depends on your definition of AI, I think the future of AI will probably work alongside solvers and ontological reasoners which I worked on at university in 2003 though the tech goes back much further.
In what way did SF catch up? I don’t see how people taking all these peptides and transforming into accidental freaks is a step forward for anything but another reason for the state to get involved bc it’s going to be kids using next and it will create an uproar. People with legitimate medical needs will be left up a creek.
The state is already heavily involved, many gray market peptide suppliers were shut down this year, but demand just went to the black market. This would be harder to stop than the illicit drug market that the government has also consistently failed to stop. It’s so cheap that I’ve stockpiled many years supply so there is little worry about lack of availability for whoever needs it.
I turned to peptides because of how slow research has been, my medical condition (hEDS) has been known about since Hippocrates yet still no official treatments, so it’s not reasonable to expect one any time soon. Gray/black was my only option and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future.
A lot of what we know about peptides comes from athletes cheating in sports and they’ve been doing it, some of them abusing it, for decades so the long term effects are not completely unknown. And this includes the GLP1As and the various combo stacks. Some people naturally have excesses of signaling peptides through genetic variation so they’re another good source of long term effects.
Of the things gay people inject into each other, ozempic is probably one of the safer options.
What are the peptides you're using for hEDS?
This is a blog post, not journalism as such. It's someone humorously recounting their own personal experience. They have no responsibility to contextualize anything for you.
Okay? Points still stand: It’s written as an authoritative exploration of a social scene extrapolated from a few days visiting a place and attending one party.
If someone’s writing in journalistic style I think it’s fair to criticize it as journalism, even if it’s on Substack
It is not presented as authoritative anything, except perhaps one person's experience. And we should assume it is embellished.
You are taking this far too seriously. It is a vignette which captures the flavor of a place at a particular time. And it is delightfully written.
> It is a vignette which captures the flavor of a place at a particular time.
That’s my point: It captured a specific party with a small group of friends, but the blog goes on to wax philosophically about how it’s indicative of society and tech as a whole
It’s a perfect motte-and-bailey setup where you’re supposed to read it as a big trend indicative of a place and a scene, but the second anyone criticizes the writing it becomes a retreat to arguments that we shouldn’t take it seriously, that’s it’s just a blog, that we should selectively believe it’s embellished however convenient to defuse any criticism.
I think you're on tilt with this argument now. This is a personal essay. You disagree with some of its implications. That's fine. People disagree with each other. You should just write "I disagree with this", rather than try to critique it as formally bad journalism.
I think you’re too stuck on the word “journalism” in my post, as if reclassifying something as not-journalism means it must not be critiqued.
If it helps, s/journalism/writing/g
If we’re not allowed to discuss posts in the comments, what are we even supposed to discuss here?
I read the entire post and it isn't, at all. It's a personal story with his own reflections on a scene as he experienced it. It's no different than literally any other blog post or journal entry, and at no point does it claim to be a neutral sociological study.
The whole thing read to me like:
"Let me tell you about the weird people in my social circle I've chosen to write about ... aren't they weird? Now I'm going to draw massive conclusions about everyone in the Bay Area based on the extremely weird group (that I self-selected)."
It's not journalism though is it, it's just someone's blog where they can tell any story they want, as has been the entire history of story telling. With that out of the way the rest of your post is just flanneling.
If the title was “I went to a single party while visiting SF and say some weird things” I might agree, but the article from beginning to end is written as if the party was a lens into society as a whole and indicative of larger trends.
There’s a motte and bailey thing going on with this type of rationalist writing where someone writes authoritatively on broad subjects and then when anyone starts responding to it they immediately repeats to “it’s just a blog” to forgive all of the problems with it.
this is likely to be the most interesting argument I will read today: is substack legit editorial journalism?
certainly there is no organized journalistic outfit behind it, but also, a lot of legit journalists want their substacks to be taken as facts of record.
You're claiming laziness because a writer gives explicit testimony to what he saw, heard and thought, without sufficient moralizing layered over the top about how "drugs are bad m'kaay?" I wish more writing was this lazy.
>Go back a few years and they might be talking about nootropics or “research chemical” drugs that are analogs of methamphetamine or MDMA. Go back further and they might be bragging about doing steroids and importing testosterone from gray market sources. Go back before that and they’d be bragging about all the Modafinil they’re taking.
The peptides and nootropics are the mildest things on the list, and yet here being compared to illegal stimulants and steroids? Those are not the same crowds at all.
Well said. This is better written and more sensible than the article itself.
I know you edited your post, but I'm actually taken aback by people trying to argue it's a blog, not "journalism". I see no real difference between this and some of the most celebrated pieces of gonzo journalism.
However, this cuts both ways. This format is how we get some of the most interesting pieces of reporting about culture and counterculture. It's someone who went to some parties or worked for some companies. What you refer to as laziness is what makes it valuable: it recounts specific experiences instead of trying to speak in generalities. And it's descriptive rather than moralizing.
In the same vein, some of the most powerful exposes about neo-Nazi movements are just raw accounts of what's going on inside, without the author constantly repeating "and by the way, Nazism is bad, these people are all bad, and here are some statistics".
The SF Bay Area culture is probably not a thing, but there are some pretty awful subcultures within it, and many of them revolve around performance-enhancing drugs and rationalism-as-a-justification-for-bad-things (Zizians, longtermism, etc). I think we should own it.
JFC, that twink thing is freaking me out. My ex, objectively hot and already too thin due to a gallbladder problem, kept bugging me to get her various GLP-1 drugs and we had screaming arguments about how her drug abuse was going to kill her (recreational ketamine, GHB, cocaine, marijuana, whatever peptide stupidity her friends just read about, probably a few I'm forgetting). Fast forward and she's not my problem anymore. I have no idea what's she's on now, but I fully expect to get a call about her having ODed.
>I fully expect to get a call about her having ODed
Guess she's still your problem then.
Poor people.
I'm inclined to agree.
But...
I'm also inclined to believe we are not the cool people being invited to these circles :)
Looking at what has happened with wegovy etc, it doesn't seem impossible.
Maybe this hits different for me because I have been to a lot of parties just like this, without getting sucked into the culture.
Thats why I wrote that if you go back several years you’d find similar small social scenes around different trends: Steroids, Modafinil (when it was new and rare), RCs like 2-FA and MXE, or psychedelics depending on the era. Each time the social scenes that emerge around these have the same beliefs that everyone is doing excessive experimentation and that it’s only improving their lives. The later outcomes are not so rosy.
I want to defend my hometown a bit: most people who live in and around SF have nothing to do with any of this crap. SF is a diverse city of many ages, nationalities, and values. It is not a “high school,” not a tech scene, not a glib bunch of online assholes.
I’ve lived in SF for over a a decade and I have no idea what any of this is. I hope I never meet any of these people.
WTF is any of this, is there some ELI5/OOTL explanation?
I work in big tech and have never heard anyone talk about "peptides". Is this a startup scene thing or just an SF thing? (I live in New York)
all of my coworkers are pretty normal, sure there are the stereotypical fitness types that are marathon training, cycling, or have a climbing gym membership but no one is talking about buying weird Chinese drugs
Wegovy/Ozempic (semaglutide), Zepbound/Monjourno (trizepitide), etc are the GPL-1 drugs sold today for diabetes and weight loss. Technically they are peptides. So if people you know how "finally" lost a lot of weight, they are likely on peptides.
Peptide manufacture is not as difficult as other drugs because they are injected.
Because the brand names cost a lot, and their manufacture is not too difficult, obviously lots of people got in on the action. Compounding pharmacies, gray market providers, and lots of cheap chinese copies. For one month cost of the name brand you could get many years worth of chinese copies. That is a pretty good hook.
Now that you are injecting one chinese peptide, and it works amazingly well, it is pretty common to check out some of the others. And it is hard to avoid since by the time you find the gray market / chinese suppliers, it is only one of the things they sell.
This pairs well with this recent article by NY Magazine: The AI Kids Take San Francisco: Brilliant, workaholic teenagers are flooding the city — and reshaping our future in their image
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/san-francisco-ai-boo...
This is one of those things where someone writes a fun blog post about their lives and everyone concludes it's a story about San Francisco or New York or whatever. I have to say that most of my closest friends are startup executives and we've lived in San Francisco for over a decade and while I've somehow met Curtis Yarvin and Cremieux and all these people I haven't actually been to a peptide party or whatever. I have used retatrutide quite effectively for weight loss[0], so it's not like I'm unfamiliar.
People live so many parallel lives, even in a small town like San Francisco, that you can take so many paths through the scene without even going through the same points.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47672926
I think this author has a very different conception of what “sincerity” is than I do, but I guess that’s the difference between the east coast and the west coast.
Yeah lol, it reminded me to this Onion post:
> Claim: My uncle says Mamdani will abolish the entire NYPD.
> Fact: Your uncle does say that.
From TFA:
> Someone once said that SF is a town of extremely high sincerity, and all of its modern and historical weirdness — the AI doomerism, the cults, the hippies, the drug use, the polycules — is downstream of people saying things and other people taking them extremely seriously.
This is a perfectly reasonable usage - perhaps not the Hallmark greeting card one but it's certainly valid.
> the difference between the east coast and the west coast.
Having lived in and visited places on both sides of the US I can safely say that there is no single "difference" between them and that treating both as culturally monolithic (or their constituent places as broadly similar) is a massive category error. Boston is not Miami is not Atlanta just as San Francisco is not San Diego no matter how many people confuse them because they both start with "San".
The part about the warehouse full of twinks got me, I read that like I was witnessing a live standup comedy show.
My issue with this article is the author writes about them in a frame that says “they are so quirky and this makes them cool / good” when really they are a bunch of degenerates.
I really didn't get that vibe at all. If anything, he seems pretty balanced in his appraisal of SF.
On running an AI a startup in NYC vs SF:
> Every single person that I met in SF was dangerously opinionated about AI best practices. It is impossible not to be! When everyone is constantly jumping from idea to idea, trying to stay on top of the Twitter firehose, you need some kind of opinion just to stay relevant and sane.
SF-specific assumptions aside, this the most useful takeaway. Seems they're calibration and signaling costs to being in the center of everything.
I read the whole thing. Good, easy writing style.
Kinda wild to me that people are down with injecting mystery substances received from the other end of the world entirely outside any real medical chain or certainty of contents or recourse.
Like black market steroids except with less track record
It’s wild, but unsurprising to me. Coke, “noots”, and psilocybins were big a decade ago and the same argument could be made about their provenance and origin.
I was close to a name brand pre-workout company and the FDA would play whack-a-mole with their formulas and they were on store shelves in every US city.
I’m not really understanding the notion that these people are so sincere. Perhaps we have different definitions of sincerity.
To my eye, the entire fascination of unsafely injecting peptides in a desire to change your being is largely the opposite of sincerity.
> If a 14 year old says that they are going to change the world, they are being very sincere even if an ‘adult’ knows that the likelihood is low.
No, it's really a form of sincerity permitted by a sort of willfully affected naivete—adopted in pursuit of the strategy of Twain's amateur:
> The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do: and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.
— 1889, Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”
Hence why the "disruptors" so frequently, so irritatingly blast through Chesterton's Fence and/or market regulations.
Only one amateur in my portfolio need "catch" the incumbent "out".
Yeah, isn't the entire point of SF startup culture (for the last decade++) to build personal wealth through a successful exit rather than build a sustainable business that benefits society? It's a big speculative con game... Opposite of sincere.
Of course we can warp the semantics and argue that these people are "sincere" in their desire to defraud retail investors or something, but that doesn't seem to be the author's argument.
A successful exit means you've built something so useful that someone else will pay lots of money for it. Sure that gets twisted sometimes when borderline frauds (and actual frauds) sell companies through misrepresentation ... but there is similar fraud whenever and wherever money is involved!
Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow.
But ... it's also true that founders who exit successfully are like 0.001% of the Bay Area's population, but we talk about them like they're 10% ... so we should all stop talking about them so much ;)
> you've built something so useful that someone else will pay lots of money for it
"Useful" is quite the euphemism.
> Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow.
This is an extraordinary claim.
I enjoyed Good Work's recent coverage on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0ltbBby9FU
Sometimes I have been in situations in life where I think I must be insane, because everyone else sees something I do not. I got a bit of that feeling reading this article.
Good to see the vibe hasn't changed. At least since I lived there in the 1990s, parties with heavy drugs and crazy sex have always been linked with a faction of the tech scene.
I moved to the Bay Area in 1990 after graduation to work a corporate job in the valley but quit shortly after meeting a group of eccentrics that ran a small business setting up networks for commercial clients and joined their gig. I was making startup money before the word "startup" had any significant meaning. The skillset wasn't AI any kind of coding, but pure network admin. Companies paid obscene amounts of money for us to jumpstart their IT.
I moved into an 8 bedroom mcmansion (location omitted) with a rotating occupancy of about 10-20 people at any one time. We didn't do peptides, we did X and crystal, but it was near constant. The jargon was similar. And there were several houses like this from Oakland to Novato (to LA). It was just constant drugs, sex, partying and a little bit of work to cash a huge check. People moved through houses like they owned them, showing up and crashing, then going to another house, then flying down to LA and doing the same.
I burned out after 5 years of the lifestyle but kept in touch with the rolling scene that still had the same vibe through the startup madness of the late 90's (which unfortunately I missed out on due to years-long medical issues), but I've visited every few decades and it seems nothing has changed except we're greyer and fatter, and the houses are still monstrous, but cleaner and people wear clothing more often.
So when I hear stories like this, I'm glad to hear the culture hasn't changed and the torch has been passed.
Here comes another post reminding me of the SF crowd with Peter Pan syndrome and delusions of grandeur. Maybe if they weren’t such insufferable assholes, the rest of the country wouldn’t dig on California so much.
Software is fun, but lots of people in other cities change the world without writing another AI harness. For example a group of aerospace engineers from across the country (Including Utah, Alabama, etc.) sent humans around the Moon and back. Something tells me they aren’t bragging about injecting research chemicals.
Strong parallels with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967):
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/
Note that this post isn't just about peptides, it's more an overview of the SF social scene in general and what has changed in just the last year. So it includes things like "Tesla FSD actually works now" and "the right is uncool again and nobody talks about e.g. Curtis Yarvin anymore" (both true, IME).
> it's more an overview of the SF social scene in genera
It tries to be, but the person writing it isn’t an SF person. They said they visited SF and went to a party and now they’re lecturing us on SF social scenes from that experience.
Actually from the author's description it sounds like he has lived in SF for longer than most of the people he's meeting.
Can I claim I invented the term "partydes" for these events? Is there anyone else out there that can make that claim?
> Someone once said that SF is a town of extremely high sincerity, and all of its modern and historical weirdness
Not directly related to the piece but this explains so much. I’ve always seen it as high credulity. That is to say all lots of people are lying but lots of other people trust them. The missing part has been why would you take some of these people at face value. If there’s also a lot of sincere people it would then make sense that many would end up overly credulous.
See also this recent article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...
https://x.com/Kaz_Khadem/status/2045600370617995600?s=20
20% work in tech? I think that’s gone up quite a bit since I last spent a lot of time there in 2015. I would see these articles from time to time and think, people are getting the wrong idea if they haven’t been there, when I think of SF I think of middle aged Chinese people and alleycat bike races and music venues and book stores and drug dealing and gays, though tech bros are also present (and overlapping). But damn, 20%, that’s a lot bigger than finance bros, maybe tech really is ruining the city. Shoot.
I think that’s 20% of the workforce not the population overall. That’s still a large number but its not the whole city. Also nobody is ruining the city, SF is doing just fine these days.
The citrus party fervor just sounds like dead internet theory and social media ad targeting doing it’s job. If everything is peptides and ai then a citrus party sticks out. Wow it must be really ego-fulfilling to be rich and just party all the time in SF. And your momentum is that you experiment with drugs.
One word: Omelas.