California can seem incoherent from top to bottom. From the south, there’s San Diego, a militarized pleasure dome that has quite effectively obscured obscene inequality with sunshine, sand, and SeaWorld. There’s Los Angeles, a gorgeous paragon of health and wellness famous for its exhaust fumes and smog, the world’s glorious entertainment capital where the most common thing to catch on TV is a news story about the rich and powerful caging as many poor people as they possibly can. There’s the Central Valley, hundreds of miles of farms so fertile that they produce more than half of America’s fruits and vegetables, resting atop a desert so perpetually drought-stricken that its denizens have been pumping the state’s groundwater dry just to keep up with demand. And then, of course, there’s the Bay Area—the coolest, queerest, most radical place in the country—and also one rapidly being made unlivable by tech bros, their tough-on-crime allies, and all of the money spewed in their wake.
