The bay area is a bit unique though in that the physical space you occupy is covered in signifiers of tech. Virtually every billboard on the 101 and virtually every ad at SFO and San Jose Airport are some AI thing now. As you drive around you see waymos and corporate busses constantly. It is difficult to avoid tech campuses. Housing stock disproportionately targets high paying single people. When you ride the caltrain it is impossible not to overhear people talking about software engineering.

Yes, you can find community among non-tech people. The bay area is large and there are plenty of other people doing other things. SF is filled with cultural spaces. But my experience of the south bay is pretty dire if you want to escape the gaze of tech.

I agree with this. It's a critique you'll hear often from intellectual elites who prefer NYC. But most people, even in the bay area, are people with many interests who don't talk about intellectual things all the time!

"Mid-tier cities" are great too and have rich social fabrics if you look for them as well!

You are not alone, as an outsider who moved 20+ in the last 15yrs, the Bay Area seems to attract a high concentration of awkward and arrogant people. Introverts who focus all their time in computers and careers, so other parts of their lives suffer - dare to point this out, their fragile egos will slash you back, blinding themselves in the process.

So objectively speaking, there is some truth to this concern. Women often complain of tech bros: "the odds are good, but the goods are odd" https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/18uxyd7/is_it_me_o...

I found the opposite problem. I tried to hang out with non-tech people, I spent a lot of time hanging out with non-tech people. The kinds of people who I ended up hanging out with, and I recognized that this might just be a me problem, though I certainly tried to avoid pigeonholeding myself, were not great people. The great non-tech people I met didn't stay very long.

Living here for twenty years, and having now filled my dance card with every compass direction of the bay, I laughed in familiarity at a bunch of the anecdotes I read. Three notes.

First, I think that the Bay Area tech-like cultures are described accurately — but that the Bay Area non-tech cultures, as in those who are neither within it nor modeling after it, deserve separate consideration. Certainly every local culture I’ve interacted with that is tech-primary or tech-derived has been defective as described, while I also see evidence of thriving non-tech cultures.

Second, no one understands how to bait and tease and flirt other, which certainly aligns with the anecdotes reported by the author about ‘not enough bullying’. I’ve had to exit multiple communities because they’re so intent on putting safety bumpers on every single sharp corner that has ever affected anyone, that I get so dizzy from all the bumpers just in trying to say Hello You Look Nice Is That Wool that I Just Don’t Bother Trying Anymore. I held three long-term relationships spanning two-thirds of my time here and I have been forced to developed a fascinatingly competent filter for people who expect their needs to be discovered and fulfilled without having to bully the world. Local kink is the worst of all worlds: permission required to be flirt, focused on promoting long-term poly and poly-adjacent relationships, and saturated with ‘pillow passive’ subs who assume that service is due them.

Third, the local culture feels like a corpo descendant of the third-wave secular cults such as Landmark or Oprah. It can be distilled trivially into the Three Laws of Bay Cultists, but these are present everywhere in the U.S., but focused into explicit acceptance and preference here. They are:

1. What advances one’s goals is ethical.

2. What hinders one’s goals is unethical.

3. What has no bearing on one’s goals is exempt from ethical consideration.

So, yeah, don’t move here unless you’re forced to. I’m due to leave later this year and it’s not like the local scenes will notice or regret the loss of a ex-tech woman who isn’t interested in talking tech or calendaring poly.

On one hand it often feels like the tech industrial complex is all consuming here. When you fly you can sit and watch 12 different billboard ads in a row for different companies all claiming to be the "foundation of enterprise AI". All the money is there. On the other hand objectively most people are not tech bros. Even if literally all office workers were (and they're not), people need to eat, get around, shop, get their plumbing fixed, their teeth cleaned, etc etc. Your perception of the normalcy is probably mostly dictated by your willingness to engage with normal people activities, and perhaps your command of Spanish.

If you are looking for white people culture you won't find it. Young demography is mostly ORM males, I guess that's true across other age groups also.

This is honestly incredibly wrong. My family is from Mumbai. Like literally the indigenous people of Mumbai and I grew up in CA and lived many years in the bay. The idea that anywhere in India is remotely comparable to the bay area (except for gated communities) is honestly the sort of deranged take that many online Indian nationals make. But for people who have actually been to both cities the difference is obvious.

There is nothing like Dharavi in the bay area. There is some visible poverty in the bay, but it's not at that scale at all . Not to mention the functioning animal control, flood control, etc.