JONATHAN WEBER

PETALUMA --

Copperfield's Books is delighted to welcome acclaimed journalist, editor, and media entrepreneur Jonathan Weber to Petaluma in celebration of his compelling new book - City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco!

Part history, part political investigation, and part insider's account, City on the Edge examines how San Francisco transformed from an eclectic, countercultural city into the global epicenter of the technology industry—and the profound consequences that transformation has had for the city, the Bay Area, and the nation.

Join us for an engaging reading and conversation followed by an audience Q&A and book signing with photo opportunities.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is recommended for seating.

The definitive story of the San Francisco’s dramatic transformation from an eclectic post-industrial melting pot to the global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom nearly engineered its collapse.

At the dawn of the 1990s, San Francisco was a beautiful if troubled mid-sized metropolis. The mythic, fog-shrouded city at the edge of the continent was still reeling from the AIDS epidemic and the Loma Prieta earthquake, its boom-and-bust economy stuck in a long decline. Once the undisputed capital of the American West, and later the beating heart of the global counterculture, San Francisco faced an uncertain future.

But in that very moment, a band of free-thinking technology enthusiasts was immersing itself in the unique creative zeitgeist of the city, and inventing the contemporary internet. The companies they spawned would change the way we work, play, socialize and engage in politics. San Francisco would undergo a transformation unlike any in modern American history, becoming an economic and cultural juggernaut that could fairly claim the title of tech capital of the world. Local politicians like Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris advanced to the national stage, while an unlikely union of underground culture and technological optimism gave rise to the annual reverie known as Burning Man.

This should have been a happy story for San Francisco. But while the city’s tech economy roared, a host of urban ills lurked in the shadows: homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness, and a crippling lack of new housing. The city’s famously liberal political establishment struggled to get its arms around the mounting problems in the streets, becoming a punching bag for President Trump and the new right. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, it didn’t just create new crises but laid old ones bare, and shattered a “City Family” that had ruled for thirty years.

Reporter and newsroom leader Jonathan Weber was an eyewitness to these events. He offers a sweeping history of a city that rose to dizzying heights, only to be all but undone by the heedlessness of a tech industry it did so much to spawn, and politicians who had lost the plot. Drawing on some two hundred interviews with elected officials, CEOs, activists, investors, artists, and beyond, City on the Edge is more than a simple chronicle of a city. It’s the story of a war waged for the heart of San Francisco—one that both anticipated and reflected the culture wars raging around the world. Its outcome would have an impact far beyond the city’s famed Golden Gates.

Author: Jonathan Weber was named the Los Angeles Times’s first-ever Silicon Valley reporter in 1990. He was later editor in chief of The Industry Standard, which chronicled—and lived—the first dot-com boom. He served as editor in chief of The Bay Citizen, a local news non-profit, and oversaw West Coast news and global technology coverage for Reuters. He was most recently the founding editor in chief of The San Francisco Standard. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Wesleyan University.

Praise:

“From the beginning of the rise of the commercial Internet to today, Jonathan Weber has been in the middle of everything San Francisco–related, including technology and politics. In this beautiful book, he interweaves the two and shows how they've played off each other, both in positive and negative ways, in a city whose history is both fantastical and entertaining.” —Brad Feld, co-founder of Foundry Group and Techstars

“To understand the San Francisco of today, you can’t do better than Jonathan Weber’s chronicle of its recent decades of euphoria and disillusion. In his fast-paced narrative, Weber shrewdly navigates the city’s volatile juxtaposition of transformational innovation and intractable social ills. City on the Edge is a captivating story of iron-willed idealists, inventors, activists, and power players who shaped San Francisco’s contentious character, altered how we all live and work, and inflamed the most fractious political debates of our time.” —Marty Baron, author of Collision of Power and former executive editor of The Washington Post

“So much that happens in the nation happens in San Francisco first. Jonathan Weber tells the city’s story from the rise of the internet and the behemoth powers that followed through to the national political figures the city has spawned—with, along the way, a cast of vivid and Machiavellian behind-the-scenes players. He has made it a riveting tale and turned San Francisco into an unforgettable character.” —Michael Wolff, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fire and Fury

“Jonathan Weber tells the story of San Francisco’s internet era as someone who was there and who knows everyone. He digs deep into tech, culture, and politics, revealing much that was never well known and much which has been forgotten. City on the Edge offers a story that affects the world and human history.” —Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist

“Having spent the 1990s and early 2000s at the heart of the story Jonathan Weber tells here—working at Wired and HotWired, living in San Francisco at the peak of the dot-com boom—you can take it from me: This book is the real deal. Imbued with insider access, outsider perspective, and Weber's prodigious story-telling gifts, City on the Edge is the definitive account of a monumental era in a mythical city and a world-changing industry that both lost their way.” —John Heilemann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Game Change and Double Down

“A well-informed, granular account of San Francisco's history since 1990, and a portrait of how it has served as a microcosm of some of the fundamental changes occurring in U.S. society during that time… With all its triumphs and travails, it is impossible to leave this account without a strong sense that what Weber calls the ‘boom-and-bust cycles’ of San Francisco life are destined to repeat yet again.” —Shelf Awareness