THE TROUBLE WITH SAN FRANCISCO

It looms over the city like the abandoned lance of some dead Cold War god; perhaps the hills beneath it were formed from his irradiated corpse. It is the only civic landmark as obviously visible as the bridge to its north.

This is by design. Sutro Tower, as it is known, was built explicitly to be visible. In the 1960s, San Francisco and its surrounding Bay Area were not saturated with enough electromagnetic radiation to allow every television set to receive the Signal. The air needed to be filled with information, unimpeded by hills, walls, or skulls. To achieve this end, line of sight needed to be established from a proper vantage point to the whole of the city's thumbprint and its surrounding shores.

Construction of the tower began in 1971, after years of feud over the necessity of something so monolithic. But there was, ultimately a mandate; the Signal, no matter its origin, must reach every possible Receiver.

The thing is, when someone begins building something like this, they don’t have to turn it on for it to start working.

Consider the case of Philip K. Dick, who in February of 1972, had a profound spiritual emergency while living in the area. Some alien force had contacted him through a divine pink beam, permanently fracturing his mind. Following this, he spent the rest of his life, thousands upon thousands of pages of typewriter ink and handwriting, trying to make sense of what he had experienced. As far as he could tell, a higher intelligence had implanted information in his mind, but did so towards no clear end. The result was indistinguishable from insanity.

Dick was far from alone in 1972; Robert Anton Wilson had similar experiences living nearby, as recounted in his Cosmic Trigger memoirs. Terence McKenna was similarly moved across reality's chessboard in his quest to understand the Logos. There were many more like them. Outside the sphere of the obviously revelatory, Steves Wozniak and Jobs began building blue boxes, leading up to the eventual project of a personal computer in service to the mandate of the Signal. There would be a Receiver in every office, then in every bedroom, then in every pocket.

Madness in San Francisco is of a different bandwidth than that which any other American city produces; it is ubikuitous and subtle. Starting around 2015, you could push an illusory button on a slab of liquid crystal while half-asleep on a couch in the Mission, and a bento box catered to your tastes would arrive at your door within twenty minutes. A disjoint network of strangers in thrall to the Signal would abruptly change behavior in accordance with its will to make it happen. You could call it ordering food, but in many ways, the Signal was feeding you of its own accord, and likely putting you to use as well.

All the while, almost wherever you were, you could see Sutro Tower, ever proclaiming the mandate of its existence across every electromagnetic band it could scream in. Never once would you notice what it was doing to you.