Downtown San Francisco is a strange place these days.
You can ride in a driverless Waymo to the Wild Fox cafe and buy a cup of luxurious coffee for $105. Or you can venture to the Zoox Rider Lounge for a free spin in Amazon’s version of a driverless taxi, which looks like a fish tank on wheels.
You can puzzle over flashing artificial intelligence ads with grammatically incorrect phrases like “Everything is database.” Or you can guess at what’s inside the truck that rolls past with “Big AI Energy” written in huge letters on its side.
You can cry over what A.I. might do to humanity. Or you can laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
Patrick Heij hopes you do the latter.
Mr. Heij, 46, was once a writer for “Vice News Tonight” and has written humor pieces for The New Yorker. Born and raised in San Francisco, the Marin County resident gained fame last year when he launched Marin Lately, a mock news site that skewered Marin County with headlines like “Marin to Be Hit Least-Hard by Whatever Happening in World, Experts Say.”
But enclaves filled with wealthy, white liberals with a lot of time on their hands provide only so much fodder, and Mr. Heij felt that 300 fake headlines about Marin County, north of San Francisco, was enough. He was ready for a new challenge.
Look no further, he thought, than just across the Golden Gate Bridge.
On Thursday, Mr. Heij will debut a new site, San Francisco Currently. In an on-the-nose twist, the site skewering a city with plenty of billionaires will be funded by one: Michael Moritz, a Welsh venture capitalist and philanthropist who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and now funds The San Francisco Standard, a local site covering actual news.
Mr. Moritz’s news and humor sites will be run separately.
Mr. Moritz said that San Francisco is ripe for the kind of news and political satire similar to “The Daily Show” or the British magazine Private Eye, which he has long loved.
“There is an endless array of mirth in San Francisco,” he said, adding the city has lacked a writer who skewers the stream of bizarre news with an edgy, comedic bent. “It’s the absence of that voice that we want to fill.”
Mr. Moritz said that he has placed no limits on what Mr. Heij can mock — even billionaires like himself.
Mr. Heij said the city’s perpetual boom-and-bust cycle seems to be on hyperdrive.
Just a few years ago, the city was depicted by outsiders as a dystopian hellscape filled with drug dealers and thieves. Now, it is ground zero for OpenAI, Anthropic and other A.I. companies, and the influx of wealth means finding an affordable apartment or even an affordable dinner has become increasingly difficult.
“San Francisco is like a shower that’s either scalding hot or freezing cold,” Mr. Heij said. “You can never get it just right.”
The first headlines on Mr. Heij’s new site nod to the current moment. “Billionaire Still Eats at Same Restaurant as When He Had Hundreds of Millions of Dollars.” “Sam Altman Comes Out as a Toddler.” And “Street Disorder Reduced to Previous Astronomical Level.”
While San Francisco will be the main target of Mr. Heij’s new venture, he will still make fun of Marin County and other Bay Area locales (watch out, Berkeley, Oakland and Atherton). He hopes Marin Lately readers will come along for the ride, and that site now directs readers to San Francisco Currently.
“If Marin was a show about nothing,” he said, “the San Francisco version will be about something.”
A.I. has become an easy target for San Francisco comedians as of late, tapping into residents’ angst about how their city is transforming.
Caleb Zeringue, a stand up-comic in the city, recently asked an audience if they liked board games. One woman shouted out that she loves Monopoly.
“You’re like, ‘I love capitalism’” Mr. Zeringue responded. “OK, so we know who works in A.I.!”
The woman copped to actually working in A.I., and the crowd roared.
Xander Beltran, who lives in Oakland and performs in San Francisco comedy clubs, said he has found that audiences do not want to hear much about A.I., although he has gotten laughs about how expensive the city has become. He said he can detect the city’s wealthiest audience members by their deep guffaws.
“You can hear the rich laugh. They’re like ah-ha-ha!” he said in a phone interview, his voice lowering for the chortle. “‘You are correct! Yes, we are destroying the city!’ That’s the vibe you get from them.”
Mr. Heij said he thinks Daniel Lurie, the city’s mayor and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, has improved the city. But he sometimes questions the mayor’s relentless optimism and his incessant social media catchphrase, “Let’s go, San Francisco!”
“Let’s go where? Where are we going?” Mr. Heij asked.
His preferred slogan?
“Slow down, San Francisco.”
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