Dean Preston was frustrated.
In the year and a half since he’d narrowly lost his seat as District 5 supervisor to moderate Bilal Mahmood, the democratic socialist politician had watched an ultra-rich nonprofit founder become mayor, corporate interests thrive in San Francisco, and rents surge seemingly unabated. Progressive voices, he felt, were being silenced.
“Especially in progressive political circles, there’s a feeling that the billionaires and corporate interests have so completely just bought the media through PACs,” Preston told Gazetteer SF. “It’s like, how can people fight back?”
Preston had one idea: Round up all the lefty media figures in San Francisco and get organized. Over a few months, Preston hosted get-togethers for allies and like-minded acquaintances at spots like Make-Out Room, Specs’, and Zeitgeist, connecting people from different corners of the scene into an IRL social network.
Eventually, Preston decided to put a name to the network. He called it Punch Up Media Lab, which was soon condensed to the quippier, more impactful sobriquet PUML.
PUML’s roster of collaborators is nebulous; some are heavily involved in messaging and strategy, some just drop in for a cross-post on social media. Preston said there are currently “dozens” of PUMLers in the Bay. News outlets like 48 Hills and Broke-Ass Stuart, watchdogs like the Phoenix Project, indie media projects like Sad Francisco and Doom Loop Dispatch, and solo content creators like CJ Trowbridge have all collaborated with the project on Instagram, amplifying with their audiences PUML’s messaging around the housing crisis, criticism of the Lurie administration, and the backchannels through which billionaires are reshaping the city.
Abe Woodliff, the man behind the popular Instagram meme account @realbayareamemes, has brought one of the largest followings in the PUML ecosystem; he has some 137,000 Instagram followers between his personal and meme accounts. Between screenshots of wry tweets about Bay Area culture and more avant-garde content, like AI-generated images of Daniel Lurie as a Baja Blast-sipping Jesus and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins as a cyberpunk thought cop, Woodliff also posts more straightforward videos where he breaks down Bay Area news from his own anti-corporate perspective.
With progressive politicians like Preston and former District 3 supervisor and mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin now out of elected office, Woodliff said that a loud, mutli-channel media campaign like PUML is local progressives’ best shot at pushing the city leftwards.
“People with money,” Woodliff said, referring to the billionaires who fund corporate-friendly media and political candidates, “spend a significant amount of money on propaganda. We’re basically using their tactics of sensationalism and propaganda to get out a message that actually affects people positively.”
Woodliff described PUML’s content as “a mixture of memes, news articles, opinion pieces, videos, and also event organizing, all in one place.”
For now, Preston says PUML does not have a “traditional structure.” The group has no official headquarters; they communicate sporadically on Zoom calls and in group chats.
“A lot of these folks, on no budget whatsoever, have developed hundreds of thousands of followers, and are reaching just as many people as a mainstream media source that’s spending millions of dollars a year,” Preston said. “So I find there’s an optimism, a confidence about folks’ ability to impact narrative… without being connected to highly funded corporate media.”
