Jeffrey Tumlin is under fire, and his loudest opponents don’t just blame him for transportation mishaps — they see him as a “tentacle” of the progressive-left machine, and are now attempting a recall-style coup to “fire” Tumlin.
Tumlin was appointed director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency in December 2019, taking over for Ed Reiskin after a tenure filled with organizational chaos, hiring errors, and high-profile accidents. After nearly five years, some city stakeholders are upset at what they claim is Tumlin’s mismanagement of transportation projects, including the controversial bike lanes installed along the center of Valencia Street in the Mission.
They allege all manner of sins: Losing revenue due to lesser car traffic, playing favorites with the nonprofit SF Bicycle Coalition, and disrespecting communities by not trying hard enough to curry favor.
But perhaps the loudest proponent of Tumlin’s demise is a familiar one in San Francisco politics: Garry Tan, the president-CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator, who is also a prolific donor to campaigns aimed at unseating progressive figures and policies.
Tan is mad as heck, and firing Tumlin appears to be a new pet project after leading the recalling of three progressive members of the school board, paying $100,000 to topple former District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and plying the moderate political action group GrowSF with money while serving as a board member.
And although other voices may be complaining about bike lanes, road closures and pedestrian-friendly developments, Tan appears focused on one thesis: Tumlin is an enemy of autonomous vehicles, and therefore a righteous target for tech evangelists everywhere.
On May 18th, Tan declared on Twitter that Tumlin is a “worthless bureaucrat” who “doesn’t believe we should have self-driving cars.”
“Decels want to prevent technology from ever existing… He is wrong and must be fired,” Tan concluded.
If there’s one clue that suggests this “Fire Tumlin” effort is about more than the usual complaints toward a municipal transportation agency, it’s the word “decel” — a favorite insult of the e/acc crowd.
Tan is a longtime acolyte of “effective accelerationism,” and includes the label “e/acc” in his public X profile to show it off. And what is e/acc? It means a lot of things to a lot of different people, but in short, it is an ideology that suggests the “singularity” of human evolution relies on deregulated free markets to accelerate technological progress (especially of AI) and bring prosperity to all.
It touts the importance of hyper-capitalism and unfettered competition as crucial tools for this goal, and views centralized control — such as government regulation — as an existential enemy of the movement.
The ideology gained attention last year, following the publishing of a highly influential manifesto by a figure nicknamed “Beff Jezos.” Reporting from Forbes would unmask this anonymous figure as an ex-Googler and AI startup founder named Guillaume Verdon, and he’s now considered the “patron saint” of e/acc due to the way he defined the philosophy.
Much of his manifesto is a garbled mix of thermodynamics, biology, and programming jargon, but e/acc got an even more mainstream boost when Silicon Valley juggernaut Marc Andreessen dropped his own “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” in October 2023. As with Verdon’s treatise, it makes several scathing mentions of “deceleration.”
“We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder,” Andreessen writes.
Elsewhere, the manifesto declares “collectivism” and “sustainability,” among other concepts, as enemies of e/acc. These “anti-merit” forces spread “zombie ideas, many derived from Communism,” Andreessen claims.
To be clear, proponents of e/acc don’t all hew exactly to these two manifestos; as with the Web3 and “effective altruism” trends before it, e/acc is partly in the eye of the beholder. But Tan is very much a believer: “AI is powerful. Power is corrupting. Too much AI power in the hands of the few is too dangerous… Open source and accelerationism is the way,” he wrote in July 2023.
So no wonder that Tan is so visibly bothered and angry about Tumlin. The MTA chief has made headlines for critiquing the rapid expansion of AV “robotaxis” in San Francisco by companies like Waymo and Cruise, which took its cars off the roads after a high-profile accident that saw a woman hit, dragged, and seriously injured. (Of note: Initialized Capital, the VC fund that Tan co-founded, was a seed investor in Cruise. He stated on Twitter in July 2023 that he has "no financial interest in Cruise or Waymo.")
But the strange part is that, in the grand scheme of things, Tumlin hasn’t really worked to eliminate AVs. His big ask is for more granular data from AV companies and the development of state rules based on performance metrics. And Tumlin has publicly acknowledged that AVs can be safer than human drivers in the future.
“We also see the promise of safety and are enthusiastic about achieving that goal,” Tumlin said in July 2023.
No matter: Tan is on the warpath, and has been keyboard-yelling about Tumlin for nearly a year. It appears to have begun last July, when Tan published a video on the robotaxi fight, ultimately suggesting a citywide conspiracy to stop the evolution of tech.
“Powers in this city are so desperate to politicize and remove [AVs] from our streets, they’re coordinating to stop them from happening,” he says to the camera dramatically.
He blames the lack of a “strong mayor” in SF and claims the Board of Supervisors is controlled by “anti-tech” politicians, specifically pointing a finger at District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston as “someone who seems to work at every turn to destroy business of all kind, whether it’s tech or small business.”
Despite the YouTube video being titled “The Truth and Lies About Driverless Cars in SF,” Tan then invites his friend Lee Edwards, of venture capital fund Root Ventures, to declare that … Preston once belonged to the Democratic Socialists of America, and the city’s chapter of the DSA had a book club for the writings of Mao Zedong, therefore… something.
(If you recall the name Lee Edwards, it may be because he was quoted in the New York Times claiming that SF politics are “Mao socialist” and later tweeted that it was “cool” for fascist Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to “toss communists out of helicopters.”)
Elsewhere, Tan rambles about Supervisor Aaron Peskin having his “fingers all over” the anti-AV shift and how former Supervisor Gordan Mar is a “hard leftist” who, as an Asian man, “sold out his own people.”
“What they’re doing here with self-driving cars is exactly what they do with blocking housing of every kind… [and] it’s the same people fighting against public safety,” Tan concludes in the video.
This is important context for the stream of anti-Tumlin tweets that Tan has delivered since July. On August 3rd, he called Tumlin a “useless idiot” while questioning how he has a job. A week later, Tan mused about selling T-shirts that read “FIRE TUMLIN.” On August 12th, he again called Tumlin a “worthless bureaucrat”; “I’ve heard [Tumlin] speak and it maxes at about 75 IQ,” he told someone in his replies.
On and on it goes: “Fire Jeffrey Tumlin,” in various forms, including Tan claiming Tumlin was literally allowing parking enforcement officers to ticket stolen cars so Tumlin can “juice numbers” and “hit his revenue quota.” (The city stated it is due to internal policy on reading license plates and getting real-time info from law enforcement.) Tan kept tweeting in the winter and spring, too, again calling Tumlin a “decel” and bemoaning “the worst transit system in the world.”
There are currently 1,150 signatures on an online petition for Tumlin to resign; Mayor London Breed has noted via a spokesperson that she will not make personnel decisions based solely on public calls for a firing. All in all, it remains extremely unlikely that anything happens to Tumlin’s seat.
But Tan’s agitation throws a spotlight on the ideology and strategy that he and other e/acc acolytes are attempting to implement in San Francisco, using general public dissatisfaction as leverage in a fight against any and all political figures they deem progressive “decels.”
It’s hard to know how seriously Tan and Co. take the AV tussle – any walk around San Francisco proves these robotaxis are everywhere, and will only expand in the future. Yet if you believe the singularity can only be won via an existential battle, Tan’s rage makes sense.
As he tweeted to Verdon, aka “Beff Jezos,” in August: “We in the fight together now.”
