“She’s going to write an exposé! She’s going to call us a cult!”
Banu Kellner, the founder of a small and very new AI collective called Superhuman Society, was kidding — well, mostly kidding — when she said that to me at a cocktail bar in the Financial District. As the handful of other Superhumanists around us laughed, Kellner craned her neck a little to see what notes I might’ve been taking down from the evening, which went something like this:
It was not my original intent to attend strange happy hours with the Superhuman Society, but cults had certainly been on my mind as I began my investigation into the members-only, underground clubhouse in Hayes Valley called The Commons SF.
It was at The Commons that I had first met Kellner and her crowd a few days before, at an AI discussion event hosted by representatives from three overlapping organizations: The Commons, the Superhuman Society, and an event series called the AI Salon. I’d attended that event expecting to find myself among radical young techies, some real accelerationist sharks, wondering if I’d be kicked out once I revealed my being a journalist.
But by the time Kellner was teasing me with cult revelations at the happy hour, I was pretty sure that, no, none of these organizations were cults. They also weren’t quite companies, or social clubs conducive to creating lasting friendships, or political projects with real teeth. And yet, The Commons has nearly 500 active members, many of whom, like some of the Superhuman members, spend a lot of time in this weird and parochial space, where everyone seems to be consumed by some combination of AI, spirituality, and constant existential dread. Obviously they were all there to satisfy something. But what?
Throughout the hazy, nowhere days of late summer, I left every interview more confused and unsettled by what I heard from these “Cerebral Valley” scenesters. What was everyone getting out of this? What exactly was the point?
Whispers of power
In early September, sitting barefoot under a tree at the front of Golden Gate Park, Kylie Yorke, The Commons’ 23-year-old social chair, described The Commons to me as “an adult playground, but more intellectual, spiritual, philosophical.” Other members referred to it as “an intentional community,” “a startup,” and “a sacred space,” designed to make its members feel like “how it was in college.” In a blog about the launch of the club, a friend of The Commons founders dubbed it “a philosophy speakeasy.” On the website, it’s “a social movement.” The Commons is, one newly onboarded member told me, “whatever you want it to be.”
What it is, in the most literal terms, is a coworking and events space founded by former product managers Patricia Mou and Adi Melamed that opened in the summer of 2022. But The Commons is almost never described in literal terms. The founders, the members, and the website all primarily sell The Commons as a “fourth place,” a grandiose upstaging of the concept of third places, or public gathering spaces where people can interact freely and build community outside of the home (the first place) or workplace (the second).
“Most residential areas built since World War II have been designed to protect people from community rather than connect them to it,” begins a 1996 essay from sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who coined the term. “What suburbia cries for are the means for people to gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably…Most needed are those ‘third places’ which lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life.”
A lack of accessible third places, they say, is a driving factor of the American loneliness epidemic. The Commons, then, bills itself as a sort of third place plus — a third place plus an ethos and shared values, plus founders to provide guidance, plus admissions and special feelings of exclusivity.
Plus membership fees of up to $200 a month.
Yorke, who graduated last year from Wake Forest and now works in a social neuroscience lab at Stanford, told me she actually doesn’t pay anything. Since she joined about a year ago — which, in Commons time, is quite a while — she’s volunteered enough to get her membership comped. Yorke has seen The Commons through a few eras, and she describes this one as “the post-psychedelic metaphor of fresh snowfall,” a blank slate where anything is possible. This summer, she spent almost every day at The Commons, working remotely and “being playful,” particularly with Melamed, who she posited is the more social of the two founders.
“Adi is so beloved,” Yorke mused. “Like he sometimes can’t walk through The Commons without everyone coming up to him.”
By the time I sat in the grass with Yorke, I’d already had my eye on The Commons for a few months, since reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle had tied Mou and Melamed to a strange land acquisition project in Hayes Valley called City Campus.
The City Campus project was first announced back in April, when mysterious flyers featuring AI-generated images of an urban utopia and the headline “Where are all the grandparents?” were posted around Alamo Square. Soon after, a website popped up, which included a manifesto explaining the plan to build “essential social infrastructure to nurture serendipity, community, and purpose in the Hayes/Alamo region of San Francisco.”
The branding was cutesy, all hope and togetherness; in the Chronicle article, one of the City Campus founders gushed that the happy tech commune they were trying to create would be like an “episode of Friends.”
But there was always a vaguely nefarious nature to City Campus. All four co-founders — Mou and Melamed, along with former Sequoia Capital scout Jason Benn and former product designer Thomas Schulz — run insular coliving and coworking spaces for tech workers. Schulz’s AI startup incubator is even funded in part by the controversial venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan, who wrote the book The Network State: How to Start a New Country and has proposed the replacement of the San Francisco government with an authoritarian political machine called the Gray Tribe.
Vague ties to technofascism aside, the City Campus rhetoric sounded a lot like a plan to wall off the tech class from the rest of the city, under the guise of a righteous effort to create a modern Eden “for the community.” Whose community?
That was one of the many questions I wanted to ask Mou and Melamed, but they avoid journalists. (“We’re not usually interested in talking to media,” Melamed texted me, before directing me to contact The Commons’ general manager, who also did not respond to my request for an interview.)
What I did know about The Commons is that it buzzed, newly open 24 hours, beneath Topo Designs on the corner of Hayes and Laguna streets. I also knew that some events let outsiders in. So as soon as an event called AI Salon: Let’s Get Canceled! popped up in July, I applied as a “writer” and sent in a request.
Into the clubhouse
On a warm Thursday evening, I made my way to The Commons for the first time.
Inside the underground space, there is a generic coziness that reminded me of a dorm room, with cheap tapestries and string lights gingerly hung on the walls, and loose cushions covering up the cold basement floors. This might be by design, since The Commons’ branding leans heavily on a university roleplay: Programming is called “curriculum,” and time is organized into “semesters.” On the bookshelves, there is literature on Eastern religions, design, and self-optimization. Next to a cabinet full of dusty board games and empty champagne cases, a chalk wall prompts members with “I feel alive when…”
They’ve filled in:
“when I take intuitive risk”
“when I’m in my onesie!”
“WHEN I’M AT THE SF COMMONS”
“when I think I’m going to die.”
The event description for AI Salon: Let’s Get Canceled! informed me tonight would be a “safe space for what you can't say in ‘safe spaces’.” Everyone would be given a slip of paper with a hot take on AI, which would provide us all with “plausible deniability to make it safer to share your cancellable beliefs.”
When I arrived, the hot takes were being distributed by the two co-hosts: The first, a bashful 22-year-old named Chris Lakin who runs popular “awkwardness events” at The Commons and whose LinkedIn bio at the time read, “I study social interaction and AI alignment as one and the same.” Now, it just says “multi-scale alignment.” He was evasive when I asked what exactly it is that he does for work. (“Well I run workshops, and I have some donors that pay for my time and results.” What exactly are the results? “Whether the thing I did was productive.”)
The other co-host was Kellner, the 47-year-old founder of the Superhuman Society. That evening she was hosting on behalf of an organization called the AI Salon, which holds structured discussions about AI and how it will impact society. The AI Salon’s founder, Ian Eisenberg, was also present that evening.
“You’re catching me at a time of great transition,” explained Eisenberg, 34, as people filed in from the street above us. “I’m trying to scale the community. I mean, there’s the ‘enthused,’ and then there’s the ‘empowered,’ right? What the AI Salon is trying to do is find the connection between those two. I’d say the people here are mostly the enthused.”
Suddenly, Kellner turned off the lights. Everyone else found a seat on one of the white couches or the floor.
“Why are we doing this?” Kellner asked the crowd of about 50, entranced by her soft Turkish accent and didactic presence. “Because we need to change direction to a more human future rather than degrading ourselves as a species. We need to create a discourse.”
Based on our hot takes, we sorted ourselves into groups: Future of humanity, AI personhood, existential risks, AI romance, AI startups, AI safety, e/acc, AI x art. I joined the AI x art group. An edgy kid from the Superhuman Society kicked us off.
“Uh, so, I’ll say that AI copyright law is bullshit.”
The discussion ping ponged from there, bumping up against huge essential questions like “What is legal?” “What is ethical?” and “What is art?” I took notes at lightning speed, trying to capture what the so-called “enthused” people in my group thought about the future. To my surprise, almost no one was radically onboard, but everyone took all dystopic possibilities very seriously.
“The world is going to look drastically different in a year. It’s like, people need to buckle up.”
“Oh,” one girl jumped in, “my hot take is that men’s relevancy will be diminished by AI. At least women can be mothers.”
“For now,” prodded another.
“Yeah, I mean once a robot can rock your baby at the exact rate to soothe them, or whatever, the question of parenting starts to get really different,” added a third. “Do you guys know about the Purpose Problem?”
Eventually the structured environment relaxed, and people were just chatting. It was easy to join new conversations. People were educated and curious, and they waited for each other to finish. Everyone was happy to let me take notes, and several people offered me their numbers for an interview later. No one said anything terribly inflammatory. Most people were worried about the same things: Loneliness, purpose, extinction.
Looking for a seat at the table
Nearly all of the attendees of the event were under 30, worked in tech, mostly in remote capacities, and had moved to San Francisco, on average, only a few months ago. For some, it had only been a few weeks.
Of all the people I talked to, Cecilia Callas was the closest person I found to a San Francisco native. She is from Cupertino.
This is her second time living in the city. The first was right after she graduated from journalism school at USC and got a job in marketing at Intuit, which eventually took her to London.
“It was amazing, fantastic. I have the most amazing friends there,” Callas, 31, reminisced about London. “But I still had this niggling feeling, like, this is not my purpose.”
Trying to find it on a yoga retreat in Bali, Callas found herself surrounded by beautiful, meditative people telling her about the coming power of AI.
“It scared me a lot at the time,” she said. “But I was just like, fuck it, I’m going to go all in on the thing that scares me.” And so she returned to San Francisco.
These days, Callas assists Eisenberg with marketing the AI Salon. She also writes a Substack called RemAIning Human and is taking two AI safety courses online. Still, she’s unsure if any of that will ultimately fulfill her; she also just started an MFA program in creative writing and is in the market for a day job.
Both Callas and Eisenberg claimed the AI Salon was about “giving people a seat at the table.” But aside from publishing meeting recaps on an email newsletter, so far there is no meaningful action. A few days after the salon, I asked Callas what she gets out of being a part of the AI Salon and Hayes Valley scene.
“You know, my whole career in marketing, I’d just be sitting in meeting after meeting, being like, none of this matters. We're just, like, staying busy until we die,” she said, looking at the sky. “And now I've made such big life transitions. I mean, I'm not making enough money to, like, go on big trips anymore, but I feel so peaceful, because I'm aligned in myself.”
“Do you feel like people are having fun in this circle?” I asked.
She laughed. “No! Absolutely not, are you kidding?”
Preparing for the singularity
I kept searching for the objective, the reason people kept coming back, again and again, to unpack topics that many of them seemed to find dark and unsolvable. Perhaps the Superhuman Society, the most fringe and action-oriented of the three organizations, would have the answer.
On the patio level of SFMOMA, where she likes to take meetings, Kellner told me more about Superhumanism, an AI philosophy she came up with in 2022 while on a psychedelic retreat in Jamaica. To explain Superhumanism, she often compares modern humans, operating in a world that has not been designed to meet their needs, to “Ferraris struggling in off-road conditions.”
On the Society’s website, Kellner published a manifesto detailing the ethos of Superhumanism. I have read it three times over and still cannot totally decipher the main thesis, other than guiding AI development toward a “different path” that enables “human flourishing.” Within the first five minutes of our interview, Kellner had mentioned widespread brain chips in the near future.
“We don’t exactly know what’s going to happen, how things are going to take shape, so it’s also hard to say, ‘This is what we should do,’ necessarily,” hedged Kellner. To figure that out, they organize conversations, like the Let’s Get Canceled event. “From conversations, we recruit people for action.”
Currently, some recruits are working on a CGI film, which aims to show what a morning routine might be in a future with, basically, a lot of AI. Other members spend their time writing essays about AI and then workshopping them in small groups.
From the widest perspective, the Superhuman Society, which currently has about 15 members, is ultimately trying to prepare humanity for the imminent, drastic shift that AI advancement will bring.
“The TLDR is, you can’t prepare people for the emergence of God. It’s like a rocket ship is taking off, you gotta just strap in,” a 25-year-old Superhuman Society member named Virgile told me at the happy hour. Virgile moved to San Francisco in January and believes “the singularity,” as he calls it — the moment when AI suddenly outpaces human intelligence and causes massive societal transformations — could come within weeks.
Conversations in the Superhuman Society, the AI Salons, and The Commons can turn existential quickly. AI advancement becomes mass job loss becomes mass loss of purpose becomes mass suicide. Sophisticated biotech becomes disrupted parent-child dynamics becomes everyone on their own, with chips in their brains, from birth.
After only a few weeks in the scene, I started to feel adrift, lost in a sea of hypotheticals that swung from utopian to dystopian in every other sentence. By the end of every meeting I was desperate to see my friends, to be near people who actually know me. I couldn’t be the only one.
At the happy hour, I met the earliest member of the Superhuman Society, a 20-something Canadian man named Ansh. He joined about a year ago. I asked him if he would consider people in the Society his friends.
“Um, yeah. Kind of.” He paused. “Do you think there’s a loneliness problem in San Francisco?”
It was a leading question. I asked what he thought.
“Yes,” he said, definitively. “Yes.”
Kellner has been in San Francisco for 11 years and has a young daughter and a husband, who she says is afraid of all this AI business, so she doesn’t bring it home. At SFMOMA, I asked her what it feels like to spend so much time in this heady space with all these younger, unrooted people.
“It’s San Francisco! Who’s rooted?”
Somewhere to belong
I began to get the sense that I was reporting a very old story. There is a long history in California of transient young people uprooting themselves and going West, searching for meaning, progress, something, drawn with what seemed like no explanation to other people searching.
Since California became California, there were cults, there were communes, there were coliving houses and “intentional communities.” Hopes of gold, of Hollywood stardom, of tech utopias.
By the end of August, I found myself rereading Slouching Toward Bethlehem, the 1967 Joan Didion article on the state of the Haight, which crescendos to a diagnosis of the situation that, after all I had seen and heard throughout the summer, felt eerily prescient: “It’s a social movement, quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. An invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental."
In the last few years, many journalists have probed at the overlaps between God and AI, between religions and the many techno-philosophies that have begun to emerge. Corporatized spirituality is everywhere in San Francisco these days. Off-the-grid festivals like Burning Man have “morphed into a confab of tech bros,” a 2023 Wired article declared. Monks from the Page Street Zen Center regularly visit The Commons to give sermons. (One time, I attended a sermon at the Zen Center myself, where I heard a young man ask the monk how best to optimize his meditation practice.)
But coastal tech workers aren’t supposed to believe in platitudes like “God loves you,” even if it might secretly make them feel better, and downstream messages of American exceptionalism say they’re all supposed to want to found a company and be their own boss. Silicon Valley’s “move fast, break things” culture is, on the whole, at odds with the regulation of institutionalized religion. In its place, there are cults of Feeling Powerful.
Yorke, The Commons’ social chair, is frank with me about the religious elements of The Commons. The physical space of The Commons offers her ritual, its hierarchy offers structure, its spiritual bent offers a portal to enlightenment. She grew up Methodist and loved being part of a church. Since connecting with some of the more theologically-minded folks in the club, she’s started praying again.
“At the end of the day, it’s a club. And what is a club? Somewhere you have to belong,” explained Yorke in her matter-of-fact tone.
By the time we sat in the park at the beginning of September, Yorke told me that City Campus, the land grab project which had brought me down this rabbit hole in the first place, had largely been put to sleep. Sometime this fall, the GoFundMe page was made private, and this past Monday, Thomas Schulz, the City Campus co-founder with funding from Balaji Srinivasan, announced his AI incubator, Solaris, was closing up shop.
Even so, Mou and Melamed run in circles where venture capital and real political power is within arms reach, so to me, it seems possible some similar project could emerge soon. After all, its root idea remains essential to The Commons’ culture.
“I think the benefit of the insularity of The Commons is that you’re cultivating this sense of a really special community, where, like, you know that the people who are there were chosen to be there,” Yorke explained.
To Yorke, The Commons has delivered something her outside friends can’t always provide. But it goes both ways.
I heard, over and over, that it’s hard to make friends at The Commons. The times I’ve been inside the space, during the day and at night, there has been no music playing, and most people are on their laptops, headphones on. One member told me she once saw someone sitting at a table with a little sign that said something like, “Come have a conversation!” No one ever joined them. Another member said she’s heard once people do make real friends there, they don’t renew their membership.
The Hayes Valley scene attracts a certain socioeconomic class: Young, itinerant people who can afford to pay high membership dues and spend a lot of time in aimless philosophical discussions about the latest technologies. Degrees from schools like Stanford, Brown, and Berkeley are common here, as is a rosy nostalgia for such selective institutions; several Commons members told me they consider college the last time intellectual and social stimulation was easily accessible.
But when the dogged pursuit of productivity and self-optimization hangs over every interaction, there’s very little room for the things that really bond people together: conflict, purposelessness, and good drunken messiness.
So instead, they have grafted their existential urges onto the frameworks they know: Self-improvement. A fetishization of the elite university. Exclusive startups that seek to address humanity’s great undoing by AI with more AI. The pursuit of frictionlessness is baked so deeply into Silicon Valley that its answer to loneliness is not to join the chaotic social world outside — the actual commons, you might say — but to block it out, City Campus-style, network state-style, and build a perfect third place: the fourth place.
But the snake feeds itself: Isolation begets isolation. They privatized hanging out and lost the plot.
In The Commons, taped above the high-end coffee station near the bathrooms, there is a cheeky sign that has the classic Zen koan, “Have you eaten? Then go wash your bowl.” That is what comes to mind when Callas told me she’s getting out of the city next week to see her old coworkers in London, far away from all this.
“I’m not gonna talk about it, or like, I’m not even gonna even think about AI for like a week. I’m just gonna, like, go out and have fun. It’s gonna be great,” Callas said, smiling.
