Moving to SF: My Game Plan for Finding the Weirdos
I'm moving to San Francisco on April 1st. SoMa, specifically. I've spent the last few years building a comedy club in Austin, running a touring show for South Asian audiences, learning Ableton, and generally trying to figure out how many creative lives one person can live simultaneously. The answer so far is "more than you'd think, fewer than you'd like."
SF is the move because the city collects the kind of people I want to be around. Not the tech-bro caricature. The other ones. The people building robots in warehouses and performing tape music in the dark and hacking their own biology in community labs. The ones who went to Burning Man and came back different and never fully re-entered normal society. I want to find those people.
So I made a game plan.
The Spaces
Noisebridge is at the top of the list. It's an anarchist hackerspace on Mission Street that's been running since 2007. Free, open to anyone. People build robots, do biohacking, teach classes on everything from lockpicking to neural networks. The ethos is "show up and make something." No membership required, no gatekeeping. Just a building full of tools and people who know how to use them.
Gray Area on Mission Street is where art and technology collide in the way I find most interesting. They're a nonprofit that runs immersive exhibitions, creative coding programs, and AI-art shows. Their 2026 curriculum integrates AI and machine learning with physical computing, and it all culminates in public exhibitions. They also host the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, which is experimental electronic, not EDM. Sound art, audiovisual performance, the stuff that makes you feel something you didn't know you could feel.
The Midway in Dogpatch is a massive warehouse space that does everything from immersive art parties to tech conferences. Multiple rooms, outdoor areas, Burning Man energy but with a roof. SOMArts is a community arts center right in SoMa with exhibitions and performances. And 111 Minna Gallery, also in SoMa, is an art gallery that hosts live experimental music. These are all walking distance from where I'll be living.
The AI and Biohacker Scene
San Francisco in 2026 has become the center of gravity for AI development, and the community that's formed around it is genuinely strange and interesting. Cerebral Valley is the name people use for the neighborhood where AI startups and researchers cluster. They run hackathons, demo nights, and founder dinners. AGI House is a $58 million mansion in Silicon Valley that serves as a hacker house for startups and researchers. Coding marathons on Saturdays. The vibe is "200 people in a mansion trying to build the future in 12 hours."
On the biology side, Biohackers Collective SF is a 1,500-member community doing monthly meetups on peptides, nootropics, and longevity. BioPunk Society is the first openly accessible biotech hackerspace in SF, focused on micro and synthetic biology. Actual lab work, not just theory. Counter Culture Labs in Oakland (BART accessible) does DIY genetics and citizen science. And there's a Bay Area Existential Risks Meetup for the transhumanist and longtermist crowd, the people thinking about what happens when all of this actually works.
Experimental Music
This is the part I'm most excited about. I've been learning Ableton for the past year, just published my first song, and I want to find the people making music that doesn't fit neatly into any genre.
The San Francisco Tape Music Festival calls itself "cinema for the ears." People performing tape music and electroacoustic compositions in the dark. It's run by sfSound, a collective of experimental musicians who also do a West Oakland Sound Series on Sundays and stream experimental music on sfSoundRadio.
The Bay Improviser Network is the hub for everything experimental, improvised, noise, free-jazz, and avant-garde in the Bay Area. If something weird is happening with sound in San Francisco, it's listed on bayimproviser.com. This is the directory I'll be checking every week.
Amnesia on Valencia Street is a small bar that books ambient, drone, and loop-based performers. The kind of place where someone shows up with a modular rig and plays for 45 minutes. F8 on Folsom is an intimate underground spot right in SoMa, more independent and weird than the big clubs. DNA Lounge on 11th Street has been around since 1985, booking everything from industrial to synthwave to noise.
The SF Ableton User Group is the community I'm joining immediately. Active Discord, regular meetups, production tips, collaboration. Since I'm still learning, this is where I'll find people to make music with.
And then there are the house shows. The real underground doesn't advertise on Google. It lives on bayimproviser.com, on 19hz.info (the comprehensive Bay Area electronic music listing), and in Instagram stories from the artists and small venues. You find it by showing up to the places I listed above and talking to people. The network reveals itself to people who participate.
Events I'm Hitting
The San Francisco Art Fair runs April 16-19 at Fort Mason. They have a panel called "Unintended Outcomes: AI in the Artist's Studio" that puts art people and AI people in the same room, which is exactly the intersection I want to exist in.
The Big Art Loop is 100 temporary Burning Man art installations spread across a 34-mile loop around San Francisco. Free, outdoor, running through 2028. This is the kind of thing you stumble across on a walk and it resets your entire day.
Silicon Colosseum is an underground robot fight club in a SoMa warehouse. Invite-only. Hundreds of people lined up outside for the last one. The description I read called it "the right amount of weird." That's the bar I'm trying to clear with everything I do.
SFMOMA currently has their "Art of Noise" exhibition up, tracing the history of music and design. There's also a sonic sculpture on the free terrace by Yuri Suzuki that remixes San Francisco's ambient sounds into something new.
The Actual Plan
Week one is orientation. Walk the neighborhood, find the coffee shop where I'll do morning pages, find the pool where I'll swim. Join the Ableton User Group Discord. Check bayimproviser.com and cerebralvalley.ai for what's happening that week. Go to Noisebridge and just see what's going on.
Week two is deeper. Hit an event at Gray Area. Go to a show at Amnesia or F8. Start showing up to the places where the people I want to know spend their time.
After that, the plan is just: keep showing up. The interesting people in any city find each other eventually. You just have to be in the rooms where they gather, doing the things they do, making the things you make. San Francisco has always been good at collecting interesting people. I'm betting it still is.
If you're in SF and any of this resonates, come say hi. I'll be the comedian learning Ableton in a SoMa coffee shop, trying to figure out how experimental music and standup comedy and AI art all fit together. I don't know yet. That's the point.