A newcomer is running for District 11 Supervisor. Only six months ago, Michael Lai moved to the district that includes the Excelsior, Outer Mission and Oceanview. As a recent arrival with few ties to the community he hopes to represent and a similarly slender resume, Lai is the perfect candidate for the city’s mega-millionaires and billionaires. 

In fact, Lai has little to do with the unique needs of District 11, a racially diverse working-class neighborhood, and everything to do with the Astroturf Network’s steely determination to move San Francisco to the right. If elected, Lai will be answerable to the uber-wealthy San Franciscans who bankrolled his run.

Lai’s political career began just a few months ago. He was one of 18 candidates on the Democrats for Change slate for the San Francisco Democratic Party, popularly known as the DCCC. The slate, handpicked and financed by the Astroturf Network which includes GrowSF and Families for a Vibrant San Francisco (recently rebranded as the Abundance Network), was the vehicle for the successful $2.2 million effort to take control of the DCCC.

Once elected to the DCCC, Lai, at the behest of his wealthy friends,  turned his attention to D11. He effectively parroted the Astroturf Network’s misleading message that San Francisco has been “ruined” by progressive leadership. (No matter that the city has not had a progressive mayor since Art Agnos left office more than 30 years ago.) He proffered the Astroturf Network’s solutions: Sweeps as an answer to homelessness, criminalization as a fix for drug use, and the elimination of regulations on real estate speculators to resolve the city’s housing crisis. 

No matter that these solutions have been tried and failed.

While he lacks community connections, Lai enjoys close ties to politically interested techies GrowSF’s Garry Tan. Lai and Tan share a strange ideology, that of the Network State, a cult-like belief that tech elites should exit democracy and form their own sovereign states. 

While it sounds as bizarre as a science fiction plot, the Network State, the brainchild of venture capitalist Balaji Sriinivasan, has gained traction among influential techies like Tan. In fact, a handful of Network State experiments have been launched, among them The Neighborhood, financially backed by Google billionaire Eric Schmidt’s fund. The Neighborhood’s scheme is to create cohousing communities “building common knowledge of the most interesting problems at the frontier of progress.” Lai is among its founders.

Jason Benn, Lai’s friend and The Neighborhood SF’s cofounder, presented the plan at Srinivasan’s 2023 Network State Conference. Benn says they were inspired by Solaris, the Srinivasan-backed tech campus in the Alamo Square, Lower Haight, and Hayes Valley neighborhoods of San Francisco. District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston called the concept “concerning” in an area already “devastated by racist redevelopment and mass displacement,” Mission Local reported. 

Lai was a resident of Genesis House, a 21-room collective in a Hayes Valley Victorian that touted itself as “hottest hacker spot in the city,” as well as a “first mover” for the Neighborhood SF. 

While Lai claims that District 11 is where he “wants to raise his future kids,” The Neighborhood’s white paper proves otherwise: “By the way, speaking of raising kids here: we know that SF public schools are terrible. The bet is that the edtech landscape just got a massive kick in the pants from the Pandemic and that the frontier of education might look pretty different by the time our kids turn 5. In the meantime, we can franchise a daycare and maybe a Montessori school. If everything still looks bad in 7-10 years, then we’ll start another Neighborhood in a city with better schools.” To summarize, the Neighborhood folks have little faith in San Francisco schools, and are already considering leaving in just several years. 

Lai likes to boast about his bona fides as an educator. He founded Tinycare, a startup that created micro daycares and provided housing for educators. It landed him $17.8 million in venture capital funding as well as a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. He was also a founding member of Minerva, a new university. 

Lai sold Tinycare last year to a large Montessori school network. Former employees told Mission Local that Lai created an oppressive work environment where long hours were the norm and little support could be expected. Lai was described as being “unfamiliar with day-to-day aspects of childcare, since he had never been a full-time educator.” 

Scratch the surface of Lai’s impressive resume and his claims don’t hold up. Not only did he lack experience as an educator when starting Tinycare, he is equally unprepared to serve the varying needs of District 11. What is certain is that if elected, Michael Lai will prove loyal to those who have engineered his political career at the expense of his constituents.