noun · first recorded 2026 · status: emerging
Nontechnical North
1.The northern band of SF (Marina, Cow Hollow, Pac Heights) where the venture, product, and media people live. The few engineers up there dress well and can make eye contact, which makes them spiritually nontechnical.
He says he's an engineer, but he lives in Cow Hollow and his laptop has stickers from conferences, not compilers. Spiritually nontechnical. Nontechnical North.
01Origin
Coined by Neall Seth in an August 2026 post mapping the city's true political geography: those in venture, product, and media inevitably live in the Nontechnical North, while technical labor, in his framing "the oppressed labor class (openai researchers)," gets pushed south. Tale as old as time, now with zip codes.
The borders are understood rather than drawn: roughly Lombard down to California Street, bounded by the Presidio and the bay. It is the natural habitat of Balboa Cafe, the 7 girls of SF on weekends, and every deck that was never accompanied by a repo. The south has the GPUs; the north has the term sheets; the 1 California bus is the class corridor between them.
The genius of the coinage is the "spiritually nontechnical" clause, which converts geography into diagnosis: living north of California Street with a GitHub account does not exempt you. It is the residential wing of the "what are you building?" economy: the north asks the question, the south is the answer.
02Notable sightings
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