For $30 a pop, a San Francisco trek advertised on Eventbrite as the “doom loop” tour promised to allow attendees to get “close and personal” to the “squalor” of the city’s downtown. The walking tour planned to take people through the “open-air drug markets, the abandoned tech offices, the outposts of the non-profit industrial complex and the deserted department stores”, according to an event description. The guide, who declined to reveal their identity, would be a “card-carrying City Commissioner overseeing a municipal department with an annual budget over $500m”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tour attracted controversy. Then over the weekend, it collapsed. Not even 24 hours before it was scheduled to go ahead, the anonymous organizer canceled the event claiming the media scrutiny had become too great. Now, the San Francisco city commissioner who was revealed to have been behind it has stepped down.
