On January 26, the San Francisco Center will finally perform its last service to the public: it will close. This isn’t merely the shuttering of a retail space; it is the final, rhythmic thud of a coffin lid being hammered shut on the delusions of a city that once fancied itself the vanguard of the future. As the lights dim for the last time in this downtown monument to glass and bourgeois aspiration, we are treated to the spectacle of a municipality that has managed to make the concept of 'shopping' feel like a high-stakes survivalist excursion.

One must admire the sheer, surgical precision with which San Francisco’s leadership has dismantled the urban contract. It is a masterclass in bureaucratic incompetence so profound it borders on the artistic. To witness a premier shopping destination—once the crown jewel of Market Street—devolve into a hollowed-out shell is to watch the 'Doom Loop' transition from a theoretical economic warning into a tangible, graffiti-covered reality. The mall, which has seen its occupancy crater as retailers fled like panicked sailors from a sinking galleon, is not a victim of the 'rise of e-commerce.' To blame Amazon for the death of the San Francisco Center is like blaming the weather for the collapse of a house whose foundations were intentionally dissolved in acid. No, this is a local triumph of institutional paralysis.

The exodus of flagship tenants, led by the funereal departure of Nordstrom last year, was the inevitable result of a city government that treats the basic concepts of law and order as optional aesthetic choices. When a department store realizes that its inventory is being treated as a communal resource by the local criminal element—and that the consequences for such redistribution are non-existent—it tends to lose its appetite for the 'San Francisco experience.' The retailers didn’t leave because people stopped wanting shoes; they left because they grew tired of their employees having to navigate a gauntlet of human misery and open-air pharmaceutical experimentation just to reach the time clock.

From my vantage point, there is something exquisitely pathetic about the 'reimagining' rhetoric that usually follows these collapses. No doubt, there will be talk of 'community spaces' or 'innovation hubs'—the typical buzzwords used to mask the stench of a decaying tax base. But let us be honest: a city that cannot protect a stationary building full of expensive goods is a city that has lost the mandate of heaven. The San Francisco Center is a microcosm of the grand American urban experiment gone sour. It is what happens when the ruling class becomes so enamored with the performance of empathy that they forget how to keep the sidewalks clean or the storefronts intact.

There is a specific brand of world-weary irony in the fact that this occurs in the shadow of some of the world's most valuable technology companies. The contrast is almost too heavy-handed for a mediocre novel: the digital elite crafting algorithms to optimize the human experience in their high-rise fortresses, while the physical world beneath them rots into a liminal space of boarded-up plywood and broken dreams. It is the pinnacle of the absurd. The city planners have created a landscape where the only thing cheaper than the dignity of the residents is the property value of a downtown lease.

As the doors lock on January 26, the officials will likely issue statements filled with the usual tepid optimism, speaking of 'transitions' and 'new chapters.' They will ignore the obvious fact that this is an 'I told you so' moment of global proportions. In Europe, our ruins have the decency to be ancient and carved from stone. In San Francisco, the ruins are made of drywall and 'Going Out of Business' signs. It is a uniquely American tragedy—fast, expensive, and entirely self-inflicted. One can only hope the last security guard out the door remembers to turn off the lights, though at this point, it hardly matters. The darkness has already settled in.