As a Photosensitive Person, I’m Ready to Sue the Lights Off SF
Construction of the new Bay Bridge lights display is now officially underway, so no one should be surprised that there’s already a fly in the soup. On December 18, 2024, local news outlet SFGATE published a story about a recent lawsuit filed against multiple City agencies over the proposed new display, which is slated to cover both sides of the western span of the Bay Bridge (the lights were, previously, only on one side). According to the article, Mark Baker, head of the Soft Lights Foundation and the plaintiff, is concerned with the number of LED lights involved in this iteration of the project, saying that the LED lighting has negative impacts on people with certain neurological disabilities such as “epilepsy, autism, PTSD, photophobia, Traumatic Brain Injury, [and] migraines.”
As a photosensitive individual with one of the aforementioned neurological disabilities, I like where Baker is going with this. Had I known that I could sue the City for having lights, I certainly would have beat him to the punch a long time ago!
Though I would have started by suing the US Government, which banned incandescent lights in favor of energy-efficient LED bulbs in 2023. LED bulbs, for those who don’t have a reason to know or care, not only emit more high-frequency blue light, they also flash 400 times per second–a rate that’s undetectable to the human eye, but very much detectable to the brain. So that’s one small step for the planet, one giant headache for the photophobes. If anyone reading this has either connections to the light bulb black market or hundreds of candles, please reach out.
Actually, do you think I could sue the earth? It’s climate change, after all, that makes energy-efficient LEDs so darn popular. So if the earth could just chill out, I could have my incandescent light bulbs back, we could continue dumping loads of plastic into the ocean, and everyone would be happy!
After suing either the Feds or the earth (or both!), I’d move on to Elon Musk, or whoever it is that owns the internet now. The easiest way to access the internet, after all, is by staring at a pocket-sized light bulb, which is downright reprehensible. To make matters worse, everything on the internet moves. Take the SFGATE article, for example. In the course of reading a short few paragraphs of text, I had to dodge three videos, one of which scrolled with me down the entire page. I’ve even been told that some people go to the internet because they want to watch videos. This is, for a photophobic person, like asking the dentist to give you a filling when you have no cavities. Why have TikTok and YouTube when we could go back to telegraphs and carrier pigeons? Give me one good reason, I dare you.
Don’t even get me started on GIFs. The next time someone sends me a GIF of a dancing corgi wearing a sombrero, I’ll throw my phone into the ocean.
Anyway, the entire internet is a glaring accessibility issue that I’ve been shafted by for a long time. The easiest solution, again, is to sue Mr. Musk. (Or should I say Lord Musk? Not sure what his title is now.)
By the time I get to suing San Francisco, I’ll be pretty rich, but still, it’s the principle of the thing. Street lights. Tesla headlights, which are as bright as they are ubiquitous. BART station lights. The top of the Salesforce tower. Motion-activated floodlights. And nothing says “Merry Christmas” like red and green spotlights pointing in my face. I thought San Francisco was known for its progressive civil liberties, not for its mistreatment of photosensitive people. I demand compensation!
To Mr. Baker: If you’re game to help me sue the world into darkness, or at least into incandescence, call me. But in the meantime, please don’t turn off the Bay Bridge lights. I think they’re pretty.
(Editor’s note: While the author is photosensitive, this article is satire.)
