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The thing to me is Silicon Valley is the place in the US that still looks like that post WWII America. Large monopolies like Google, Apple and FB utilizing fantastic profits and paying amazing perks to employees. Everyone working in and on the same mission acting as a social fabric tying people together. Glass Door and the Internet in general replacing trade unions by helping balance a knowledge imbalance so that workers can maximize their benefits.

The irony of regularly lecturing the rest of the country and world about what the future holds from the position as a final bastion on unassailable US hegemony of last century (2nd only to Hollywood?) perplexes me.




Agreed 100%, that was one of my take aways from the article as well. I suspect that this dominance is next to fall, and I feel that SV has already passed its zenith, perhaps some time ago, and that locals and those intimately tied to its fabric like PG will not be the first to notice. I think the talk of the last few years about a "bubble" may have been noticing symptoms of this rather than a true "tech bubble". There was a WP article the other day about how people are priced out of homes in SV, with the median home price at nearly a million dollars. We are in the early, possibly mid crisis of student debt, and despite a certain lauding of the dropout culture in the tech industry, this debt has fueled its rise over the last 40 years. It is unsustainable.


But that only happens because automation and globalization are barely harming the US. And its not like the oligopoly is not trying - why are there so many appeals for more H1Bs?

If you need skilled workers and the varying skill of a worker produces magnitudes of difference in wealth created of course you need to both be huge enough to afford them and centralized enough to take advantage of them.

The article itself seems like a blinders on interpretation of the US tech industry. Corporate consolidation is at all time highs in areas like food processing, farming, finance, raw materials, and industry. Mom and pop shops the world over are bellying up for Walmart and Starbucks. Startups and creative culture in the tech bubble are against the general grain. Its why money in politics is being considered such a larger problem now than twenty years ago - as dozens of economic effects interact, from people having less spending money to companies consolidating and having guaranteed revenues to regulatory meddling in their favor.

Fundamentally I think that newer generations growing up on the Internet are turning out much more hive minded than their grandparents, because there are just more of them as a fraction of the population. The perfect white nuclear family of 1970 still only accounted for a stark minority of the American public - it is just strange that a disproportionate number of people on HN ended up coming from that class. There was still extreme social unrest throughout the century - prison camps for the Japanese, the KKK, segregation, and the banning of many chemicals due to being "foreign" like opium and marijuana. Just because one microcosm of the American economy that produced most of us was homogenistic doesn't mean the era was exclusively defined by it.


How do you know the race and sex distribution of hacker news users? Or are you just assuming they are like you? (or unlike you? I have no way of knowing what group you might identify with)


There have been a number of informal polls over the years. Here's a link to an aggregation thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397332


You are only mentioning the tech industry in Silicon Valley, which I admit is pretty utopian. This description excludes everyone else in Silicon Valley. You can't talk about income inequality while only looking at those with high income (everyone in the tech industry), and forgetting about those with lower income is a huge reason why income inequality is problematic.


That's very true. And quite frankly, the housing rents, the overstuffed infrastructure, the student suicide rate in Palo Alto, and so forth make SV look pretty dystopian, even for most tech industry workers. The only thing tech has is what Michael O. Church so eloquently said: "Software engineers aren't a privileged set. They're just less fucked than the rest of the U.S. Former Middle Class."

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much...


In what way is Apple a monopoly?

(I'm also not sure if Google or Facebook are either, but at least in those cases it's obvious what you mean)


Yep fair point. In tech most are duopolies or oligopolies. iOS and Android, Google and Bing. FB and? Maybe Twitter. Maybe SnapChat one day.


It's certainly true that SV's days as a big tech hardware manufacturer are past.

I am not at all certain, but I have to wonder if something magically keeps SV software innovators glued to SV. This is something I've never understood. But there must be SOME reason why software innovation/work didn't completely disperse from SV ten years ago.


One very simple answer is VC money. They want you local and their talent network (of people for your growing startup) is local. Who knows how different Boston would be if Facebook stayed there? (Just one small example)


People overestimate how quickly unacceptable conditions arise. The Bay Area can get even more congested and expensive than it is today, and most people will make do. Cambridge and some surrounding areas have San Francisco pricing now. It won't so much be a "dispersal" but a hunt for talent, which is why you get Uber and other SV companies in Pittsburgh, where you can live in a steel magnate's castle for the price of a condo in Palo Alto.




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