
A technology writer visits the Bay Area for the first time - sohkamyung
https://www.economist.com/news/2019/05/03/silicon-valley-geography-is-destiny
======
itsaidpens
Best part of the piece:

“In the Bay Area, though, many young tech workers live in the city and commute
out. Every day dozens of plush, Wi-Fi-enabled buses ferry workers out to the
Valley. It is 40 miles (or 64km) from downtown San Francisco to Mountain View,
where Google is headquartered, roughly the same distance as from central
London to Reading, or from midtown Manhattan to Edison, New Jersey.

Those who cannot bear this commute—generally workers with children—live out in
the Valley itself, a bleak, featureless sprawl of American exurbia. It is all
office parks, strip malls, single-family homes and highways. Anybody looking
for a “there” will be disappointed.”

I don’t know how we’ve accepted a place that has so much diversity, so much
money, so much natural beauty - and yet, it’s so blasé and ugly. Between San
Francisco and Santa Cruz is an architectural and cultural wasteland.

~~~
usaar333
Is it worse than any other American suburb?

~~~
mercer
That's a low bar, though. I don't know if the DFW area suburbs are unusually
bad, but my experience of them rank among the worst places I've ever been:
generically-named suburbs connected via highways to generic mall areas
(Kroger's, Walmart, Trader Joe's, or the fancier places with the
aforementioned plus generic cinema and restaurants). The closest thing to
something non-generic were tiny pockets along the way that had various tacky
stores: barber-shop, dollar-store, nail salon, etc.

I found myself baffled at how anyone could be happy living in a place like
that, where even going to the generic take-out place meant walking through
your shoddily-built air-conditioned house and garage, getting into you air-
conditioned car, and driving to a spot that was literally within viewing
distance of your generic backyard, but inaccessibly on foot because of the
highway in between.

EDIT: I'll add that it was the shoddiness of everything up close that shocked
me most. Houses were large, but upon closer inspection everything was just
gaudy and off and cheap and ill-fitting, from door handles to sinks to fences.
I thought the McMansion thing was an exaggeration, but in the various suburbs
and malls I visited, it was standard.

------
CalChris
How do you talk about Silicon Valley without mentioning Stanford and Berkeley,
without mentioning the defense industry which preceded it? The writer doesn't
even get the Gertrude Stein quote right. She was writing about her childhood
home, the house she had grown up in, that it had been torn down. [1] Traffic.
We have traffic. Who doesn't?

What drivel.

[1]
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/there_is_no_there_there](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/there_is_no_there_there)

~~~
caprese
> How do you talk about Silicon Valley without mentioning Stanford and
> Berkeley

Because it is a relatable hajj to tech Mecca that many others will experience
for the first time, in the same context that this writer experienced it.

~~~
CalChris
SV has been around for 50+ years. I think what the writer is seeing now is
_destination_ rather than _destiny_. I think the writer's first impressions
now are really overblown as any sort of analysis.

~~~
caprese
I find it relatable and find your being bothered by it to be unrelatable

It comes across like you are married to the area and its history in a way that
the heavily transient population derives zero benefits in caring about

Whatever ship you are defending sailed long ago and also is not what the
article is about

If I want a primer to tell people what they’ll experience, this is an article
to encapsulate all that

If I want a museum, this isnt the article for it

Simple

------
ereyes01
The descriptions in this article can be generalized to describe almost any
American city that grew in the automobile age. Wide streets, large highways,
strip malls with parking lots, a landscape truly designed with the car as the
first-class citizen. I frequent the Bay Area, and in fact, it feels quite
dense compared to where I live (a major Texas city).

------
jpatokal
[https://outline.com/P5yRJC](https://outline.com/P5yRJC)

------
rdiddly
Finding this hilariously apt, mainly because I live in a similar place, but
don't use a car, hence I've been in a position to notice what others tend to
ignore: Wherever you are (not just SV), the automobile does create a culture
(and it's not necessarily the one in the ads).

------
doe88
Funny to see the same orthodoxy of unamed articles also applies to _personnal
takes_ at The Economist.

