I have lived in Seattle since 1995. It is now a shi-shi techtropolis fully of 300k+ tech bros, of which I am an aged version. There is zero reason for tech (and god I hate hate this term) should be clustered in a locale. It is absurd, my locality has never played into anything I have done. It isn't like someone opened the yellow pages and looked for a data gravity consultant.
How about for one year, we all put our incomes into a pot and split it 1/population of america. Just for funsies.
There is zero reason tech should be clustered in a locale
Presumably because the end-product (and some intermediates) are ephemeral and can be transmitted losslessly long distances in little time at low cost?
Perversely: that's just what leads to greater rather than less concentration in industries. Especially where there's a great deal ofhumam interaction and collaboration required.
Since the end-products are ephemeral, they can be distributed to any point on Earth. But clustering of creation activities, returns to scale, even a small component of ancillary support services and infrastructure, and even small gains to round-trip interaction rates, reliability, or flexibility, favour concentration over decentralisation and mean that any one locale which gains an edge over others sees path-dependencies and positive feedback encouraging yet higher growth. Only when frictions develop (say: high costs of housing), or regional differentiators (language, cultural, regulatory regimes, say), do you see a formation of alternate hubs.
Zipf's law / power functions still strongly favour the formation of small numbers of such hubs.
Film, banking, and publishing have very similar tendencies.
How about for one year, we all put our incomes into a pot and split it 1/population of america. Just for funsies.