That was what I was thinking: just as nine women can't have a baby in one month, you cannot create a seething furnace of urban synergy by just throwing a bunch of infrastructure together. It's like giving a kid a cupcake liner filled with raw batter: you're going to make him cry.
I don't see NYC or any of the other regions mentioned—London, Tokyo, the Valley—becoming irrelevant anytime soon. I doubt any city is going to steal the title of "Capital of X" from any of them, though the industries that drive the success of these cities may wane—and wax and wane and wax and…—new cities (or existing cities) will rise to prominence due to the development of new industries and new ways of working.
One of the ironies that always struck me about the Valley was that much of it was built on the dream on making distance no longer matter. Instant, global, paperless, tele-blah, and on and on. Yet the Valley continued (and continues) to matter.
What we think of as technology really isn't technology any longer, in any meaningful sense. Pencils and paper are technology, yet CTOs don't control the stationary cabinet. I've asked, sarcastically, CTOs why they don't show more interest in the legal pads and ballpoint pens, to make a point: computers and phones are no longer perceived as technology but as things.
And as things, along with other newly-just-a-thing things like web apps and virtualized servers and storage and clusters, the history and dynamics that favor the Valley don't necessarily support the sort of innovations that are going to make a big difference.
That's why the New Yorker article on Nick Denton, who, according to the article, is trying to bring a television-like time model to web advertising—and is working to kill the impression model—is so interesting. It details a guy that's using technology—yawn, programmers—but has internalized and is working to forward the interests of a completely different culture.
Of course, the existing web advertising mindset is a product of the application of the paper publishing world's advertising models, which just goes to show that as time passes it's less about how any given technology technology wants us to think but how we make sense of that technology.
So maybe the sorts of things that come out of the Valley will change. There's an understatement. Of course they've already changed!
Place has a huge role in shaping what happens. Where you live affects the way you think about the world. The way you think about the world affects where you want to live. (See Slate's "The Big Sort" coverage.) Until a city has a distinct worldview, a Weltanschauung, that draws people and changes them—and the rest of the world—it doesn't really matter.
I don't see NYC or any of the other regions mentioned—London, Tokyo, the Valley—becoming irrelevant anytime soon. I doubt any city is going to steal the title of "Capital of X" from any of them, though the industries that drive the success of these cities may wane—and wax and wane and wax and…—new cities (or existing cities) will rise to prominence due to the development of new industries and new ways of working.
One of the ironies that always struck me about the Valley was that much of it was built on the dream on making distance no longer matter. Instant, global, paperless, tele-blah, and on and on. Yet the Valley continued (and continues) to matter.
What we think of as technology really isn't technology any longer, in any meaningful sense. Pencils and paper are technology, yet CTOs don't control the stationary cabinet. I've asked, sarcastically, CTOs why they don't show more interest in the legal pads and ballpoint pens, to make a point: computers and phones are no longer perceived as technology but as things.
And as things, along with other newly-just-a-thing things like web apps and virtualized servers and storage and clusters, the history and dynamics that favor the Valley don't necessarily support the sort of innovations that are going to make a big difference.
That's why the New Yorker article on Nick Denton, who, according to the article, is trying to bring a television-like time model to web advertising—and is working to kill the impression model—is so interesting. It details a guy that's using technology—yawn, programmers—but has internalized and is working to forward the interests of a completely different culture.
Of course, the existing web advertising mindset is a product of the application of the paper publishing world's advertising models, which just goes to show that as time passes it's less about how any given technology technology wants us to think but how we make sense of that technology.
So maybe the sorts of things that come out of the Valley will change. There's an understatement. Of course they've already changed!
Place has a huge role in shaping what happens. Where you live affects the way you think about the world. The way you think about the world affects where you want to live. (See Slate's "The Big Sort" coverage.) Until a city has a distinct worldview, a Weltanschauung, that draws people and changes them—and the rest of the world—it doesn't really matter.