If you’re slicing code and dicing algorithms in Silicon Valley, you know there’s no other place like it on earth.
Governments around the world keen to capitilize on Silicon Valley’s success at inventing and profiting from the future are desperate to create their own version on their home soil.
Well-meaning people in suits anoint this hub or that suburb Sydney’s or Melbourne’s or Berlin’s or London’s or Tokyo’s or whatever’s Silicon Valley. Easy in theory, impossible to bring to fruition.
Because Silicon Valley is more a state of mind than a wedge of temperate Santa Clara County real estate once covered in orchards and now overflowing with computer science graduates, ambitious startup founders and more than a few delusional sociopaths.
Institutional investors and institutional mindsets are the antipathies of Silicon Valley. Well-reasoned, sensible thinking is not what drives the venture capitalists, let alone the chaos monkeys.
Disruption may be the word of the day. But it’s a polite misnomer. Real technologists in Silicon Valley don’t want to disrupt institutions so much as detonate them to kingdom come with technology, negative externalities be damned.
Think revolutionary anarchist armed with machine code instead of molotov cocktails. Imagine the golden age to come.
That revolutionary urge to destroy the status quo is the essential ingredient to the Silicon valley miracle.
That mischievous disregard for the present at whatever eventual costs is what makes everything tick.
If you want to change the world, don’t hire orderly coders, developers and ethicists.
Hire anarchists.