In William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer, the hero Case lives in a near-future place called BAMA—the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, aka the Sprawl, a giant city that has spread Coruscant-like across the whole eastern seaboard. (If it had extended to Orlando, maybe Gibson could have called it OBAMA.) But while this part of Gibson’s sci-fi dystopia may have seemed plausible in the 1980s, it’s a little less so today. Yes, cities are still dealing with the consequences of the mid-20th-century’s automobile-driven sprawl—but if anything, the big metropolitan regions in the U.S. today are contracting around the edges, not blurring into one another.
And once the cheap oil runs out, analysts like James Howard Kunstler argue, cities will have to get smaller yet. The future “will be much more about staying where you are than about being mobile,” Kunstler predicts. Unless there’s a miraculous advance in solar-electric vehicle technology, or the government suddenly decides to invest a couple trillion dollars to build a serious passenger rail network, it’s hard to see how he might be wrong.
But that’s just one side of the picture—the physical reality of freeways and suburbs and Wal-Marts. There’s another trend at work that’s erasing what I would call the mental boundaries between cities. That trend, obviously, is digital networking.
It’s a tired cliché to say that telecommunications technology is breaking down the meaning of geographical distance. People have been pointing this out since the advent of telegraphy in the 1840s. What I’m saying is a little more radical. Given today’s work styles and networking tools, information workers can be anywhere. It makes very little difference whether your software engineers or QA testers or telesales representatives are in Boston or Burlingame or Bangalore. In fact, it’s easier to send an e-mail or an instant message to a colleague 3,000 miles away than it is to get up and walk a hundred feet across your office.
Which means distributed teams can get the same amount of work done as concentrated ones—probably more, thanks to the planet’s rotation and the single most important invention of 1883-84, the division of the globe into 24 standard time zones based on Greenwich Mean Time. In effect, the world’s information workers all live in one giant city—a mental space where Gmail and Twitter are more important than parking garages and subway tunnels.
Which makes one particular strain of inter-city bickering all the more inane. Over the last few years, I’ve listened to endless arguments about whether New York or Silicon Valley or Boston or insert-your-favorite-city- here is the best place to be an innovator, find investors, hire engineers and salespeople, and grow a technology company. In Boston, people still wring their hands over why Mark Zuckerberg moved Facebook to Palo Alto. In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, people glance nervously over their shoulders at New York. Recently, in fact, there’s been an extended and entertaining kerfuffle over New York’s merits as a startup hub, involving, at various points, SpeakerText CEO Matt Mireles, Hunch and Founder Collective co-founder Chris Dixon, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham (see 2:30 in this video), and AdGrok co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez. Dixon, Fake, and Graham think New York’s tech scene is exploding with cool startups and “ambitious ass-kickers,” and that it’s becoming an easier place to find angel or venture financing and engineering talent. Mireles and Garcia-Martinez, on the other hand, think that New York is expensive and elitist, that the angels and tech-focused venture firms are still few and far between, that Wall Street sucks up all the talent, that the city lacks decent engineering schools, and that New Yorkers are generally hustlers rather than builders.
It’s all beside the point. Regions have their distinct flavors, of course, but in the end, none of this affects the global pace of innovation, which depends on people and their ideas much more than their locations. Does anyone seriously want to argue that Google would not exist if
