Center of the Universe

A clerk in New Delhi when told that the visitor was from the San Francisco Bay Area replied, “Oh that is the center of the universe”! When asked why, he said:

“Because the center of the universe is wherever there is the least resistance to new ideas.”

If that didn’t make sense, let me explain. The Bay Area stretches from San Francisco to San Jose. Or to put it differently, it is Silicon Valley.

America produces more new ideas than any other country. And within America, it’s Silicon Valley. Kind of like fractal geometry, huh?! Kelly then explores why that is the case. If you stick to more recent history, the answer usually revolves around Stanford University (They fund companies of their alumni within this area since it is close to the university; their students are very smart; ergo…and then it becomes a virtuous cycle of success attracting more braniacs…).

Kelly though goes much farther back and gives J. S. Holliday’s take on it:

“(J. S. Holliday) argues that it began in the gold rush days, when hundreds of thousands of young men came stampeding into the Bay Area to start their fortunes. It was the gold.com era. There was no adult supervision. No one to tell you No. You just headed into the hills with your wits and either came back rich or poor…The Bay Area collected these young free spirits and retained them.”

Gold.com? Don’t you just love his choice of words?

Others say that being outside the East Coast’s (and Washington) sphere of influence (due to the enormous distances involved) resulted in the Bay Area relying on “entreprenurial investments instead of grant money and corporate buyouts”. That spirit continues to this day in its modern avatar of venture capital, the spirit of which Kelly describes as:

“Mistakes are not only tolerated, unlike in Old Places, but even these days, mistakes are embraced as the best teacher.”

Then there’s the hippy origin of the digital era:

“I agree with the urban sociologist’s Richard Florida’s notion that bohemians = innovation = wealth, and that any city or region that wants to encourage innovative wealth creation has to encourage bohemians.”

But Kelly worries whether its very success may have sowed the seeds of destruction for Silicon Valley:

“The one sure thing limiting the success of the least resistant place in the world is its success. Eventually no one can afford to make mistakes anymore, and then the center moves.”

And now I come to the point where I disagree with Kelly: what will be the new center of the universe? His guess is Shanghai or some other place in China. I disagree (and no, it’s not because he said China).

First, does Kelly not know anything about Asian cultures? Failure is verboten to them (India, Korea, Japan and oh yes, China). Contrast that with how failure is almost worn as a badge of honour, a battle wound, in Silicon Valley. Such a big culture change this side of the world is, well, hell is more likely to freeze over first.

Second, this is not a zero sum game. America’s loss does not necessarily mean somebody else’s gain. Silicon Valley could just fade away, never to rise again. Anywhere.

That might make physicists happy though: we’d have aligned with the universe. There would be no center of the universe anymore. Copernicus and Hubble must be smiling at the thought. Silicon Valley may turn out to have been an aberration, a quantum fluctuation, if you want to continue with the physics analogy.