12 ms·

This seems a very important point, if it's correct. It affects so many of the big stories we see in the news, from SV's housing shortage to the widening gap bet

This seems a very important point, if it's correct. It affects so many of the big stories we see in the news, from SV's housing shortage to the widening gap between Republicans and Democrats. It would also mean that Y Combinator making founders move to SV (at least temporarily) turns out to be perfectly aligned with the times. "The emerging knowledge economy, Mr. Moretti argues, depends on constant innovation, which turns out to be a social process. To succeed, cities need a critical mass of highly educated workers engaged in the regular, often informal, exchange of ideas. Once this critical mass comes into being, it feeds on itself: Innovation hubs attract new innovators in a self-reinforcing process, while areas lacking this critical mass fall further behind. In the early stage of the information revolution, it was fashionable to argue that new technologies would eliminate distance. People could do creative work in rural Colorado and communicate their ideas anywhere on earth with the flick of a finger. This thesis rested on an excessively individualistic understanding of creativity. In fact, remote exchanges of ideas are no substitute for the elemental human process of face-to-face communication. Innovators don’t do their work in isolation; they stimulate one another."

meric 9y ago
In the early stage of the information revolution, it was fashionable to argue that new technologies would eliminate distance. People could do creative work in rural Colorado and communicate their ideas anywhere on earth with the flick of a finger. I think that effect is true to a limited extent. People could do creative work in countries such as Vietnam, India, Thailand and communicate their ideas to anywhere on Earth; The equalisation of Geography didn't apply between rural vs urban. It applied between developed and developing countries. I can speculate several reasons why, but without deep enough research or sources I'll leave them as an exercise for the reader. (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bsder https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bsder is an interesting comment)
closeparen 9y ago
"Economies of agglomeration" [0] have explained the phenomenon of urbanization for quite a while. It's not a stretch to think that there's an intellectual corollary. Why do university researchers work in centralized walkable enclaves? Greater connectivity amplifies the productivity of headquarters cities by enabling them to more readily project their power and distribute their output globally. With easy access to the output of Silicon Valley/Seattle/New York, there's less reason for each Nowheresville to have its own knowledge-work economy. The once-powerful bank manager of your local Chase is replaced by an algorithm in New York. The once-lucrative IT systems engineering work at your local manufacturer is replaced by AWS in Seattle. And so on. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
- api 9y ago
  ... which is a terrible, terrible thing and a recipe for the rise of disastrous politics or even the descent of the majority of humanity into a new dark age. The phenomenon you describe is a problem. It's one of the greatest problems of the early 21st century.
  - cryptonector 9y ago
    Explain?
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      The current US president is a result of the process you described. If that's not a big problem, I don't know what is. And it's caused by people in "towns" unable to find work and unhappy because if it.
      - mr_overalls 9y ago
        I think Trump's rise isn't explicable only in the light of _economic_ stagnation in small towns. Growing insularity and racism (or maybe a climate where those are freely expressed?) are to blame as well.
        fladrif 9y ago
        The most probable scenario is that racism and insularity are caused by economic stagnation.
      - cryptonector 9y ago
        Given the premise that cities have a fundamental advantage, what's the problem? Just wait a bit and liberals in cities will vastly outnumber rural conservatives, no?
        api 9y ago
        This would eventually result in violent revolution. Suppressing that revolution will require a complete forfeit of civil liberties. There's another reason it's bad too, and it's economic: in this world you will not be able to get ahead. These super-concentrated mega-cities will see runaway real estate inflation due to the "law of rent," while jobs will be scarce elsewhere. The choice will be: move to a "real" city and spend all of your surplus income on rent, or live elsewhere and have no opportunity to advance your career. The urban model looks a lot like the old "company store" model, which is a form of feudalism more or less. In the end this future looks like a 1980s B-grade cyberpunk dystopia: endless slums and rural wastelands patrolled by drones and special forces officers and dotted by gated totalitarian enclaves for the super-rich. "DNA sample and body scan are required for entry..." You said "liberal." What is liberal about this?
nawitus 9y ago
"The emerging knowledge economy, Mr. Moretti argues, depends on constant innovation, which turns out to be a social process." Why can't this happen online?
- viraptor 9y ago
  It's hard to find niche forums where you have small communities these days. Or maybe I lost touch with what the young crowd is doing. From my school times, I remember hanging out on forums where we worked on things like reverse engineering Siemens feature phones. Or my town's IRC channel. Or weird international places like cdc discussions (or was it nsf?). I don't even know we're I could find people with commitment to such ideas anymore. Maybe some private slack instances, or diving into one of the distributed Twitter replacements? I'm not saying these were placed where invocation actually happened, but I know they were a jump start place for many people. It's hard to have meaningful, small, dedicated communities online these days. Anything good gets popular and anything too popular gets bad in the end.
  - nawitus 9y ago
    There's still communities for niches. Subreddits, Facebook groups, forums, Slack instances etc.
  - mistermann 9y ago
    I think to a degree the runaway success of Stackoverflow had the unfortunate side effect of sucking enough of the oxygen away from some dedicated forums to kill the critical mass needed to maintain these communities on an ongoing basis.
- closeparen 9y ago
  Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers? Can it happen online? Probably. But proximity vastly decreases friction and increases the chances of success. Even between offices with enterprise-grade fibre and high-end videoconferencing-integrated conference rooms, telepresence isn't that good yet. There's no substitute for unscheduled hallway conversations and impromptu whiteboarding. These things might be unnecessary distractions if your job is to churn out code that fulfills well-defined specifications, but if you're doing something new and innovative and not fully understood yet, or something complex enough to require deep interactions with your coworkers (beyond task assignment and status updates), they are a major boon.
austincheney 9y ago
> "which turns out to be a social process." I used to agree with this 100%, particularly as I was teaching myself to program. Now I don't. Not even a little bit. I learned to program, almost entirely, on my own, in a vacuum. I started learning to program just before I was pulled into my second military deployment, years on the job at Travelocity, and then refined my skills during my third military deployment. It wasn't completely a vacuum as I could talk to people online. I learned most of my early architectural concepts from practicing against the recommendations of Douglas Crockford. I had nobody in the real world I talked to about my programming. In reflection this made me a substantially better programmer, and I never realized it until somebody in the military explained why. I am a JavaScript developer. I first started learning to program just before abstraction libraries became the religious dogma that nobody could live without and ultimately coalesced around jQuery. This was not a technology phenomenon it was a social phenomenon. I largely missed the insanity that was so popular in the social business world as I was bouncing around various FOBs in Afghanistan without an internet connection. I learned to write against the vanilla DOM and optimize my code to perform quickly, cross browser, with simplified logic. I didn't an abstraction library and a bunch of dependencies to slow me down. When I came back to Travelocity my ability to write fast code in the browser that just always seemed to work earned me a promotion and I became a senior developer and the A/B test experiment guy for the company. When I started my second deployment I taught myself to program by writing an open source code beautification tool that worked in the browser. Node.js was just invented and I wasn't aware of it just yet, so my tool was limited to the browser. I taught myself language parsing for various different kinds of grammars. Much of this code mostly worked but it was poorly constructed and certainly not 100%. When I was sucked into my third deployment I wasn't skilled enough to be a software architect. I had more learning to do, but a few months in I really learned to refine my approach to architecture and wrote some new language parsers from scratch that turned out to be solid and extensible. At this time while I was again out of the mix from the corporate world large MVC frameworks became the rave that suddenly became the thing developers could not live without. I learned to live without them and continued programming on my own refining and extending my little open source application. I was easily able to apply the architectural concepts I taught myself in place of large generic MVC frameworks to produce code that is significantly smaller and generally executes much faster. Late into my third deployment I overheard a conversation about the origins of Best Buy. The key guy, Richard Schulze, never went to industry trade conventions or focused on common industry practices for doing business of his new "Best Buy" store model. He had found the concept by accident and refined it over time into a more retail without commission concept that allowed his stores to out sell the competition. This was a process of refinement and reward over time by practice and experimentation. The concept was successful because it discard the social process of industry peers! The social process is a means of validation. It lets you know how you fare against the median population you are competing against. If your goal is to be average the social process is your guide. If you want to be more than that you have to be willing to step back from what is popular.
flexie 9y ago
I believe it’s true, yet some of the best work of man was done largely alone. Einstein had his miracle year not at a university but by himself at the patent agency in which he worked and at home in his apartment in Bern. He was all but isolated from peers with very little face-to-face time with anyone who understood just a little about advanced physics. In our time, he could have been working from home somewhere in a small town, couldn’t he?
- hyperpallium 9y ago
  He actually had a little club of three people, who discussed physics. However, I'm not sure of the time line, I think it was before his miracle year. Explaining an idea to someone (rubber ducking) can help a lot. It may be that he had the hint of the ideas before, and spent a year working out the details, and writing them up.
- oblio 9y ago
  Everybody likes to pick these miraculous examples. Sure, Einstein worked alone. Did the people who expanded and industrialized his theories also worked alone? I’d say solo genius, lone wolf kind of work is the minority of work. And it’s probably not enough to keep employed huge masses of people.
omgPhysics 9y ago
Explain Linux with this rational... the most successful and possibly most innovative project of our lifetime.
- jcfrei 9y ago
  Linus started development at the University of Helsinki...
  - omgPhysics 9y ago
    He is also one of the biggest proponents of working only through online communication. He, as the sole contributor to Linux at that point with famed single line license, release linux to the open internet. The entire philosophy is based on the idea of: 1. Being open to skepticism (this includes being technically evaluated on your work, which is possible through public submission of that work) 2. Allowing people to work on the things at which they excel. If you don't subscribe to these ideas, it doesn't matter where you work, how you work or what you do. It will not be 'innovative'.
    - selectodude 9y ago
      Over 20 percent of kernel contributions come from Intel and Red Hat. Over 90 percent of patches are written by people who work for corporations. Linux wouldn't be 10 percent of what it is now if it relied solely on volunteers communicating on the LKML.
      - hutzlibu 9y ago
        Does it matter, that they work for corporation or on their own, when the topic was that the overall working process of Linux is mainly online? ation?p
        selectodude 9y ago
        Sure it does. Most kernel development is done by developers working in an office. They don't have to brainstorm over the LKML.

meric 9y ago

In the early stage of the information revolution, it was fashionable to argue that new technologies would eliminate distance. People could do creative work in rural Colorado and communicate their ideas anywhere on earth with the flick of a finger. I think that effect is true to a limited extent. People could do creative work in countries such as Vietnam, India, Thailand and communicate their ideas to anywhere on Earth; The equalisation of Geography didn't apply between rural vs urban. It applied between developed and developing countries. I can speculate several reasons why, but without deep enough research or sources I'll leave them as an exercise for the reader. (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bsder https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bsder is an interesting comment)

closeparen 9y ago

"Economies of agglomeration" [0] have explained the phenomenon of urbanization for quite a while. It's not a stretch to think that there's an intellectual corollary. Why do university researchers work in centralized walkable enclaves? Greater connectivity amplifies the productivity of headquarters cities by enabling them to more readily project their power and distribute their output globally. With easy access to the output of Silicon Valley/Seattle/New York, there's less reason for each Nowheresville to have its own knowledge-work economy. The once-powerful bank manager of your local Chase is replaced by an algorithm in New York. The once-lucrative IT systems engineering work at your local manufacturer is replaced by AWS in Seattle. And so on. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration

api 9y ago
... which is a terrible, terrible thing and a recipe for the rise of disastrous politics or even the descent of the majority of humanity into a new dark age. The phenomenon you describe is a problem. It's one of the greatest problems of the early 21st century.
- cryptonector 9y ago
  Explain?
  - jjeaff 9y ago
    The current US president is a result of the process you described. If that's not a big problem, I don't know what is. And it's caused by people in "towns" unable to find work and unhappy because if it.
    - mr_overalls 9y ago
      I think Trump's rise isn't explicable only in the light of _economic_ stagnation in small towns. Growing insularity and racism (or maybe a climate where those are freely expressed?) are to blame as well.
      - fladrif 9y ago
        The most probable scenario is that racism and insularity are caused by economic stagnation.
    - cryptonector 9y ago
      Given the premise that cities have a fundamental advantage, what's the problem? Just wait a bit and liberals in cities will vastly outnumber rural conservatives, no?
      - api 9y ago
        This would eventually result in violent revolution. Suppressing that revolution will require a complete forfeit of civil liberties. There's another reason it's bad too, and it's economic: in this world you will not be able to get ahead. These super-concentrated mega-cities will see runaway real estate inflation due to the "law of rent," while jobs will be scarce elsewhere. The choice will be: move to a "real" city and spend all of your surplus income on rent, or live elsewhere and have no opportunity to advance your career. The urban model looks a lot like the old "company store" model, which is a form of feudalism more or less. In the end this future looks like a 1980s B-grade cyberpunk dystopia: endless slums and rural wastelands patrolled by drones and special forces officers and dotted by gated totalitarian enclaves for the super-rich. "DNA sample and body scan are required for entry..." You said "liberal." What is liberal about this?

nawitus 9y ago

"The emerging knowledge economy, Mr. Moretti argues, depends on constant innovation, which turns out to be a social process." Why can't this happen online?

viraptor 9y ago
It's hard to find niche forums where you have small communities these days. Or maybe I lost touch with what the young crowd is doing. From my school times, I remember hanging out on forums where we worked on things like reverse engineering Siemens feature phones. Or my town's IRC channel. Or weird international places like cdc discussions (or was it nsf?). I don't even know we're I could find people with commitment to such ideas anymore. Maybe some private slack instances, or diving into one of the distributed Twitter replacements? I'm not saying these were placed where invocation actually happened, but I know they were a jump start place for many people. It's hard to have meaningful, small, dedicated communities online these days. Anything good gets popular and anything too popular gets bad in the end.
- nawitus 9y ago
  There's still communities for niches. Subreddits, Facebook groups, forums, Slack instances etc.
- mistermann 9y ago
  I think to a degree the runaway success of Stackoverflow had the unfortunate side effect of sucking enough of the oxygen away from some dedicated forums to kill the critical mass needed to maintain these communities on an ongoing basis.
closeparen 9y ago
Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers? Can it happen online? Probably. But proximity vastly decreases friction and increases the chances of success. Even between offices with enterprise-grade fibre and high-end videoconferencing-integrated conference rooms, telepresence isn't that good yet. There's no substitute for unscheduled hallway conversations and impromptu whiteboarding. These things might be unnecessary distractions if your job is to churn out code that fulfills well-defined specifications, but if you're doing something new and innovative and not fully understood yet, or something complex enough to require deep interactions with your coworkers (beyond task assignment and status updates), they are a major boon.

austincheney 9y ago

> "which turns out to be a social process." I used to agree with this 100%, particularly as I was teaching myself to program. Now I don't. Not even a little bit. I learned to program, almost entirely, on my own, in a vacuum. I started learning to program just before I was pulled into my second military deployment, years on the job at Travelocity, and then refined my skills during my third military deployment. It wasn't completely a vacuum as I could talk to people online. I learned most of my early architectural concepts from practicing against the recommendations of Douglas Crockford. I had nobody in the real world I talked to about my programming. In reflection this made me a substantially better programmer, and I never realized it until somebody in the military explained why. I am a JavaScript developer. I first started learning to program just before abstraction libraries became the religious dogma that nobody could live without and ultimately coalesced around jQuery. This was not a technology phenomenon it was a social phenomenon. I largely missed the insanity that was so popular in the social business world as I was bouncing around various FOBs in Afghanistan without an internet connection. I learned to write against the vanilla DOM and optimize my code to perform quickly, cross browser, with simplified logic. I didn't an abstraction library and a bunch of dependencies to slow me down. When I came back to Travelocity my ability to write fast code in the browser that just always seemed to work earned me a promotion and I became a senior developer and the A/B test experiment guy for the company. When I started my second deployment I taught myself to program by writing an open source code beautification tool that worked in the browser. Node.js was just invented and I wasn't aware of it just yet, so my tool was limited to the browser. I taught myself language parsing for various different kinds of grammars. Much of this code mostly worked but it was poorly constructed and certainly not 100%. When I was sucked into my third deployment I wasn't skilled enough to be a software architect. I had more learning to do, but a few months in I really learned to refine my approach to architecture and wrote some new language parsers from scratch that turned out to be solid and extensible. At this time while I was again out of the mix from the corporate world large MVC frameworks became the rave that suddenly became the thing developers could not live without. I learned to live without them and continued programming on my own refining and extending my little open source application. I was easily able to apply the architectural concepts I taught myself in place of large generic MVC frameworks to produce code that is significantly smaller and generally executes much faster. Late into my third deployment I overheard a conversation about the origins of Best Buy. The key guy, Richard Schulze, never went to industry trade conventions or focused on common industry practices for doing business of his new "Best Buy" store model. He had found the concept by accident and refined it over time into a more retail without commission concept that allowed his stores to out sell the competition. This was a process of refinement and reward over time by practice and experimentation. The concept was successful because it discard the social process of industry peers! The social process is a means of validation. It lets you know how you fare against the median population you are competing against. If your goal is to be average the social process is your guide. If you want to be more than that you have to be willing to step back from what is popular.

flexie 9y ago

I believe it’s true, yet some of the best work of man was done largely alone. Einstein had his miracle year not at a university but by himself at the patent agency in which he worked and at home in his apartment in Bern. He was all but isolated from peers with very little face-to-face time with anyone who understood just a little about advanced physics. In our time, he could have been working from home somewhere in a small town, couldn’t he?

hyperpallium 9y ago
He actually had a little club of three people, who discussed physics. However, I'm not sure of the time line, I think it was before his miracle year. Explaining an idea to someone (rubber ducking) can help a lot. It may be that he had the hint of the ideas before, and spent a year working out the details, and writing them up.
oblio 9y ago
Everybody likes to pick these miraculous examples. Sure, Einstein worked alone. Did the people who expanded and industrialized his theories also worked alone? I’d say solo genius, lone wolf kind of work is the minority of work. And it’s probably not enough to keep employed huge masses of people.

omgPhysics 9y ago

Explain Linux with this rational... the most successful and possibly most innovative project of our lifetime.

jcfrei 9y ago
Linus started development at the University of Helsinki...
- omgPhysics 9y ago
  He is also one of the biggest proponents of working only through online communication. He, as the sole contributor to Linux at that point with famed single line license, release linux to the open internet. The entire philosophy is based on the idea of: 1. Being open to skepticism (this includes being technically evaluated on your work, which is possible through public submission of that work) 2. Allowing people to work on the things at which they excel. If you don't subscribe to these ideas, it doesn't matter where you work, how you work or what you do. It will not be 'innovative'.
  - selectodude 9y ago
    Over 20 percent of kernel contributions come from Intel and Red Hat. Over 90 percent of patches are written by people who work for corporations. Linux wouldn't be 10 percent of what it is now if it relied solely on volunteers communicating on the LKML.
    - hutzlibu 9y ago
      Does it matter, that they work for corporation or on their own, when the topic was that the overall working process of Linux is mainly online? ation?p
      - selectodude 9y ago
        Sure it does. Most kernel development is done by developers working in an office. They don't have to brainstorm over the LKML.