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I was one part of a group of people who worked hard for several years to try to nurture a growing a tech scene in a rural area not far from Sacramento. I steppe

I was one part of a group of people who worked hard for several years to try to nurture a growing a tech scene in a rural area not far from Sacramento. I stepped away from that almost two years ago and my current thinking is it can't be done, not just because we largely failed at it but because there are a number of other towns trying to do the same and they aren't getting traction either. I wonder if a healthy tech economy isn't more of an emergent behavior, and it tends to emerge in cities because there are more people, more resources, and more opportunities all mixing together. You need good communications infrastructure, not just fiber but cellular too. If all you have available is satellite or (gulp) DSL, it's really painful to get work done. But that requires an enormous financial investment, especially in rural areas where RoI-per-mile is mostly negative. Often the rural areas already have a culture there, and that culture doesn't necessarily want to get along with tech. Here, cellular providers can't deploy new towers because too many people are convinced that they'll get cancer, including some members of city council. Rural areas will tend to be mostly populated by people who either moved to get away from the city, or have never experienced life in a city. For those people, there's very little about a strong tech scene that sounds marketably attractive. That also means that the talent just isn't there. And talent isn't there in part because opportunity isn't there. And opportunity isn't there because talent and infrastructure aren't there. Nobody wants to just pump half a billion dollars or more into a small town just to see what shakes out, and if you did, you'd probably only end up ruining everything that made it an attractive enough small town to experiment with in the first place. This is all really a shame, because it's contributing to a lot of the political and economic divide in this country, as rural areas are neglected, and shrink, and die slow deaths, while people all jostle for tiny amounts of space at high cost in dense population centers.

lsc 8y ago
I grew up in a rural area near Sacramento. Culture is your big problem; when I was there, reading in public was "gay" and grounds for a (light) beating/physical humiliation. Of course, I was in high school at the time, and high school is terrible everywhere; I'm sure it's different for adults. But, point being, at least in the '90s, it was not a place that encourages you to study or engage in intellectual pursuits.
- thaumaturgy 8y ago
  Culture can be one of the challenges, and it is different once you get out of high school. This area (Nevada County) is far less hostile overall.
  - lsc 8y ago
    One of the reasons why I love the bay area so much is that not only is it not hostile, it's actively supportive. Like people talk about their favorite tech companies the way people talk about football teams in other parts of the country. Moving from Yolo County to Santa Clara county, for me, was going from a place where being what I am made me an outcast, to a place where being what I am made me... valued to an irrational degree. Like I am not saying the bay area is better for everyone, I've talked to some people who find it really unfriendly here, but... for someone like me? it was really amazing to go from being treated irrationally badly to being treated.. irrationally well. I think that and the fact that this is home for so many people who grew up with parents in the tech industry is really the advantage the bay area has for tech industry work. I think everything else would follow, if you could move those things elsewhere. Getting good internet connectivity, even to a farm, really isn't that difficult or expensive, compared to the cost of a decent Engineer.
    - thaumaturgy 8y ago
      I grew up in the east bay, and my experience at school wasn't great, despite being lucky enough to go to one of the most technologically advanced school districts in the state at the time. Anyway, everything else doesn't follow, because culture isn't a thing that can be just transported from one place to another. Nobody's got a reliable recipe for growing a specific culture. I think culture is instead a result of the environment. Bend, Oregon has a great craft beer and outdoor culture that is the result of having Mount Hood and other features nearby, and being close enough to some metropolitan areas to get supplies but far enough away from them to retain its own identity. Moab, Utah has a strong outdoors identity but little economy outside of that, because while they're one of the top destinations for mountain bikers, offroaders, hikers, and canyoneers, they're hours away from anything that anyone on HN would consider "a city". Seattle's culture is largely the result of its location and history as a sea port and lumber area, and then a home to Boeing before Microsoft and the rest arrived. (And coffee for suffering through the winter.) San Jose was a vast agricultural area when one side of my family settled in it a hundred years ago. Vast acres of easy-to-transform land, loose environmental regulations, nearby Stanford University, then Hewlett-Packard all transformed the culture there from agricultural to tech-driven. So this is what I'm getting at: you don't set out to change the culture in an area. I don't think it works that way. I think the culture is an emergent effect of the conditions, and maybe you can change a few of the conditions a little bit, but mostly they work like natural processes. It's not economically feasible to just create a tech culture in a rural area, nor can you simply "change the culture" to make a rural area more tech-friendly. There are a handful of people here who've had enough money to pay the $50k or more to get fiber lit up on their property. Doing that didn't make them more successful; they were already successful enough to be able to do it, and that success came from elsewhere.

lsc 8y ago

I grew up in a rural area near Sacramento. Culture is your big problem; when I was there, reading in public was "gay" and grounds for a (light) beating/physical humiliation. Of course, I was in high school at the time, and high school is terrible everywhere; I'm sure it's different for adults. But, point being, at least in the '90s, it was not a place that encourages you to study or engage in intellectual pursuits.

thaumaturgy 8y ago
Culture can be one of the challenges, and it is different once you get out of high school. This area (Nevada County) is far less hostile overall.
- lsc 8y ago
  One of the reasons why I love the bay area so much is that not only is it not hostile, it's actively supportive. Like people talk about their favorite tech companies the way people talk about football teams in other parts of the country. Moving from Yolo County to Santa Clara county, for me, was going from a place where being what I am made me an outcast, to a place where being what I am made me... valued to an irrational degree. Like I am not saying the bay area is better for everyone, I've talked to some people who find it really unfriendly here, but... for someone like me? it was really amazing to go from being treated irrationally badly to being treated.. irrationally well. I think that and the fact that this is home for so many people who grew up with parents in the tech industry is really the advantage the bay area has for tech industry work. I think everything else would follow, if you could move those things elsewhere. Getting good internet connectivity, even to a farm, really isn't that difficult or expensive, compared to the cost of a decent Engineer.
  - thaumaturgy 8y ago
    I grew up in the east bay, and my experience at school wasn't great, despite being lucky enough to go to one of the most technologically advanced school districts in the state at the time. Anyway, everything else doesn't follow, because culture isn't a thing that can be just transported from one place to another. Nobody's got a reliable recipe for growing a specific culture. I think culture is instead a result of the environment. Bend, Oregon has a great craft beer and outdoor culture that is the result of having Mount Hood and other features nearby, and being close enough to some metropolitan areas to get supplies but far enough away from them to retain its own identity. Moab, Utah has a strong outdoors identity but little economy outside of that, because while they're one of the top destinations for mountain bikers, offroaders, hikers, and canyoneers, they're hours away from anything that anyone on HN would consider "a city". Seattle's culture is largely the result of its location and history as a sea port and lumber area, and then a home to Boeing before Microsoft and the rest arrived. (And coffee for suffering through the winter.) San Jose was a vast agricultural area when one side of my family settled in it a hundred years ago. Vast acres of easy-to-transform land, loose environmental regulations, nearby Stanford University, then Hewlett-Packard all transformed the culture there from agricultural to tech-driven. So this is what I'm getting at: you don't set out to change the culture in an area. I don't think it works that way. I think the culture is an emergent effect of the conditions, and maybe you can change a few of the conditions a little bit, but mostly they work like natural processes. It's not economically feasible to just create a tech culture in a rural area, nor can you simply "change the culture" to make a rural area more tech-friendly. There are a handful of people here who've had enough money to pay the $50k or more to get fiber lit up on their property. Doing that didn't make them more successful; they were already successful enough to be able to do it, and that success came from elsewhere.