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 distric

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.