Silicon Valley is one of the world’s great tech meccas, of course. Every developed country or region probably has a ‘silicon valley’, and as you can see it’s a household term.
In India, for instance, that place is called Bangalore — where you find the same massive tech campuses that you find in the West, made by firms like Facebook, Yahoo and Google.
And as you can see from our publications, Silicon Valley, California has a vibrant (exemplary, even) local scene of arts and social interaction. A far cry from being a city full of penned-up nerds and coders. We would bet that this liveliness is the average condition of all major world tech-cites.
Local Offline Life
That begs the question of whether the Internet really kills land-based social events and person-to-person culture, if, as we see in San Jose, Boulder, Bangalore, Shanghai, and so on — all of them tech havens — street culture thrives in such cities.
The whole curiosity in this topic is related to the future of cities. Some of us secretly fear that the Web, ubiquitous Web-ready devices, and deeply immersive home entertainment systems are going to make futures (dystopias) like those pictured in WALL-E and Idiocracy more real than comedy.
Utopia Inside Dystopia
But fortunately, as residents of Silicon Valley will tell you, the opposite is the case even in the most wired cities of the world. That is very good news — sorry, if it seems too elemental or simplistic.
Just as the world has witnessed and experienced history’s most significant transformations of the mental life of humanity on the Web, we think it could be that Web access will have the effect of opening up our cities and making them safer for nighttime fun-seekers — in other words the real social life of people.
You never know: many space-consuming things like shopping malls (and their parking lots), and various kinds of redundant spaces like the rows and rows of slot machines in land-based casinos, could one day go online and stay there (without new construction of those things happening in our physical spaces).
We already know how well online shopping works. If you are curious just how this kind of future (where more mundane social infrastructure goes online, and, more quality space is freed in the real world) might play out, then simply use a trustworthy guide-site to play pay pal casino — you’ll see how well it works.
