I think it&#x27;s a symptom of something else: the hyper-centralization of relevance and cultural center of gravity in only a few places.<p>When I was younger (1990s), I don&#x27;t remember it mattering <i>so much</i> where you were located. I&#x27;ve spoken to older people and they concur: they&#x27;ve all said that when they were young being in, say, Indianapolis or Toledo was not a big deal.<p>Today, at least in the USA, there&#x27;s a strong sense that you&#x27;re nobody unless you are in one of about eight big coastal cities. Nothing happens anywhere else.<p>I&#x27;m talking about perception here. You can argue that this isn&#x27;t really true, and that you can do anything most anywhere, but the cultural <i>perception</i> is that you&#x27;re nobody and can&#x27;t do anything unless you are in NYC, SF, LA, etc.<p>I&#x27;m a startup founder and have been told by several people on several occasions that we are doomed because we are not in the Bay Area. I&#x27;m in SoCal but apparently if we&#x27;re not in SF or its Southern suburbs it&#x27;s impossible to succeed as a tech company. Obviously I don&#x27;t believe this, but the meme is strong. If enough people take this stuff seriously, it&#x27;s going to contribute to a hell of a property bubble in SF&#x2F;SV.<p>I still don&#x27;t understand why this is the case, especially since the Internet was <i>supposed</i> to have the opposite effect. By making information globally available and communication easy, the Internet was supposed to flatten the world and make place less relevant. Instead I&#x27;ve noticed a strong and obvious trend in the opposite direction since circa 2000.<p>I can only comment on the USA, but what I see elsewhere seems to support this being a global thing. London has gone totally insane for example. I wonder if the Internet is actually having a paradoxical centralizing effect here, allowing larger cities to broadcast their cultural &quot;signal&quot; and then have that signal amplified enough by network effects to make them appear exponentially more and more influential. This in turn drives a feedback loop in which talent and ambition is drawn increasingly to these cities, etc., and the rest of the country is hollowed out.<p>It&#x27;s actually part of an even larger trend. Since 2000 <i>everything</i> seems to have gone increasingly power law: wealth distribution, geographic relevance, education, etc.