Silicon Valley vs. New York: Social vs. Algorithms

As part of a series about the advan­tages New York has over Sil­i­con Val­ley and why it may become dom­i­nant, we con­tinue our explo­ration of cul­tural differences.

In order to fully under­stand the con­cept of peo­ple at the cen­ter, you must immerse your­self in the sub­ject. You must meet peo­ple out­side of your own cir­cle, out­side of your own eco­nomic sphere, out­side of your industry. And you can’t do that if you’re liv­ing in an area with a sin­gle dom­i­nant industry, commuting largely via per­sonal car and inter­act­ing pri­mar­ily, either at work or after work, with peo­ple in your own industry.

Social vs. Algorithms

Another win area for New York in the social game is that exper­tise in social is some­thing that is forced on every one liv­ing in the city. Because it is a very dense envi­ron­ment, New York forces a nat­ural social dance on a daily basis. The minute a New York res­i­dent steps out of his/her apart­ment, the social dance start, with care­ful silent nego­ti­a­tions for things like where to place your­self on the curb, to how to man­age get­ting in and shar­ing seat­ing arrange­ment in sub­ways and buses. These quiet nego­ti­a­tions hap­pen hun­dreds of times before some gets to work. As a friend of mine wryly remarked once “no won­der New York­ers are intense; The nego­ti­a­tions required to just get­ting to the office is a almost full time job.”

So social inter­ac­tion pat­terns get ingrained in New York just by liv­ing there and become sec­ond nature. By com­par­i­son, peo­ple in Sil­i­con Val­ley tend to com­mute by car (no, I’m not dis­count­ing peo­ple tak­ing the train or bus but it seems to be a minor­ity). Some peo­ple decide to com­mute with friends from work or other startup but the net net is that the social inter­ac­tions with total strangers and dif­fer­ent socio-economic groups are not forced on them. So they have to go an ana­lyze wider social pat­terns instead of liv­ing them, some­thing that can be more of a challenge.

If you look at it in his­toric terms, the tech­nol­ogy field was tra­di­tion­ally dom­i­nated by algo­rithms. Hard­ware and soft­ware solu­tions in the past meant that peo­ple were not as essen­tial to suc­cess in tech­nol­ogy. As the web became more social, cul­tural anthro­pol­ogy has become more essen­tial. It is no won­der that none of the major new play­ers in the tech field has come out of the Val­ley in the last 5 years (Flickr was born in Canada, Skype in Europe, Face­book in Boston, Twit­ter and Zynga in San Fran­cisco (Accord­ing to Wikipedia, SF is not part of Sil­i­con Val­ley), Groupon in Chicago,  and Foursquare and bit.ly came from New York).

This is not to dis­count the value of algo­rith­mic approaches. Com­pa­nies that are depend­ing on heavy maths and engi­neer­ing will con­tinue to thrive in the val­ley (I’m think­ing of com­pa­nies like Google, Net­flix, and Apple, for exam­ple) but those will have to reach out to tal­ent in the cities if they want to thrive in the social web (inter­est­ingly enough, it seems that Face­book and Google have now started to real­ize this as they are poach­ing New York star­tupsor expand­ing their phys­i­cal foot­print in the city in an attempt to get social DNA flow­ing back into their companies)

Take­away: Liv­ing in a city is inher­ently a social expe­ri­ence. Liv­ing in a car-driven soci­ety isn’t.

Update: This post is part of a series of why New York may gain the top posi­tion in the tech world, dis­plac­ing Sil­i­con Val­ley. The whole series is now online: Intro, Cul­ture Part 1, Cul­ture Part 2, Tal­ent, Adver­sity, Busi­ness