Teens do drugs and play video games even in your shining coastal beacons of civilization.
>It's also largely an entrepreneurial wasteland ... Meanwhile the "alpha cities" are experiencing uncontrollable real estate hyperinflation since everyone who wants to do anything must move there If you're trying to become a millionaire making trash like Uber for banana hammocks, sure. Small businesses do just fine outside of dying small rural towns. Midwestern cities have plenty of work in my experience, it's just not the sexy "let's trick ourselves into thinking we're changing the world with our app" kind of work.
I mean, you're not wrong that there's a malaise going around the country in a seriously troubling way. We live in an era where remote work is very doable for many of us and there's no good reason we have to all live in coastal cities. My reflex is to blame the VCs for this, but there's plenty of other businesses that also don't do it for whatever reason. IMO this mindset needs to change, and quickly.
I agree about VCs. In my experience the coastal cities do not have a monopoly on talent but they do have a strong monopoly on investment capital for new businesses.
I think it's a branding thing too. If you were an angel and saw a company on AngelList would you be more likely to fund them if they were from:
(a) Mountain View, California
(b) Los Angeles, California
(c) New York, New York
(d) Cincinnati, Ohio
(e) Louisville, Kentucky
I bet you picked (a).
Uhh, I think we live in very different realities. Drugs and video games are proper subcultures in their own right. It has nothing to do with where you live and more to do with your identity.
The parent poster is right: most of the USA is cultural wasteland. It's also largely an entrepreneurial wasteland. New value creation is concentrated in the same hot spots as new culture creation.
This is always true everywhere to some extent but it's gotten much worse over my life time. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and I remember being a teen and an early twenty something there. You knew you weren't New York but there was a sense that things were possible. I worked on some pretty cutting edge software stuff around web and Internet there in the late 90s. Today it's an opium addiction ward and everyone who wants to do anything leaves. Meanwhile the "alpha cities" are experiencing uncontrollable real estate hyperinflation since everyone who wants to do anything must move there. This real estate hyperinflation problem is a symptom of something much larger.
The majority of the USA (by land area) is in a permanent malaise and has been since ~2000-2001. I quite frankly find it terrifying. It's a precursor to fascism, totalitarian socialism, or dissolution.