I think about that a lot. I suspect unfortunately the quick and dirty startup is both cool and lucrative for young people with privilege. I've talked with a lot of VCs who won't look at startups that can't see revenue within 18 months, yet they will take propped up or bought revenue with metrics that look good but have no hope of ever reaching profitability. I suspect the next wave of real businesses that make many truly useful products will come out of places like Detroit, Cincinnati, Boston.

I wonder this a lot. To me it seems that a lot of that "hacker" mentality and the radicalism that follows with it kind of died down a bit. The maker movement is one of the only things I can think of in recent times that was a slight push in the right direction of advancing an industry. Some neat stuff has come out of that such as 3D printing and IoT devices; it's questionable if those are really helping society though. I think another thing to think about is if we've, in a way, maxed out physical product based value adds. SV seems to be stuck in a feedback loop with services rather than physical products.

In a corporate open space office? According to the article, this is where they are.

Sure, but my question was really aimed at something deeper. I agree that they're in the corporate open space office. But that doesn't answer the question of why they're there, on the whole, and leaves the question of getting the hackers working on societal problems instead of attention problems.

You have a bit of idealism in your understanding of how things are made , created adopted and maintained. Weather the problem is societal or not these are the attributes that need to be solved.

1) what is the problem and how much money can we make from solving it? 2) how much will it cost the enginners to solve the problem (we are not your slaves) 3) If problem is solved at a profit is it still viable/worth to approach , is it a $5 profit or a $50,000,000 (business men/women/pick a gender are not our slaves either) 4)Is it legal? The more money to be made the more the masses and dems feel its evil even if it good for all , we cant have anyone being successful off of hard work now can we, so any kind of far reaching societal solution will have gov red tape (this is a good thing I believe, better to be safe than sorry)

we are all in this together, its no super smart guy overlords that tell us what to do, and if you think that is the answer you should look up the idea of "euthanization". Elite , intelligent people are not always kind , but they are always efficient. They sometimes have very cold ways of solving your "societal" problems.

I'm sorry, but you have completely missed the mark here.