Ist San Francisco die ambitionierteste Stadt der Welt?
Via Tyler Cowen bin ich auf diesen Text von Ruxandra Teslo gestoßen, hier ein Ausschnitt:
One could simply say San Franciscans are ambitious. And that would be true, but incomplete. “Ambition” has a somewhat bourgeois connotation to it — someone who gets an MBA, goes on to work for a prestigious company and climbs the corporate ladder is ambitious. This is for example the vibe I sensed in Oxford, where the dream was to get a good job in The City, the financial district of London, become reasonably rich and get a nice house in the countryside, spending one’s 50+ years happily surrounded by family.
Yet there is nothing bourgeois about the ambition that animates San Francisco: the ultimate, unspoken goal here is not merely success, but greatness, in all the depth and power that the word implies. This is accompanied by a certain disdain for the tepid ambition of those who merely follow the “established path”. The ultimate goal is having a say in how the future itself will play out, or “bending reality to one’s will”. Being a real world ubermensch. Great people have existed everywhere, but I am not sure there has ever been a place in history that has concentrated so many people who want to be Napoleons.
Of course, this is somewhat delusional. Statistically speaking, one cannot sanely expect greatness in one’s life. But, as Tobias Huber and Byrne Hobart point out in Boom: The End of Stagnation, (constructive) delusion is a prerequisite for greatness. The narratives pervading San Francisco create a self-fulfilling prophecy and do ultimately generate extraordinary things. Not for the individual aspirant, of course: in this story, each ambitious young person arriving in SF is merely a coin toss. But inspire enough coins to toss themselves high enough, and collectively, greatness shall be reached. Failures do not matter, it’s the 100x successes that drive everything forward.
And Silicon Valley has driven America forward. The tech industry is a crucial driver of US economic growth, and the dire consequences of a lack of similar innovation can be seen in Europe. It has given birth to companies like Tesla and SpaceX, with the latter pursuing the most expansive goal of all: making civilisation multiplanetary (and in the meantime providing high quality internet connection across the world). And, perhaps most importantly now, we are witnessing the beginning of an Artificial Intelligence revolution, originated as well in Silicon Valley.
Hier der ganze Beitrag:
