Southby

Now comes one of the weekends where it’s a great time to be in San Francisco.  Burning Man is one.  The other is South by Southwest Interactive, a.k.a. Nerding Man, the tech-annex of the hallowed South by Southwest music industry festival.  SxSWi has somehow become the tail wagging the dog, the opportunity for all the hipsters in SoMa to hop a plane to Austin, that sainted paradise on Earth…

…hold. Up.

Texas.  TEXAS.  George W. Bush and Mack Brown and Ted Cruz and Rick Perry and Aggies and the Dallas Cowboys and the entire spectrum of Southern pathology.  Just as Atlanta got to be “the city too busy to hate” (not too decent, not too Christian, they just couldn’t find the time?) and wound up with every Southern branch office and pro sports team, Austin somehow gets to be the get-out-of-jail-free card because they have bands and beer and basically nothing you wouldn’t find in Boulder or Tuscaloosa or Nashville…except bats.

And of course there’s the great Texas economic miracle, by which regulations and taxes race to the bottom while the roads turn into moonscapes and kids graduate high school thinking Jesus rode dinosaurs.  Kind of a shitshow, actually, but then that’s at the heart of the great Southern economic experiment: make yourself a third-world equivalent and you can get all the business to move South.  Right before it decamps to Shenzen.  It’s how southern Alabama became a textile capital in the mid-20th century and a ghost land at the end of it.

And then I look at the article in the Verge last week, about the Googleburg-ing of Mountain View, and it occurs to me that we’re missing a hell of an opportunity here.  Google has about 11,000 employees in Mountain View.  Half of them drive alone to work, which explains some of the traffic (more is explained by the horrific geographical coincidence of where Google is located; the placement of the ‘Plex puts it on the wrong side of 101 from every other freeway in the area and too far to walk from any train system).  The buses are controversial and don’t carry as many people as Google asserts; even if they did, discontinuing them doesn’t necessarily mean single riders (it’s equally likely that half the bus riders would move somewhere closer to work). Google itself doesn’t generate nearly as much tax revenue as one would expect; with most of its employees eating on campus (tax-free) and living somewhere else and not really selling much product, very little flows into the local coffers – in fact, there’s a good case to be made that Mountain View would be just as well off if Google decamped somewhere else.

So why not Birmingham?

Seriously.  Birmingham is fifty years removed from police dogs and fire hoses.  The state is still suffused with racism and pig-ignorance, as should be obvious to anyone who was watching the opening session of the state Legislature, but the city of Birmingham has artisanal coffee and amazing Beard-award-winning restaurants and a spectacular new downtown ballpark – and a rent and tax climate that would allow Google to do its business almost without paying a nickel.  If the state was willing to grant ridiculous tax incentives to Mercedes to build a plant in 1993, how much more would they go nuts to attract the biggest Internet company of them all?

And Google’s business is on the Internet.  They don’t have manufacturing plants to work with.  They don’t have factories to operate.  The whole promise of the Internet is that you can do stuff from anywhere.  Lay down the fiber, clear some open-plan loft space, and boom, you’re off to the races.  Why not?  If Google feels insufficient love from the people of Northern California, why not head for the Heart of Dixie and start a new revolution outside Silicon Valley?

Let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you know damn well why not.  But why not put their money where their mouth is and see what happens?

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