Now comes one of the weekends where it\u2019s a great time to be in San Francisco. \u00a0Burning Man is one. \u00a0The other is South by Southwest Interactive, a.k.a. Nerding Man, the tech-annex of the hallowed South by Southwest music industry festival. \u00a0SxSWi 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…<\/p>\n
\u2026hold. Up.<\/p>\n
Texas. \u00a0TEXAS. \u00a0George W. Bush and Mack Brown and Ted Cruz and Rick Perry and Aggies and the Dallas Cowboys and the entire spectrum of Southern pathology. \u00a0Just as Atlanta got to be \u201cthe city too busy to hate\u201d (not too decent, not too Christian, they just couldn\u2019t 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\u2019t find in Boulder or Tuscaloosa or Nashville\u2026except bats.<\/p>\n
And of course there\u2019s 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. \u00a0Kind of a shitshow, actually, but then that\u2019s 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. \u00a0Right before it decamps to Shenzen. \u00a0It\u2019s how southern Alabama became a textile capital in the mid-20th century and a ghost land at the end of it.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re missing a hell of an opportunity here. \u00a0Google has about 11,000 employees in Mountain View. \u00a0Half 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 \u2018Plex puts it on the wrong side of 101 from every other freeway in the area and too far to walk from any train system). \u00a0The buses are controversial and don\u2019t carry as many people as Google asserts; even if they did, discontinuing them doesn\u2019t necessarily mean single riders (it\u2019s equally likely that half the bus riders would move somewhere closer to work). Google itself doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s a good case to be made that Mountain View would be just as well off if Google decamped somewhere else.<\/p>\n
So why not Birmingham?<\/p>\n
Seriously. \u00a0Birmingham is fifty years removed from police dogs and fire hoses. \u00a0The 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. \u00a0If 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?<\/p>\n
And Google\u2019s business is on the Internet. \u00a0They don\u2019t have manufacturing plants to work with. \u00a0They don\u2019t have factories to operate. \u00a0The whole promise of the Internet is that you can do stuff from anywhere. \u00a0Lay down the fiber, clear some open-plan loft space, and boom, you\u2019re off to the races. \u00a0Why not? \u00a0If 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?<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s face it, if you\u2019re reading this, you know damn well why not. \u00a0But why not put their money where their mouth is and see what happens?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Now comes one of the weekends where it\u2019s a great time to be in San Francisco. \u00a0Burning Man is one. \u00a0The other is South by Southwest Interactive, a.k.a. Nerding Man, the tech-annex of the hallowed South by Southwest music industry festival. \u00a0SxSWi has somehow become the tail wagging the dog, the opportunity for all the … <\/p>\n