Big Tech Has Helped Trash America

And tech has certainly helped trash the place — the place being America.

Hence, the need for reinvention, which I discussed with Mayor Francis Xavier Suarez of Miami last month. It seems like an eternity has passed since our conversation — yet it still resonates.

I had called the peppy pol because of the spate of attention that the Florida city has gotten recently after a bunch of well-known Silicon Valley investors — like Keith Rabois and Shervin Pishevar — had relocated there from the Bay Area to begin anew.

Remember “Miami Vice,” the TV crime drama set in Florida that was an ’80s phantasmagoria of white suits, fast speedboats and a whole lot of artisanal beard stubble? Now, decades later, consider the latest trend: Miami VC.

Mr. Suarez, a young Republican rising star, has garnered a lot of attention lately by using social media to market his balmy city as the next great place to start over. It all began early in December when a longtime investor suggested on Twitter that Silicon Valley should move to Miami.

“How can I help?” Mr. Suarez replied, employing a can-do, come-on-down brio that is in stark contrast to the growing disdain cities like San Francisco have developed for tech culture.

Mayor Suarez loves you, tech bro, he really loves you.

He kept at it for weeks, with a series of pithy and adorkable comments on Twitter, trying to take advantage of the wholesale re-evaluation many tech firms are having about staying in the Bay Area, given that the pandemic has spurred a rethink of remote work.

Of course, Mr. Suarez knows that creating the next Silicon Valley has been tried and has failed many times over the last decades — remember Silicon Prairie? Silicon Desert? Silicon Beach? Recreating that iron triangle of venture capitalists, a major world-class university and tech giants is far-off for Miami, and perhaps futile, too.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/opinion/tech-hope-america.html