Tech City: Myths of Silicon Valley and globalization

The San Francisco Bay Area, encompassing Silicon Valley, is the world’s premier center of electronics and information technology in the age of the internet and social media. The urban region is a leading example of the dialectic of globalization/deglobalization via networks of big cities and industrial clusters. Its prodigious growth and enrichment has been marked by rapid innovation, new firm start-up, and venture capital, and this has led to a mythology of "immaculate innovation" by technical wizards, heroic entrepreneurs and cagey risk-takers. Reality does not support this view. In fact, the region’s achievements rest on a solid base of capital investment, large corporations, agglomeration economies, technological development and human labor, both skilled and unskilled.