1/ This long piece by @JamesFallows is a brave and partly successful attempt at a positive reading of the zeitgeist. Some comments https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/reinventing-america/556856/ …
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2/ I'm going to call Fallows' thesis the "Little Sky Country" optimist narrative, I think that label says more than the title of his upcoming book, "Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America"
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3/ Fallows' thesis is one part Tocqueville (energetic travel criss-crossing America to get the "real America" story) and one part "Our Town" in a Thornton Wilder sense.
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4/ The headline "finding" as it were, is that the zeitgeist is much more positive at a local resolution than global. People are being more resourceful, agent-y, and pragmatic locally, on every subject from education and economic revitalization to race relations and immigration.
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5/ You get the sense that Fallows is trying to play Tocqueville to Trump's Andrew Jackson (it is interesting that Tocqueville visited and wrote (1831-35) during Jackson's tenure (1829-1837).
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6/ It appears to be an attempt at an oblique counter-programming of Trumpism. But I'm not sure it entirely works, and the problem is the fact that this is a "Little Sky Country" thesis. America is "Big Sky Country" and 100,000 Little Skies don't add up to a Big Sky.
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7/ While Fallows doesn't deny the reality of the toxicity of national level discourse, he appears to think it either doesn't matter too much, or that Little Sky Country thriving will defeat it.
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8/ Just two examples: venture capital and reverse migration trends, which Fallows treats as evidence for the potential of Little Sky Country.
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9/ Unfortunately, VC has not shown much potential for thriving at smaller-than-SV scales. It is a model that relies on scaled concentration of capital. Almost all attempts to replicate SV at smaller scale fail badly.
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Replying to @vgr
Hmm have failed thus far. I agree that investors find it hard to trust startups 1000 miles away but as decentralization and virtual workforces grow, couldn't that shake up a bit?
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Yeah, that's the dream, but when it happens, what it will do is realize SV-like geographic scale potential via virtual distributed systems, not make small-town sensibilities create wealth in small-town ways.
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Replying to @vgr
do agree that small-town won't really work that way, but it's more about optionality for those in small towns without necessary relocation, it appears.
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