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I've lived in Seattle my whole life.

Do you think the culture is affected by one specific industry being so prominent? For instance, in New York people might ask where you live because it might be too difficult to even understand what someone else does. (Someone's address in NY isn't just some clever proxy for asking their income, since it could be related to how savvy they were at some point in the past, and could be an opener for talking about specific restaurants, etc)

Yes, the culture is affected, for better or worse. Lately it seems like it's been for the worse. To me, the crowding and traffic are the most significant problems. In addition, it's been proven time and again that over-reliance on specific industries is very, very bad for cities and regions. See also: the steel industry in the Eastern United States, aerospace in Seattle, and the tech crash of 2001 in the Bay Area.

That's why we should distribute tech. Yeah, there are benefits to clustering, but at a certain scale the negative affects start to outweight the benefits and simply induce misery. See also: what's happening in SF, Seattle, and other areas where tech has far too much influence on how everyone in a city/region else has to live.

As a programmer, I'm certainly not against tech, but I think industries should have some sort of collective ethics about taking over certain places.

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