Cheery optimism and pride in a place are all well and good. This article feels like it's from a different time, perhaps a decade before. Certainly, there has been a lot of negative press of Silicon Valley in recent years. Much of that has been well-deserved. For years, engineers have pretended to be above the petty tribalism of politics (even as we bikeshedded and fought our editor holy wars), only for the revelations of the last few years of SV lobbying and collusion with the surveillance state to come out.

Of course, this article is more about SV as a cultural place and ideal, and not a political force, more about Manhattan than Wall Street. But it still brushes off high rents as normal, something ever-present. Meanwhile, a San Jose city councilman and his family are evicted because of high rents:

https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-housing-crisis-council...

I grew up in San Jose. (I remember when we were the capital of Silicon Valley, not San Francisco.) We now live in a very different Bay Area from that of the irrationally exuberant '90s. I think positive profiles of SV have to be tempered by realistic coverage of the many, many problems this place is experiencing. At the very least, acknowledgement of these problems- and not breezy dismissal- can spur change to make things better. So we can build a Silicon Valley worthy of these utopian fantasies.