Redefining the Local “Tech Scene”

I spent this week in New York for interviews, meetings and the DLD conference, where I interviewed two veteran journalists (Wired’s Steven Levy and New York Times’s John Markoff) and one disruptor disrupting them (Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti). And seemingly everywhere I went, people wanted to talk about the same thing: the vibrancy of the “New York Tech Scene.”

The idea of  “tech scenes” has long made me uneasy. Talking about Silicon Valley, Alley (New York), Beach (LA) and Prairie (somewhere in Midwest, doesn’t seem to be agreement), Allee (Berlin) increasingly seems like an insufficient way to analyze this technology revolution. It involves comparing apples and oranges, in my opinion, when we should really be doing something else.