I feel like everyone I know that works in tech lives in the bay or Seattle. NYC as the center of finance makes sense to me, DC as the center of gov't obviously, Boston/New England as a center of learning also makes sense, but why have these places ended up as the center of tech?
idk, I haven't gotten to that part of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris yet. From what I've read I suspect it has to do with rapid industrialization from the gold rush, along with the first commercial bank in the country being founded in SF leading to financialization, leland stanford's hijinks, cheap labor with high immigration, and lax regulation with high defense spending (a lot of the bay is heavily polluted to this day)
Also a concentration of top tier academic institutions in the Bay (Stanford, UC Berkeley, others)