San Francisco, Manchester and Shenzen

With the largest concentration of geeks in the world, something like four hundred thousand hi-tech workers, the Bay area, centred on San Francisco, is a seriously interesting place.  Just sitting in cafés puts you in touch with the buzz of people putting ideas together. Sometimes they will manage to hook up with venture capitalists, angel investors and the like, ready to risk their money and a start up will be born. Everyone knows that around 90 percent of start-ups fail, maybe 95%., but everyone also has a story about those who succeed, or could have succeeded if they'd taken up the offer of stock instead of cash when offered by one of the founders of Google, Facebook, Twitter or Apple or the like. Those that have made it are the force to beat in a world where is difficult to find any city whose leaders aren't trying to build up its science park, or business start ups working with techies. 

Two hundred years ago it was Manchester that performed this role of being the most exciting place on the planet when it came to shaping its future.  The world's first industrial city, 'the city of a thousand chimneys', people came from around the world to be part of it.  Marx's collaborator Frederick Engels, was one of a thousand Germans who lived in the city.  Writers such as the French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, and novelists such as the future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote about this amazing development.  What everyone commented on was the creation of such vast quantities of wealth in conditions of such appalling exploitation and squalor.

What a contrast to today's San Francisco. Homeless people on many street corners, the local press full of stories of the rising rents squeezing the less fortunate out of the city.  The inequality is there: California spends more on prisons than it does on education and the prison population is disproportionately black. The techies are overwhelmingly white and male.  But something is missing: no chimneys, no smoke and little dirt.   And the answer quite simply is that the chimneys and the dirt are in China.  The I-phone is produced by Foxconn, a Taiwanese company. Its largest factory is in Shenzen, not far from Hongkong employing around 300,000 workers (estimates vary).  So there's the contrast: two hundred years ago the techies worked alongside the spinners and weavers and all the other trades producing the textiles. Today these two groups are  on opposite sides of the globe.

Where does the power lie? With the interconnectedness, the likelihood is that even small groups of workers, whether in Silicon Valley or Shenzen, are potentially strong. But as I remember it, at Cowley, producing motor cars in the early 1970s, they used to say that the closer you are to the finished product the more powerful you are.  I would be surprised if that wasn't still true today.