Bigger and better things than, you know, Facebook games and click through ads.
If the less risk-averse minority believes innovating will make them a quick buck, they might give it a go. The majority, however, will try to follow the rest of the lemmings to the pot at the end of the rainbow, which right now seems to be Facebook games, iphone apps, and web services.
Maybe their minds are not that great after all.
The other problem is more systemic and less confined to tech. Most of the people I know under 40 are shackled to student and other forms of debt and home ownership is utterly unthinkable to them. (So they have no way to ever escape paying rent to the rentier class.) They have no "fuck you money," or even enough slack to contemplate changing course. They have to go for whatever pays the best even if they hate it and even if it's stupid or they have no hope of ever escaping the indentured servitude of the debt-financed college degree.
Combine that with real estate hyperinflation and you have a formula for an economy that encourages premature convergence on local maxima:
http://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/bitstream/1822/4291/1/P07...
I know that what drives me is the hope that one day I will have amassed enough money that I can stop going to work for somebody else, and instead choose to work on what interests me.
Why does it take millions of dollars to be able to do good work?
As they scaled, regulatory realities set in... but to trivialize Elon like that is foolish imo.
The archetype?
For one, he worked on real stuff from the beginning -- not ads or social crap: online publishing and payments.
Second, even if he fit the profile, he would hardly be an archetype, because I don't see many (if anyone) following on his footsteps.
People making FU money and leisuring or working on pet hobbies I do see. But people making FU money and "going and doing something real", well, can't think of anyone. There could be 2 or 3. I doubt there are ten.
I chuckle when I think back to this and realize this is what world markets have become: a place for k-r4d 31337 d00d3z to totally pwn the market, l0l.
I wonder what "restructuring" you have in mind though? It seems stronger wealth redistribution and higher taxes could be one form of structural change that might eliminate get--rich-quick schemes.
Even if you want to do a startup, avoid "startup culture" and the "startup scene" like the plague. Just build something, launch it, and market it, and ignore all that noise.
Not calling your thing a startup at all can be a good start. Call it a project, or a business, or whatever.
Just look at hot huge github has become in the past five years. not to mention open source linux distros, which have arguably taken over Microsoft in the 'best desktop OS' field lately (yet still behind, in my opinion, OS X). There's also new devices like Raspberry Pis, Arduinos and Beagleboards, which are bringing a new age in 'open source' learning. It's a rather amazing time we're living in, actually.
I also don't see how the narrative even fits in a world where we've seen Google, SpaceX, Tesla, and the Apple smartphone revolution emerge from the Valley recently.
Facebook, social, and the boy-hacker culture is just one thread in the recent history of the Valley. I do find the systematization of "get-rich-quick" to be interesting in of itself, though.