As sad as it may be that the current California-centered incarnation of technology has fallen to become Yet Another Feudal Reputation Economy, I think the only thing worth doing is to figure out what comes next. It's dead, we won't be able to save it, so let's move on. The established players aren't going to quit their shitty behaviors just because a few negative blog posts are written about the death of meritocracy in the Valley (which is old news; they're the ones who killed it).

Rather than complain about MBA culture and colluding VCs and Stanford Welfare, we should be figuring out a way to replace these assholes. What are we, as a generation, going to build that shows them up? The same inefficiency that beset large corporations in the 1990s is hitting the mainstream startup scene now.

Maybe Austin will take the lead, possibly somewhere else like Portland, Chicago, Baltimore, or Durham. It might not even be in the US.

What does make me sad was that I thought (being extremely naive) that the Crash of 2008 might have a positive effect on technology, by reversing the "talent graveyard" effect of finance. However, quants (the ones we'd want) mostly stayed in high demand; the ones who moved into tech from finance were the MBA-culture types who ruined New York's potential to ever be taken seriously as a startup scene. It had the exact opposite effect of what I was hoping for.