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David has a long, thoughtful post on the pathology of this region:

After a decade of living here, I see the reactionary narrow-mindedness that lies under New England's progressive face. This region still votes Democratic and champions liberal causes, certainly. But the landscape, so seeded with history and the evidence of past successes, breeds a poisonous conservatism that never looks beyond its own feet, and never thinks past yesterday.

This is a deep and scary observation. It puts Boston somewhere on the scale between Silicon Valley (where a “conservative” might wish it was 1999) and Paris (where someone is always frowning at you for violating some ancient rule of etiquette). I find it personally threatening because a conservative, hidebound environment is the worst place to write software; it's important to leverage the malleability of program code to try out new ideas and back out of the stupid ones. On the other hand, maybe the growing generation of hackers will carry an attraction to change into the halls of power.

This is all very interesting because it combines questions of industry development and city (vs. suburb) growth with broad cultural analysis. One of America's pivotal characteristics—a lack of history—is self-effacing, and as this plays out, the implications will touch just about everyone.