[iamcasen]

I remember the same. I visited Alcatraz as a kid in the early '90's, and then later returned in 2010 for my tech career. 2010 was pretty great honestly, but by 2014 I realized I was just one of the hollowed out tech workers too busy and drained from work to contribute anything of value to the city.

That's one of the big issues with tech: it isn't really tied to place. It has global reach via cyberspace, with entire decades of work existing purely as bits and bytes in the cloud. Only a software engineer would even have the slightest clue of the vastness of various compute systems composed of millions upon millions of lines of code. People work day and night on this stuff, and the general public only sees the tip of the iceberg.

I think this makes for a challenging recipe to balance in a local economy