NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plans to build a world-class science and engineering campus in Manhattan is the impetus for a debate in the New York Times about whether the Big Apple can ever overtake Silicon Valley as America’s center of tech. I think it’ll be a long haul at best. Tech-centric culture has been gradually and relentlessly built and nurtured in the Valley ever since Shockley and Hewlett and Packard set up shop there. It’s kind of like asking why Los Angeles can’t do better than Broadway or why a country that has never known democracy has trouble installing one. Minds have to be changed before reality can. An excerpt from the Times piece, which was written by Flipboard‘s Craig Mod:

“To be in Silicon Valley is to be completely immersed in technology. The building, the pushing, the hacking, the designing, the iterating, the testing, the acquisitions, the funding — it is everywhere and wholly inescapable. Here is a culture and place that emerged seemingly from nothing, and yet over the last 50 years it has developed a mythology deep and inspiring and all its own.

Anyone can take part in this great valley mythology. For a place so overflowing with money, there is shockingly little pretension. With sufficient curiosity and gumption you are in. This is what captures the minds of entrepreneurs around the world. That the great founders aren’t in Ivory Towers — they are standing in front of you, eating yogurt. That the great companies aren’t just of the past — they are being replaced by even greater companies. And those greater companies are hiring like mad.”