[My current attempt to play in this playground hasn’t made me any less cynical about it. -egg]
Who knows what innovations will crawl from between the interlocked toes of the technology corporations, venture capitalists, physicists, chemists, engineers, and biologists now incubating in the nation’s creative class redoubts. Collaboration is the buzzword that sits tremulously like a fig leaf over the privatizing clusters in which America’s future is restarted.
A mix of big corporations and investor-backed startup enterprises gathers around the shared strategic value of innovation, operating in an environment rich with public resources. The triumphant arc is chronicled in the rapid development of some new product and said to be personified by a Zuckerberg or a Gates, a captain of coding brimming with cowboy grit, pressing onward into the computerized frontier and all. The hero is the one who creates something from nothing, thus resolving the eternal pundit riddles of American life like Can we keep our edge? and Are we still number one?