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- How did California become the epicenter of tech & innovation in the 21st century? | RP 91
How did California become the epicenter of tech & innovation in the 21st century? | RP 91
PLUS: Books for better work-life balance & why Chinese food is all over the world
Roxine Kee
April 21, 2023
Hey friends!
Welcome to Rox’s Picks — a weekly newsletter that analyzes business, technology, and media through the lens of history.
Last week’s newsletter had a 44% open rate. The top link you clicked was this clip about looking deep and mysterious in museums. Welcome to the 1 person who joined since then!
I’m slurping my caramel macchiato as I write this from my quaint neighborhood Starbucks.
The weather in Toronto has been much chillier this week. I attended try outs for a competitive ultimate frisbee club I want to play with. It was not the best time to throw flat plastic discs outdoors, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.
This week, I participated in the kickoff of the 10th cohort of David Perell’s Write of Passage course. This is the fifth time I’m going through it. The course has changed the trajectory of my career each time. I don’t doubt that this cohort will be equally as transformative.
As part of the course, I’ll be publishing five essays in the next five weeks. It’ll be a challenge to publish them and write the newsletter, but I’m committed to it.
Wish me luck!
(If you’re curious about WOP, here’s what I thought about the course and how I prepared for it.)
And with that…
Here’s what I learned, shared, and paid attention to this week:
1. A fascinating argument on how our modern world came to be —
How 1970s California Created the Modern World by Francis J. Gavin
California is arguably at the nucleus of modern culture:
Silicon Valley raised multibillion dollar companies on the backs of transistors.
Hollywood produced blockbusters like Jaws and Stars Wars, exporting American film and culture to a global audience.
Gold’s Gym turned Venice Beach into the creatine junkies’ Mecca, simultaneously drawing up the blueprint for the modern fitness club.
I could go on. But the question is, how did California become the influencer of influencers of the modern age?
In this essay, historian and academic Francis Gavin suggests that this phenomenon — what he calls, California dreaming — was caused by a number of seemingly disparate events:
The rise of Silicon Valley as a centre for software and hardware innovation
The rise and establishment of venture capital and startup culture
The emergence of California as a global shipping port
An improvement in relations with China
New shipping container technology
Gavin argues that these shifts, as well as a number of developments in the restaurant, fashion, and aerospace industries, positioned 1970s California at the epicenter of American influence on global economics and pop culture, a quake that has reverberated over the last 50 years.
Meta-lessons:
There are many factors involved in any existing trend. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, we can only connect the dots looking backwards. This essay is a great example of how understanding history helps us better comprehend the present.
To fully understand an event in time, we need to take a multidisciplinary approach. At a minimum, we need a grasp of economics, history, and world politics. To understand how the 1970s built 2023, we need to understand the history of Silicon Valley, the relationship between Asia and the USA, and the stalemate of the Cold War.
We need to ask about competing narratives, about what didn’t happen. Historians tend to remember the 1970s as a turbulent phase in history. But it birthed a technological revolution that others would argue ushered in a new golden age for human civilization.
Along those lines, keep in mind that it is the winners who tend to write the history books. Learning about our present world is great, but it is also worth asking why Silicon Valley didn’t emerge anywhere else like in Japan, Britain, or even New York.
2. A fun read on the ubiquity and localization of Chinese food —
How Chinese Food Won Over the World by Sam Lin-Sommer
This article features an interview with Chinese-Canadian filmmaker, Cheuk Kwan. According to the article, Kwan “spent four years filming Chinese Restaurants, a 2006 documentary series spanning six continents and 14 countries.” He also speaks five languages, having grown up in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan.
For me, reading this article was like meeting an acquaintance who immediately felt like an old friend. I've always taken enormous pride in being Filipino-Chinese. Thanks to my upbringing, I feel just as comfortable asking a tram driver in Portugal to parar for my stop, as I do buying halo-halo in a sari-sari store in Jerusalem on a Sabbath, or communicating in Hokkien, Mandarin, and English in Singapore.
Meta-lessons:
Just as there is no such thing as authentic Chinese food, there is no such thing as authentic, undiluted culture. Chinese food anywhere is heavily influenced by the culture it grows out of, the ingredients on hand, and the palate of the cook.
Similarly, for better or for worse, any culture in history is a product of geography, trade, or imperialism (amongst other factors). Kwan says,
“I wanted to make my films for Chinese people and say, ‘You are not as pure as you think.’ All those maritime voyages and the Silk Road all brought cultures and people from everywhere, and they got mixed into the population. And of course, food-wise, too, Chinese food is not as pure as you think either. A lot of influences from other places.”
Understanding history helps us notice parallels between different cultures. Here’s a few simplistic examples:
While medieval Europeans were obsessed with conquest, the Chinese have always been obsessed with commerce.
In the modern day, while the US exported its culture through Hollywood, China did it through its cuisine.
The spread of the Christian gospel in Asia was a result of the first Jewish Christians fleeing Roman persecution in Palestine. Similarly, the dissemination of Chinese food, culture, and tiger parents into the world was a result of Chinese immigration to escape dynastic wars and the communist government.
3. A quote that’s guided me since 2019 —
You have to keep a dozen of your favourite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
I’ve kept a list of my 12 favourite problems since 2019 — the first time I went through Write of Passage. After Cohort 10 kicked off this week, David asked us to come up with a new list to serve as inspiration for our writing.
Here’s mine:
As the quote above describes, these questions cover areas of curiosity at which I could chip away for months or years.
Meta-lessons:
These lists of questions reflect (a) which games in life that you only want to play for a season, and (b) which ones you want to play over and over again. In solving your questions, you may realize that…
You don’t feel the urge to dig deeper into the question. That’s a dead end, and that’s okay!
There are more nuanced questions beneath the first one that you’d like to answer. These are ones that you would like to keep digging deeper into for years to come. Pay special attention to these — they’re your passions!
The 12 Favourite Questions exercise serves as a guiding light for what you consume and publish. Evaluate every piece of content you save, every book you stack on to your To Read pile, every podcast episode you add to your queue based on how well they help you make progress on your questions.
As well, whenever you come across an interesting idea, story, or concept, run it through your questions. This is a systematic way to find a unique angle for anything you publish.
The questions are supposed to evolve over time. In the future, if your new list is different from your old list, celebrate! This means you solved the questions and problems you had before and are ready for bigger, better ones.
😉 You're welcome
A selection of interesting links & fun recommendations.
• ❝ “I have never bothered or asked in what way I was useful to society as a whole; I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result.”
📚Rest by Alex Soojung Kim-Pang. If you enjoy books like Mason Curry’s Daily Rituals, you’ll like this one. Two quotes that have stuck with me:
“When you examine the lives of history's most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: they organize their lives around their work, but not their days.”
“We've come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that's wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.”
🎙️The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill by Christianity Today. From the website:
“In 2014, after more than a decade of tremendous growth and ministry, Mars Hill Church imploded with the resignation of its lead pastor, Mark Driscoll.
Once a hub for those disenfranchised with cultural Christianity, Mars Hill’s characteristic ‘punk rock spirit’ became its downfall as power, fame, and spiritual trauma invaded the ministry.
But how did things fall apart? Where did Mark Driscoll take a wrong turn? Who could be held responsible for the hurt and disillusionment that resulted?”
That’s all for this week, folks!
I’m off to throw more plastic discs this weekend while I procrastinate on my taxes and my WOP essay.
Thanks for reading.
Stay strong, stay kind, stay human.
Till next week,
— roxine