The Internet is San Francisco shaped?

Matt Webb thinks the whole Internet is created in the image of San Fransisco

I caught sight of the dot com bubble half-way along, too late to get properly involved, and moved to London just in time to experience the crunch from the inside. Great timing. The whole boom looked pretty weird from London -- was there really that much cash to be made in pet supply home delivery? Or in online services to invite people to dinner? There must be, I figured, since there was so much money being invested.

Visiting San Francisco for the first time in 2001, it all snapped into place. Here was a city cross-hatched by freeways that each felt just a little too dangerous to walk under. Coupled with a lack of decent public transportation, it meant there were loads of communities slightly too small to support really big stores or specialist shops. I was seeing, in short, a city in which home delivery made a ton of sense: pet supplies, groceries, late night snacks...

Unlike London, the apartments seemed to be big enough to have a decent number of folks over. Enough folks that you may indeed make use of some kind of online service to do invitations. The dot com boom made sense. In San Francisco.

The whole thing is well worth reading. One point worth making, though. The world may not be a gigantic San Fransisco. But it's certainly not a gigantic London either. I realised that when I moved to Manchester.