| "In years past, when technologists got disenchanted with Silicon Valley, they might move to Silicon Beach (Los Angeles), Silicon Hills (Austin), Silicon Slopes (Salt Lake City), even Silicon Alley (New York)," Arielle Pardes writes in her most recent feature for WIRED. But by the summer of 2021, a new destination was ascendent: Miami. In some tech circles, the city "was like crypto," Pardes writes. "The more you heard people talk about it, the more you thought about buying in." So Pardes went to Miami to appraise the burgeoning hype. She watched a Marlins game with a group of early-stage startup founders, one of whom told her, "We got memed into moving." She visited with a venture capitalist in his new apartment in Miami Beach, took a driving tour in a real estate agent's Porsche 911 convertible, and sat down with Miami's crypto-evangelist young mayor, Francis Suarez. Pardes found potential, but also questions. "Mayor Suarez had promised that an influx of technologists would bolster the local economy, in a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats way," she writes. "Instead, the actual tide was rising every year, and so were rents." How long before the hype moves on? Anthony Lydgate | Features Editor, WIRED |
