Seattle is "the next Detroit." This is the thinking presented in a piece published by Pacific Standard. Broadly speaking, there are four technological ages, and each has as its center a city, and what makes that city central is its defining company. The first age (1880 to 1920) was all about Pittsburgh and US Steel. The next age (1920 and 1960), Detroit and Ford. After that (1960 to 2000), Silicon Valley and Intel. The present and fourth technological age is ruled by Seattle and Amazon.

The thing that places Amazon at the core of the new age of technology, according to Pacific Standard, is not its online shopping services but its cloud services. Our times are about computing power. Jim Russell, a geographer, writes:

Amazon's Model T is the cloud. Amazon Web Services sells computing power, akin to Ford selling horsepower.

He also reports that Amazon employs more people than Microsoft and Google combined, and that many of those people are based in Seattle, which owes much of its current growth to the seemingly unstoppable growth of Amazon.

The final sentence of his post will make you shudder: "We are living in the world of Jeff Bezos right now."