I finished reading City of Fortune over the weekend. It's a history of Venice, an early example of a "virtual" city without natural resources other than a built in moat and pulling itself up with grit, gumption and a lot of warehouses. It kinda reminds me of Amazon to the Byzantine-esque empire in DC these days. Similar to that analogy, Venice had a very intertwined and at times adversarial relationship with Constantinople. Here's a post I wrote partway through the book, part of the Contraptions book club for January: https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/of-upstart-entrepots-and-dying-empires

The bittersweet and often broken relationship between Venice and Byzantium feels like a good parallel with tech and CA gov today

Venice 
- virtual warehouses (Amazon analogy)
- trader ethic
- networked
- small, agile, nimble
- ships -> naval power

Byzantium
- center of the world (think landholders)
- guardian ethic
- center
- 10x the resources
- walls, army -> hubris

Playing around a bit and may elaborate more in the future. There is definitely something there in Venice's innovations in norms aka breaking the rules in trading with the infidels and Byzantium's complacent focus on owning land rather than scrappily trading for advantage