Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. He has created a musical piece titled “Berkshirian” for you to enjoy while reading this column.
What’s unfolding in and around the Berkshires isn’t just a shift in geography. It’s a redefinition of what innovation looks and feels like. From converted barns filled with projectors and pianos to world-class institutions blending AI with the arts, the region is quietly offering a blueprint for soulful innovation. Berkshirian Tech is not about unicorns or exits. It’s about resonance, sustainability, and right-sizing ambition. If Silicon Valley ran on adrenaline, the Berkshires hum with intention. Together with Albany’s rise as a semiconductor hub, the region is poised to strike a balance between deep culture and deep tech. We are not just creating the next thing. We are creating the right thing. Silicon Valley didn’t lose its soul. It has one, but it’s not as deeply embedded or enduring as the soul of the Berkshires.
Silicon Valley was born in defense labs, raised by venture capital, and optimized for speed, scale, and disruption. And now? Many who helped build it are quietly walking away. Not because they failed, but because they succeeded, and discovered it wasn’t enough. They’re looking for something more. Something deeper. Something with roots. And in the hills between New York and Massachusetts, they’re starting to find it.
I live equidistant from Juilliard and MIT, which are both two and a half hours away. For the first few years after I moved to the Berkshires full-time in 2013, I spent one day a week at each. I’ve taken classes at both institutions and know them well, not just geographically, but philosophically. I also worked in Silicon Valley for twenty-five years, and in Boston’s tech sector for ten. I’m fluent in both languages: engineering and composition, circuitry and soul. But when I had to choose where to ground my life, I chose the Berkshires. Not to retire. To rewire.
At forty, I made a conscious shift. I chose to live in nature and visit culture, rather than living in culture and visiting nature. This transition was one I made while in graduate school in Rhode Island, and I continued it when I moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to live by the ocean. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. At the time, the Berkshires had everything I needed except reliable bandwidth. That changed in just the past few years. Now, people like me can live here and earn a living. We can collaborate globally while living locally. We can participate in ideational proximity, not based on where we are, but on what we value.
This shift is already manifesting in tangible ways across the region. At the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, scholars at the Digital Scholarship Lab are utilizing machine learning and AR/VR tools to reinterpret classic art collections. This is technology serving culture, not dominating it. In North Adams, MASS MoCA showcase installations like James Turrell’s immersive light chambers and Laurie Anderson’s AI collaborations. These are experiences that are simultaneously technical feats and emotional journeys.
In the age of geographic proximity, value was measured by access. In the age of ideational proximity, value is measured by resonance.
This is where the term “Berkshirian” emerges. A Berkshirian isn’t just someone who lives in Berkshire County. It’s a mindset. A worldview. A conscious decision to lead with soul, not scale. To pursue quality over velocity. To ground ideas in the landscape, not just in the cloud.
The evidence is everywhere once you begin to look. In Chatham, Mac-Haydn Theatre is experimenting with projection mapping and hybrid productions that extend their cultural reach without losing their essence. At PS21, composers, dancers, and digital artists collaborate in intentionally intergenerational workshops that would make the creative salons of Florence, Italy, proud. Meanwhile, in converted barns around Great Barrington, independent collectives of musicians, coders, and filmmakers are prototyping AI-generated music tools in environments where acoustic instruments and the natural world shape the design process itself.
And you don’t even have to live in Massachusetts. Many of us live just over the border in Columbia County, New York. We shop, eat, work out, and perform in the Berkshires. We’re New Yorkers who chose to align with a different rhythm. A small collective called FrinGeTech, composed of former Silicon Valley and NYC engineers now based in Kinderhook, exemplifies this perfectly. They are developing tools for sustainable forestry, acoustic ecology, and regenerative agriculture monitoring. They prioritize meaningful problems over maximum scale.
Here’s the part no one is talking about. The Berkshires could be the Florence of the 21st century. A place where culture and technology don’t compete but cross-pollinate. We have the ingredients: a long-standing arts ecosystem, an influx of creative professionals, increasing bandwidth, and now, emerging just to our northwest, Albany as a potential semiconductor hub.
Albany’s GlobalFoundries expansion and AI chip research ecosystem are creating something unprecedented. Tech sector workers are choosing to live in the Berkshires and commute or telecommute, bringing high economic potential to the cultural landscape. This convergence of blue-sky innovation with blue hills nearby is already reshaping communities like West Stockbridge, where The Foundry supports experimental performances that integrate projection, sound tech, and improvisational interfaces. These performances help local artists scale their work globally while staying grounded in Berkshirian values.
What’s happening in New York’s Capital Region may be the missing piece. It could be the economic engine that gives the Berkshires a sustainable business model. Western Massachusetts has historically struggled with job creation, but Albany’s tech boom is unfolding only 40 miles away from Great Barrington, much closer than either Boston or New York City. It could redefine what’s possible for those who live here.
Even the counterculture contributes to this ecosystem. The Flying Deer Nature Center in East Chatham offers tech-free resilience programs that often attract former tech executives seeking reconnection. This is an active antidote to screen-centric burnout, which in turn fuels more thoughtful technology development. At Bard College, just a short drive away, creative residencies involve AI-generated theater using IBM Watson to explore how algorithms can co-author drama with human performers.
Berkshirian Tech isn’t a brand. It’s a possibility. It’s what happens when you combine cultural depth with technological fluency, nature with network, soul with signal.
It’s not about unicorns. It’s about usefulness.
If Silicon Valley optimized for speed, maybe Berkshirian Tech will optimize for meaning. Perhaps the future won’t be built in the largest cities, but in the most intelligent ecosystems. The ones where trees outnumber people. The ones where the volume of traffic doesn’t drown out the sound of thought.
We are not trying to recreate the past here. We are trying to prefigure a better future, much like Florence in the Renaissance, which wasn’t just a cultural center, but also a thriving hub of commerce and finance. That blend of art and enterprise is what allowed Florence to flourish. The Berkshires, with Albany rising nearby, could follow a similar trajectory.
That’s what Berkshirians are doing, whether they live in Great Barrington or just over the line in Hillsdale. Whether they used to live in Manhattan, Silicon Valley, Boston, or Paris. They’re not building the next thing. They’re building the right thing. And they’re doing it from here in the Berkshires.
