A tier of retail exists that most of the country has never had reason to know about -- not because it costs too much, but because the stores themselves were never nearby. And for at least one brand, proximity to the store turns out to be the first step in a documented, litigated system for deciding who gets access to what's actually scarce.

By 2005, real language-processing companies existed in Las Vegas, a Boston suburb, Pittsburgh, and a small city outside Salt Lake City -- not one of them in Silicon Valley. Each was funded independently, wherever it already existed, by capital chasing one urgent national need.

Nevada built an entire city from scratch in 1931 just to house Hoover Dam's workforce. In 2014, the state gave Tesla $1.3 billion to build a different kind of power plant -- the Gigafactory.