I moved out of the Bay Area after 5 years, and to be honest, the divide between where I am and where the ideological center of Silicon Valley has drifted just continues to get wider.
It has little to do with politics, and it has more to do with the role of technology in human life and the future.
Silicon Valley is overrun by techno-utopians.
I used to be into that, believing that software was this wonderful force that is going to turn man from the ape he is into some kind of artificially-intelligent hyper-being. It's a fail, it's a fantasy. It's just not going to happen, and it's time to wake up from the dream. We're not going to be living on Mars or visit Jupiter or become immortal, not in the next 10 years or in the lifetime of anyone reading this. With high probability you're going to live out your life and die somewhere between 70 and 100. Just like the billions of humans before you. Get used to it! It's OK, even.
I moved away to get out of the shouting match, to get away from so many young bright software developers like me straight out of college, who just want to disrupt everything for no reason, and to get out of that echo chamber. Everyone's a unicorn. Everyone's gonna change the world. FFS your stupid chat apps are not going to change the world.
Moving out of the Bay Area is not about being disillusioned, it's about focusing on things that actually matter, instead of the silly bubble.