Do not let their names fool you. The silicon places--- Silicon Slopes, Silicon Prairie, Silicon Beach, Silicon Peach, Silicon Bayou, Silicon Shire, Silicon Desert, Silicon Holler, Silicon Hill and, separately, Silicon Hills---do not aspire to become “the next Silicon Valley.”

Sure, the country’s burgeoning tech enclaves in Utah and Kentucky and Oregon draw inspiration from the original. And sure, they’d love to have even a tiny fraction of the wealth, power, and jobs provided by a massively successful tech company. And sure, the only proven way to do that is to follow the Silicon Valley recipe of accumulating engineering talent, venture investors, incubators, and mentors. And sure, for the last decade, many cities around the country have tried to import the valley’s spirit, work ethic, and culture. Plenty have copied the Valley’s penchant for hype, too. “Could Toledo, Ohio, be the next Silicon Valley?” the PR blasts wonder. “How about Jacksonville, Florida? Care to take a media junket to tour the St. Louis tech scene?”

But leaders from these communities bristle at the idea that they’re emulating Silicon Valley. (Plenty of Los Angeles techies, for example, hate the name “Silicon Beach” because of the comparisons it invites.) They’re doing their own thing, which just happens to mirror a lot of the things that worked in Silicon Valley.

That message hasn’t really changed in the last year, even as Silicon Valley suffers from charges of unethical business practices, sexual harassment, racial and gender discrimination, addictive products, and a toxic culture of greed and hypergrowth. As the tech backlash builds, the leaders of smaller tech scenes elsewhere remain eager to foster the good aspects of Silicon Valley---jobs and innovation---while avoiding any association with the bad. Everyone is aware of the pitfalls, but the promise of job growth and progress that comes with a booming tech industry is too appealing to abandon. It creates a delicate dance, where a model with many ugly flaws still holds a lot of appeal.

Of course, it’s not that delicate in many cases, because these aspiring tech hubs are so far from the scale of Silicon Valley. Worrying about the evils of startup unicorns requires actually having startup unicorns. There’s little need to warn against a toxic “move fast and break things culture” in places where leaders say they and their peers value more community-centric, slow-growth strategies.

Phoenix, for example, isn’t known for its ambitious business culture, according to Greg Head, a local serial entrepreneur. He sees no risk of Phoenix becoming as big and powerful as Silicon Valley. “We’re slowly and organically discovering our own brand of startup and tech ecosystem, which is more about small businesses and less about funding and unicorns and so forth. We have a slower growth, more sustainable model.” Still, he aims to inspire more entrepreneurs to think bigger. “We’ve got to get Phoenix moving into the fast-moving, global tech economy, and we’re a phase away from that.”

Likewise Columbus, Ohio. Chris Olsen spent years as a Silicon Valley venture investor at prestigious firms including Sequoia Capital before moving to Columbus and launching Drive Capital to back Midwestern startups in 2012. He says he’s seen little change in sentiment in the Columbus tech community in the last year. If anything, he says, techies from Silicon Valley now seem more interested in moving elsewhere and Sand Hill Road investors seem more interested in backing companies outside of the Bay Area. “Silicon Valley is far from a perfect ecosystem,” he says. “It’s the land of opportunity for the 1% and it’s great if you’re the 1%, but if you’re everyone else it’s a really tough place to live.”