I expect the future to be bright for little towns that get decent networking infrastructure. At some point the kids who moved back to the cities for cool clubs or artisan cookies or whatever will stop wanting to pay $madness to live in a shoebox in a place where it's impractical to own a car and someone keeps taking a dump on the subway and the population density alone is enough to give a saint a misanthropic streak. Many of them can work anywhere with good bandwidth.It sucks, but unless West Virginia figures out something to do other than mine coal, it's gonna be a rugged place to live.
I actually lived through the last time people said this, in the late 1980's to mid-1990's. I took a sabbatical from work specifically to work in one of these "tech communes" that were springing up in unlikely places like AZ, MT, NM, etc. The idea was that coders could be anywhere, so why not go somewhere cheap, beautiful, and have a really nice life outside of work, as well? Didn't work out. Turns out face-time is a real thing, and that when you work outside of the city, you are not pressured by the same stresses that city-dwellers are... so you don't think of inventing Uber, because, well, shit. The store is right down there, and I walk over there when I need something. Or I borrow Bob's truck when I need some hay. Or whatever. I wound up moving to Eastern Europe just after the wall came down, and lived a Wild-West kind of existence over there for the better part of a decade. And their tech infrastructure was always better than the US, and remains so even today. But Silicon Valley is still the 800 lb gorilla, no matter how many other countries try to develop their own version of it. Turns out, the people who make the disposable income are the people in the cities. And unless you live there with them, you don't come up with the killer apps that they will pay for. (No matter what that "app" is...)
I see my fellow programmers once or twice a year, and management not at all if I can help it. About half of us couldn't locate each other on a paper map. We've been working that way for years. Most of us learned computing in the free software community, so that was most natural to us; we'll email or im when we're in the same room.
This is an interesting point because I can think of four different books off the top of my head that make erudite, well-researched points that all disagree with each other. Bill McKibben agrees with you. The proliferation of online social networks and the decline in the standard of living the world over will lead to isolated small town networks that perform the majority of their socialization via virtual space, while their physical presence is likely to be curtailed and insular. Stephen Pinker disagrees with you. He points out that the network effects of innovation within cities exactly matches the ATP transfer efficiency of biological organisms (or some such - I can't remember precisely how he worked that one out) and that it takes a large grouping of people in order to find that small grouping that inspires you. Social movements, after all, always come out of the coffee houses of metropolises. Shannon Hayes agrees with you. Happiness is best found through self-sufficiency and generating your own resources and happiness independent of money or finance and that really, salary is a terrible marker for success when happiness matters so much more. Sherry Turkle disagrees with you. Virtual companionship is no substitute for actual companionship and happiness comes from the people you can reach out and physically touch, not the people you can skype. We were noticing something interesting yesterday while dealing with HostGator (again) and the fact that there's a giant airgap of knowledge between "I have a Wordpress website" and "I can harden my website against Slovenian portscanners" and that airgap is largely bridged by people who are overeducated and overqualified. Nobody got a CS degree in order to keep their girlfriend's brother's cousin's website online, but there's a lot of that. And maybe if you live in West Virginia and maintain clients across eight time zones, you can make it work. A camera operator I love working with lives in Fayetteville, WV. She tried LA for about a season and bailed. She built her own house out in the woods and it's well-insulated enough that she doesn't need heat. She makes it look super-attractive. I think all four of those smart people are right and wrong, in different ways for different reasons at different times. It's gonna be interesting to see.
Can I add a large group of economic geographers to that list? There is a significant part of the field devoted to the question of globalization and the (non)importance of clusters. Basically, they focus on the 'anywhere' part of bfv's comment. Is it true that globalization has made place irrelevant for work? In general, there have been two ways of looking at the question: 1. Globalization results in equality. The moment telecommunication made remote working and long distance talking possible, there have been people predicting a future where work can and does happen anywhere. Most notably, Thomas Friedman declared a decade ago that 'the Earth is flat', meaning the global playing field is leveled because of globalizing forces like the Internet. 2. Globalization cannot overcome cluster advantages. Michael Porter, for example, argues that The world is not flat: it is spiky, with peaks of wealth. Clusters - whether they are a startup cafe, a campus, a business district or a Silicon Valley - have a lot of advantages that trump globalizing forces. Bringing people together makes interaction, collaboration and innovation much easier. While the amount of jobs that can be done remotely has increased dramatically over the last decade, there are still so many jobs where physical proximity matters. I don't think giving Harrison, West Virginia a great network is going to be enough to save it.in a global economy [...] one would expect location to diminish in importance. But the opposite is true. The enduring competitive advantages in a global economy are often heavily localized, arising from concentrations of highly specialized skills, knowledge, institutions, rivalry, related businesses and sophisticated customers.
I think the state of Silicon Valley is a pretty good argument that making interaction and collaboration too easy is not a good thing. People who start talking about a thing after they've done it do all the good things.Bringing people together makes interaction, collaboration and innovation much easier.
For one of my clients right now, I am doing a bunch of research on collaboration, what works and what doesn't, etc. This Harvard Business Review article is an excellent place to get started with some really shocking shit about collaboration and it's effect on the workplace: https://hbr.org/2016/01/collaborative-overload Check this: 80% of our work day is spent on unstructured and (largely) unproductive "collaboration". Emails, meetings, and other bullshit that isn't actually our essential job function. And, something like 90% of all value is generated by 3-5% of the actual people "working". Everyone else is basically shuffling virtual papers around on their desks, and jerking off.
I would counterargue that the state of Silicon Valley demonstrates that limited resources produce more innovation than unlimited resources. Knock three zeroes off the capitalization of Silicon Valley and suddenly you've got a double handful of scrappy entrepreneurs surrounded by the piled corpses of people looking for a million dollar exit.
There's an argument going around, originating with Michael O. Church I think, that the problem isn't too much money, it's that the amounts of money floating around attract graduates from elite business schools who couldn't make it on Wall Street and use VC firms as their safety net, so the people running the show don't really want to be there, don't have much understanding or appreciation of technology, and see no reason to learn because startups are expected to fail. In that view, the whole circus is run by people treating it as a power suit McJob. I don't know how much truth is there, I have avoided that world my whole career, but from stories I hear and looking from the outside it sure sounds plausible. What I do know is that even among programmers, outside of Silicon Valley there's much more healthy skepticism of the stupid memes (the sharing economy...) than in it, and there would be fewer very smart people wasting their talent on nonsense, trivialities, and horrors with smiley faces painted on if they could get some distance. Talking to a Palantir recruiter was one of the scariest conversations I've ever had, because he was more than happy to admit the tinfoil hats don't know the half of it, but it was for the best because someone is going to do everything they do, and they're all "deviants" too. He said "deviant" a lot. They like deviants at Palantir, and that's why they're Making the World a Better Place. Because while they're deciding whether or not you're a terrorist based on your taste in porn, at least they're not going to judge you. And I could see how that pitch might work, he sounded like he really bought what he was selling himself.
Completely anecdotal, but I was friends with two people in college who now work at Palantir, and a third who spent a summer there before working elsewhere. From the three of them, and conversations involving other people with Palantir experience that place is completely drinking from the well. They all completely bought into the company, it's mission, and everything that Peter Thiel had to say. It was kind of scary to see that level of blind allegiance to a company.
Bill McKibben - Middlebury, Vermont (pop 8,545) Stephen Pinker - Boston (pop 655,884) Shannon Hayes - Warnerville, New York (the census doesn't know it, but Wikipedia says it's between Cobleskill, pop 4,678, and Richmondville. pop 2,513) Sherry Turkle - Boston Everyone thinks the way they live makes the most sense. I know someone who maintains Wordpress sites for a living. She has an English degree. Used to be a technical writer, but no one thinks a good manual is worth paying for anymore. When a problem an English degree and google can't solve comes up, she phones a friend, pays obscene consultant money, and bills her client for it in turn.We were noticing something interesting yesterday while dealing with HostGator (again) and the fact that there's a giant airgap of knowledge between "I have a Wordpress website" and "I can harden my website against Slovenian portscanners" and that airgap is largely bridged by people who are overeducated and overqualified. Nobody got a CS degree in order to keep their girlfriend's brother's cousin's website online, but there's a lot of that. And maybe if you live in West Virginia and maintain clients across eight time zones, you can make it work.