The Irrelevance of Thingies
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
I know it may be a bit tropey but Ready Player One book did a great job of portraying how something like that could destroy what it is to feel part of a community in the real world. Even if you step outside of your little comms den for the day, no one else has and there is no one to talk to.
It happens now with social media. People spend all day clicking about, then they stop and take a moment to realise none of it actually happened, it's just text and daydreams, and they are alone in their house again.
That's the kind of lifestyle previously reserved for people living and working downtown in major cities, but can be (and for me is) a reality in small-town America. I make more money in one year than it cost me to buy my downtown, 2000 sq ft house with a two car garage and a half acre of land. And I don't have to drive anywhere unless I want to.
That's what remote working can offer. That's what small towns should be promising today.
Right now, in the US, that means cities. That's _it_. And even then, most cities are horrible places to cycle.
But it doesn't have to be that way. I'd love to walk or cycle around Houten (NL, pop ~45,000 and built for walking and cycling from the beginning), or perhaps Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber in the old town centre (Germany, pop 10,000 for the town as a whole, smaller within the medieval walls of course).
I just can't think of any place built since the rise of the car which is not a city, and pleasant to walk in, aside from some very small communities like ecovillages (which are nice but not going to be self contained) - https://ecovillage.org/ . Even towns in the US that like to think of themselves as fitting this tend to be fantastically expensive and still very car dependent (San Luis Obispo comes to mind)
Not every town is like that, of course, which is why I picked this town to live in. The best walkable/bikable towns, I've found, don't advertise themselves as walkable or bikable. They just are.
I'll also check out Verona, another well rated suburb. Looks to be a bit more expensive in housing, but also more local food options. Again a solid bike trail into the big city. Monona might be a little too close to the big city. Sun Prairie might be a little too far away. Disclaimer, I've never lived in any of those cities, so this is all based on just 5 minutes worth of Internet research. YMMV.
We got lucky when we settled down in that we knew what state we wanted to live in and what metro area we wanted to be around. From there it was just trying to find a bedroom community with a good solid downtown. Most suburbs close to the city won't have a downtown (they're more like residential areas), so it really narrows your choices a lot. I like using Google Maps to find area bike trails and bike lanes, which helps show how seriously a town/area takes bike safety and their overall attitude towards bikers/pedestrians.
Hopefully that helps.
Hot piss, my house cost $150,000.
With a home office, you don't have to put on pants to go to work. It's always beckoning. Although, your small town might be relaxed about walking around pantless, the walk alone will help give some hysteresis between switching from work mode to home mode.
The wording on this struck me as poignant. It almost sounds like it should be part of a poem or philosophical treatise. Have you used this phrasing before?
2. you start to bump into same people - in fact you will likely have more in common than average office neighbour because you live in same school district, have chosen to telecommute etc
3. mostly telecommute does not happen because it's less convenient to manage not to do
Number 2 is highly circumstantial but it does ultimately come down to the individual to make friends. My concern is just that it becomes harder when everyone else is also locked up at home working or consuming entertainment all day. Many people are only a commute and an office away from that being their life.
I definitely prefer working from home for myself mind you, but I can see the negatives and totally understand why many peoppe would rather an office. I currently split time between office and home and they both have very diverse pros and cons.
Most of my original comment was just speculating a possible future scenario. I just see the possibility for people to fall through the cracks of society and just work and consume entertainment all day at home, and if that becomes the everyman then society will change to accommodate that.
It's just those cracks are not easily visoble. Perhaps even putting more of our lives online will make the cracks more visible - our shared pessimism may be wrong :-)
We want to be around people and have all the urban advantages in our free time, but most of us learned in past decades that we want to be around different people than we work with.. and this decade, we want to be around different people from work and inside a social media blackout.
Perhaps I am wrong about mass telecommuting isolating people. Perhaps instead it would give them more time and opportunity to be part of and support their communities.
I think philosophical explanations for our loneliness epidemic (found on both right and left) are missing more obvious practical causes: how we build, urban planning, economic systems that incentivize workaholism and anxiety, etc. Not saying other causes don't exist, but we should look at the simple ones first.
Gave you a compensatory upvote though because I am sick of ideological echo chambers. Things one disagrees with nevertheless can provoke productive discussion.
This isn’t specific to religion, that’s just an example (but I think a pretty useful one).
On a tangent, I highly recommend "Internet of Shit" Twitter account if you want to have a laugh:
Compare Vancouver with a small town of less than 100k people just up the Fraser valley (Chilliwack). I've lived in both.
Vancouver has better restaurants, more concerts of every sort, better transit, access to the ocean, better internet, is more diverse, more liberal politics, better social services for the homeless and those needing mental health services, better access to diverse foods at the grocery stores, better night life, etc.
Sure, I paid a lot more when I was living in Vancouver that. I was in Chilliwack, but it's worth it.
No amount of videoconferencing technology can make up for the fact that if I want to go out for good sushi and I live in Chilliwack, I have to spend 2 fucking hours in the car each way.
Smaller cities are not universally conservative. Decent coffee can be found in most places, and this didn't used to be true. Many smaller cities that get some tourist traffic have small downtowns with good restaurants; maybe not every kind of ethnic restaurant, but some good choices.
There is not a big migration of retirees to big cities, so it seems pretty clear that it's all about the jobs. Without the attraction of a big paycheck, people look for smaller "nice" cities that have enough.
Could just be that retirees can't afford to live in the big cities.
When i was in my mid 20s, living in inner London was vital to me, because it meant i was close to the cool bars, nightclubs, art galleries (really!), and all my friends, who also lived in inner London. Now i am approaching my 40s, none of those things are much use to me, but i appreciate the fact that in my not-quite-inner-London suburb i have a good neighbourhood coffee shop, and some excellent bakeries and a big DIY shop nearby. I should imagine that in my 60s, i will value different things, and in my 80s, different things again.
If it’s just a case of the future being unevenly distributed, where in the world is an example of the distributed future? It’s certainly not the Bay Area, for a start.
That's comfortable both in terms of literal headset weight but also latency, resolution, sound, etc.
When I sit down in front of a 48" TV I'm absorbed into a different world and forget where I am. When VR is good enough you can spend hours inside the virtual world, that's when it can be called good enough.
It's not there yet, but sure we might be there in a generation or two.
Meanwhile remote work means having the worker not need to come into the office at all - each employee can theoretically be anywhere in the world, whether that be in the midwest or in Eastern Europe.
With remote work, the workers are still employees of your company, they just don't always sit in your office.
The problem is that employees want something and then justify that thing being good in whatever way works.
I mean... of course getting fired sucks. I'm actually surprised that you seem to be arguing that getting fired should be considered a good thing?
Because productivity is all about being seated on the office.
I find it so old fashioned how by default, they expect me to stand in the rain for 2 hours a day to travel to the centre of a city to sit at a desk and log into the internet for 38 out of 40 hours a week.
That is a real life equivalent of a code smell.
PS: Where did you first learn of the expression "code smell"? I'm curious because I recently heard of it and would like to know if it was from the same source
If you have a remote team, you'll still have teamleaders and/or managers that keep things in sync with the company goals.
This is of course quite a caricature, but it illustrates the issue unless the company is willing to allocate manpower to be in continues dialog with an outsourcing company.
I have worked for an outsourcer and that's not what happened. I know dozens of people who continue to work for outsourcers, that is not what happens. They have daily standups with the team in Toronto, London, Berlin, etc. They fly back & forth at least monthly. They have video calls nearly daily. They have shared Slack instances, shared Confluence instances, shared JIRA instances.
And that's not just in software; when Tesla outsources a part, they don't just throw a spec over the wall. When Apple outsources manufacturing, they also don't have this caricatured approach. When Nike outsources manufacturing, they have Nike employees in the factories. And so on.
Since your caricature doesn't reflect the reality that I have years of experience with, I'm not sure it adds much to the argument.
The reality though is that remote work will always be priced down. Even if remote workers show up everyday by some kind of robotic telepresence, once that remote role is established there's enormous pricing pressure from literally every other worker on the planet. Everybody seems to think its corporations that are resistant to remote work when in reality its actually workers who are very hesitant to take on remote roles and do not want to be seen as some sort of outsourced and easily replaceable remote provider.
It will take a sea change in the culture and desires of workers to make remote work a real possibility at scale. Workers will have to embrace a vision of themselves as freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
This is the important point.
> freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
That's because outsourcing and freelancing are mostly a mechanism for fleecing labor. Workers SHOULD be terrified of this.
I would love to outsource some of out development, but to align that work with our goals, I would need a full time senior dev with intimate knowledge of our company and customers working with them managing all they do. Otherwise it's not a given that we get the code quality that ensure we can evolve the software the way we need to in the future.
Is it possible that there might be some complexity to this beyond boring old corporate inertia? As you so correctly say, there are talented people hungry for work everywhere.
This is what everybody talking about the death of distance and remote work doesn't get: cities are not about supply, they are about demand. This has been the case since Sumer was founded 7,000 years ago. These are the most desirable markets in the world. If you have something to sell -- including yourself -- and you can create demand in one world city and then drive that demand to other world cities then you will have a money printing machine. Corporations gather in cities because they are in fact the biggest consumers on the planet and they require all types of services -- from legal advice to market research to sophisticated technology -- and the one stop shop to buy these goods -- along with every other good -- is a world city.
I totally understand them. I am a very late millenial (born Sept 1996), but I don‘t want to live in a city center, especially not a big city.
You can take a train to the city to experience the excitement, the fun, the new things. But work/live daily in a pleasant town - where a few of the jobs would never exist without the internet.
Also the price/distance graph was interesting. It looks like apart from the rich suburb times the price went up everywhere. It doesn't really show the centre getting more expensive. Relatively, it's the centre that doesn't grow as fast.
Our apps to communicate are run by corporations, and despite what their marketing says, are not built to connect us.
Rural economic developers are usually out of touch with the possibilities of tech, and rely on old economic development methods like how to get an Applebee's in town.
Despite the articles claim that people move to cities for face to face interaction, people report elevated levels of loneliness in our urban tech paradise.
I think it's a lot of features contributing to slow rural development, and as a society we aren't using them as productively as possible.
The article is talking about cities and community as most of the good articles on that site also cover (but in different ways).
The other big problem with small towns is healthcare, and this is where older tech workers are going to have a problem. Healthcare in the US is well-known to be a dumpster fire and one reason is that it has become essentially unavailable in rural America. If you're older and need access to good doctors and hospitals, you need to live close to a major city, and even then it very much matters which city and which state you live in as to the quality of healthcare you'll get.
Small American towns have a lot of desirable qualities; they're often very pretty and the cost of living is quite low compared to cities. But they have a lot of catching up to do w.r.t. education and healthcare before they'll be competitive with cities for tech workers.