In my mind, it is not ironic. While the Internet has made great progress in solving human connectivity and distance problems--and indeed for many people (e.g. r

In my mind, it is not ironic. While the Internet has made great progress in solving human connectivity and distance problems--and indeed for many people (e.g. remote workers who happily work from home) it has solved it them for all practical purposes--in reality it has not solved it to the point that renders physical presence unnecessary. We've gotten to a point where remote interactions are OK-ish (pareto), so incremental improvements now have diminishing returns with decreasing payoff. Nobody's really working on making things a lot better than they are now. To me, there's still great benefit in clustering human beings of like mind in the same physical space because it creates a creative buzz than somehow cannot be replicated with telepresence. Being able to have serendipitous side conversations (without having a video conference camera on all the time), going to meetups in physical spaces (as opposed to watching streaming videos), and the ability to make random real-life human connections with people working in the same area all contribute to this buzz. This buzz is purely psychological but tremendously powerful [1], and I don't know of any instances where it can be created through technology alone. Some say it is a question of bandwidth -- maybe some day we'll have augmented/virtual reality, very high-resolution video, etc. that will render all of this moot. Perhaps... but it would also need to be able hack our neuroscience and psychology in some way... [1] Cities and Ambition http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html