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The Irrelevance of Thingies

• Svenstaro 8y ago
  This article barely even touched IoT and mostly talked about economics living in the city.
  • coldtea 8y ago
    Makes sense if the economics of living in the city make the point that IoT will make cities obsolete moot.
  • coatmatter 8y ago
    strongtowns.org isn't a website about tech - don't get confused by the title, it's not really talking about the Internet of Things. The article is talking about cities and community as most of the good articles on that site also cover (but in different ways).
• montenegrohugo 8y ago
  I am skeptical on this. Yes, currently the desireability and price of central, metropolitan housing is skyrocketing, and rural communities are declining. But I think once technology catches up to emulate or near-emulate in person contact, that more distributed, more at-distance work will be more common. We are not there yet, but I do think we will arrive there sometime. On a tangent, I highly recommend "Internet of Shit" Twitter account if you want to have a laugh: https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en
  • mathnmusic 8y ago
    In fact, it should already be possible to gain competitive advantage to hire talent from cheaper locations using remote work. There's some great talent out there that's hungry for quality work.
    • freddie_mercury 8y ago
      Isn't this just outsourcing? Wasn't it tried? What are the differences between "remote work" and "outsourcing"?
      • pjmlp 8y ago
        For one, many companies are open to outsourcing, but refrain to allow remote work to their own employees, or just allow a couple of days. Because productivity is all about being seated on the office.
        • Fifer82 8y ago
          It really baffles me how that is the case (I understand the tongue in cheek). I have been working remotely for just shy of 10 years. That capability was a primary reason for going into programming in the first place. 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.
          • montenegrohugo 8y ago
            Have you tried having a conversation with your employer? If they view it as a negative maybe you could forego your next salary increase and ask for maybe two work-at-home days per week or something similar. 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
            • wott 8y ago
              He said he has been working remotely for 10 years.
              • montenegrohugo 8y ago
  • Wellshit 8y ago
    Well. My servers are on the cloud. My IDE is on the cloud. My everything is accessible through the internet. I need to be at office everyday, for some reason.
  • iainmerrick 8y ago
    What technology do we need that we’re currently lacking? We already have fiber broadband and decent VR. 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.
    • WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
      VR isn't decent yet and won't be until it's comfortable enough to slap a VR headset on and watch a movie. 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.
      • iainmerrick 8y ago
        Hardware generation or human generation? :)
  • na85 8y ago
    I take the opposite view. Most of these debates overlook the fact that for a lot of people, it's simply more desirable to live in cities. 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.
    • skybrian 8y ago
      Completely agreed that it takes a lot more to make a community desirable to yuppies than just fixing telecommuting. But it seems like at least some of this can change? 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.
      • lmm 8y ago
        > 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.
        • twic 8y ago
          Or that they want different things. 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.
• fuball63 8y ago
  I think it's a generalization to say that tech can't bridge distances and improve rural development. 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.
• ehnto 8y ago
  I don't think it's a technology issue. Remote work has been possible for years. Many people just don't want to work from home, for a whole myriad of reasons. Likewise, if I am feeling lonely the last thing I want is to confront a dystopian reality of telecommunications being my best option because I live in the sticks and society has forgotten about me. 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.
  • yayana 8y ago
    What I've seen work is satellite offices in other cities followed by satellites of satellite offices as people realize they don't want to commute into a beltway. No one in these satellite offices had a direct business relationship with others in the same office and I don't think that hurt, just as I see no actual business advantage to living downtown. 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.
  • lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    1. Most everyone steps out at lunchtime 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
    • ehnto 8y ago
      I can agree to point three being a big contributor but it is definitely not the only reason. It would alienate a lot of people if you just switched to entirely remote one day. 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.
• viraptor 8y ago
  While I agree that cities won't disappear due to remote work (it's kind of obvious if you live in a small town), I feel like the article introduces a false dichotomy of: the city, or the scenic mountaintops. There's so much in between where you can get both your remote work and your social interaction. Where "rural" farmers come to hack nights to play with lora module for reporting vineyard soil/weather metrics. 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.
• dnomad 8y ago
  All the net really does is bring cities closer together. Up until, say, 2001, there was a clear directional flow of information between cities. You could chart ideas originating in SF, LA, NY and then spreading to Europe and Asia. It would take about a year for some trend to circumnavigate the world and there was money to be made in leading the charge. The flow is gone now; ideas originate everywhere and flow rapidly from city to city through social networks in a matter of hours. A new pastry shows up in Shanghai on Monday and then becomes available in LA by Thursday and then, thanks to Instagram, explodes across NY, DC, Paris and London that weekend. These major world cities constitute the most important and powerful network on the planet and this network, augmented by social networking, makes each individual city that much more valuable. 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.
  • fjsolwmv 8y ago
    I didn't know that the world's ideas came only from USA to the rest.
• Finnucane 8y ago
  In previous decades (1950s-1970s), city planners in the US adopted the Robert Moses model of development--highways and cars meant that middle-class (white) workers would be encouraged to live in the suburbs, the city center would be a warehouse for the poor (ethnic, minority), with some nice areas reserved as playground for the rich. Everyone who had any say in the matter--planners, bankers, developers, HUD, and so on--bought into this idea. Redlining and race-baiting were actively used to shape neighborhoods. In more recent decades, this has somewhat reversed. Declines in crime and pollution have made the city center more desirable, and people are looking for shorter commutes and convenience to services, and less car-dependence. Now we face the problems of gentrification, as the benefits of the resurgence of the city center has not been widely shared. Rural areas, and secondary cities once dependent on heavy industry, have seen their livelihoods decimated by automation, outsourcing, and other factors, with little to replace it, because all the new money is concentrated in a few coastal cities. The possibilities of remote work are not going to benefit them very much.
  • daxfohl 8y ago
    Yeah just looking at the graphs on that page, it's not hard to understand where and why the MAGA movement became a thing. Or why all us city dwellers were caught so off-guard by it. And largely still live in a bubble where we assume it's a mistake that most MAGA voters regret and will be overturned in 2020.
• princekolt 8y ago
  I feel a lot of people here see this as a issue of absolutes: either living in the middle of Manhattan or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There are certainly intermediary points. I think the major issue is that very large corporations (think Google/Apple) have no major objective reasons to stay in such an expensive location. Or at least they don't all have a reason to be all at the same place.
• pfd1986 8y ago
  People in silicon valley tell me everyone is going to move to the mountains / beach once self-driving cars can bring them to town any time, while they can do whatever in the comfortable commute. My belief though is that most people want to be able to walk to the pub, to bike to the park, and to be a short drive from work... I don't see self-driving cars changing that
  • ksdale 8y ago
    Anecdote from the US: Your belief may become more true as demographics change, but my parents and my wife's parents, who are baby boomers, and the vast majority of their friends and acquaintances, have no interest whatsoever in living within walking distance of basically anything because they have such an aversion to living really close to other people. For sure they are hardcore suburban people and not representative of everyone in the US, but I also don't think they're unusual among baby boomers, at least.
    • Hendrikto 8y ago
      > they have such an aversion to living really close to other people 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.
  • CalRobert 8y ago
    My biggest fear about self driving cars (aside from cycling and motorcycling becoming incredibly dangerous or illegal as a result) is that we'll use them to destroy the last vestiges of nature within a couple hundred miles of any city.
• dreamcompiler 8y ago
  Even if remote technology was great, demographics and healthcare are going to make it difficult to convince people in tech jobs to move to rural areas. Young, college-educated tech workers tend not to want to hang out with people who are religious and/or not well-educated, and small-town America abounds with people who can't speak three sentences without mentioning god or jesus, who don't much care for skin-tone diversity, and who cannot converse about ideas. Yes, OF COURSE this is a generalization and there are notable exceptions -- like small (secular) college towns -- but it's such a predominant phenomenon in America that the exceptions are notably rare. 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.