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While I agree with your general premise, I'm not convinced that remote work is the driver we should rely on. As a peer comment mentioned, infrastructure is a we

While I agree with your general premise, I'm not convinced that remote work is the driver we should rely on. As a peer comment mentioned, infrastructure is a weak point right now, and remote work would add another dynamic that would make the situation more risky instead of less. Up front though, I should clarify I am a huge proponent FOR remote work. The rest of this is focused on why remote work should not be a foundation to build American housing on. Prior to the normalizing of remote work and cloud computing, the infrastructure risks that a company needed to consider were related to hubs. Cloud computing moved a lot of the processing out of the hub, which is good from a risk perspective. This leaves the need to ensure the infrastructure related to workers accessing the computing is resilient. If remote work becomes the foundation we building our cities on, we now expose our companies to the additional infrastructure problem related to internet connectivity while not resolving the connectivity issues inherent in the other grids of roads, power, and water. This is fine for companies that are natively born to this, but this is dangerous for the existing large cap companies and governments that are not. And just as we're pushing for an increase in remote work, we are also in a period of time where our infrastructure is regularly attacked remotely. Again, this is not to say remote work is bad. There's just a lot of transformation that needs to occur and I personally feel we should not take a darwinian approach to this when state and local governments are involved. The instability we would introduce through this would likely lead to corporate funded infrastructure being stood up to ensure remote workers maintain access to cloud computing. I believe the company town concept [0] would make a comeback. My main fear is that we would inadvertently create remote private corporate fiefdoms that would lead to corporate scrip [1] being used for local goods and services and non-transferable to other regions. The flexibility of remote work would, if my fears are realized, lead to a world of less flexibility than we have today. Not more. I don't know what a better driver is though. How does one generate desire for a traditionally undesireable location? 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip

lelanthran 3y ago
> The instability we would introduce through this would likely lead to corporate funded infrastructure being stood up to ensure remote workers maintain access to cloud computing. I believe the company town concept [0] would make a comeback. I'm not following this argument for two reasons: 1. I don't see corporate-funded infrastructure being stood up nationwide across a nation because the local services in a few places are not up to scratch. IMHO, those few places just won't get the migrants from the cities. 2. Even if the corporations built private infrastructure to support WFH, I don't see a probability of that leading to something like a company-town concept. IOW, I don't see how "Microsoft built private infrastructure to ensure WFH works" leads to "A Microsoft town in those places that has the MS infrastructure." After all, even if the alternative is unreliable, it's still there!. In company towns, your actual dollar was close to worthless - you had to spend it elsewhere.

lelanthran 3y ago

> The instability we would introduce through this would likely lead to corporate funded infrastructure being stood up to ensure remote workers maintain access to cloud computing. I believe the company town concept [0] would make a comeback. I'm not following this argument for two reasons: 1. I don't see corporate-funded infrastructure being stood up nationwide across a nation because the local services in a few places are not up to scratch. IMHO, those few places just won't get the migrants from the cities. 2. Even if the corporations built private infrastructure to support WFH, I don't see a probability of that leading to something like a company-town concept. IOW, I don't see how "Microsoft built private infrastructure to ensure WFH works" leads to "A Microsoft town in those places that has the MS infrastructure." After all, even if the alternative is unreliable, it's still there!. In company towns, your actual dollar was close to worthless - you had to spend it elsewhere.