
The Irrelevance of Thingies - oftenwrong
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/28/iot-the-irrelevance-of-thingies
======
ehnto
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.

~~~
freehunter
The promise of telecommuting for me isn't living three miles way from my
nearest neighbor, but rather living in a town of less than 10,000 people and
still making six figures. I live in a town of 7,000 with a strong community
and a good downtown, but I don't have to commute a half hour into the city.
Instead I can wake up at 7am, walk down to the local coffee shop and chill for
a bit, then go back home and work. I can pop out for lunch to the diner, and
at 5 when everyone is just getting into their cars, I'm already at the local
brewery unwinding.

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.

~~~
CalRobert
I want to live in a walkable place where I can ride my bike without dying. I
also want the same for my kid.

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/](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)

~~~
freehunter
You might be surprised. My Midwestern 7,000 population town doesn't have very
many dedicated bike lanes, but biking in town is incredibly common (to the
point that the local library allows you to check out bikes like books) and we
have a long-distance bike trail connecting us to the nearest "big" city.

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.

~~~
CalRobert
If you don't mind sharing, can I ask what town it might be? Or if you don't
want to reveal your home do you know of any others with similar traits?

~~~
freehunter
I'd rather not say where I live (even though I love my city and really do want
you to move here), but I can tell you how to find similar cities. Pick a mid-
size Midwestern metro area (say, Madison Wisconsin), then do a Google search
for "best suburbs around Madison Wisconsin". I see a site like niche.com and
click on it. I know the first few results are likely to be the most expensive
places to live, so if my budget is high those are where I'm going. I might go
down into to 5-10 range if I'm looking for a more budget-friendly place. Now
I'm looking at Oregon, WI, which is about 15 miles from downtown Madison.
Bringing it up in Google Maps, looks like there's a bike trail that will take
me all the way into Madison without having to ride on the road? Score. Zillow
shows housing prices around $150-$300k, great. Yelp shows a coffee house and a
couple of tasty looking restaurants. Doesn't seem to be any local breweries,
but oh well.

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.

------
montenegrohugo
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
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
Isn't this just outsourcing? Wasn't it tried? What are the differences between
"remote work" and "outsourcing"?

~~~
freehunter
Doesn't outsourcing imply you're working with other companies? If I outsource
my IT staff, generally that means I am hiring another company to handle my IT
work, right?

With remote work, the workers are still employees of your company, they just
don't always sit in your office.

~~~
UncleMeat
Largely it just means "hiring non US/European engineers". When a company fires
some people in the US and replaces them with people in India people lose their
shit. But remote work is also considered the pinnacle of enlightened hiring.

The problem is that employees want something and then justify that thing being
good in whatever way works.

~~~
freddie_mercury
As someone who doesn't live in the US/Europe this is how "remote work" on HN
comes across to me.

~~~
freehunter
I'd wager that most of the "remote work" employees at US companies are US
citizens living inside the US. In my experience (I'm an IT consultant who
works remotely and visits many other companies) companies who hire remote
employees outside of the US tend to do so as contractors, not as employees.

------
Finnucane
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
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.

------
dnomad
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
I didn't know that the world's ideas came only from USA to the rest.

------
pfd1986
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
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
> 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.

------
viraptor
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.

------
fuball63
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.

------
Svenstaro
This article barely even touched IoT and mostly talked about economics living
in the city.

~~~
coatmatter
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).

------
princekolt
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.

------
dreamcompiler
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.

