Preaching to the choir. I think it points to deep/immersive telepresence as a major unsolved problem. It's telling that the people who build the Internet can't use it to escape some of the highest rents in the developed world.

Solving that problem would help the interior for the reasons you explain.

Can't upvote this enough. Taking this thought further -- it's telling that most people in the tech industry don't even consider this as a worthwhile goal. Both company leaders and employees.

If people here can create self-driving cars, delocalizing software work doesn't seem so far fetched. I'm inclined to believe that there is a lack of will and vision rather than a lack of ability.

I expected you to disagree with me on this, considering that you grew up in the midwest, but ZeroTier is located in California. Is there some reason you have to be there?

It's kind of circumstantial: I ended up out here for a job, lived here for a while, and then started ZeroTier. It could be located in a place like Pittsburgh that has a decent talent pool but now that it's up and running and has employees it'd be a pain to move it.

That illustrates another point: ecosystems have a draw because they draw people in, and brain drain has the opposite effect. Both effects are exponential: the more people come the more people come. That's part of why interior places that have very strong university systems or major local employers with a lot of drawing power (or government labs, etc.) have been spared the worst of it.

I wasn't implying that labor arbitrage is the only cause of this depression, just that it's probably the largest single cause.