I'd kind of like to go to rural nowheresville, live cheap, and still make tech money. But my parents are here, my wife has health issues, and my kids need decent colleges.

We're getting to the point where maybe the work part works. College may be able to be fully remote fairly soon (Western Governors University is there already, but only has select majors). Specialized doctors, though... that might be a bit harder.

I mean, yes, you can do "face to face" via Skype. You can't do blood tests that way, though...

I grew up in rural nowheresville and went to a good college across the country, but that's not necessary. Every single state has acceptable state colleges, if your children cannot bear doing their own laundry :)

I think it's because our telecomm tech still sucks. It's not as good as real life and it has bugs.

Until we can smoothly emulate meatspace with VR, I don't think you can replace face-to-face interaction. If you can't do that, then people will still want to be close to jobs and similar businesses, so they'll continue to urbanize in a natural distribution.

And even if you had your new VR tech with enough bandwidth to run it nicely, you'd still need to be able to provide it to your offworld coloni--I mean rural exclaves.

I think that until you're able to emulate meatspace in every aspect with VR, you cannot replace face-to-face.

Economic clusters aren't just valuable for people being in the same office. They produce value because people and ideas meet in bars and restaurants and coffee shops and backyards. All of this is stuff you'd need to replace to "disaggregate the knowledge economy".

This is not something you can accomplish with GitHub and teleconferencing.