In his recent Wired opinion piece “Software Is Reorganizing the World”, Balaji Srinivasan asks whether the affinity groups we form on the net will eventually coalesce into real physical locations where we come together not because we were born in a certain place or grew up there or happen to work there, but because we choose to be with likeminded people … kindred spirits if you will.
Some selected paragraphs:
When cloud formations take physical shape, neither their scale nor duration has an upper bound: We may begin to see cloud towns, then cloud cities, and ultimately cloud countries. At first this sounds rather implausible.
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Technology is enabling arbitrary numbers of people from around the world to assemble in remote locations, without interrupting their ability to work or communicate with existing networks. In this sense, the future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant.
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When it comes to the constraints on mobility imposed by the physical world, the rule is simple: when goods themselves can’t be digitized, our interface to them will be.
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What we can say for certain is this: from Occupy Wall Street and YCombinator to co-living in San Francisco and co-housing in the UK, something important is happening. People are meeting like minds in the cloud and traveling to meet each other offline, in the process building community — and tools for community — where none existed before.
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Will this ultimately end in a cloud country of our own…
The article is well worth reading, you can find it here:
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