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 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
