Posted on 06/23/2005 3:05:10 PM PDT by Lorianne
Last weekend I left my city of Portland and headed out to the nearly depopulated northeastern corner of Oregon, to the small town formerly known as "Halfway." The town recently changed its name and posted a sign on the outskirts -- "Welcome to Half.com Oregon: America's first dot-com city."
Don't let the sign fool you. There's nothing dot-com about it, not really, not yet. In exchange for the name change -- a naked publicity stunt if there ever was one -- the Half.com company donated computers to the school and promotes the local microscopic tourism "industry" on its Web site. Half.com is a tourist destination of sorts because it's just down the road from Hell's Canyon, the deepest canyon in North America. (Yes, Hell's Canyon is deeper than the Grand Canyon. But it's a six-hour drive from the nearest international airports in Portland and Seattle and it's a royal pain to get to even if you live in this state. That's why you haven't heard of it.)
Only a couple hundred people live there. And from the look of the place at least half of them are senior citizens. The town is almost painfully low tech and provincial. It's surrounded on all sides by a beautiful but brutally isolating vastness so empty you could fit entire nations inside it. Not only is Half.com no Internet boom-town, you have to drive almost 100 miles out of it before you can even make a call on your cell phone. The town's name and its slogan are lies.
It occurred to me, though, that the day places like this one will become real dot-com towns may be coming.
Real estate in much of rural America is shockingly inexpensive, especially in the remote parts of the West. Houses are practically free compared with what they cost in Seattle and Portland, not to mention what they cost in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. That's because hardly anyone can move there and find a job. First Wave agriculture economies (to borrow Alvin Toffler's terminology) require fewer and fewer humans to do the work. These places hemorrhage young people to large urban areas, and they've been doing it ever since the Second Wave Industrial Revolution got rolling hundreds of years ago. Rural economies keep spiraling downward, and home prices circle the drain along with them. When the current generation of senior citizens passes, and a smaller number of young people grow up to take their places, home prices will be knocked into oblivion. The number of houses for sale will drastically exceed the number of people who live anywhere near them and might want to buy one.
Meanwhile, telecommuting jobs are more common than ever. There will only be more of them in the future. In the past such jobs were rare because they were impractical or downright impossible. Blue collar workers needed to show up in person at factories. Office workers didn't have email, teleconferencing, instant messaging, and other various "virtual water cooler" places to meet and discuss work projects online. Now they do.
I telecommute at several part-time writing and editing jobs simultaneously. Several of my old colleagues in the high tech industry do, too. One former co-worker of mine now tests software for a Portland company from the beach in Costa Rica. It's a great deal for him because, hey, he gets to live on a North American salary in an inexpensive ecotourism paradise where tech jobs of that sort of have never even existed. The company benefits, too, because it doesn't have to rent office space for him anymore.
There isn't, not yet anyway, a huge outflow of telecommuting employees from the cities to the American countryside or to the beaches of Latin America. That's partly because there are very few households where both wage-earners telecommute. If one spouse has a day job rooted in a specific geographic location, the telecommuting spouse has to stay put. But if the number of telecommuting jobs ever reaches, say, 30 percent of the total number of white collar jobs available, millions of American households will include two wage-earners who can live absolutely anywhere they want as long as they can connect to the Internet.
These two trends -- declining rural real estate values and increasing white collar telecommuting jobs -- are slowly approaching their respective tipping points. When they both reach those points, a third new trend will likely be born. At the same time large numbers of people can effectively work from anywhere, real estate in the countryside will be both plentiful and even more dizzyingly cheap than it already is. Many who today leave cities for the suburbs because they want to live in "the country" will have the option of actually living in the country at hugely reduced cost, with real peace and quiet, with vanishingly close to zero crime rates, and with zero-minute commute times. Towns like Half.com may, then, become small dot-com cities in fact as well as in name.
The First Wave agriculture revolution created small towns - or "villages." The Second Wave Industrial Revolution depleted and drained them. The Third Wave tech revolution just might restore them.
Yeah...in the Third World, where Sandeep and Krishna will work late in the night for a few rupees per day.
Wishful thinking, imo. Not a trend yet, just a few isolated cases.
1. The jobs in my field that can readily be done from an outside office in a telecommuting environment are the jobs that are being outsourced to foreign countries.
2. The people in my company who are most enthusiastic about telecommuting are the most overpaid.
Sophisticated Urbanite shocked at not having cell phone service. Poor baby. It is the distances that shock the urbanite. And, it is the distances and landscape and weather that will limit what level technology will work(Hells Canyon is very aptly named).
I had my laptop, Nextel and was connected to the Internet and was able to do all my work while listening to the birds and sitting out in the sunshine. If I can do that there, why not the middle of Wyoming or Montana?
Week after next, I go to my parent's farm in Alabama for two weeks of vacation. I've been going to Alabama every summer for many years. Used to be that going to Alabama meant leaving civilization. No cell phones. No cable. Nearest supermarket (Piggly Wiggly) was 30 miles away. Hell, my grandmother didn't get running water until 1969. I remember going there as a kid and having to pull water out of a well to take a bath.
Now when I go there, I can get a broadband connection to the Internet and it's just like I never left home!
Actual experiments in telecommuting have not produced good results. Confusion, misunderstanding, and screwups have been common in many projects.
It seems like continual physical proximity is necessary for groups to accomplish complex tasks together.
You're absolutely right. A 44-hour drive from New York to Seattle really puts things in a good perspective for any "sophisticated urbanite" with an attitude.
"Real estate in much of rural America is shockingly inexpensive, especially in the remote parts of the West. Houses are practically free..."
Well, would you kindly shut the hell up about it? Some of us would like to keep it that way just a bit longer!
Actually, those were precisely the two points I had in mind!
Has to be done carefully and with the right people. I did it for a while on a contract, where I was 2 weeks on site and 2 weeks home. I got more done at home as far as the actual physical work. Obviously, when I was on site, meetings, hall talk etc obliterated that. But at least when I got there I had specific things to talk about.
As far as the physical work at home, I loved it, and I was extremely productive. The best part was being able to segment my day according to my circadian, not "8 to 5", which has more to do with retail trade then anything else. I would start working about 9-10 am, work till about 3, then head out for daily stuff. Mrs. Regulator and I would have dinner about 7, our usual. At 9 I would start work again, usually till about 11 or 12, sometimes early am. I did way more in those hours than any other; it's just the way I'm wired.
So it depends. But as far as the efficacy of wholesale tele-outsourcing....it could easily be a disaster. Of course, they probably won't get that until it's too late. Oh Well.
see my profile
Very funny story. I hope you are a writer.
If it weren't for this weather, she would probable be asleep already. The wind is gusting – the river is running to about two feet today. The sun is hiding, and peeks out only occasionally to brighten my world.
Jerry stopped by for a while – he was hanging out in the boathouse playing pool, and got worried that I might be lonely out on the boat by myself. I wanted to tell him to go away, that I was busy, that I was thinking of you, but I didn't. I had a beer with him, and we swapped a few war stories and laughed, even though I was a bit distracted.
I am in a really strange mood, my muse. I would gladly spend the rest of my life writing at this table – assuming that you had no room to spare for me in that berth. As muses go, you are incredible. I have not written this much, or this well, in years. Nor slept so little, to be honest.
Earlier today, I went up to the boathouse to buy a beer. A redheaded girl that I have never seen before walked in, and I stopped breathing for a moment. She looked at me, and said, "Wow. I really like that hat." I just looked at her for a couple of minutes, then I walked past her, and back out to the boat. I am afraid that I made a bad impression on the poor girl.
The thermometer is bumping on the wall, as the boat rocks, but the sound of the water against the hull is kind of soothing. I like listening to it – you can just hear it, over the soft country music on the radio.
I was stalling about coming down to the marina. Usually, I just sit on the boat and watch the world go by, or go play pool at the boathouse. But I knew this trip was going to be different.
Everything is different, my love – you have changed my world. My vision, and my very sight. My world is different, because you are in it, and I love you.
Even on a cloudy, windy day, sunsets are beautiful on a boat. I wish you were here to see this one.
My batteries are dead – I accidentally left the dock charger on manual last time that I was down here, and it boiled the water right out of the batteries. Today, I filled the batteries with water again, and reset the charger to automatic. But I will have to come back next weekend to winterize my engines –the have to be running.
I had to put on my coat, just now. The gauges say we are down to fifty degrees inside, and about forty-two outside. And, of course, someone I know is hogging all the blankets.
Across the river, in Anacostia Park, the lights are on. It is pretty quiet, tonight. During the summer, I can sit down here and listen to the gunfire over there all night. In many ways, our American Capitol is worse than a war zone.
The worst nights are, of course, the warm balmy ones. This time of year, though, it is pretty safe. Or, at least, it is safer.
Trafficant's boat is about to come loose from its moorings, again. I better go tie it up for him. I wouldn't want the junk to come loose and disturb my Muse in her sleep, after all.
Just damn! It is cold out there. All secure now, but I almost dropped my pistol in the river. Oops. Note to self – always check straps before climbing around the marina.
What a glorious, glorious, night. Who wouldn't want to be me, indeed.
They are playing our song.
Somehow, you and this boat just go together, my love.
J'tem.
****************
Actually, I am a mathematician.
Well, did you miss your calling?
I do both. Sort of an eclectic guy. Give me a momment, and check freepmail.
So it seems like on your project, they could have stability over a period of weeks.
In a dynamic environment, however, goals, plans, and deliverables will fluctuate rapidly. That's where the fun begins if people are scattered at all different sites.
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