| But why does one's address have to be fixed to provide these services / establish these qualities? Society adapted to advance the listed social causes in the historical context where having multiple or frequently changing residences was far too costly for the average person to consider. But what if modern civilization makes this mode of living attainable for the masses? * Information technology enables efficient markets for renting out housing for short durations. * Modern financial technology enables these markets to become globally accessible with minimal processing fees and delays. * Modern transportation technology enables people to travel globally very quickly and affordably. * Modern construction technology enables people to build much more housing units per capita than in the past, which makes second homes, vacation homes etc more viable. * Modern telecommunication enables people to work remotely, which makes a work life that is combined with travelling much more viable. We could very conceivably see a significant fraction and even a majority of people consider themselves world citizens, and prefer to travel non-stop, with the change brought about by the aforementioned technologies. In such a setting, society could very possibly manage physical neighborhoods differently, without tying people to a district in order to procure the necessary resources to maintain said neighborhoods. In terms of the social aspect, people may adapt by linking themselves moreso to virtual communities, in order to enable connectivity amidst physical travel and migration. Society not currently being set up to work without residents who are tied to physical neighborhoods is more likely due to the majority of people historically not being able travel non-stop than functional societies not being possible without static addresses. |
Information technology is only a tool, it is not, never has been and never will be a replacement for the real thing. A child cannot develop motor skills by climbing a virtual tree, a toddler cannot take shelter from a storm by dwelling in a virtual home. You cannot raise a child on an aeroplane without substantially reducing its quality of life and damaging its early growth. Thus continuance of the society that produced us and all the freedoms and privileges we enjoy (including air travel) is largely incompatible with these new tech-centric ideals.
In the normal case for that society to continue functioning, long term physical presence is required for development of its next generation, and nomadic world citizenry is largely a temporary (and abnormal) trait of those who are young, unwilling to reproduce, and primarily misallocate their capital to consumption and selfish pursuits. This trend is a significant contributor to the collapse in population growth rates across the western world and consequently directly impacts GDP, which is to say, the steady decline of our way of life.
Often immigration is offered as a solution to the population growth aspect, but immigrants quickly assimilate our culture and consequently our growth rates within a single generation (predictably as a result of their new privilege), meaning the qualities our culture celebrates cannot be worked around by importing replacement people to breed on behalf of the laptop class exploiting the spread between income and the cost of a beer in some remote reach of the world. Finally there are many signs that immigration may have reached a local peak as resource access concerns are beginning to dominate global politics for the first time in half a century.
For a little more context, I'm a tech native that has lived on the Internet since around 1998, this is mostly written as a rebuke of my former self, who had little idea of the practicality or implications of all the grand empty promises of technology. You cannot now and never will be able to replace a physical address with a transaction on a blockchain.