[bfz]

I think most of this comment can be answered by highlighting the difference between supposed "Internet friends" and "real friends". Over corona there have been a wide range of studies published on the negative effects virtual communication has had on education in particular, the strength and quality of the relationships children have managed to develop, and even the severe effect it has had in some cases on development of vocal skills and the ability to read emotion.

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.

[CryptoPunk]

I entirely agree with you on the damage done by lockdown-imposed remote learning for kids. I don't believe we're at a place technologically where telecommunication can fully substitute for in-person learning. If left to our own devices, people would not have chosen to switch their children, en masse, from in-person learning to remote learning, for precisely this reason.

But as technology advances, I believe more activity will voluntarily migrate to electronically mediated, as this mode of interaction becomes more effective. This is especially the case if the law and institutions are adapted to make this mode of living more possible. People should have a choice to switch to this mode of living if they perceive it as advantageous. That is all I'm arguing for.

If my predictions of a mass-transition to an 'always traveling' mode of life don't pan out, then that means the technological evolution I predicted didn't emerge, and no one was harmed because they were able to discern that this mode of life was not advantageous, and avoid switching to it. So I don't see the harm in providing that option, just in case my predictions do pan out, and being able to switch to having a dynamic physical address turns out to be better for most people.