[surgical_fire]

I understand centralization in the sense that you so aptly put in bringing benefits in a very similar vein of economies of scale.

A bunch of businesses in the same city benefit from shared infrastructure (in a broader sense) and a large pool of labor.

But when we specifically talk about knowledge work, where the output is not a physical good (and even when the output is a physical good but that requires a lot of knowledge work before it can be produced) does the centralization even make sense? Technology vastly expanded the possibilities in terms of infrastructure and pool of labor. The limits now may be more in terms of the cultural shift and government regulations.