[friend_and_foe]

Remote work is the future of work that you don't need to be physically present at a location to do. You'd be surprised by some things you do need to be physically present to do, even if it's only sometimes, so there will be a lot of "remote but you must live within X miles of location" type jobs.

For the rest, it's kind of like uber. Anyone with the right skills and equipment can do the job from anywhere, but you're self employed. This doesn't work out for everybody, it drives pay down. Why pay SF wages when workers don't have SF cost of living? It's going to work a lot like call center outsourcing, information workers will be where they're competent and cheap, and it doesn't matter where in the world that is. If you've been freelancing a while you know what's coming. If you've been a salaried employee, get ready to make trade offs. Sounds great to be remote, and it is, but you're competing with people all over the world for that job, and many of them don't need a quarter million dollars a year to do the job.

I personally think it's a fantastic thing. A lot of people don't like it when pay goes down. I personally don't care what my pay is, only what my standard of living is, and if I live somewhere cheap and have a higher standard of living with lower pay I'm happy. Costs do need to go down, and some of you reading this are ridiculously overpaid (and many of you know it) which is not sustainable and wasn't going to last forever no matter what happened. A good effect of this is that if you do work that requires you to be somewhere it will come with a premium, physical workers are going to be getting a pay bump without having to have a union negotiate it for them or a cartel agreement to keep pay high.

A lot of people don't like change. Any change creates some who benefit and some who lose out. But it's happening and can't be stopped.