From: Mark Grant (mark@unicorn.com)
Date: Sun Mar 02 1997 - 07:13:26 MST
On Sat, 1 Mar 1997 GBurch1@aol.com wrote:
> For a young person with
> few roots in the old world, living in a repressive society with few
> opportunities, immigration is relatively easy. For a succesfully established
> person living in a relatively free society with good economic prospects, the
> decision is harder.
For a rich technomad running a business over the Net, emigration is merely
a matter of getting on a plane to another country. While I was travelling
around the world last year few people noticed that I was in a different
country every few weeks and several people offered me contract work
(sadly, horrid Windows programming) over the Net. As communications
technology improves location becomes increasingly irrelevant for business,
and people will have a strong incentive to, say, work for an American
company for American salaries but live in Thailand.
If most business can be moved online, then we enter a situation where
countries will become the kind of proprietary communities I was talking
about earlier, vying with each other to attract the most successful
technomads in return for their taxes. This may be one important route
towards the kind of societies we talk about, and is probably one important
reason why governments are trying hard to screw up the Net.
Mark
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