But if the corporation doesn't need an office, why the fuck would its workers even live in a city (or even a suburb, which are nothing but a lifehack to avoid some city problems even at the price of a long commute to work in city) with its hyper-expensive real estate and shitty governance by a thousand special interest lobbies, among which are the greens proposing this?
The whole point of living in a city is the job opportunities, and if they are just as accessible from every podunk nowhere with an internet connection...
The knives will *have* to go out in the establishment camp over this.
Charitable Answer: Because rural living means longer supply chains and more hospitals, fire stations, police stations, etc., to cover a very large area, defeating the purpose of clustering people together, which is to shorten the distance to services and from raw material to product to consumer as much as possible.
Uncharitable Answer: So people can be farmed. So they can be fed, and watered, and watched with cameras, like cattle.
I’m going to give you a little scenario. Let’s say you’re a wealthy Western oligarch.
The IPCC are saying that we need to put an end to all fossil fuel use. Yes, that includes diesel fuel for mining vehicles, semi-tractor trailers, farm equipment, and everything else.
Zero additional carbon. Not a single drop of additional fuel burned. George Monbiot is saying that we need to put an end to basically all livestock farming, and that GMO monoculture crops are destroying 2000 acres of farmland a day in America due to soil erosion. Kate Raworth is pushing her zero growth, circular economy pipe dream. Jeremy Rifkin is saying that we just need to hold out a little while longer and avoid ecological collapse, and we'll have some sort of communitarian techno-utopia where goods and ideas just magically produce themselves, or something.
The puppet politicians you've put into power are panicking, because a whole generation of workers is about to retire, creating a massive brain drain as legions of barely sentient, mouth-breathing TikTokers take their place, while also putting additional strain on a completely bankrupt social security system that already gave away its entire budget to you. China and Russia are champing at the bit to start World War III, fracturing supply chains and cutting you off from cheap labor, plastic baubles, and microchips. Also, at the same time, AI automation is promising to make millions of people suddenly, irreversibly jobless.
You're faced with the unenviable position of having to ease the world's population into a zero-growth, economically stagnant hell, where their bread and circuses are sharply curtailed, their pensions are canceled, and they're forced to rent everything they need to live from you.
Given these conditions, how do you prevent people from:
A. Fleeing into the countryside and becoming a few billion subsistence farmers burning biomass for heat and producing India-level pollution and runoff?
(Note: Realistically, this does not happen, since very few people actually have the knowledge, initiative, or willpower to do this, so you get mass looting instead)
B. Voting for populist candidates who promise to make us more dependent on fossil fuels and industrial capitalism, not less?
C. Dragging out the guillotines and cutting your head off?
D. All of the Above?
