Wasn’t the Internet supposed to make mobility redundant?
The Internet has increased transport intensity in the economy as a whole more than it has displaced individual acts of movement. It continues to stimulate more mobility than it replaces in much the same way that roads built to relieve congestion often end up increasing traffic. Rhetorics of a “weightless” economy, the “death of distance,” and the “displacement of matter by mind” sound ridiculous, in retrospect. The good news is that people and information want to be closer. When planning where to put capacity, the law of locality states that network traffic is at least 80 percent local, 95 percent continental, and only 5 percent intercontinental guide network designers. This is not the “death of distance” that the companies who laid the fiber had in mind.
