Eric Schmidt posted an interesting article about the digital divide in both urban and rural America on Google+ and Twitter recently (I don't use Facebook).https://goo.gl/GYrBGgDo the digital divide and the urban-rural divide have something in common? Here in Germany they seem to have a lot in common, all the people want to live in the big cities like Munich, Cologne, Hamburg or Berlin, where the digital startups and agencies are, and the surrounding country often feels as if it were empty, there are no jobs here, and you will have difficulties to get a Taxi because there is simply none.
The manufacturing jobs went to China long ago, and the European rust belt from Gelsenkirchen to Gliwice suffered a similar fate as the American one. In the county there is lots of affordable space but no jobs, while in the urban regions there are plenty of jobs but no affordable space to live. How can we make the COUNTRY great again? It would make much more sense if people would move out of the cities back into rural areas, in the moden digital age people can work remotely from everywhere as long as there is a good Internet connection. The cities in turn would gain more space and could get greener. Let us say Google or Apple would move their headquarters to St. Louis, Kansas City or Albuquerque. In the modern digital world it doesn't matter where are you are located as long as you have a good Internet connection. Suddenly San Francisco would have a lot more affordable space to live, and St. Louis or Albuquerque would thrive. If the big IT corporations can not relocate their headquarters, maybe government agencies can. CIA and NSA are both located near Washington, D.C. If their headquarters would move to Kansas City or Albuquerque than these town would prosper and more affordable space to live would become instantly available in the capital. In Germany the CIA counterpart BND moves just now into the opposite direction, from the country to the capital. I think that's wrong. One thing that the NASA space program did well was to consider the whole country and every state, the Kennedy Space Center is in Florida, the control center is in Houston, Texas, the JPL in California, etc. Regards,Jochen
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