Distributed culture/production

Another argument for quality of life ahead of production requirements. Means rural inhabitants can have their lower-cost lifestyle and also compete via Internet ecommerce and marketing for their share of the pie.

The Long Tail:

"In a previous life, I briefly built a videogame software company based around a microcluster of talented programmers based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. They lived there because it offered a concentration, to use Florida's term, of the quality-of-life factors that they cared about, from family to culture. Once, that would have come at the cost of their careers. But thanks to the Internet, they're now able to live in Friedman's Flat World, collaborating and competing with other programmers around the world. And there are hundreds of thousands of other talents like them, scattered to the four corners of the globe."