@louis I don’t think that’s right. I think both with cities and with the internet, it’s not at all about the real-estate. It’s about the people. How available is attention, activity, interaction. 1/

@louis Yes, hypothetically, you can buy a domain, shove something on it, and it’s possible to become a vibrant hive. But the actual distribution of human attention has shifted very dramatically, as all of us who do run independent websites know very well. It matters a great deal how thick or thin that long tail is. It was thick. It is now very thin. 2/

@louis Your website can still become the exception, and every entrepreneur, then and now — in the broadest sense, including cultural entrepreneurs — must overestimate the probability of their own success relative to what an “objective” outsider would estimate for anything to happen. But those “objective” odds are much uglier than they used to be, and that’s a real change in the landscape. The landscape is made of people, not domains. 3/

@louis Similarly, the scarcities of good city are also much more a function of social and political phenomena than they are of the weight, the objective cost or scarcity of city real estate. Asia is where cities still thrive. They build a great deal at high density, and limit (as China is now, at extraordinary cost) the degree to which rentierism overtakes the use of space as space. 4/

@louis Both in “real” space and cyberspace (how retro!), the problems of human flourishing are at this point much more about how we organize and govern the humans than they are about any objective incapacities or scarcities. /fin