Blair Reeves, a friend, and an occasional Margins contributor (on remote teams) wrote a persuasive piece on how companies should people based on what value they add, not pay them differently based on where they want to live. In some ways, I understand. People who live in more expensive neighborhoods in NYC or SF should not get paid more than those who decide to live farther away.

Their model also raises the question of scale: unlike Facebook, whose mission has always been to accommodate and connect everyone, everywhere, Low Tech supports the idea that a website can serve a small community connected through common interests. The Internet's global accessibility has lead us to think on a massive scale, but a community that lacks physical proximity can still be “local” in mindset.

Perhaps because it was conceived as a utopia, we tend to think of the internet as a limitless superhighway, a virtual mirror free from the constraints of our physical world. Data, files, our work, our memories, all float up to the cloud and are called down to attention by what seems to be magic. Yet in reality, life online is governed by the same limits to growth affecting the rest of our world. According to Low Tech Magazine the entire World Wide Web is responsible for consuming 10% of all global electricity production, a rate that is exponentially increasing.