Olive trees are important. They represent everything that roots us [and] locates us
in this world…We fight so intensely at times over our olive trees because, at their best, they
provide the feelings of …belonging that are as essential for human survival as food in the
belly. … [Conflicts] over who owns which olive tree are so venomous precisely because
they are about who will be at home and anchored in the local world and who will not be.
Their underlying logic is: I must control this olive tree, because if the other controls it, not
only will I be economically and politically under his thumb, but my whole sense of home will
be lost…. Few things are more enraging to people than to have their identity or their sense
of home stripped away. They will die for it, kill for it, sing for it, write poetry for it and
novelize about it. Because without a sense of home and belonging, life becomes barren
and rootless. And life as a tumbleweed is no life at all. (Do you sense my despair?)

A global village may mean that we know more about each other, but not that we understand better each other…

But cities have diminishing returns: at one point or another, they simply don’t scale. That’s where this offloading feature works: you can live close to a big city but not deal with it’s headaches each day. Before the grid, upstate NY was a series of bedroom communities. Increasingly, though, as more folks spend only a couple of days in Manhattan, their local towns get a bit more attention, a little more love, and greater interaction.

Like many things, the network allows for a strong neck in the long tail: you don’t have to live in the city, but you also don’t have to be stuck in a remote place, far from the culture you may seek.

As for

I started featuring little villages as we seem to be attracted to them to escape from urban centers, but we can’t quite figure out how to stay there. The qualities they lack, cities have. Will cities engulf every little cute village eventually? Or perhaps villages will finally acquire the urban attributes that would make them more desirable.

What continues to fascinate me is watching how people migrate now that they can be connected from and to anywhere. Some are hunkering down in small towns instead of big cities while others, as the final line in your post suggests, just keep moving.

Anyhow, you’ve successfully avoided the mundane