Online giants must accept responsibility for impacts on the physical world

[Commentary] While we’re engaging in a new assessment of technology’s transformative impacts, no one should leave aside tech’s most physically enormous influence: its big role in reshaping the nation’s urban geography. Scholars have for years suggested that tech might alter the city hierarchy. Most notably, Beaudry, Doms, and Lewis showed more than a decade ago that the cities that adopted personal computers earliest and fastest saw their relative wages increase the quickest. Yet, there is now strong evidence (including our own work) that digital technologies are contributing heavily to the divergence of metro economies and the pull away of “superstar” cities from smaller ones and the rural hinterland, with painful implications.

In short, it may be inherent in tech that the digital rich get richer, suggesting that this must be a gargantuan concern in coming discussions of tech’s responsibility to the offline world. Quite simply, the nation’s ongoing tech revolution, for all of its benefits, is likely implicated in the nation’s rising geographical imbalances and urban-rural divides.