Until Sawant runs many of these companies out with her Trotskyite agenda, you mean...

So Seattle will replace New York? NOPE. Not a chance.

Seattle will never be the epicenter of this country. The companies discussed in this article have been there for decades. The post-pandemic world, whatever it may look like, is not going to have Seattle as the epicenter. Never going to happen.

New York is one of the most powerful states in the United States, with a gross domestic product comparable to Canada and South Korea.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/11-mind-blowing-facts-about-new-yorks-economy-2019-4-1028134328

Why New York, Not London, Is The Economic Powerhouse Of The World
https://citi.io/2015/10/08/why-new-york-not-london-is-the-economic-powerhouse-of-the-world/

Just as long as businesses keep privatizing profits and socializing losses we'll all be fine!

A lot of people are going to die in the South and the Midwest.

We shall see.

The virus cares nothing about your political beliefs, or excuses.

(caveat - all of my siblings appear to have had it, and survived)

@1:

And where will they go - Peoria? Bangalore? Kinshasa? Da Nang? As much as tech companies are "virtual" in the sense of not necessarily needing their physical workforce to be in proximity to each other they still need the workforce: in this case tens, if not hundreds of thousands of workers, most of whom I imagine are not going to have much inclination to relocate en-masse to some low-tax haven half way across the country or planet or wherever you're envisioning some Randian "Galt's Gulch" of an unchained Capitalist Utopia. It doesn't matter where Bezos decides to plant his HQ flag: the workers are still going to want to stay more-or-less where they are, and in some cases will NEED to stay where they are, efficiencies of scale and global supply-chains being what they are.

@2 xina: I agree. I'm Seattle-born, and a bit surprised by Charles's theory on Seattle becoming the national post-pandemic epicenter of the U.S. economy, too. For starters, New York City, with its vast five boroughs (the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island) is over ten times bigger (population 8,399,999) than Seattle (population 744,955, in 2018)!
@7 COMTE: So working from home will be more essential than ever before? As a music composer I have been doing just that, only printing sheet music as needed. While live performances have been furloughed for the time being, I can still stream my work online.

"Money is not possible without an ultra-sociality, which is the grund for our hyper-culture. Money descends from the cultural and absorbs the social. The presence and absence of cash, the universal equivalent, becomes biological. It is the presence or absence of our long-evolved sociality. The total absence of what people are equals people sleeping on the streets."

This is just word salad nonsense.

If Charles was a baseball player, his batting average would be .020, which is also about as often as he is correct in his predictions.

@10 Yep

@11 By all means then, explain to us how ultra-sociality is the grund for our hyper-culture.

I had to look up "grund," but points otherwise well-taken, Charles. And by golly it just wouldn't be America if we weren't already inflating the next bubble -- one that looks suspiciously similar to the one that percussively popped at the turn of the century and left Seattle a rather quiet place for two or three years. Maybe we're moving toward ever larger bubbles that pop ever more quickly and violently. So much for the anthropocene, which started eroding pretty much the moment we all got around to subscribing to it. See, even a pandemic has a silver lining.

Sheer hilarity that three sources of information -- Slog, Mudede and Cary Moon -- who collectively can't raise the money to buy a fucking sandwich -- have such omnipotence on all matters related to the global economy.

@19 Sorry, I must have missed my hourly "Refresh Slog and read the replies to my comments" alarm. I'll try to be more timely for you in the future.

My response is this: @17's comment was coherent, but restating the premise of the entire article doesn't prove that this particular bit of his writing is any more intelligible or enjoyable to read.