When my business partner (who is also my wife) and I moved to a small town in Minnesota in the early 1980s, ARTS & FARCES was a tiny independent video production company and we had enough raw footage in the can from several documentaries to be able to live and work outside of the coastal media hubs.
After all, we were only a half-hour from an international airport and could get to either coast or anywhere else in a few hours. Besides, we had this new-fangled 300-baud modem thing that would soon allow us to collaborate with clients and subcontractors just as good as being there. Or so we thought.
I’m sure lots of you had similar dreams back then. Probably still do. Broadband connectivity has finally made that dream a possibility, at least if you have enlightened clients (of which we could use a few more, by the way). The problem of getting from anywhere to somewhere else for independent creatives has become a nightmare of gargantuan proportions because the hub-and-spoke, centralized air travel system is clearly broken and beyond repair.
Jon Udell is clearly someone who had similar ambitions of living and working outside of a megalopolis and has written an excellent overview of one of the missing pieces: peer-to-peer air travel. Decentralizing air travel is certainly doable and now’s the perfect time. As Jon says, “nobody is going to miss visiting O’Hare.”
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