As I rode into the city, the opportunity was so palpable I could taste it. Tall buildings, busy people, high energy. I had never felt anything quite as powerful. I knew then that my life had leveled up.

Summary: Trends are more likely to propagate from places with lots of people and higher information flow (duh).

New York City is massive and dense. If you walk through some of the more popular neighborhoods in Manhattan for a few days, chances are you will run into someone who is someone. Having lived here for the past few years, I realized something that most would consider entirely obvious: in general, the areas within short transportation of tall buildings tend to be more trendy than the areas really far away from tall buildings. For instance, Dumbo -- a really trendy neighborhood in Brooklyn -- is less than a 20 minute subway ride from the Financial District (Wall Street). Now this is obviously not a hard-and-fast rule, but intuitively it makes a lot of sense. Sitting on the 45th floor of a building is inherently kinda unnatural. The conditions to build that high couldn’t exist unless a LOT of people wanted to spend a portion of their lives in a very densely populated area. For the market demand for an excessively tall building to even exist, every iteration of a shorter building must have already been tried with the consensus feedback: “we want more.” So to build that high, you need MILLIONS of people crammed into a tiny space.

Abstracting a little bit, that train of thought got me thinking: what if a group of aliens performed a diabolical experiment where they wrapped massive impenetrable spherical tarp around the entirety of planet Earth, which flattened away natural geography but could not compress our man-made infrastructure? In this incredibly bizarre scenario, my guess is that the places that rose above the others (i.e. places with lots of concentrated tall buildings) would roughly mirror the 2-dimensional longitude/latitude probability density function of the origin of a given trend. And in all likelihood, those places with taller buildings would have significantly higher representation than just the direct proportion of their height.

My first justification is simple: places with tall buildings have more people. So they are bound to have more ideas. And with a higher volume of ideas, if something is bound to catch on and turn into a trend, it will be in a city.

But I think my second justification is more powerful: population density creates network effects. In a very simple example, consider two good friends who live one million people away from each other (weird way to measure distance but bear with me). In a dense city traversing that distance may only require a 30-minute transit ride, whereas in a sparsely populated state, that distance could require a 12-hour drive. The time barrier-of-entry for a given interaction is thus much lower in the city, which allows for more such interactions. As this applies to everyone within the city, there are compounding effects which makes the tall parts of the density function even taller.

In my opinion, the effectiveness of information transmission in virtual communication methods is dramatically lower than that of real-life interactions. Text messages might give you 10% of the information. A phone call 25%. A video call 35%. A virtual reality meeting 50%. Nonetheless, it is incredibly difficult to replicate the smells, body language, and consistency of eye contact that exist within a real conversation -- so elements of interaction are inevitably lost.

Nonetheless, these methods are FAR easier to implement. A video call takes less than 5 seconds to start up and is invariant of people-distance, so it can be executed with far greater frequency than even the transit ride in the city.

So what would the virtual equivalent of a tarp look like? My guess is, with an optimized virtual-native system (which is pretty important here), it would look something like a regular tarp on elephant steroids. Tight-knit virtual communities can have thousands of micro-interactions in the same time that a real-life farm town individual has a single interaction. That’s absolutely insane. This is obviously subject to the limits of human concentration. But it means that in that system, we could see an exponential proliferation of human potential beyond a traditional city. When the infrastructure for these optimized hypercities are built out and adopted (which has been rapidly under way for the past 25+ years with social networks), we will revamp almost everything we currently understand about our own collective limits.