Today's @bopinion post asks: With more and more social life migrating online, do second-tier cities finally have a shot at luring knowledge workers away from the overpriced superstar cities?
You don't really need to live in NYC or San Francisco in order to live the hip Millennial knowledge-worker life anymore, thanks to the magic of internet dating, social media, and co-working. 
The future of the American "creative class" might be this: a scattered archipelago of coffee shops, boxy apartment complexes, cute shopping villages, indie bookstores, and Thai restaurants, all tied together by the invisible threads of Online.
Once, farm towns across the U.S. all looked pretty similar, with a few local variations. Then it was factory towns. Maybe now it'll be these knowledge-worker villages.
A Trade Joe's nation.
A Trade Joe's nation.
It's kind of a weird vision of the future, and some will inevitably find it dull or even dystopian. But it would be a far more equitable geographic distribution of economic activity than what we see today.
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