Smart City aficionados are agog at the prospect that the Internet of Things will create vast new markets for technology that will disrupt and displace cities. Color us skeptical; our experience with technology so far—and its been rapid and sweeping—is that it has accentuated the advantages of urban living and made cities more vital and important. From the standpoint of urban living, one should regard “IoT” as “the irrelevance of thingies.”

It’s been more than two decades since Frances Cairncross published his book The Death of Distance that prophesied that the advance of computing and communication technologies would eliminate the importance of “being there” and erase the need to live in expensive, congested cities. (It goes down, along with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Kevin Hassett’s Dow 36,000 as one of the demonstrably least accurate book titles of that decade.)

Back in the 1990s, when the Internet was new, there was a widely repeated and widely accepted view of the effect of technology on cities and residential location. The idea was “the death of distance”—that thanks to the Internet and overnight shipping services and mobile communications, we could all simply decamp to our preferred bucolic hamlets or scenic mountaintops or beaches, and virtually phone it in.

And these predictions were made in an era of dial-up modems, analog cell-phones (the smart phone hadn’t been invented, and Amazon was still making most of its money cannibalizing bookstore sales). We were all going to become “lone eagles”, tipping the balance of power away from cities and heralding a new age of rural economic development. Here’s a typical take from 1996, courtesy of the Spokane Spokesman Review:

Freed from urban office buildings by faxes, modems and express mail, lone eagles are seen by economic development experts as a new key to bolstering local economies, including those of rural areas that have been stagnant for much of the century.

Faxes? How quaint. Since then, of course, we’ve added gigabit Internet and essentially free web conferencing and a wealth of disruptive apps. But despite steady improvements in technology, pervasive deployment and steadily declining costs, none of these things have come to pass. If anything, economic activity has become even more concentrated. Collectively, a decade after the Great Recession, the nation’s non-metropolitan areas have yet to recover to the level of employment they experienced in 2008; meanwhile, metro areas, especially large ones with vibrant urban cores, are flourishing.

The economic data put the lie to the claim that cities are obsolete. One of our favorite charts from Oregon economist Josh Lehner points out that larger metropolitan areas have outstripped smaller ones, and rural areas have continued to decline in this tech-based era: