Lately though I took a look at
https://www.amazon.com/Between-Two-Ages-Americas-Technetroni...
and a conference proceedings about Brzezinski's ideas that came out in the next few years. Partially I wanted to roll my eyes at times because my interests have moved on but something that struck me was an essay by Paul Goodman which reflected a sentiment that was really common at that time to the effect that people were dogpiling into urban areas, that large cities were becoming unmanagable, that the exodus into urban areas had to be stopped, etc. This report was a relatively late one on the topic
https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E...
which did not have any 1960s radical positioning but rather saw it is an almost universal political problem that the UK was too concentrated in London, France too concentrated in Paris, etc. All of these countries saw some need to do something about it.
That kind of talk stopped abruptly circa 1980 when we got Reagan and Thatcher and competition between international economic centers seemed too fierce for, say, the UK to give up any competitiveness at all by dispersing its financial sector out of London.
Today the message is overwhelmingly that people are more productive when they live in big cities thus it is an economic necessity for population to concentrate. There's a counternarriative now which is not positioned as a counternarriative that housing has become unaffordable in places with vibrant economies.
As I see it is the old "large cities have become unmanageable" theme that's become crystalized.
Right now it can seem like a political problem (e.g. existing residents, landlords, etc. profit from the current situation) but since growth is prevented through this mechanism there are many other problems we're not seeing (if California was adding as much population as it could could they afford infrastructure investments, could they handle environmental impacts, provision social services, etc.)
https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E...
which describes a nearly universal perception in Europe at the time that it was a problem that economic and cultural power is concentrated in cities like Paris and London. (It takes a different form in the US in that the US made a decision to put the capital in a place that wasn’t a major center just as most states the did the same; so it is not that people are resentful of Washington but rather a set that includes that, New York, Los Angeles and several other cities.)
At that time there was more fear of getting bombed with H-Bombs but in the 1980s once you had Reagan and Thatcher and “globalization” there was very much a sense that countries had to reinforce their champion cities so they can compete against other champion cities so the “geographic inclusion” of Shenzhen and Tel Aviv is linked to the redlining of 98% of America and similar phenomena in those countries as well.
It is not so compatible with a healthy democracy because the “left behind” vote so you get things like Brexit which are ultimately destructive but I’d blame the political system being incapable of an effective response for these occasional spams of anger.
https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E...
pointed out that most European countries were concerned that a single large city was bleeding the life from the rest of the country, famously the UK and France. It was a common idea that governments should try to counteract it which starting to be talked about in the (mostly tricentric at the time) US.
Then by the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher came and we started talking about “globalization” and suddenly it became a matter of London now competes with Paris which competes with New York which competes with Hong Kong and now London can’t compete if has to farm work out to Birmingham and there was a time of about 30 years that we didn’t hear a word about dispersion.
One trouble of it we are seeing now is that votes are distributed evenly even if cultural and economic power are not, so we will come to realize that keeping your republic and keeping your lopsided distribution of cultural and economic power are not compatible — the question is do we lose our republic first?
It's hard to tease apart the differences between modalities. On Youtube today there are many "videos" that are good to play in the background, be it Technology Connections, Pod Save America, or Asmongold's show. Part of the experience of reading is that an individual can find things that are rare, obscure, that it doesn't have to be massy at all [1] -- in the past economics required television and radio to be massy but podcasts, in principle, are really cheap and could service obscure tastes. Another fraction is that reading itself is a filter: even in the core a lot of people like Asmongold are functionally illiterate, in a place like Rwanda you just can't reach most people through writing.
[1] read https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med..., read https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E...