In 1973, J. Neil Schulman interviewed Robert A. Heinlein for three hours for an article in the New York Sunday News. In 1990, a transcript of the full interview was published as The Robert Heinlein Interview. In it, Heinlein, when asked about the conflict between high technology and personal liberty responded,
The question of how many mega-men [millions of population] it takes to maintain a high-technology society and how many mega-men it takes to produce oppressions simply through the complexity of the society is a matter I have never satisfactorily solved in my own mind. But I am quite sure that one works against the other, that it takes a large-ish population for a high technology, but if you get large populations human liberties are automatically restricted even if you don’t have legislation about it. In fact, the legislation in many cases is intended to—and sometimes does—lubricate the frictions that take place between people simply because they’re too close together.
This has been true for most of human history and almost everywhere around the globe: cities have been the site of most innovation and technological progress because of the network effect of having many people with a wide variety of talents and access to resources collected together in one place. But with that concentration comes the downside of concentrating too many creatures who evolved to live in small bands of fierce hunters and gatherers in one place. Until the public health developments of the 19th century, cities were net sinks of population: the mortality due to disease and other consequences of urban life required constant replenishment of the population from the countryside.
Perhaps now that we have global, high bandwidth, and essentially free communication, plus an increasing capability to fabricate physical objects without massive and capital-intensive factories, we can have the advantages of dense urbanisation without the physical concentration of population. If you believe, as Marx argues, that political organisation is downstream of economics and the means of production, perhaps this decentralisation will lead to the emergence of the Network State, as envisioned by the eponymous book.