Instead, it just makes them irrelevant to the substance of people's lives. Commodification, to use a horrible neologism. The structure of the Victorian family, for example, dissolves as the servants go elsewhere, the women stop being dependent, and the paterfamilias finds himself just one more individual facing others in a constant bargain. Meanwhile your currency collapses, and eventually you end up as North Korea, useful as a horrible example. You can have any national policy you like, as long as they like it.
Technological change is part of the same process, and magnifies it, of course.
Take this Web we're using. Someone may be sitting in a small Mormon town in Utah, but with the Internet, they're culturally in the Big City. The ability to be invisible that was traditionally associated with life in places like New York is now available to anyone. Increasingly, this is not so. And increasingly, the anonymity and anywhere-ness is moving into the physical realm as well.