The advantages were obvious: no travel time or cost and total physical security (because the participants never had to leave their homes). Some technopsychologists were pointing at the phenomenon of virtual meetings as one of the most significant changes in human society since agriculture replaced early mankind’s hunter-gatherer existence. These psychs believed that the Matrix would eventually spawn "electronic tribes" and "virtual nations." Membership in a particular social group would no longer depend on physical location, but more on channels of communication. Just as "telecommuting" had changed the work place in the late nineteen-nineties because knowledge workers no longer had to live within commuting distance of—or even on the same continent as—their employer, so this would change other facets of societies (or so said the pundits). While most people in 2053 still thought of "groupness" and "nationhood" in a geographical, location-based sense, virtual meeting places were starting to break this concept down.