Rod Dreher, How Crunchy Con You Be?

There is a vast middle ground. I favor doing the best one can to re-localize life by patronizing local businesses, living in a localist manner, and so forth. That will necessarily look different for different people, depending on their circumstances. I think it’s a good thing that extending broadband to rural areas will make it possible for a number of folks to move (or move back!) to those areas, or to never have to leave in the first place. Where I live, West Feliciana Parish, there aren’t now enough jobs to enable everyone’s children to stay here if they wanted to. Broadband access, and the move towards working at home, has the potential to expand the economy here. The place still needs a more diverse economy, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

All of which is to say that I generally agree with Ballor that given the world that we actually live in, the localism and the kind of conservatism I favor will in many cases only be feasible through the Internet. When I was growing up, one reason people moved from small towns to the big cities was the lack of something to do. The lack of movies and bookstores were a big deal to me as a kid. We still don’t have theaters or bookstores in St. Francisville, but Netflix and Amazon.com mean that sort of thing need not be an impediment to choosing small-town life over city life. Now, if you never leave your house, and instead just sit inside watching TV and not getting to know your neighbors or your town, you haven’t really accomplished much. Still, it’s good that books and movies are easily available electronically. And of course I am grateful that the Internet makes it possible for me to sell my product to a wide audience. But if the day comes when I cannot do that, I’m either going to have to find another line of work, or move to where the job is, whether I want to or not. Unless you’re independently wealthy, you are dependent on economic forces no locality can control.

The internet makes living in a small-town possible because it alleviates boredom? How about following Wendell Berry's sugesstion that we learn how to entertain ourselves?

One is a hostage of the system that is true. So long as one is a wage slave, one must go where work is, and there may be no way of escaping wage slavery. It would be ideal to re-establish roots where one has some sort of familial connection/history, but it will be a struggle, if it is at all possible.