But when you talk about “a problem of “content rather than scale” I wonder whether you are being naive. The infrastructure for electricity, for internet access, comes from large corporations, who have a very direct interest in remote people’s access to the wants, the putative “needs,” of the first world consumer economy. Until this is no longer true (and how to get there?), scale and content will remain completely linked. They are different in mind, but not in reality.

A related anecdote. I was on a reservation, watching a ceremonial dance in which a friend was dancing. During a break in the dances (they last from sunrise to twilight with breaks), I went to his house to rest and get out of the sun. His grandchildren were inside the house, watching the boxed set of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movies.

This vignette shows the difficulty of balancing local culture with global entertainment; and until scale and content are severed, I’m afraid that the entertainment will steamroller the local culture.

This idea of parallel networks is intriguing, and in many ways is an application of other sorts of alternative thinking to the specific challenges of rural poverty. We already see these alternative pathways springing up in other contexts, such as agricultural localism or homeschooling, where people and communities organize outside of and parallel to the mainstream.

But I see the same difficulties arising that these other alternative networks have to deal with (and increasingly, succumb to). How do we work out such parallel regional networks when the apparent thrust of government and business is toward ever-greater centralization, even to the point of making it illegal to form alternate pathways? The Amish have managed it in modern times, at least to a point, because of the wide latitude granted them under religious conviction exceptions. But their relative independence is fast eroding as their practices increasingly conflict with zoning regulations (think outhouses) or public health initiatives (vaccinations) or agricultural regulation (animal tracking, manure handling, business permitting and licensing to name a few).

It seems to me, in connection with Susan McWilliams’ post on civil disobedience, that we traditionalists may expect that some kind of civil disobedience will eventually be necessary to make the connections and build the alternate pathways you suggest, and that I find to be compelling. Perhaps this isn’t necessary yet (and given the economic situation, may never be necessary), but the net seems to be tightening and the flexibility to work outside the “approved” channels seems to be disappearing. I’m not sure what to think about this.

So how to balance these things? For balance them we must; even those most cranky of us are probably sufficiently attendant to basic Christian principles or human rights or simple egalitarianism so as to be unwillingly to deny the poor those things they desperately need to live fuller lives. And it’s not like many young people don’t leave small rural communities anyway, however connected they feel to their families and local cultures, driven away by the relative (or absolute!) deprivation they see their parents experiencing. (Folks have been leaving the farm and the village for the big city for centuries.) So we are left with balancing. Your thoughts explore one element of such a balancing: delivering goods in a way which bypasses already loo-large concentrations of work and wealth, and which instead seek to connect small, disparate places together. Such regional networks are, I think, crucially important, and yet there are too-few real-world examples of them out there for us to dwell upon and use as models. Thanks very much for giving some food for thought about what might go into building such models. I suspect I’m going to be coming back to this essay of yours again and again.