In college, most people I met had little to no experience with rural life—so I came up with an easy shorthand to describe where I’m from. I’d say we lived in the middle of the woods, far from highways or stores and pretty far from other people. And then, for illustration and dramatic effect, I’d deadpan: “At our house you can go outside and yell at the top of your lungs and no one will ever hear you.”
It was a bit creepy but did the job of communicating that home was a place a lot of people would describe as the middle of nowhere, without actually using that phrase. And it also struck what at the time felt like the right balance of quirky and backwoods yet able to see where I’m from through the eyes of outsiders. All of which seemed key to being perceived as a “good” hick.
Maybe because there were relatively few of us, housing assigned me a roommate who came from an even more remote area and we quickly became close friends. I always loved when she invited me to visit her family, which involved driving through the mountains on miles of dirt roads and then, depending on conditions, possibly walking or snowmobiling the final mile. A place that passed the yelling test with flying colors.
Anyway, we were both from the sticks, while our classmates were mostly raised in cities or suburbs. And when we talked about our homes, their responses tended to be some version of Weird! or I couldn’t live like that, or the slightly more generous I’ve been on vacation, it’s beautiful but I can’t imagine living there.
For them, part of it was geographic isolation. But an equal or maybe even bigger issue was the digital isolation. Although we’re millennials, my roommate and I had grown up in places with no cable—and where internet service not only arrived late, but was so slow and expensive and prone to going out for days or weeks at a time that it was more like not having any. If we technically belonged to the first generation whose childhood and adolescence was as an ever-expanding virtual landscape of information, the reality was that we lived beyond its borders, immersed instead in physical landscapes, which provide a different kind of information.
That said, not having internet when most other people do is also a real problem.
View from the Vinalhaven ferry on a rainy day, Annie Avilés
According to Pew, just seven years ago, internet connectivity was still a problem for nearly 60% of rural U.S. households. This improved during the pandemic—however pandemic-era funding that supported rural internet has since been cut. And globally, internet access is even more unequal. In 2024, the U.N. estimated that 52% of people living in rural areas worldwide still aren’t online, compared to just 18% of people living in cities. Today AI is being pushed as essential to the future—yet even if you ignore all the issues raised by the tech and the way it’s being developed, what does using AI require? Internet.
The impact of what often gets described as an internet gap, as if the internet were a daydreamy child falling behind in class and not a massive network of infrastructure and services run by businesses and governments, is just one of many nuances missing in larger narratives about the future. Especially when it comes to so-called rural people and the places we live.
Even that phrase—rural people, or in the U.S., rural Americans—obscures more than it reveals. Take Maine as an example, where it means members of the tribes that make up the Wabanaki Confederacy, whose families go back on the land 12,000 years, as well as working class people whose families migrated to Maine one or two or half a dozen generations ago. It’s nurses and farmworkers and teachers and artists and business owners, some of whom come from other countries or states. Increasingly, it’s influencers with varying levels of celebrity, many of whom arrived in recent years and do anything from reading tarot or sharing decor and cooking tips, to posting about survivalism. It’s also trust fund kids who have never needed to work and tech workers trying to escape the internet they helped build and other well-to-do people who moved in the pandemic and maybe even passed as vaguely middle class in cities, yet often live more like landed gentry once they go rural.
This wide array of people live in farmhouses, net zero homes, cabins, condos, compounds, yurts, trailers, in-law units, tents, campers, and cars. The structures sit on tiny village lots where you can peer into your neighbor’s windows and two acre parcels with suburban-style lawns and far larger properties that range from cut over brush and muck, to grand lodges and coastal estates. In Maine they are a majority but by no means only white. Some have progressive social values and some are various persuasions of conservative and some vote across party lines. Some don’t vote at all. And this is just one state. Because Maine rural differs from Montana rural differs from Alabama rural and so on.
There are simply too many kinds of people considered rural in a demographic sense to use terms like “rural people” or “rural Americans” and call it good. Especially now.
And while at first glance rural places might seem like the opposite of a tech story, what’s happening here is in many ways about technology. While there still isn’t internet everywhere in the U.S., it’s become faster and more accessible in many areas, which influences who wants to live where. The pandemic of course accelerated that process. Now add to that:
Increasing numbers of people migrating out of areas hit by environmental disaster, rising costs of living, that trend of rural influencers, and general uncertainty about the future—all of which have more people thinking rural.
A move to build large numbers of data centers, many of which are being installed in rural locations, where outsiders often view land as plentiful and cheap, and some communities feel like they can’t afford to say no.
The basic fact that humans already depend on rural lands for much of what we need to survive: from food, water, clean air, and energy, to raw materials for housing and tech, to space for recreation and other cultural activities.
We are so far beyond any semblance of the tidy urban-rural divide people sometimes use to explain the world. Instead, what we have are many different kinds of rural lands and subcultures—and many angles to the story of who is rural and what comes next. The only thing for certain is that big changes are happening, and the future of rural places impacts everyone, wherever we live.