The farmers usually weren’t so bad off, but their situation was inherently precarious and threatened by modernity. Farmers didn’t work on desktop computers, and so they’d largely skipped the initial internet revolution. But they had mobile phones, and in 2008, when the 3G networks went up in rural America, farmers finally got online. “The problem with the internet is that it shows everyone on earth what they’re missing,” said Friedberg. “And if you can’t get to it, you feel you are getting fucked. That there is this very visceral and obvious shift that is happening
