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I spend significant time in very urban areas and very rural areas, and I'm seeing more convergence because of the net.

There is covergence thanks to major sites such as Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, etc. And near-ubiquitous smartphones help.

More-powerful convergence is happening thanks to the rural areas adopting tech for farming, weather, robotics, construction, how-to learning, and broad support for personal freedom.

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If your thesis was correct, it would be evident to the author who is actually time-sharing (taking advantage of all the things you say). But what he describes in his essay is how even he is of a different mindset...this essay is more about context switching. Its impossible to context switch when you never leave the house/office/facy neighborhood. Or to use some data, look at the dismal % of african americans that go to yosemite or even know how to swim. There's lots of racial and historical bias at play in that data, but the empirical point remains--context switching for urbanites is hard. And the poorer you are the harder it is. The reverse is also true--the poorer and more white you are in appalachia, the less likely you are to context switch with the weathy coastal cities. So we have money and culture paying a part as barriers to context switching, notwithstanding the revolutions in transportation (train, plan, auto, jet) and communications (telegraphy, telephone, tv, internet...etc).

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