Exactly. You read about things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A and you just have to wonder. That's an Internet backbone, who knows what they're capable of parsing and retaining from it. And if the capabilities existed to data warehouse the entire backbone, why not (if you're the NSA)?
I'm a Python/Ruby developer in Chicago originally from Michigan. If you want to stay close to Michigan for whatever reason, but need a job, Chicago is a great compromise.
Chicago has an excellent Python user group: http://chipy.org/
Get on the mailing list and let them know your situation. Also consider learning Ruby on Rails. If you Python, Ruby will be easy to learn. If you know any Javascript at all, leverage that.
This was a period when you could support a family and live a comfortable middle-class existence while working on an assembly line. It wasn't a question of the education, just much less global competition.
It really depends which large company you work for. My very first job was at an average large company and it was rather soul crushing. I currently work at a huge media company that has a terrific work atmosphere/culture. I think the difference between the two companies was a bankruptcy. The later company went bankrupt, projects were canceled, the hackers in the room figured they would be laid off any day and started working on whatever they felt like. Clients caught wind of what the hackers were developing and started buying in. The upper management saw all of this and didn't dare mess with it.
The best case scenario for cloud computing would be some sort of device that you could run on your home network that would provide services like email, web hosting, and file sharing. It would have to be painless to setup. Maybe it could backup heavily encrypted copies of your stuff onto off-site servers just in case. You could VPN/SSH into your cloud wherever you had an internet connection.
Unfortunately, I think such a device would STILL be too much work for the average computer user when all it takes is a couple seconds to make a dropbox account.