Can we all walk away?

Greetings, gophernauts! Warm welcomes to recent newcomer sundogs

sol_solaris[1], aliasless[2] and nox[3] (if I've missed other recent

Republic arrivals, my apologies!). Also, please note that due to a

recent (good natured!) civil right claim (circumlunar jargon for

account deletion, as recently discussed by kvothe[4]), there is now

one more blank space in the Zaibatsu's roster of 32 sundogs, so if you

or somebody you know wants asylum, now is the time...

It feels like there's been a healthy amount of activity in gopherspace

recently, after a bit of a lull. I'm not sure if that's an accurate

perception on my part or an illusion caused by the fact that for

reasons I can't quite put my finger on I've been feeling - against my

genuine will for it to be otherwise - a bit detached from gopherspace

myself in recent weeks. I was very excited to read about the launch

of tilde.black by tomasino[5]! More pubnix activity is always

welcome.

I'm bummed out to read that cat is feeling bummed out[6]. I

sympathise about the overload on tech-related content in gopher- and

pubnix-space, even though I'm as guilty (and will continue to be as

guilty) of this as others. Nevertheless, I do want gopher to not

become, as I said previously, "the FORTH of internet protocols", so

even though I'm going to keep talking about various ideas for

reclaiming the internet (and even the web!) in the near future, I'm

going to strive for balance. The weather is becoming genuinely lovely

here at the moment and my velofever has come right back, so expect

more writing about my adventures on the Franken-Peugeot[7], including

hopefully some stuff that's not just bike-tech geekery - though there

will be that, too, and maybe even some dynamo-hub related shenanigans

worthy of the "solder" in solderpunk.

But right now, prompted by jynx's recent post[8] about the end of

civilisation in its current form, I want to pick up a very old thread

of thought that I wrote about over a year ago (!!!) in a series of

very verbose posts about asceticism[9], technoskepticism[10] and

frugality[11].

At the time of those old writings I was very much caught up in the

idea of some kind of modern day Walden-esque semi-hi-tech (or, better,

"mixed-tech") alternative lifestyle in which rather than working hard

full-time for most of, and surely the best part of, our lives just to

keep one's head above water in a default modern lifestyle of

consumption, one instead works hard - and saves hard - for on the

order of five years and uses the accumulated money to walk away from

that lifestyle by building some kind of small and humble but smart

(not in an IoT sense, but actually smart) (semi-)off-grid home and

leading a lifestyle which requires only a fraction of the ongoing

costs of what most of us are used to.

Genuinely, a one sentence paragraph up there. That's a new low for

me!

I'm as entranced by this idea as ever, but I know it's not a complete

solution. There's the practical question of how one is supposed to

acquire even a small piece of land on which to do this, along with the

freedom to live an unconventional life without being forced by

well-meaning but ultimatley overbearing legislation which forces

larger homes and infrastructure connections one might not want or

need. But what's really still itching in my brain is the

• philosophical* question of how this scales up from more than a tiny

fraction of population.

Give me the land, the legal freedom and the money, today, and I

believe I could set this life up, no problem. But it would be

feasible only because I'd have access to widely available and

reasonably-priced industrially produced things like solar panels and

efficient LED lighting and super-effective insulation materials and

tiny computers. And those things only exist because 99.999% of the

population is living and working in a world which isn't obsessed with

building simple, minimal, long-lasting good-enough ways of life which

need to be built once and then minimally maintained until you die.

The rest of the world is always making more and better and newer. If

more and more people walk away from that world and do a modern

self-sufficiency kind of thing which is only facilitated by the

products of that world, then those products will gradually become less

available or less affordable and less maintainable and the whole thing

sort of falls apart. A small number of techno-Thoreaus can live

parasitically off a mass-production, mass-consumption society, but

it's not actually a sustainable option for the whole world.

Maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe so few people are invested in

walking away from the current system that the there is no point in

being worried about whether they all can. In which case, fine, I

suppose, but it lends the whole thing an air of "watching the world

burn from afar" rather than "leading the way out of the fire", which

is a little disatisfying. Is there a transitionary path from the

current world to a stable alternative world which is less than the

current world (in terms of how much we have to work to keep it running

and how much distruction and misery it causes as a side-effect of

running) but more than pre-industrial society (in terms of the "quality

of life" and personal autonomy it offers)?

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~sol_solaris/

[2] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/1/~aliasless

[3] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/1/~nox

[4] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~kvothe/phlog/2019-04-07-civil-right/

[5] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20190414-ssh-keys

[6] gopher://baud.baby:70/0/phlog/fs20190414.txt

[7] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/bikes/franken-peugeot/

[8] gopher://1436.ninja:70/0/Phlog/20190414.post

[9] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/asceticism-or-something-like-it.txt

[10]

gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/technoskepticism-or-something-like-it.txt

[11]

gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/radical-frugality-or-something-like-it.txt