(Disclaimer: Slightly off-topic. Also, it's not my intention to belittle their lifestyle. I hope I don't come across that way.)
Some of the things they need even in this disconnected lifestyle - like the mobile home, laptops, books, solar panels, batteries and even the slippers have to be made by someone doing a 9-5 job somewhere. The idea of civilization to me is to take advantage of these specialists who are really good at doing or manufacturing some of the things I need and in turn I become a specialist in something (probably one thing) which I contribute back to the society - it's a barter. That I don't have to do all the things I need to do to survive, seems efficient and effective. Also, not all of the jobs are going to be able to afford this "luxury".
Right on. When considering lifestyle choices I ask myself how many people could live the same way. If it turns out to be a small minority before collapse, I reject it as a path for myself. To me off grid lifestyle seems a retreat from the goods of society without a commensurate benefit to self and others. As an art movement or experiment I say fine.
I suspect you could scale the 'off grid' lifestyle to around 1/2 the US population without many issues. Web + FedEx means a lot of jobs can be done remotely. Consider plenty of teachers work remotely even if most people think of it as a face to face job. Even some doctors have started to work remotely let alone the classic 9/5 office worker.
Sure, city's are a far more efficient use of land and energy, but at least in the US we still have a lot of open space.
PS: My only gripe is people think of this as a 'green' lifestyle. Generally, living in a city high-rise and using public transit is far better for the environment.
>I suspect you could scale the 'off grid' lifestyle to around 1/2 the US population without many issues.
As you spread out the population, the cost of FedEx deliveries is going to grow. Now you can drop off goods in a city via a highly efficient train, have that switched to a truck, and have it delivered to the end customer.
If everyone is off the grid in the wilderness, that train becomes a lot less useful to deliver goods. Now you've got to reach a larger area to serve the same number of people.
> Web + Fedex means a lot of jobs can be done remotely
A lot of jobs can be done remotely, but that doesn't mean they could be done remotely without cost. Many people are less efficient when working remotely. I find communication to be much harder when remote than when in person, especially as issues get more complex.
FedEx works because people near you also need packages. The more packages they ship the more efficient they become.
Also, the US population density is ~100 people per square mile so chances are good someone within 1 mile of you also needs a package today. Sure, it's cheaper for them to drop off 10 packages at the same apartment complex, but even fairly remote areas can be surprisingly profitable.
>Fedex works because people near you also need packages.
That's exactly my point. The more people who need packages around you, the less it costs to deliver a package specifically to you. Going off the grid in remote corners sounds great, but part of the reason we moved to cities is because sharing infrastructure costs makes things more efficient.
>Also, the US population density is ~100 people per square mile so chances are good someone within 1 mile of you also needs a package today.
The US's population density is 100 people / square mile, but that doesn't tell you the full story. We don't live all over America, we are clustered into cities and towns, mostly on the coasts. There's a lot of desert and Alaskan wilderness with no one around bringing down the average. NYC alone is ~6% of the US population. The Northeast megalopolis is ~17% on ~2% of the land.
There are less than 4 million miles of road in the US. At 1$ per mile you can send a truck down every one 6 days a week for 1.3 billion a year. (Note, there would be some backtracking but also some roads are avoided.) FedEx's revenue is 45 billion a year so the last mile is not a problem as long as the volume is there.
On top of that if you live in the middle of nowhere they simply don't deliver to you. So, if more people moved to the desert for whatever reason there costs stay more or less the same.
The drivers alone probably cost more than $1/mile, then you have gas and maintenance. FedEx had $45B revenue with $2B net income, not exactly huge margins.
Obviously there is more to package deliver than just the raw cost of getting a package from a local sorting center to the end of a rural driveway.
At the moment, a lot of the cheap rural shipping is being subsidized by the USPS.
I was surprised that UPS will now do overnight delivery of Amazon orders to my mom's house in rural Oklahoma (she's at least a mile from her nearest neighbor), even though the truck originates from Lawton, OK - 50 miles away according to Google Maps.
Her "broadband" connection is a 2-6/2Mbps Wimax connection via an antenna on the roof to the nearest town a few miles away. It's still weird being able to sit out "in the middle of nowhere", talking to friends online, and order stuff I need and still have it show up the next day. Was a lifesaver when I stayed there for two weeks back in March after she had a hospital stay, and I needed a proper office chair and a folding table to act as a desk rather than using her kitchen table.
Was still able to work remotely just fine (most of my stuff was SSH to remote servers, and a web browser).
More surprising is that when I did the same thing earlier this month to help her after knee replacement surgery, that I could get T-Mobile LTE inside her house - back in March, I'd only been able to get it while sitting on the front porch.
Quite a change from a few years ago when all she could get was 21.6Kbps dialup, and I had to send her a literal pile of USR Courier modems with instructions "if you have a lightning storm and the modem won't work the next day, throw that one in the trash and plug in another from the stack."
> Quite a change from a few years ago when all she could get was 21.6Kbps dialup, and I had to send her a literal pile of USR Courier modems with instructions "if you have a lightning storm and the modem won't work the next day, throw that one in the trash and plug in another from the stack."
With all due respect, that seems very decadent. Back when we lived in the sticks, the (simple) rule was to just unplug (from power as well as POTS) all electronic equipment when not in use. Never lost a modem to a thunderstorm in those days!
This was at a point when most people already had broadband, and used dialup modems were dirt-cheap on eBay (e.g., that's why she had a stack of USR Courier V.Everything models instead of Sportsters). IIRC I got a few of them from toss-out piles at ISPs I worked for, and some were my own stash from before I went to ISDN then cablemodem at home.
I couldn't depend on her to unplug everything every time there was a storm.
> but even fairly remote areas can be surprisingly profitable.
This is only true because they subcontract these rural deliveries to USPS [1]. Without USPS, who's already required to go there anyways to deliver traditional mail, it isn't profitable.
Lots of rural communities, like the one I live in, have a central mail box location where we go to collect our mail. That one location services about 50 properties. FedEx or any courier deliver to the local post office in town. It all works quite well, and it's not so bad having to go out to get your mail, since you usually need other things from town too.
I’m sure some of these off-grid philosophies don’t hold water when you put it like that. However, consider that many people out there have been dealt a bad hand by society. They’ll never have the options or opportunities that most of us posting here take for granted. “Doing your part for society” may work for most of us, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Some people out there are going to have more peaceful and productive existences living at the margins.
There is definitely an irony to people who make a show of disconnecting, but do so on the largess of society. In this piece, the guy who gets free electricity and shelter from his friend's shed. Or what I used to run into frequently, the rebel wanderer who eschews The System and couch surfs at the houses of his office worker friends.
I don't mind people who want to disconnect, but when you've got a campstove, a phone, a laptop, photovoltaic panels, a car... you're still enjoying the fruits of progress & society with the rest of us.
I think the mindset is more "bring the parts you like, leave the parts you don't." I know there are some hypocritical people (especially the Anarcho-primitivism people) that have romanticized ideas but the people in this article at least just seem to like it and aren't trying to avoid all progress or society.
No, the ones that irk me are specifically the people who make a big show about everything that's wrong with modern life and capitalism and such, and how much better it is to live off the land free of the corrupting influences society, and yet don't see how much they still depend on "The System" they profess to hate so much.
The ones in this piece don't particularly seem to be that type, I suppose, so maybe it's not relevant.
Why do you think it bothers you? Genuinely curious.
I understand that hypocrisy is frustrating, but perhaps this situation is more illustrative of the fact that "The System" has so pervasively invaded free spaces (physical spaces as well as psychogeographic ones), than it is that these (or others) are just young punks who won't know any better until their older and wiser (like us -- by implication?). What criteria do their motivations not satisfy, and in what way do their actions or desires/beliefs/ideas impact you to the extent that it would provoke any reaction at all? Is it dishonest to say you're disconnecting and still wear shoes? That doesn't seem right to me.
I'm forever interested in why righteous motivations seem to automatically provoke feelings of judgement or disdain from some people, who usually make comparative observations about the relative purity of a project or intentions, against their own values and wisdom.
There are certain people for whom the simple act of someone's wanting to do something substantially different (and who knows, maybe better?) seems to be an existential threat. I'm not saying that your reaction here is that serious, but I've seen it in many others.
It just seems like there is a knee-jerk reaction from many quarters that finds any discussion about alternatives to simply accepting and living within the defined parameters of "The System", and I wonder where that often-vehement opposition comes from.
You like your laptop because it makes your life better. That makes me happy. But then you tell me the "The System" is evil, and makes nothing good, etc- it's not only hypocritical, but it stings just a little, as I am a member of the very system making your laptop.
I don't want thanks, I just don't want to be told I'm evil at the same time as you enjoy the fruits of my labor.
See also: RMS and his willingness to avail himself of other people's cell phones and grocery store club cards even though such things are verboten surveillance instruments.
Isn't using someone else's store card a great subversion of their surveillance? I share a card with about half a dozen other people. Ralph's computer must scratch it's head when it looks at "my" purchasing patterns.
I had already bookmarked this post because I love the idea. But your response is incredibly thought provoking.
I love the idea of moving to Alaska or Canada in the wilderness, and figuring out how to survive and stay connected.
I'm thinking on the fly, but I think I would be contributing to society. My specialty is web programming and software architecture. I'd even go so far as to call it an art form.
I encounter a problem. Sleep on it for a few days, then bam, things settle into place and I spend a couple days solid programming. Those days that I'm "sleeping on it" if I'm at work, I'm often distracted by day-to-day tasks that usually could have been handled by someone else.
I'm not sold on the concept one way or the other. I do like the idea of a middle-ground solution.
I really appreciate your counter-argument. Good to think about at least.
> Actually, the person making those things could also have chosen to live a simpler life and only be working part time. It's their choice.
I did not interpret the point you responded to the same way as you. It's not about that individual's choice, but about the necessity for some person to be producing those products under those working conditions, in order for the off-grid folks to be able to consume them.
For some people, there's an implicit hypocrisy in visibly "opting-out" of a lifestyle if your new lifestyle necessitates that others have to fill in behind you. For others, yourself included I guess, it's just a market and anything goes.
Why do you assume those are the only working conditions possible?
>your new lifestyle necessitates that others have to fill in behind you
My lifestyle doesn't "necessitate" anyone to do anything. I buy solar panels because they are available and I can afford them. If all of a sudden nobody wanted to work more than 10 hours a week and solar panels were not available or too expensive, I would not buy them.
What each individual does with their time is up to them. When the world changes because of how people spend their time (i.e. stuff might get way cheaper, or way more expensive, or self-driving cars may or may not become a thing), I, and everyone else, will continue to re-evaluate their choices about how they spend their time, and adjust accordingly.
You can live disconnected, while still participating occasionally in the labor market.
Lifetime jobs at a single employer died in roughly my grandpa's generation. And I'm not that young. My father went into semi-retirement in the 90s and he RVed roughly all summer and due to lack of connectivity technology at that time, he only contracted in the winter unless it was an emergency (charged higher rate!). RV life is a lot simpler with a house and mailing address. I spent a lot of time in the 90s and 00s picking up my parent's mail and generally keeping an eye on their house, which wasn't so bad because they lived kinda between my house and my work at that time, once I had kids it was more of a hassle but I still made the time. I remember how creepy it was watching 9/11 coverage on their big TV when they were in some campground a thousand miles away, wondering if this is "the big one" and should they be packing up to come here or should I be packing up to join them?! Also when you get too old/sick you just move back into the house permanently, or take shorter RV trips anyway.
Anyway, in summary, a home base strategy with "far less than full time employment" works pretty well, and if you're going to have "far less than full time employment" you need to do something with your spare time between work, and some folks like to travel and camp in their extensive spare time. So you end up with people disconnected and wandering the earth, most of the time, yet occasionally slaving away 9-5. For my dad it was voluntary in a semi-retired state of being, but mere education and talent do not guarantee employment for anyone, so I'm sure for some its involuntary. I suspect most of humanity in the history of our species never had a job, or never had a 9-5 job, they had a life instead.
My grandfather never completely stopped working into his 80s... I don't have any elderly role model to show me how to retire and do nothing. Personally when I retire I'm going back for the chemistry degree I always wanted and who cares if there's no jobs... after all, I'm already retired!
Some of the things they need even in this disconnected lifestyle - like the mobile home, laptops, books, solar panels, batteries and even the slippers have to be made by someone doing a 9-5 job somewhere. The idea of civilization to me is to take advantage of these specialists who are really good at doing or manufacturing some of the things I need and in turn I become a specialist in something (probably one thing) which I contribute back to the society - it's a barter. That I don't have to do all the things I need to do to survive, seems efficient and effective. Also, not all of the jobs are going to be able to afford this "luxury".