💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › can-we-all-walk-away.txt captured on 2020-11-07 at 02:15:10.
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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