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