Absolutely no hate to these people - their projects are very interesting, and if this is how you want to live by all means do it!
But i gotta say, living off grid is fundamentally solipsist. Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society will always be a dead end. Imo. It’s easy to say you’ll go it alone, but staying and improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else is more valuable.
Living off grid isn't always about abandoning society. For some it is, maybe a majority I don't know, but I've met quite a few people living off grid for reasons other than hiding from the rest of the human world.
I live somewhere in the middle. We aren't off grid but we are slowly moving more in that direction with solar and rainwater projects on the list. We raise a good portion of our own food, I'd assume a little over half given that most meat, dairy, and eggs are from our land. I also work in tech though, and regularly go into town for various reasons. I'm not building a doomsday bunker, after having lived in close to a dozen cities and two countries I just find that I disagree with certain aspects of modern infrastructure (mostly related to food production, energy use, and waste).
"Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society"
What happens when you attempt to live within society and they treat you poorly? The ability of people to freely associate with the society of their choice is supposed to be their right. There are many different societies throughout the world. Living independently when the society you happen to be geolocated with should not be a negative so long as you are not actively harming them.
I’ll add to this, many places in America and I’m assuming other places in the world, society might not be serving you. Where I grew up I knew multiple people living off well water because there was no water main anywhere near them and the closest city/utility said they would be happy to install a pipe in their direction but at cost to them.
I would also argue living off grid isn’t abandoning society if you’re still paying taxes.
Yeah I was thinking something similar -- overall it's easy to conflate government, society, community, and lifestyle (urban, rural, off-grid). There are also different reasons people live off-grid; it can be primarily a financial decision. It can also be an extremely engaged social decision, in the sense that some people want to be part of a society that is less oriented around resource extraction, commercialization, industrialization, etc -- and they are becoming the change they want to see. In any case, solipsistic isn't the right word.
This is exactly the point they're making though. This is an exercise only available to the privileged. It is not available to people who haven't worked in tech for some amount of time, if not actively working in tech or holding equity like the homesteader above us.
It takes for granted the concentrated specialization of production that is modern, "on-grid" cities to produce things like microprocessors and food safety and insulin. This lifestyle is not available to masses of people, and we have a word for a society where everyone lives off-grid: "hunter-gatherers".
There can be other value in doing this, like Hundred Rabbits' exploration of how tech itself could be made more resilient given different macroeconomic conditions / incentives. But talking about this as if it's about how The Man just doesn't want you to be an independent free thinker is a misunderstanding of why most people live in the societies that they do.
If somebody views “escaping” the industrial-corporate-government grinder, still operating on 18th century mystical conceptions of rights and property as giving up, then there’s nothing to argue against
"Because of the decentralized nature of our work, this has to be spelled out quite clearly: Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean collective action and structural reform, not individualism and isolation."
Now, there's a very good historical record of human nature that warns against going all in on a collective mindset, but these guys are already on your wavelength.
Off grid does not mean "no interaction" or "no contribution". The "Hundred Rabbits" people contribute knowledge, view it as their mission to work on resilience and of course they interact with people a lot. What they do has next to nothing in common with the "I want to build my society of one and have nothing to do with the rest of humanity" perspective. In my experience, the latter approach is most often the result of being hurt too much by life experiences (so it benefits from a much kinder perspective than the one you imply) while other forms of off-grid-ish experiments are often very explicitly driven by a desire to contribute.
> Because of the decentralized nature of our work, this has to be spelled out quite clearly: Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean _collective action and structural reform_, not individualism and isolation.
We shouldn't equate "the (power/water) grid" and all of society. The grid is a small subset.
One can argue that living apart from society is aiming to fulfill the same goals as those trying to colonize Mars; it is an effort to shore up human resiliency in the face of an uncertain and possibly less hospitable future of the planet. The skills required to bootstrap civilization and the technological stack need to be practiced and exercised so they do not die out, and this kind of off-grid living is very much keeping those threads alive.
My grandparents that i grew up with more than anyone else lived less connected to society in a way that is sometimes described in homesteading or offgrid spaces.
Not out of some choice but it was natural to them. The place and country has become very modern and densely populated but they are stuck a little bit.
It is not without it's upsides either. They did quite well with their extreme ww2 frugality, wood cookstove, etc and saved a lot to help their children and grandchildren out and whilst i grow my own i could almost live on the food they offer me if i didn't refuse.
They also must have a tiny ecological footprint compared to most people i know here.
They weren't loners either. They were extremely connected to their (now mostly dying) neighbours and large extended family. I liked to joke my grandmother could describe everyone in the municipality by extended family and friend relations before society there too rapidly started changing.
I've thought about living like that and more remotely where land is actually affordable and have found that not only has society been making it less and less possible.
It's made less and less posible mostly by people who are all about "improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else"
Everyone else includes endless migration till I feel like a weirdo for having retained cultural elements (which are seen with a bit of a double standard) and incapable of owning a bit of forest and land.
Improving it includes pushing insulation standards that make it so you for example can't save glass from the landfill to build a small unheated conservatory due to insulation standards and making it so owning a few farm animals becomes increasingly impractical.
I can go on and on endlessly but I've come to feel like those (usually)well meaning society centric people are the hardest and most frustrated to argue with to work togheter to that aim.
I've found many are so convinced of the moral highground, suprisingly unempathic to others contrasting lived experience if there's no ethnic element and such strong adherents of change with no endpoint that it feels useless.
Pasolini was on to something.
>society been making it less and less possible. It's made less and less posible mostly by people who are all about "improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else"
You kinda lost me in this paragraph, why does this follow, I don’t really understand the connection you refer to here.
Since we’re sharing anecdotes, plenty of my friends and acquaintances have bought old abandoned farms on the countryside and now live somewhat off grid. It’s definitely possible and I would say at least in my bubble&age group it’s become a trend almost.
Not op, but a small example: my elderly friends had 5 acres they owned and lived on for a few decades and wanted to split a lot off for their kid's family. The modernization costs (no continued septic - must run sewer, must put in additional access, must this, must that. They gave up after spending $40k in permits and paperwork when they realized it was going to cost a few hundred grand before construction of the new house even began. The city wants developers who can invest a lot of money for semi-luxury apartments.
But as said the other guy said there's increasing legal hurdles.
Like for the construction he mentions: My grandparents built everything themselves including pouring the reinforced concrete ceilings/floors.
My dad did much of the house himself with more premade and delivered components, his own expertise in electrics and with some help from a tradesman family member.
Now if I were to build i'd need even more tradesman help, I'd need to get the house very insulated and have it certified.
That conservatory example is also a thing for people i know who moved abroad and this seems to be a trend across western europe.
Should I want to renovate instead and recoup some of my tax money trough subsidies then the work needs to be done by a tradesman even if i can do it myself.
The plumbing must be connected and must be certified.
After the electrics are done and connected as is required I need to quickly add a heatpump and solar panel otherwise i'm getting my electricity setup certified 3 damn times.
For me building a fireplace becomes impossible. Even if I'd want something much more efficient with external air intake I'll soon to get something by a big manufacturer with certifications (usually optimised for ease of installation) if i want to avoid high cost.
(and it'll still give a major penalty to my epc insulation certification so idk if it'll remain possible.)
This trough an EU law that first popped up in germany.
Alternative construction methods can be possible but again, there's more and more hurdles and limitations.
Then when it comes to the rest. Having farm animals beyond a certain small amount becomes an administration hell.
I can no longer butcher anything myself for own use beyond poultry even tho i'd get a captive bolt pistol.
My grandma tried to get rid of my uncles animals when he got paralysed and only got trough it after a government worker took pitty on her and went out of his way.
I did software and sensors and whatnot for an abatoir at some point and i started to realise why a load of farmers don't own their own animals anymore and instead are farmers for hire.
The informal exchange my grandparents did with food and the like would not be legal anymore.
Family friends had a business selling heirloom tomato seeds. They needed to get each variety individually lab tested for plant/seed pasports which would cost such a huge sum that they'd have to close shop. The inspector seemed genuenly baffled that this was the domain of anyone but multi million euro operations.
Meanwhile most of those old farms you talk about go for more than a million here. Far out of my range. Our natality has been below replacement since the start of the 50's but we keep growing and cutting up the land.
And so our progressive folk who care for our society push for this stuff along with others.
Because they want cleaner air, cleaner energy, no invasive species(of tomatoes i guess),couldn't imagine building their own home since they're largely white colar and have lost that knowledge or live in the city and think they're fending of crooked developers with this, want to embrace migration(endlessly),want to prevent animal suffering but push to factory style animal husbandry, etc, etc
It feels like society begets more society, leaves little room for escape and it's complexity and growth is in some aspects self-reinforcing ...so now I want away from it.
If that was the only thing that “living off grid” meant, then you’d be right. But it’s being used in this case as a shorthand for many things that don’t involve power grids.
>If that was the only thing that “living off grid” meant, then you’d be right. But it’s being used in this case as a shorthand for many things that don’t involve power grids.
to your original point, though, none of those "many things" is solipsism or total isolation.
One can argue that they do give back to society by sharing their research, tools, games and findings, and I think it's really valuable. They do claim to be a research collective.
By living off grid they are stress testing things so that when things are tougher (perhaps temporarily!) things have a higher chance of chugging along
And obviously, like, they go to places and talk to people and buy equipment etc.
There’s a whole gamut of failure modes for tech from “total civilizational collapse” down to “cell tower is down”, and time periods from “forever” down to “a couple of days”
People doing this sort of lifestyle but sharing findings and ideas and ultimately maybe pointing out how more can be done with less is part of us building up knowledge together isn’t it?
These people aren’t completely offline even! They blog and post online!
I feel like that’s part of their point. It’s not that they’re separating from society, they’re preparing for a future when society collapses and it’s relevant to live more off the refuse.
> Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society will always be a dead end.
I find interesting that from the perspective of sustainability, the opposite actually holds true - trying to have a sustainable life in modern society is a dead end; even a very modest life ends up being globally unsustainable.
(I'm not implying that either way is right or wrong).
Having said that, they haven't entirely abandoned society; they do socialize somewhat, for example:
> In comparison to the past few months spent mostly on our own, we've had a very social August. It seems our friends made it up north all at the same time, it has been nice to run into familiar faces, meet some new ones, and fill our days wandering in the woods catching up on the time we spent apart.
There’s a person living off-grid in Alaska that comes up on my YouTube page occasionally.
They have a “flag-stop” Alaska Railway line somewhere close-ish to them that they use to ride into the nearest town to buy crates and crates of supplies. Basically a personal freight station.
How much of this is sustainable living vs massively subsidised (and unsustainable) LARPING?
People living “off-grid” often seem still dependent on society in ways that are uniquely unsustainable and/or subsidised.
Do you see anything in common between this Alaskan (who seems to be still living a typical consumerist lifestyle, just in a different form) and what 100r are doing? Or do you just have a problem with people interested in “off grid” solutions and you’ve come here to complain?
Like how is this Alaska thing relevant at all?
Do you think that “off grid” communities in Africa are doing harm somehow?
Living in Alaska like this is feels to me way more sustainable than living in a city with millions of people - might be wrong though, I guess it’s a question of scale.
When you say subsidised you mean the state is paying for essentials here?
The cost of bringing a large, heavy and loaded freight train to a standstill in the middle of nowhere so that a single passenger can board is non-trivial.
There’s definitely an economic reason that stations exist.
The ticket they have is subsidised by the money the state-owned corporation makes from freight.
I've seen a couple of videos and I think you've missed some information, at least if we're talking about the same thing. The train is specific for a bunch of flag stop people along it, small locomotive and only a few cars. It might not be as sustainable as walking to the store but it's probably on par with driving an SUV to Costco weekly, especially when a lot of stuff at Costco is trucked not rail.
Society is not "modern society". Humans have always lived in tribes and there are significant advantage to working together. Even off-grid it's much more comfortable, and more can be achieved by living in a community rather than isolated.
Funny, I just finished listening to a podcast about Nietzsche, his conception of the ubermensch that desperately needs to stand alone and apart from the ‘herd mentality’ to be able to define new, unexplored cultural paths, and I come across this comment…
It does feel egregious that a person with no skin in the game can point and criticize what people more courageous than them are trying to achieve.
Since I know of them and what they're up to I'd be hard pressed to say that they have abandoned society. Since I can download, use and modify the software and art they create, and enjoy doing that, I'd be hard pressed to say that they're only improving their own lives.
There are a lot of degrees of "off grid". Society also includes less dense (non-urban) regions. Being miles away from your neighbors permanently isn't a crazy idea if you live in Kansas, yet they still have a coherent civilization.
It isn't very hard to reinterpret this critique as a kind of crab bucket mentality. God forbid someone goes off on a crazy boat trip for a few months without first consulting with "society".
People do this out in rural areas, it would be interesting ot do the same in an urban setting. For example, start in the middle of a city foreign to you with only the clothes on your back and, to spice it up, no shoes. No phone, no contacts, nothing else. How would you survive and thrive?
I don't really get that impression, if you look through their blog posts plenty of them talk about their interactions with and getting to know locals, moored neighbours, harbour workers etc.
Sort of. Living off-grid doesn’t necessarily mean fully abandoning society, but rejecting the part that values convenience over self-reliance. You can do this while still participating and improving society as a whole.
Granted, living full time in a sailboat is a little more extreme than a homestead with a few solar panels and crops, but even then I think it’s hard to argue that 100r have fully withdrawn from society
I disagree. There are obviously many good reasons to turn your back towards society. The real issue is that it probably won't work - number 1 are the economic realities of maintaining self-sufficiency - number 2 is society will come to haunt you eventually ... they'll build something next to your hideout, they'll find a reason why you broke some building code or law, they'll come to rob you at night or when you're out, they expect a smartphone registered mailbox 2.0 with an AI account paid with a bitcoin credit card and you have to register for that in person at some office etc ... number 3 is you probably overestimated your motivation to actually live or die with the consequences of checking out from society.
It's easy to suggest people can improve society for themselves and everyone else but actually making effective improvements is a much more difficult task.
I've said before, I'll say again:
If you were to take all technologists and instill in them a values of simplicity and re-use and longevity, and an obsession with repurposing old tech, I think you’d find they roughly sort into two camps:
One would take on an intellectual journey of discovery, sailing off into the pacific to learn to live off grid, writing colorful narrative-driven articles, full of artwork, mission statements, and subtle suggestions of donations. They would emphasize the human nature of discovery and seek to engage you as they went. Come to the enlightened tech path! Some neat new technology would be built along the way around these principles, mostly for their own use.
But the other group would write a self-hosting Forth targeting the top 10 most used CPU platforms of all time and post a text-only HTML site with download links. It would work everywhere. You’d know nothing about them and they’d probably run linux on a 17 year old mac.
This is a narrow-minded conformist perspective. Because you cannot imagine (or cannot be bothered to consider) a lifestyle different from your own, you think it is a Bad thing.
> Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society will always be a dead end.
Devils Advocate: Various religious societies such as monestaries and nuneries have been doing this for centuries, and appear to do rather well (if religion is your thing).
I have understood that they were more so extractive from surrounding communities than anyway independent or disconnected. They had to get input of people and usually collected taxes or rents of their sizeable land holdings protected from other state like actors.
Do they operate independently though? I've always seen them as organizations that rely on donations and of course a supply chain for food while they do some kind of activity themselves to generate revenue, like making beer or wine, or copying books back when. Western / Christian monestaries, anyway.
That said there is an appeal to retreating to one of those and live a simpler life dedicated to one thing. Religion isn't for me but I'm sure there's something like secular monestaries out there (that aren't suicide cults).
I mean they also sometimes die catastrophically of ergot or alcohol poisoning or toxic moulds. And it’s a misconception if you think monasteries and nunneries exist without the support structure of at least the church to which they are attached, and usually the communities they serve: the monastic life is generally one of connected outposts, not islands.
That is the whole different society that respect nature, help each other, well-planned...
Because their resources are limited, they use them very careful. Because the open sea and the weather are unforgiven, they help the others unconditionally and proactively, it's the duty, not emotion.
They contact to earch other everyday by many means, e.g. on long range radio to help alert about weather, emergency...
Living off grid has nothing to do with abandoning society, it’s all about abandoning the grid. Pretty much everyone I know that lives off grid is extremely orientated towards social good and community, they’re just orientated towards doing both without wasting energy.
What does it really mean to live off grid, anyway? Eschewing electrical and/or road connections takes you out of physical grids, but you still live in the wider and more important grid of depending on other people. It might feel rustic to live in a log cabin or a boat, but if you bought it with capital and heat it with imported fuel, and power it with mass-produced solar panels, and stock it with purchased food, you’re still on the grid of industrial civilization.
This is taking the term away from its meaning IMO. Very few of those who live offgrid mean completely detaching themselves from society, but as a way to reject parts of modern society. As others have said, you are more likely to find those living off the electrical/water/etc grid are generally motivated to form communities of their own, to have more of a dependence of other people, and generally to be closer to those people they are depending on day-to-day.
No perfect solutions, I've found it is usually just people trying to do what they think is right/better way to live in whatever ways they can.
> Because of the decentralized nature of our work, this has to be spelled out quite clearly: Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean collective action and structural reform, not individualism and isolation.
Do they not? Although they live on a sailboat, they have to pay docking fees when at port. They are vegan, so they have to buy farmed food while at port, they can’t fish for it. They have to pay taxes like everyone else. They pay for hosting for their web presence. Their boat requires maintenance, so they occasionally have to buy materials for this which are industrially produced. They have to earn an income to fund all of these expenses.
Just because they get power from a solar panel and can sail to different places doesn’t mean they are “outside the system”. They are just living an unusual lifestyle with a light footprint. They still have a number of obligations to attend to. In fact, some of these obligations (particularly the ones related to the boat) are life-or-death, and much worse than what the average person deals with. You can’t hire a handyman to come patch your boat up during a storm.
> It’s easy to say you’ll go it alone, but staying and improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else is more valuable.
There's almost no way to easily improve society now. Almost all practical pathways for people are just furthering technology past the point of diminishing returns...
I agree there's still some value in helping people but now it's mostly just helping people adapt to this dystopia of furthering our destructive influence, and it's still depressing.
> lliving off grid is fundamentally solipsist. Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society
No one should be forced or guilted to "contribute"
Those people are nobler than perpetuating the cancer upon this planet that we call "society"
Coincidentally, YouTube just randomly recommended a video about people who are on the extreme opposite end of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Mt3YJYb2A — Bali Is Everything Wrong With Society
There are different type of off-grid people. Some are the yurt-dwelling solar-toilet types that seek to live small. Others are the survivalists that want to live big "off the land" via snowmobiles and machine guns.
Then there are the sane people who want a house in the woods but with a driveway, fast internet and heated floors in their bathrooms. And then there are people who look at the cost of installing a mile of electrical poles and say "well, I can buy a kick-ass solar setup for a tenth that cost!"
What isn't a dead end? What path is it that you think you can take that doesn't end with you dead and forgotten? That's right, sucker. There isn't one. The joke is on you, and the joke is cosmic.
But i gotta say, living off grid is fundamentally solipsist. Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society will always be a dead end.
You should watch the old British sitcom "The Good Life" to discover how wrong you are.
The first thought I had was: this is not too terribly far from the technical mentality that a group trying to settle Mars would need. (For real, not the fantasy LARP that looks like an Apple Store on Mars.)
That’s true only in a society that hasn’t been hi jacked, co-opted and enslaved for the benefit of the few like through tactics like propaganda, psyops, control and injection of the food and water supply with substances to keep most of society perpetually anxious and weak and aggressive and so forth.
That society is a straw man and rotten to the core, it’s a a dead cause for you to try to stay to improve while you ignore those forces at the top that keep corrupting it. And this is the society you claim we should stay and improve.
Interesting that donsol[0] looks at least superficially similar to scoundrel[1][2] which I've also implemented as a (much simpler and completely unpolished) online game[4]. That game was one of the last public things I've built that wasn't more or less LLM-generated, and it feels a bit nostalgic. I liked building small simple stuff like that myself. Also, Gleam was a joy to work with.
Edit: On closer investigation, it is almost exactly like scoundrel.
Fascinating read. Thank you for the link. It's wild to think about how different some people's lives are compared to our own. I couldn't imagine doing that to my child.
I read the entire article (which is rare for me these days), and all I could think was: her parents were abusive, neglectful, narcissistic assholes. Imagine placing the wellbeing of your children so far down the list of priorities like that. Those people had no business having any children at all.
I mean, it's not IT jobs that provide the most food, and the people providing food are even more locked up in debt. If you feel, do it, it's not for everyone anyway!
You know, the tanks are doing the most pew pew on the front line, but wars are won by logistic not by tanks on the front. Same analogy for agriculture and all the industries behind supporting that.
I liked the part in their log where they took apart an old hat to figure out how to make a new one and compared clothing to open-source software. It seems like the same philosophy behind everything they build. Being able to understand, repair, and recreate the things you depend on.
It's important to remember that factory-made clothes are not that old as a thing. And it's only been a few generations where nearly all clothing is expected to be factory-made (even though most factories are still humans quickly pumping out items), let alone carry brand names on them like you're a nascar.
And thinking of clothing as akin to open source software is fair. Before the industrial revolution, all clothing was hand-made, almost entirely at home or by a friend, or a tailor if you had money. From the end of the 18th century until pretty much the 1980s, sewing patterns were the paper version of open source software. Could be copied infinitely, forked and changed, traded and borrowed, or created from scratch if you knew what you were doing. Magazines included them to boost sales, just like how software magazines used to include pages of code you could try at home - no license needed.
Fabric stores were commonplace for a century or more, and big box stores reserved a huge amount of floor space for fabric sales up through the 90s. Patterns were trivially inexpensive, and picking your favorite material for the pattern was how you could personalize it.
i just reverse-engineered a beloved work shirt and even improved the fit. but that's time-consuming compared to just picking up some cheap top at walmart, really more of a luxury activity than anything these days, i'm aware.
Fabric shops are still a thing too, they're often hubs for local tailoring scenes. But they are shutting down one after the other, unfortunately.
That said, hand crafts like tailoring did get a resurgence during the panny-D, I hope it stays. The local Lidl here has affordable sowing machines for sale.
I watched the whole interview. In summary I'd say that while obviously talented at art, music and logic with a solid ethical outlook (rare and admirable) chiefly what they appear to have learned is that: (1) being poor on a boat is a great way to understand why SaaS sux; (2) being in the middle of nowhere with zero supply chain is a great way to understand why BigCo supply chain and closed hardware sux; (3) using old hardware is a great way to understand we all have far more hardware than we really need; (4) an open SaaS-free bigco-free toolkit for creativity is a piece of paper and a pen or its nearest digital equivalent; (5) adding cloud features to programs is not good for the user base.
wrt (5): Is it not good for the user base at large or is it not good for users who choose to live as nomads on a boat?
I feel like we have to be realistic about the problems we’re solving here—-is the goal to optimize for 95% of users or 100%? If 100%, I have to ask if the tradeoffs for the last 5% of users are worth the squeeze to the 95%? SaaS really is the right solution for many people; not all but many.
> SaaS really is the right solution for many people; not all but many.
SaaS is a great solution for people selling software to have locked in revenue and customers who can’t leave.
For actual customers there used to be a time you could but some software, install it and then just run it for years. No forced recurring payments, no forced updates that break your workflows, no unnecessary look&feel changes every year, etc.
Spend any amount of time talking to customers and you may find that many of them, maybe even most, don't want the responsibility of maintaining infrastructure. They want "insert money, get more software." The few that run their own infrastructure often come back to SaaS after realizing they made a monkey's paw wish. Many aren't ready for, or interested in, that level of involvement and responsibility. It's a burden, and the economies of scale available to software make marginal scaling more efficient when done by the provider. Not always, but it's often a perfect fit.
But only a bad salesman dictates what the customer needs— talk to your customers.
While that might be a neat write-off mental model for the convenient few, from the perspective of most of the world, many modern software developers is live in affluent situations where processing power, memory, screen size, and connectivity are basically guaranteed. Anywhere else (much of the world) has issues with the systems they design.
This is not a 5% thing, it's a >50% potential users thing. Viewed that way, it makes commercial sense to consider them. However, SaaS was usually an exploitative now-or-never growth model seeking unrealistic returns in a short period based on false economics, so give-a-damn was already managed out of corporate scope.
The off the grid experience and journey discussed highlights how little hardware and connectivity we really need. Writing that off on the proviso it's economically 'smart' to ignore users misses the intellectual point.
3 is also relevant in the current consumer hardware "crisis". The more I think about it, the more I realize I dont even want to by anything in 2027. Not just because prices exploded. Sure, thats the initial motivation. But the truth is, most of us have enough stuff lying around at home that we can easily go for the next 4+ years without buying anything new.
Always a fan of their works, especially uxn[0] and apps developed for it. They showcase how many things a small virtual machine can do while being very portable
> We live and work aboard a 10 m sailboat named Pino in remote parts of the world to learn more about how technology degrades beyond the shores of the western world.
For a mere mortal like me, this would seem like a noob Q. But what kind of weird tax situations might you encounter when you are at sea for a majority of your time? And what advice might you have for people that encounter it?
Another interesting read is Sailing the Farm. More a how-to and manifesto than travelogue, it's a quick read and an underground classic among off-grid liveaboard folks. Sad about the author!
I'm curious what people think about the following:
The idea of living off-grid, of having your own little self sufficient homestead, a cabin in the woods, a small farm, etc. doesn't seem to work without having a bunch of cash up front, another source of income, or turning it into a engine for running classes or making content. Where it is "self-sufficient" is generally where, to put it bluntly, it has to be because people are poor and don't have a choice.
I'm not familiar with sailing self sufficiency but in permaculture in the US, it seems the only people doing it successfully fund it via running classes, trainings, writing a book, making content, etc. or they do it essentially as a hobby funded by another career, family money, etc. The closest I've seen that does work is CSA's (community supported agriculture) but with those, as with most farming related work, there is generally ten underpaid laborers with no actual stake in the farm to one owner who gets by (also see woofing).
I'm not sure where I'm going with this but I thought given the topic there might be some people who visit with thoughts on it. Maybe it would be better to treat it as a goal of how to live ones life even if it isn't self-sufficient? I don't know. I just know there always seems to be a dichotomy between imagined and real in self-sufficiency that I struggle with.
Didn't bother with the article, if you're reading about it here then it most definitely is not off grid. you'll never hear or read about people off grid because they're... off grid.
Thanks for sharing, did not know them and is a very interesting life philosophy and super cool website. I will read more around it, it's definitely more unusual from the videos I watch of american off-grid folks in Oklahoma and Alaska.
I found them few years ago and lately been thinking how they are doing and feeling in this age of slop and exponentially growing energy consumption. Seems they are doing fine and have written their own spreadsheet software to handle their finances: https://merveilles.town/@neauoire/116762882177707632 Super cool!
Also their Permacomputing 101 gave a lot to think.
Feeling inspired to finally learn C properly and never touch AI tools again :)
Every time I end up on the site I'm afraid I'll go down some other rabbit hole, no pun intended, the last time I got stuck in the Blame inspired game they made
Looking forward to a world where humans connect back in real life and leave the Internet to the AI overlords, so that they can crunch the boring administrative tasks for us.
Anyone that is genuinely interested in doing this should move north.
I moved to the Yukon in 2011, I know dozens of yukoners and Alaskans living off grid. Decades without buying meat or vegetables, building their own log cabins, etc.
One lady I met in her 50s had just worked as a cook in a mining camp for 8 weeks, and she was disappointed - that was the most she had ever worked in a year.
"Bleach doesn't remove chemical pollutants or disease-causing organisms (but in an emergency, if there is no way to boil it, it is better than nothing)."
But i gotta say, living off grid is fundamentally solipsist. Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society will always be a dead end. Imo. It’s easy to say you’ll go it alone, but staying and improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else is more valuable.
I live somewhere in the middle. We aren't off grid but we are slowly moving more in that direction with solar and rainwater projects on the list. We raise a good portion of our own food, I'd assume a little over half given that most meat, dairy, and eggs are from our land. I also work in tech though, and regularly go into town for various reasons. I'm not building a doomsday bunker, after having lived in close to a dozen cities and two countries I just find that I disagree with certain aspects of modern infrastructure (mostly related to food production, energy use, and waste).
What happens when you attempt to live within society and they treat you poorly? The ability of people to freely associate with the society of their choice is supposed to be their right. There are many different societies throughout the world. Living independently when the society you happen to be geolocated with should not be a negative so long as you are not actively harming them.
I would also argue living off grid isn’t abandoning society if you’re still paying taxes.
> solipsist
This is exactly the point they're making though. This is an exercise only available to the privileged. It is not available to people who haven't worked in tech for some amount of time, if not actively working in tech or holding equity like the homesteader above us.
It takes for granted the concentrated specialization of production that is modern, "on-grid" cities to produce things like microprocessors and food safety and insulin. This lifestyle is not available to masses of people, and we have a word for a society where everyone lives off-grid: "hunter-gatherers".
There can be other value in doing this, like Hundred Rabbits' exploration of how tech itself could be made more resilient given different macroeconomic conditions / incentives. But talking about this as if it's about how The Man just doesn't want you to be an independent free thinker is a misunderstanding of why most people live in the societies that they do.
If somebody views “escaping” the industrial-corporate-government grinder, still operating on 18th century mystical conceptions of rights and property as giving up, then there’s nothing to argue against
"Because of the decentralized nature of our work, this has to be spelled out quite clearly: Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean collective action and structural reform, not individualism and isolation."
Now, there's a very good historical record of human nature that warns against going all in on a collective mindset, but these guys are already on your wavelength.
[0] https://100r.ca/site/about.html
I've thought about living like that and more remotely where land is actually affordable and have found that not only has society been making it less and less possible. It's made less and less posible mostly by people who are all about "improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else"
Everyone else includes endless migration till I feel like a weirdo for having retained cultural elements (which are seen with a bit of a double standard) and incapable of owning a bit of forest and land. Improving it includes pushing insulation standards that make it so you for example can't save glass from the landfill to build a small unheated conservatory due to insulation standards and making it so owning a few farm animals becomes increasingly impractical.
I can go on and on endlessly but I've come to feel like those (usually)well meaning society centric people are the hardest and most frustrated to argue with to work togheter to that aim. I've found many are so convinced of the moral highground, suprisingly unempathic to others contrasting lived experience if there's no ethnic element and such strong adherents of change with no endpoint that it feels useless. Pasolini was on to something.
>society been making it less and less possible. It's made less and less posible mostly by people who are all about "improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else"
You kinda lost me in this paragraph, why does this follow, I don’t really understand the connection you refer to here.
Since we’re sharing anecdotes, plenty of my friends and acquaintances have bought old abandoned farms on the countryside and now live somewhat off grid. It’s definitely possible and I would say at least in my bubble&age group it’s become a trend almost.
But as said the other guy said there's increasing legal hurdles.
Like for the construction he mentions: My grandparents built everything themselves including pouring the reinforced concrete ceilings/floors. My dad did much of the house himself with more premade and delivered components, his own expertise in electrics and with some help from a tradesman family member. Now if I were to build i'd need even more tradesman help, I'd need to get the house very insulated and have it certified. That conservatory example is also a thing for people i know who moved abroad and this seems to be a trend across western europe. Should I want to renovate instead and recoup some of my tax money trough subsidies then the work needs to be done by a tradesman even if i can do it myself. The plumbing must be connected and must be certified. After the electrics are done and connected as is required I need to quickly add a heatpump and solar panel otherwise i'm getting my electricity setup certified 3 damn times. For me building a fireplace becomes impossible. Even if I'd want something much more efficient with external air intake I'll soon to get something by a big manufacturer with certifications (usually optimised for ease of installation) if i want to avoid high cost. (and it'll still give a major penalty to my epc insulation certification so idk if it'll remain possible.) This trough an EU law that first popped up in germany.
Alternative construction methods can be possible but again, there's more and more hurdles and limitations.
Then when it comes to the rest. Having farm animals beyond a certain small amount becomes an administration hell. I can no longer butcher anything myself for own use beyond poultry even tho i'd get a captive bolt pistol. My grandma tried to get rid of my uncles animals when he got paralysed and only got trough it after a government worker took pitty on her and went out of his way. I did software and sensors and whatnot for an abatoir at some point and i started to realise why a load of farmers don't own their own animals anymore and instead are farmers for hire.
The informal exchange my grandparents did with food and the like would not be legal anymore.
Family friends had a business selling heirloom tomato seeds. They needed to get each variety individually lab tested for plant/seed pasports which would cost such a huge sum that they'd have to close shop. The inspector seemed genuenly baffled that this was the domain of anyone but multi million euro operations.
Meanwhile most of those old farms you talk about go for more than a million here. Far out of my range. Our natality has been below replacement since the start of the 50's but we keep growing and cutting up the land.
And so our progressive folk who care for our society push for this stuff along with others. Because they want cleaner air, cleaner energy, no invasive species(of tomatoes i guess),couldn't imagine building their own home since they're largely white colar and have lost that knowledge or live in the city and think they're fending of crooked developers with this, want to embrace migration(endlessly),want to prevent animal suffering but push to factory style animal husbandry, etc, etc
It feels like society begets more society, leaves little room for escape and it's complexity and growth is in some aspects self-reinforcing ...so now I want away from it.
Devine and their partner are very community oriented and socially connected.
If that was the only thing that “living off grid” meant, then you’d be right. But it’s being used in this case as a shorthand for many things that don’t involve power grids.
to your original point, though, none of those "many things" is solipsism or total isolation.
Resilience and survival are social pursuits.
And obviously, like, they go to places and talk to people and buy equipment etc.
There’s a whole gamut of failure modes for tech from “total civilizational collapse” down to “cell tower is down”, and time periods from “forever” down to “a couple of days”
People doing this sort of lifestyle but sharing findings and ideas and ultimately maybe pointing out how more can be done with less is part of us building up knowledge together isn’t it?
These people aren’t completely offline even! They blog and post online!
But then they have in fact not abandoned society.
> As such it's an empty pursuit.
What do you believe that they are pursuing that you think is empty?
I find interesting that from the perspective of sustainability, the opposite actually holds true - trying to have a sustainable life in modern society is a dead end; even a very modest life ends up being globally unsustainable.
(I'm not implying that either way is right or wrong).
Having said that, they haven't entirely abandoned society; they do socialize somewhat, for example:
> In comparison to the past few months spent mostly on our own, we've had a very social August. It seems our friends made it up north all at the same time, it has been nice to run into familiar faces, meet some new ones, and fill our days wandering in the woods catching up on the time we spent apart.
They have a “flag-stop” Alaska Railway line somewhere close-ish to them that they use to ride into the nearest town to buy crates and crates of supplies. Basically a personal freight station.
How much of this is sustainable living vs massively subsidised (and unsustainable) LARPING?
People living “off-grid” often seem still dependent on society in ways that are uniquely unsustainable and/or subsidised.
Like how is this Alaska thing relevant at all?
Do you think that “off grid” communities in Africa are doing harm somehow?
When you say subsidised you mean the state is paying for essentials here?
There’s definitely an economic reason that stations exist.
The ticket they have is subsidised by the money the state-owned corporation makes from freight.
- requiring a private diesel train, operated and subsidised by the government for a economically unviable number of people, in order to survive
- living off grid in a sustainable manner
To me off-grid sustainability isn’t just “carbon neutral”, it’s being able to exist somewhere without assistance from the wider society.
And what amounts to a private train is an egregious amount of assistance, IMO.
It does feel egregious that a person with no skin in the game can point and criticize what people more courageous than them are trying to achieve.
It isn't very hard to reinterpret this critique as a kind of crab bucket mentality. God forbid someone goes off on a crazy boat trip for a few months without first consulting with "society".
Granted, living full time in a sailboat is a little more extreme than a homestead with a few solar panels and crops, but even then I think it’s hard to argue that 100r have fully withdrawn from society
Sometimes society likes to target and scapegoat people without any shred of justice.
One would take on an intellectual journey of discovery, sailing off into the pacific to learn to live off grid, writing colorful narrative-driven articles, full of artwork, mission statements, and subtle suggestions of donations. They would emphasize the human nature of discovery and seek to engage you as they went. Come to the enlightened tech path! Some neat new technology would be built along the way around these principles, mostly for their own use.
https://100r.co/site/projects.html
But the other group would write a self-hosting Forth targeting the top 10 most used CPU platforms of all time and post a text-only HTML site with download links. It would work everywhere. You’d know nothing about them and they’d probably run linux on a 17 year old mac.
https://duskos.org/
Personally, I’m squarely in the second camp, but I wish dearly I had the creativity and spine to be in the first camp.
Devils Advocate: Various religious societies such as monestaries and nuneries have been doing this for centuries, and appear to do rather well (if religion is your thing).
That said there is an appeal to retreating to one of those and live a simpler life dedicated to one thing. Religion isn't for me but I'm sure there's something like secular monestaries out there (that aren't suicide cults).
Because their resources are limited, they use them very careful. Because the open sea and the weather are unforgiven, they help the others unconditionally and proactively, it's the duty, not emotion.
They contact to earch other everyday by many means, e.g. on long range radio to help alert about weather, emergency...
That is the difference lifestyle, not isolation.
No perfect solutions, I've found it is usually just people trying to do what they think is right/better way to live in whatever ways they can.
> Because of the decentralized nature of our work, this has to be spelled out quite clearly: Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean collective action and structural reform, not individualism and isolation.
Just because they get power from a solar panel and can sail to different places doesn’t mean they are “outside the system”. They are just living an unusual lifestyle with a light footprint. They still have a number of obligations to attend to. In fact, some of these obligations (particularly the ones related to the boat) are life-or-death, and much worse than what the average person deals with. You can’t hire a handyman to come patch your boat up during a storm.
There's almost no way to easily improve society now. Almost all practical pathways for people are just furthering technology past the point of diminishing returns...
I agree there's still some value in helping people but now it's mostly just helping people adapt to this dystopia of furthering our destructive influence, and it's still depressing.
No one should be forced or guilted to "contribute"
Those people are nobler than perpetuating the cancer upon this planet that we call "society"
Coincidentally, YouTube just randomly recommended a video about people who are on the extreme opposite end of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Mt3YJYb2A — Bali Is Everything Wrong With Society
Then there are the sane people who want a house in the woods but with a driveway, fast internet and heated floors in their bathrooms. And then there are people who look at the cost of installing a mile of electrical poles and say "well, I can buy a kick-ass solar setup for a tenth that cost!"
You should watch the old British sitcom "The Good Life" to discover how wrong you are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Life_(1975_TV_series)
The first thought I had was: this is not too terribly far from the technical mentality that a group trying to settle Mars would need. (For real, not the fantasy LARP that looks like an Apple Store on Mars.)
That society is a straw man and rotten to the core, it’s a a dead cause for you to try to stay to improve while you ignore those forces at the top that keep corrupting it. And this is the society you claim we should stay and improve.
Otherwise, you are just negotiating your terms of confinement.
Edit: On closer investigation, it is almost exactly like scoundrel.
0: https://100r.ca/site/donsol.html
1: http://www.stfj.net/art/2011/Scoundrel.pdf
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt2tYzM93h4
4: https://munksgaard.me/scoundrel/
It doesn't look like it was a very pleasant life for her or her brother. She describes it stealing her childhood. That's one reason not to do it.
It's something that looks glamorous from the outside but a bit grim when you really consider what's involved.
Worse things happen at sea, as they say.
(I still love their website and ideas, I just know I wouldn't want to inflict that lifestyle on my family).
1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/mar/25/suzanne...
And thinking of clothing as akin to open source software is fair. Before the industrial revolution, all clothing was hand-made, almost entirely at home or by a friend, or a tailor if you had money. From the end of the 18th century until pretty much the 1980s, sewing patterns were the paper version of open source software. Could be copied infinitely, forked and changed, traded and borrowed, or created from scratch if you knew what you were doing. Magazines included them to boost sales, just like how software magazines used to include pages of code you could try at home - no license needed.
Fabric stores were commonplace for a century or more, and big box stores reserved a huge amount of floor space for fabric sales up through the 90s. Patterns were trivially inexpensive, and picking your favorite material for the pattern was how you could personalize it.
That said, hand crafts like tailoring did get a resurgence during the panny-D, I hope it stays. The local Lidl here has affordable sowing machines for sale.
a recent interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x8yKp1qdWh8&pp=ygURZGV2aW5lIGx...
I feel like we have to be realistic about the problems we’re solving here—-is the goal to optimize for 95% of users or 100%? If 100%, I have to ask if the tradeoffs for the last 5% of users are worth the squeeze to the 95%? SaaS really is the right solution for many people; not all but many.
SaaS is a great solution for people selling software to have locked in revenue and customers who can’t leave.
For actual customers there used to be a time you could but some software, install it and then just run it for years. No forced recurring payments, no forced updates that break your workflows, no unnecessary look&feel changes every year, etc.
But only a bad salesman dictates what the customer needs— talk to your customers.
This is not a 5% thing, it's a >50% potential users thing. Viewed that way, it makes commercial sense to consider them. However, SaaS was usually an exploitative now-or-never growth model seeking unrealistic returns in a short period based on false economics, so give-a-damn was already managed out of corporate scope.
The off the grid experience and journey discussed highlights how little hardware and connectivity we really need. Writing that off on the proviso it's economically 'smart' to ignore users misses the intellectual point.
[0]: https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
For a mere mortal like me, this would seem like a noob Q. But what kind of weird tax situations might you encounter when you are at sea for a majority of your time? And what advice might you have for people that encounter it?
https://merveilles.town/@neauoire/117405811781851569
> I was wondering why I was getting death threats again, right, HN front-page. Thanks guys
https://arachnoid.com/lutusp/sailbook.html
https://avoid.rocks/blog/sailing-farm/
(co-author of 100r.ca)
the documentary about a guy who invented his own self-steering gear to travel solo back in the 70s
I'm curious what people think about the following:
The idea of living off-grid, of having your own little self sufficient homestead, a cabin in the woods, a small farm, etc. doesn't seem to work without having a bunch of cash up front, another source of income, or turning it into a engine for running classes or making content. Where it is "self-sufficient" is generally where, to put it bluntly, it has to be because people are poor and don't have a choice.
I'm not familiar with sailing self sufficiency but in permaculture in the US, it seems the only people doing it successfully fund it via running classes, trainings, writing a book, making content, etc. or they do it essentially as a hobby funded by another career, family money, etc. The closest I've seen that does work is CSA's (community supported agriculture) but with those, as with most farming related work, there is generally ten underpaid laborers with no actual stake in the farm to one owner who gets by (also see woofing).
I'm not sure where I'm going with this but I thought given the topic there might be some people who visit with thoughts on it. Maybe it would be better to treat it as a goal of how to live ones life even if it isn't self-sufficient? I don't know. I just know there always seems to be a dichotomy between imagined and real in self-sufficiency that I struggle with.
Also their Permacomputing 101 gave a lot to think.
Feeling inspired to finally learn C properly and never touch AI tools again :)
https://100r.ca/site/hiversaires.html
I moved to the Yukon in 2011, I know dozens of yukoners and Alaskans living off grid. Decades without buying meat or vegetables, building their own log cabins, etc.
One lady I met in her 50s had just worked as a cook in a mining camp for 8 weeks, and she was disappointed - that was the most she had ever worked in a year.
I thought the amount of work gone into the website showed a Japanese level work ethic-- hard work and dedication.
Maybe the authors were influenced by the Japanese?
Surely wording can be improved....