Comment by overfeed
16 hours ago
> take a bit and read collapse
Fears of a collapse are overblown by people who underestimate the resilience of communities, and over-index on individualism, i.e. preppers.
There is no shame in being a prepper - if you're completely honest with yourself in the odds of the apocalypse you're gearing for, and perhaps after talking to your therapist about ways your childhood fears and insecurities may be showing up in your adult life.
The permacomputing community aren’t quite preppers, although there is some overlap in interests with that community. Preppers are usually concerned about one or more possible disasters and think that with the right gear they can survive the big war, the solar flare, whatever. Permacomputing is a mix of people who think we are already doomed due to climate change, concerned people who think we aren’t yet doomed and want to help/lead by example with simpler tech, and tech minimalists who aren’t worried about doom and who find the projects congruent with their desire for a simpler lifestyle.
I was simply commenting on the Collapse page[1] that was mentioned by gp - not the larger permacumputing community. The collapse page[1] is pure nerd-prepper material - I say this a subscriber to r/DataHoarder with a Kiwix SBC in my go-bag; I know my people. I also am self-aware enough to realize this fantasy is in line with XKCD #208[2].
Anyone that is in the US that is seriously modeling an infrastructural collapse scenario (not a brief period of unavailability), has to consider what that entails: that the federal, state and local governments have failed. If that happens, you'll have much bigger, and more fundamental problems to tackle.
1. https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/collapse.html
2. https://xkcd.com/208/
Thanks for the clarification, I misunderstood what you were referring to. Still I will mirror what the sibling commenter said. I do think there is a fundamental difference between traditional tacticool gear “preppers” who dream of fighting “zombies” (a metaphor for hungry hordes of people) and those who want to help their community be more resilient in the face of danger. I also think that small scale disaster readiness is a normal and responsible thing to do; I’ve personally been helped by it in the past!
Calling that collapse page “nerd-prepper material” is a bit reductionist; there's very clearly a solarpunk/left-libertarian bent to it (even ignoring the broader context of the rest of the site) that contrasts pretty starkly with the typical prepper “my house is my castle” right-propertarian mentality. The prepper seeks to survive and rule over the ashes, assuming the throne of the same legacy socioeconomic systems that produced the collapse in the first place; the solarpunk seeks to survive and build something better than ashes, learning from the mistakes of those legacy socioeconomic systems and hopefully preventing history from repeating itself. The prepper centers on the individual, or maybe one's family; the solarpunk centers on the community.