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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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".
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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!"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 :)
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.
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
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)."
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.
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.
In a bold outline on the 'about' page:
"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.
From their About page[0]:
We shouldn't equate "the (power/water) grid" and all of society. The grid is a small subset.
[0] https://100r.ca/site/about.html
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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.
Thanks for sharing
>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.
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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?
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.
Yeah, but none of what they do works without the rest of industrial society. As such it's an empty pursuit.
Resilience and survival are social pursuits.
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> 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.
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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".
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
That is the difference lifestyle, not isolation.
Is life not a "dead end" itself?
I wrote them an email a few years ago, they got back to me and we exchange some views.
> 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.
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!"
From their own statement:
> 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.
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.
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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.
They literally haven't abandoned society because they're PRECISELY still communicating with it, reporting about their experiences, discoveries, etc
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Life_(1975_TV_series)
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.
There is not a singular ideal for all to pursue
Someone should do it.
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.)
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You can only truly consent to participate in a society if you also have a viable option of exit.
Otherwise, you are just negotiating your terms of confinement.
This perspective only makes sense if you deny that our native environment is society.
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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.
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/
Seeing their life on the water makes me want to close every browser tab, disconnect the internet, and just build things slowly again.
What's stopping you?
Whenever I hear about people giving it all up to live on a boat I remember Suzanne Heywood's account[1] of growing up like that.
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...
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Bills, dependencies, responsibilities and inertia. Mostly inertia
kids, and understanding that if everyone decides to do this all at once, were (most of us) gonna die of hunger.
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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.
They still sell patterns to be fair at hobby shops.
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This is a really cool site and they seem cool.
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.
They are living in their dream and doing incredible work.
a recent interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x8yKp1qdWh8&pp=ygURZGV2aW5lIGx...
I remember a talk from them at Strange Loop, fascinating life living on a boat and trying to keep software running despite power and connectivity.
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.
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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.
I greatly enjoyed reading their sail log crossing the Pacific Ocean, very poignant and down to earth: https://100r.co/site/busy_doing_nothing.html
+1, a great read.
If anyone enjoys reading about sailing, check Confessions of a long distance sailor. Another snapshot of the sailing world, in the eighties.
https://arachnoid.com/lutusp/sailbook.html
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!
https://avoid.rocks/blog/sailing-farm/
paid but worth it: https://youtu.be/mupd3-w9qfQ?si=3-u0rz9H1tBi7Ums
the documentary about a guy who invented his own self-steering gear to travel solo back in the 70s
I love hundred rabbits. Their blogs make me want to get a bunch of old thinkpads, solar panels and buy a sailboat.
I thought, based on the title, this might have been about breeding rabbits for food, which I always thought was an interesting idea.
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.
ive been following these folks for, i think maybe a decade. very cool.
yes! the designers of orca, a very cool esolang for music composition
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 :)
Devine, you madman. They're an incredible tech artistry & lifestyle duo.
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.
Waterworld :)
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
https://100r.ca/site/hiversaires.html
The art is phenomenal
Wild website!
seems as if designed by a Japanese.
If it was Japanese I'd expect far less whitespace.
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two canadian people
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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.
Approved!
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ur comment had me chuckling, mate lol
"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)."
Surely wording can be improved....
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.