Comment by giantg2
4 hours ago
"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.
> The ability of people to freely associate
> 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.
600 million Africans don’t have access to grid power. Are they privileged? Are they all “hunter-gatherers”?
This is the right take
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