If you want "a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools"
read "Walkaway", by Cory Doctorow. This is the 3D printer fantasy future, where everything can be made easily with small and easily available high-tech equipment. It sort of works in the story. But in reality, 3D printers aren't that good. Somewhere, you need aluminum smelters, steel mills, and copper mines. Those don't scale down well to desktop size.
What this article is talking about is the classic pastoral dream, along the lines of Thoreau's "Walden". Walden is a bogus hermit life. Thoreau had income from a publisher in New York and well-off friends nearby he could and would visit for dinner. Or perhaps the hippie / Whole Earth Catalog dream. We know that doesn't work all that well.
Arguably, we've achieved pastoral life at scale. It's called suburbia. All the pastoral elements are there, in miniature. For a lot of people, that's good enough. If you scale up your own space beyond that, the maintenance gets out of hand. I have a friend who has ten acres and horses, and she's always painting or hauling hay or dealing with some water or power problem. If you farm, it's even harder.
How does the author propose that this work?
rmah
That reminds me of another novel called "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson where everyone has a molecular assembler (i.e. nanotech or 3D printers on steroids) in their home. Putting aside the grey goo gone wild tropes, one thing that I suspect was realistic about the novel was that there were still rich people and poor people. Many people were still very unhappy and dissatisfied. Still the criminals and the corrupt.
You'd think that people would realize by now that material wealth (we've long since surpassed basic needs) does not bring happiness. IMO, past a certain point, happiness is more a function of society, family, status, and perhaps even purpose. Personally, I don't think the top three layers of Maslow's Hierarchy are on top of each other, but an interdependent mix. Even so, material wealth certainly makes life more comfy :-)
WillAdams
A more interesting question might be, "What would homesteading independence look like in the 21st century in terms of sustainability and so forth?"
An interesting extension on this is that the pencil manufacture which made his family wealthy is now workable on a small scale (allowing for the input of materials):
I had a friend who believed that large cities should be abolished and society should be made agrarian by law. She believed that that way we would have more free time to pursue our intellectual curiosities, unburdened by our dependence on and duty to urban society. I was like... I'm descended from farm folk. My mom grew up in a farmhouse that had no television and not even indoor plumbing for the first few years of her life. Have you no idea how grueling agrarian life actually is? Sunup to sundown, backbreaking labor, even for kids and women. (Especially women.) You wouldn't have time to write your stories and essays and play RPGs. The animals would need feeding, the cows milking, the eggs gathering, the crops planting or harvesting. And now that there are no cities and hence no economies of scale, there's no industrially produced farm equipment to help you with your labor, nor industrially produced clothing. You'd have to make those yourself, or source them from local small-scale craftspeople. You'd have to mend or repair them yourself.
As miserable as cities can get, there's a reason why people sang "How can you keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" And as oppressive as today's rat race can be, it's paradise compared to even the cities of the past. You mean I only have to work for eight hours a day, five days a week? In an office where there's always adequate light and the air is constantly freshened and temperature controlled? And the company, by law, has to take reasonable measures to protect my safety and compensate me in case I do get hurt doing my job? Sign me the fuck up!
I always feel so disconnected to my fellow humans when I hear people longing for "simpler times" where they are just out in nature with no technology or modern tools.
I would be miserable living simply like that. I don't like spending too much time in nature, I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs. I am always wishing to be building something with electronics, or playing a game, or watching a show or movie.
I also want freedom from work, but I wouldn't use that freedom to "live simply" or get away from technology.
pbkompasz
> Not sure from the page but I rode one coal powered steam train in Poland for “fun” and i wish i never did. It was an open carriage trip in koszalin and the pollution it did was such that coal particles rained on everyone. It was awful and I don’t get the nostalgia of riding such an obsolete vehicle. I was so outraged about it I told my wife the experience was like trying to experience a big pre industrial city without sewage system and finding it nostalgic.
From a post earlier today
Fr0styMatt88
I get the nature thing, but people just don’t ‘play the tape until the end’. It’s all nice until you get a minor cut and die from a simple infection.
andix
The "cut and die" part is happening rather quickly, and you're done with it. But you might be hungry for weeks and have to watch your crops grow. Probably really boring and uncomfortable.
pmlnr
> I don't like spending too much time in nature, I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs
To me, it sounds like you haven't been in nature at enough places to find the one that talks and belongs to you.
Travel more.
nkrisc
Have you spent lots of time out in the wilderness before? Those you describe aren’t pleasant, but you learn to accept and deal with. I’m sure the are all kinds of unpleasantness in a “civilized” lifestyle that you no longer even notice because you’re just so used to accommodating them: traffic noise, pollution, artificial light, etc.
I once spent a week hiking and camping in a rain forest. The first day I was trying to keep dry and comfortable as much as possible, and I was miserable.
The second day I realized I’m just not going to be dry, and I accepted it, and being wet didn’t bother me again the rest of the week. At the end of the day you hang you socks and clothes up near the fire and dry your boots.
Being hot and sweaty and dealing with bugs are irritating, but it’s just part of being outdoors and if you spend significant time outside doing stuff you stop noticing it and just accept it as a part of life.
Don’t let a little discomfort stop you from enjoying nature. You might even start to notice the discomforts of modern life that you’ve accepted as a part of life.
TacticalCoder
> in a “civilized” lifestyle that you no longer even notice because you’re just so used to accommodating them: traffic noise, pollution, artificial light, etc.
But I don't have any of those for there's a whole spectrum between "go one week hiking" and "live in a city".
TacticalCoder
The amazing thing technology brought me is that I can now have optic fiber in my house in the middle of nowhere. I'm literally typing this while hearing the sound of waves and if I look above my laptop's screen, I see the reflections of the (near full apparently) moon on the sea.
It's a bit of a remote place (closest village is a 10 minutes drive and closest highway is a 45+ minutes drive) so I've got to fix many things around the house myself. My new toy, a 3D printer, is helping me with that: today the wife asked for me to fix the parasol (she wanted to enjoy being outside, without getting sunburned), which I did by 3D printing a few parts. I'm in the middle of nowhere but I'm hardly a luddite.
This afternoon we walked to the beach and my daughter caught two crabs and played with them for half an hour before releasing them: you can have both actual nature and technology: those aren't mutually exclusive.
P.S: my SO needs a lifelong treatment (nothing life-threatening as long as she gets her medication) so the "no tech" / "no modernity" stops right there for me.
andix
It's actually not that hard to return to this lifestyle. Maybe easier than ever before. Just buy an old farm somewhere in the middle of nowhere and do your thing. There are many regions in the world where farmland is really cheap and nobody will bother you.
uncivilized
Good thing your ancestors did not think like that!
dismalaf
> I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs
Maybe go somewhere colder, or in a different season.
Razengan
Try traveling to countries and cities where you can live with all modern comforts in your hotel/Airbnb room and still be close to nature.
Green mountains, fresh air, and still get 5G and order food or taxi to wherever you are.
skor
your experience is not applicable to others, thanks for your feedback and we appreciate it. Lots of people understand that nature is a part of life just like you are and live accordingly.
stevenalowe
“ The visions are filled with communities of mutually loving people, the elimination of middlemen from transactions, where everyone knows the true you, the nonexistence of bureaucracy, the existence of a social good that’s identifiable by looking around. Essentially, the simple life.”
Except none of that ever existed
bluebarbet
The conundrum, as I see it. To master our environment and achieve comfort, we needed the "congealed intellect of our multi billion population". But we also had to trash ecosystems, on which we remain stubbornly dependent (if not for literal survival then certainly for our quality of life). With 8 billion of us, we now have no option but to pool our impacts and live in massive anonymous cities. Even that is damage control. Notwithstanding the fantasies of tech utopians, the only possible solution to all this is to get humanity's population back down to a sustainable level. At which point we can have all the "cobbled villages" we apparently want.
adrianwaj
Population density is the problem/challenge I think more so than absolute population. For cobbled villages, there are farms in Japan that use Yamamoto Transport to move fresh produce across the country overnight, cheaply, and now across Asia overnight too. Can also use it as an inexpensive door-to-door parcel delivery service.
That could also become a robotic service too.
But to really zoom out, as someone else pointed out:
"What would homesteading independence look like in the 21st century in terms of sustainability and so forth?"
I am thinking here about more than just infinite intelligence, but infinite power. Science fact presenting itself as science fiction. And for that you'd need locked-up and hidden technology. Also ways to deal with all the waste and by-products of human evolution. Well said. Supporting the environment that supports us.
So Hub-and-Spoke layouts over Megacities. Providing breathing space for land and people. As much DIY as possible using scalable best-practices with commodity items. Censorship-resistant. Free-flowing funds, energy and information. Protected whistleblowers using a local-first Fediverse that can toggle anonymity on/off.
Morromist
Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people.
No wonder we love minecraft and Satisfactory and playing murder-hobos in ttrpgs. I would be in favor of restructuring society to be in smaller units, communities where people know and understand eachother, but nobody has that power.
One thing I disagree with "We won’t live in small villages with cobbled streets en masse anymore because we need the giant glass skyscrapers and the congealed intellect of our multi billion population to move ahead"
Do we? What is "moving ahead"? I would say there's a good chance our way of life is simply going to waste all the resouces that sustains it and collapse over a long period of time without moving on to a "higher" state. I know lots of people working in tech, none of whom actually advance useful technology. Instead they advance technology that makes their bosses rich and makes people consume more for no real benefit. That's actually the opposite of useful. The glass skyscrapers are not helping us move ahead.
nozzlegear
> Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people.
Humans were built to socialize and live in societies though. It's part of our own nature to group up and form communities.
Detrytus
Yes, but the size of community matters. In a 100 people tribe everybody knows everyone else. In 1M city most people are strangers, a.k.a. competitors, enemies even.
krapp
People competed all the time within tribes, even to the point of violence. Myths like Cain and Abel didn't come from nowhere.
LanceH
We also don't want to die of pneumonia at 11.
coldtea
People in villages of 1000 don't die of pneumonia at 11 either.
We can let the weirdos that want to live in huge cities make the anti-pneumonia medicine and use it elsewhere.
bloppe
I feel like you can have both. A big society with industry and laws and markets etc. and a circle of like 10-50 people that you consider close. That's basically how I see my own life.
beacon294
It just depends how far through the eye of the needle we already went, and how far we have to go. I don't want to go backwards. Humans are adapting, always locally, and never uniformly.
WJW
I don't hate it, but at the same time things like the power grid and semiconductor manufacturing have supply chains that easily have 100 million people each in them if you follow it down enough. That's probably underestimating it, even. Modern society is super complex like that, however I don't think it's accurate to say that electricity and the internet have not brought any benefits to humanity.
I get it, it can be alienating to live in modern society. But you can create meaning and community even today. Probably not if you spend 80 hours a week in the office, but if you put in the effort to get to know your neighbors, join local sports clubs and keep up with the friendships you've built over the years, having a social group is not out of reach. It's just that you can't maximize for two different goals at the same time.
sologub
We have to move to stars, maybe not all at once.
The_Blade
i like breaking bad in RimWorld
chaostheory
Centralizing populations helps with energy and transportation efficiency, which is important if you care about the environment.
ux266478
But can't sustain itself. The larger it is, the larger the diffuse buffer it needs to support itself, and this diffuse buffer naturally spreads out as well. It's the natural flow of things to do so.
Avicebron
Isn't this solarpunk in a nutshell?
nkrisc
This makes me think back to Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Whether or not you agree with all his points I do think he has one very good point that’s worth reflecting on: the way we currently live is not the only way to live.
I think another important point to take away from the book is that even if we are not currently on the right path, agriculture and civilization are not inherently exclusive to living in such a way that is in harmony with the world.
There is a world that is possible where we live as good citizens of nature while still retaining civilization and agriculture.
So tying it back to article I think a middle ground is possible, but whatever that might look like, there are other ways to live.
rmah
I think that's pretty blatantly obvious there are other ways to live. After all, there are still millions of people surviving on subsistence agriculture in fairly primitive conditions. Still people leading mostly-pastoral lifestyles herding animals. Still millions living in small isolated villages with few modern amenities. Still millions of people living in crowded dirty cities and working in dangerous factories for long hours the way people did in London of the late 1800's. And everything in between. It's funny how so few people voluntarily leave the wealth post-industrial regions to live in any of those, eh?
Makes me think of the short story "With friends like these..." by Alan Dean Foster, in which one aspect of the story has people on a future Earth living what appears externally to be a very simple (maybe hunter-gatherer) lifestyle, while still having (hidden) powerful tech
jagged-chisel
What’s that first sentence? I can’t find the breaks.
ndnichols
Took me a few reads too. I think the intended meaning is:
"There are those who are convinced that there is more to things; they spend their time chasing that 'more' but typically don't find it. And there are those who are convinced there isn't more to things; they find themselves frustrated at the abyss."
phrotoma
Sure sign of llm free writing, baffling sentence construction.
WJW
Them damn gen alphas having no sense of punctuation! Back in my day, which was when Millenialism was at its heyday, we used to put commas everywhere we, well, damn, pleased!
pmlnr
So did Edgar Allan Poe. As a non-native speaker, it's, to say the least, a challenging read.
watwut
I dunno, claude generates pure linguistic puzzles in javadoc.
rappatic
Funnily enough, the underlying signal is what’s nonsensical; the individual sentences are always well structured
NoItsDanger
I want to be able to freely move around the globe in a floating glass orb with its own WiFi and power outlets, and enough room to put some entertainment stuff in.
mohamedkoubaa
>We want to live in a hunter gatherer mode where we get to follow our curiosities and our ambitions and our vibes and our likes until it reaches the natural conclusion
If you want "a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools" read "Walkaway", by Cory Doctorow. This is the 3D printer fantasy future, where everything can be made easily with small and easily available high-tech equipment. It sort of works in the story. But in reality, 3D printers aren't that good. Somewhere, you need aluminum smelters, steel mills, and copper mines. Those don't scale down well to desktop size.
What this article is talking about is the classic pastoral dream, along the lines of Thoreau's "Walden". Walden is a bogus hermit life. Thoreau had income from a publisher in New York and well-off friends nearby he could and would visit for dinner. Or perhaps the hippie / Whole Earth Catalog dream. We know that doesn't work all that well.
Arguably, we've achieved pastoral life at scale. It's called suburbia. All the pastoral elements are there, in miniature. For a lot of people, that's good enough. If you scale up your own space beyond that, the maintenance gets out of hand. I have a friend who has ten acres and horses, and she's always painting or hauling hay or dealing with some water or power problem. If you farm, it's even harder.
How does the author propose that this work?
You'd think that people would realize by now that material wealth (we've long since surpassed basic needs) does not bring happiness. IMO, past a certain point, happiness is more a function of society, family, status, and perhaps even purpose. Personally, I don't think the top three layers of Maslow's Hierarchy are on top of each other, but an interdependent mix. Even so, material wealth certainly makes life more comfy :-)
An interesting extension on this is that the pencil manufacture which made his family wealthy is now workable on a small scale (allowing for the input of materials):
https://bridgecitytools.com/products/pp-1-pencil-precision
As miserable as cities can get, there's a reason why people sang "How can you keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" And as oppressive as today's rat race can be, it's paradise compared to even the cities of the past. You mean I only have to work for eight hours a day, five days a week? In an office where there's always adequate light and the air is constantly freshened and temperature controlled? And the company, by law, has to take reasonable measures to protect my safety and compensate me in case I do get hurt doing my job? Sign me the fuck up!
The first thing I thought of when I read the headline was "so, TFA wants us to become the Yautja?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_(fictional_species)
(btw, RIP to the OG Yautja voice... Peter Cullen)
I would be miserable living simply like that. I don't like spending too much time in nature, I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs. I am always wishing to be building something with electronics, or playing a game, or watching a show or movie.
I also want freedom from work, but I wouldn't use that freedom to "live simply" or get away from technology.
From a post earlier today
To me, it sounds like you haven't been in nature at enough places to find the one that talks and belongs to you.
Travel more.
I once spent a week hiking and camping in a rain forest. The first day I was trying to keep dry and comfortable as much as possible, and I was miserable.
The second day I realized I’m just not going to be dry, and I accepted it, and being wet didn’t bother me again the rest of the week. At the end of the day you hang you socks and clothes up near the fire and dry your boots.
Being hot and sweaty and dealing with bugs are irritating, but it’s just part of being outdoors and if you spend significant time outside doing stuff you stop noticing it and just accept it as a part of life.
Don’t let a little discomfort stop you from enjoying nature. You might even start to notice the discomforts of modern life that you’ve accepted as a part of life.
But I don't have any of those for there's a whole spectrum between "go one week hiking" and "live in a city".
It's a bit of a remote place (closest village is a 10 minutes drive and closest highway is a 45+ minutes drive) so I've got to fix many things around the house myself. My new toy, a 3D printer, is helping me with that: today the wife asked for me to fix the parasol (she wanted to enjoy being outside, without getting sunburned), which I did by 3D printing a few parts. I'm in the middle of nowhere but I'm hardly a luddite.
This afternoon we walked to the beach and my daughter caught two crabs and played with them for half an hour before releasing them: you can have both actual nature and technology: those aren't mutually exclusive.
P.S: my SO needs a lifelong treatment (nothing life-threatening as long as she gets her medication) so the "no tech" / "no modernity" stops right there for me.
Maybe go somewhere colder, or in a different season.
Green mountains, fresh air, and still get 5G and order food or taxi to wherever you are.
Except none of that ever existed
That could also become a robotic service too.
But to really zoom out, as someone else pointed out:
"What would homesteading independence look like in the 21st century in terms of sustainability and so forth?"
I am thinking here about more than just infinite intelligence, but infinite power. Science fact presenting itself as science fiction. And for that you'd need locked-up and hidden technology. Also ways to deal with all the waste and by-products of human evolution. Well said. Supporting the environment that supports us.
So Hub-and-Spoke layouts over Megacities. Providing breathing space for land and people. As much DIY as possible using scalable best-practices with commodity items. Censorship-resistant. Free-flowing funds, energy and information. Protected whistleblowers using a local-first Fediverse that can toggle anonymity on/off.
No wonder we love minecraft and Satisfactory and playing murder-hobos in ttrpgs. I would be in favor of restructuring society to be in smaller units, communities where people know and understand eachother, but nobody has that power.
One thing I disagree with "We won’t live in small villages with cobbled streets en masse anymore because we need the giant glass skyscrapers and the congealed intellect of our multi billion population to move ahead"
Do we? What is "moving ahead"? I would say there's a good chance our way of life is simply going to waste all the resouces that sustains it and collapse over a long period of time without moving on to a "higher" state. I know lots of people working in tech, none of whom actually advance useful technology. Instead they advance technology that makes their bosses rich and makes people consume more for no real benefit. That's actually the opposite of useful. The glass skyscrapers are not helping us move ahead.
Humans were built to socialize and live in societies though. It's part of our own nature to group up and form communities.
We can let the weirdos that want to live in huge cities make the anti-pneumonia medicine and use it elsewhere.
I get it, it can be alienating to live in modern society. But you can create meaning and community even today. Probably not if you spend 80 hours a week in the office, but if you put in the effort to get to know your neighbors, join local sports clubs and keep up with the friendships you've built over the years, having a social group is not out of reach. It's just that you can't maximize for two different goals at the same time.
I think another important point to take away from the book is that even if we are not currently on the right path, agriculture and civilization are not inherently exclusive to living in such a way that is in harmony with the world.
There is a world that is possible where we live as good citizens of nature while still retaining civilization and agriculture.
So tying it back to article I think a middle ground is possible, but whatever that might look like, there are other ways to live.
"There are those who are convinced that there is more to things; they spend their time chasing that 'more' but typically don't find it. And there are those who are convinced there isn't more to things; they find themselves frustrated at the abyss."
We don't all want that.
The one with the purple space bazooka