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.
> 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.
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.
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".
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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".
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
Hmm yes let’s undermine literally most successful form of economic organisation. What a bunch of morons