We Want a Hunter-Gatherer Lifestyle with Space Age Tools
What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools
This essay argues that our discontent with modern life stems from a yearning for a more personal, hunter-gatherer existence, but with the benefits of our advanced tools. It explores how industrialization has stripped away individuality in education, work, governance, and medicine, leading to a desire to 'RETVRN' to a simpler past. Yet, the author suggests, we don't need to abandon our progress; instead, we can use our understanding to recreate the personal connections and autonomy we crave, moving forward with new insights.
We can treat rules as suggestions of the right average behaviour and Schelling points and not as laws like gravity.
- Animats
Title is unrelated to content.
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?
- cortesoft
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.
- 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.
- Avicebron
Isn't this solarpunk in a nutshell?