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OPs position seems to be that primitive societies are more resilient against any event that disrupts technological capabilities. I agree with that. Your positi

OPs position seems to be that primitive societies are more resilient against any event that disrupts technological capabilities. I agree with that. Your position seems to be that primitive societies are a horrible place to live and if it's a choice between the two, no sane person would argue for a return to primativism. I agree with that too. There's a 'third way' that seems to be gaining some ground among luddites, preppers, off-gridders and primitivists. The idea is to take full advantage of modern technologies but also devote a portion of resources and time to maintaining the capability to do things 'the old way'. So, be 'on the grid' but combine it with on-premise solar/wind/hydro/genny. Use all the appliances in your modern kitchen but go into the woods a few times a year and test your ability to make fire from sticks. Buy goods from the supermarket but still grow a portion of your food at home. This third way is far from flawless. It's still a gamble, not unlike Pascal's Wager: You are investing time and money into maintaining primitive capabilities that are far inferior to the technology-enabled capabilities available to you in the modern world, and you're double-spending to maintain both in parallel. But if you can approach it as a hobbyist, it can be a pretty fun and challenging pastime to get invested in.

pjc50 9y ago
This is veering into the "prepper" debate, which the Economist clearly wanted to set up with their disaster-porn writing in the article. But the key question has to be: individual or collective resilience? Yes, it's not a straight up conflict, but I do think things could be greatly improved if people kept asking questions about collective preparation for crises, improving the civic and governmental responses to them, and (in the case under discussion) not ignoring problems simply because they are uncomfortable and expensive.
- zxcmx 9y ago
  I think theres a valid argument to made for spending effort to maintain some degree of decentralisation. That is, enough individual resilience adds up to a degree of collective resilience. I suppose I have been fortunate enough to have never seen people respond to a crisis in the ways outlined in the article though. My experience has been people pulling together and working collectively to help each other. Centralised organisation is powerful but easily overwhelmed. Decentralised response can solve a lot of smaller problems at at once.
  - emn13 9y ago
    In some really abstract way: that makes sense! But the problems of a widespread long term power outage sound like something a centralized preparation could cope with at least as effectively, if not more so; partially because it can simply be prevented appropriate preparations, and partially because even when a blackout cannot be prevented you almost certainly can ensure that recovery is relatively trivial (as compared to "rebuild transformers"). Both mitigation strategies simply aren't available to hyper-local prepper style preparations. Not to mention the fact that the population (even in the low-density US of A) is probably much higher than a prepper-tech based society can ever hope to sustain. I.e: mass prepping would likely replace famine and other catastrophes with immediate civil war, followed by famine and other catastrophes. In abstract: Decentralization offers a remedy because it is distributed; however, the best way to make a system (more) distributed may still be via a coordinated (i.e. centralized) approach.
    - FooHentai 9y ago
      The optimum lies all along that spectrum I think. So combined global/centralized, localized/coordinated and individual/decentralized preparedness would give you the highest level of resilience. Defense in depth, if you will. It's also the highest effort/cost, of course. I was thinking when the parent poster hinted at that - You see that broad-spectrum approach advocated and implemented by disaster preparedness agencies - A central coordination capability coupled with regional direct response capabilities, and strong appeals from them to citizens for individual/family-level preparedness.
      - emn13 9y ago
        That's sane sounding. But given how poor people are at dealing with low-probability, high-impact risks, the more individual levels of risk probably should have some formal guidance and/or legal requirements imposed by the the layers higher up.
  - bensonn 9y ago
    Good point, reminds me of the Red strategy of the Millineum Challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
- FooHentai 9y ago
  Agree 100%. A big barrier to those discussions is the view which society has of anyone expressing preparedness/resilience viewpoints. "You're not one of those tinfoil, gun-hoarding prepper hillbillies, are you?". You have to navigate carefully past that, slowly, to make any headway and get to the conversations you ultimately need to have to progress. So right now you see most efforts concentrated at the individual and family levels, with isolated pockets of preparedness 'societies' emerging. But even those wider efforts are regarded as pretty kooky by society as a whole. I'm thinking specifically of the American Redoubt movement when penning this, but there are others - LDS, Amish are examples of groups making wider preparedness efforts but still very much siloed. I think these discussions and wider preparedness efforts are unlikely to gain any ground without some events occurring that demonstrate a clear need for improvements in preparedness. Of course, nobody should be willing such events to occur because people will die. But the longer we go without such an event, the dimmer society's memory gets as to how to survive them. What's that poem? Something like: Hard times create strong men, Strong men create good times, Good times create weak men, Weak men create hard times. It seems appropriate.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Governments make rather large investments in preparedness. The massive food subsidy is one such example where a vast drop in yields would not harm the food supply. CDC does quite a bit to prevent epidemics which are historically the second major wide scale disasters. In third place though most expensive is war / defense spending. They tend to do less preparation for very rare disasters, but it's not clear that personal preparation for such things is all that reasonable or useful.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > A big barrier to those discussions is the view which society has of anyone expressing preparedness/resilience viewpoints. "You're not one of those tinfoil, gun-hoarding prepper hillbillies, are you?" How people's disaster preparedness is viewed depends on three things: - are the disasters being prepared for plausible or not? - do they give off the impression that they're somehow looking forward to the disaster, either as vindication or the opportunity to deem people "looters" and murder them without repercussion? - is this a form of preparation that theoretically everyone could do, or is there an implication that, in the manner of Jehova's Witnesses, only a subset of the population can be saved? So, if someone in Florida is preparing for hurricanes by securing their property, moving valuables out of the basement, and preparing for the possibility of evacuation? That's a plausible disaster with no talk of violence, and almost everyone could attempt, so that's a "normal" activity and won't get someone deemed the bad kind of prepper.
josefresco 9y ago
Aka the Amish, or even Mennonites. I spend a good deal of time in close proximity to these communities and they seem to mix old world / close-to-earth living (horse and buggy etc.) with new world-tech (solar/wind electricity generation). Each community has their own "rules" but it seems to be close to what you're describing (maybe minus all the religious stuff) I do see them at Wal-Mart ... so there's that.
athenot 9y ago
> You are investing time and money into maintaining primitive capabilities that are far inferior to the technology-enabled capabilities available to you in the modern world Except when it comes to food. Growing your own food and cooking it yields far better quality than what you can buy in stores or restaurants. Yes there is time involved, but with practice, your time is recouped in such a way that you're enjoying dishes on a similar level of taste as what you'd pay over $100 a head in a high-end restaurant. And you get to do that multiple times a week. This holds even for food you don't grow but still cook (for me: meats). The downside of course is that now it is very hard to enjoy food in a restaurant unless it's high-end or in an ethnic specialty I don't master. (raises pinky finger :) )
- maxerickson 9y ago
  You mill your own flour from your own grains? Don't cook with it?
  - colanderman 9y ago
    EMPs aside (which throw a wrench into any modernly-convenient cooking technique), grinding wheat berries into flour is easy to do at home. (I have a stand mixer attachment I do this with often.) So is growing wheat; it's just grass after all. What's painstaking at home-scale would be threshing and winnowing, but it seems [1] that you can do this by hand too. [1] https://www.groworganic.com/organic-gardening/articles/grow-your-own-grain-harvesting-threshing-and-storing https://www.groworganic.com/organic-gardening/articles/grow-...
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  Being good at cooking makes it hard not to be a buzzkill sometimes at restaurants. My friends will be all excitedly praising a place and I'm just sitting there mad about how much I paid for something I could have done better myself.
- convivialdingo 9y ago
  This is essentially how I was raised. My father was a depression kid, and they lost everything. We kids had to learn how to grow, hunt, fish and survive. I spent the schoolyear like most kids, but summers we worked on the family ranch. Electricity was for an hour a day, only wellwater in a tank, shower with a wetcloth. Most workdays were on horse with one truck to haul equipment, water and food. We went to the store once a month - everything else was grown or stored. The family ranches were 30k acres in the mountains, so getting hurt or caught in the dark meant required survival skills - medical care, making a fire, etc. Civilization was a 4 hour drive, and the closest phone was an hour though dangerous canyon roads impassible at night (for the sane). I really enjoyed it as a kid - but I later realized that most people wouldn't want the hassle unless it was a family business of some kind. I recommend scouting, camping and gardening. Ranching and farming is expensive and a lot of hard work! It's very rewarding though if you can make it a living.

pjc50 9y ago

This is veering into the "prepper" debate, which the Economist clearly wanted to set up with their disaster-porn writing in the article. But the key question has to be: individual or collective resilience? Yes, it's not a straight up conflict, but I do think things could be greatly improved if people kept asking questions about collective preparation for crises, improving the civic and governmental responses to them, and (in the case under discussion) not ignoring problems simply because they are uncomfortable and expensive.

zxcmx 9y ago
I think theres a valid argument to made for spending effort to maintain some degree of decentralisation. That is, enough individual resilience adds up to a degree of collective resilience. I suppose I have been fortunate enough to have never seen people respond to a crisis in the ways outlined in the article though. My experience has been people pulling together and working collectively to help each other. Centralised organisation is powerful but easily overwhelmed. Decentralised response can solve a lot of smaller problems at at once.
- emn13 9y ago
  In some really abstract way: that makes sense! But the problems of a widespread long term power outage sound like something a centralized preparation could cope with at least as effectively, if not more so; partially because it can simply be prevented appropriate preparations, and partially because even when a blackout cannot be prevented you almost certainly can ensure that recovery is relatively trivial (as compared to "rebuild transformers"). Both mitigation strategies simply aren't available to hyper-local prepper style preparations. Not to mention the fact that the population (even in the low-density US of A) is probably much higher than a prepper-tech based society can ever hope to sustain. I.e: mass prepping would likely replace famine and other catastrophes with immediate civil war, followed by famine and other catastrophes. In abstract: Decentralization offers a remedy because it is distributed; however, the best way to make a system (more) distributed may still be via a coordinated (i.e. centralized) approach.
  - FooHentai 9y ago
    The optimum lies all along that spectrum I think. So combined global/centralized, localized/coordinated and individual/decentralized preparedness would give you the highest level of resilience. Defense in depth, if you will. It's also the highest effort/cost, of course. I was thinking when the parent poster hinted at that - You see that broad-spectrum approach advocated and implemented by disaster preparedness agencies - A central coordination capability coupled with regional direct response capabilities, and strong appeals from them to citizens for individual/family-level preparedness.
    - emn13 9y ago
      That's sane sounding. But given how poor people are at dealing with low-probability, high-impact risks, the more individual levels of risk probably should have some formal guidance and/or legal requirements imposed by the the layers higher up.
- bensonn 9y ago
  Good point, reminds me of the Red strategy of the Millineum Challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
FooHentai 9y ago
Agree 100%. A big barrier to those discussions is the view which society has of anyone expressing preparedness/resilience viewpoints. "You're not one of those tinfoil, gun-hoarding prepper hillbillies, are you?". You have to navigate carefully past that, slowly, to make any headway and get to the conversations you ultimately need to have to progress. So right now you see most efforts concentrated at the individual and family levels, with isolated pockets of preparedness 'societies' emerging. But even those wider efforts are regarded as pretty kooky by society as a whole. I'm thinking specifically of the American Redoubt movement when penning this, but there are others - LDS, Amish are examples of groups making wider preparedness efforts but still very much siloed. I think these discussions and wider preparedness efforts are unlikely to gain any ground without some events occurring that demonstrate a clear need for improvements in preparedness. Of course, nobody should be willing such events to occur because people will die. But the longer we go without such an event, the dimmer society's memory gets as to how to survive them. What's that poem? Something like: Hard times create strong men, Strong men create good times, Good times create weak men, Weak men create hard times. It seems appropriate.
- Retric 9y ago
  Governments make rather large investments in preparedness. The massive food subsidy is one such example where a vast drop in yields would not harm the food supply. CDC does quite a bit to prevent epidemics which are historically the second major wide scale disasters. In third place though most expensive is war / defense spending. They tend to do less preparation for very rare disasters, but it's not clear that personal preparation for such things is all that reasonable or useful.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > A big barrier to those discussions is the view which society has of anyone expressing preparedness/resilience viewpoints. "You're not one of those tinfoil, gun-hoarding prepper hillbillies, are you?" How people's disaster preparedness is viewed depends on three things: - are the disasters being prepared for plausible or not? - do they give off the impression that they're somehow looking forward to the disaster, either as vindication or the opportunity to deem people "looters" and murder them without repercussion? - is this a form of preparation that theoretically everyone could do, or is there an implication that, in the manner of Jehova's Witnesses, only a subset of the population can be saved? So, if someone in Florida is preparing for hurricanes by securing their property, moving valuables out of the basement, and preparing for the possibility of evacuation? That's a plausible disaster with no talk of violence, and almost everyone could attempt, so that's a "normal" activity and won't get someone deemed the bad kind of prepper.

josefresco 9y ago

Aka the Amish, or even Mennonites. I spend a good deal of time in close proximity to these communities and they seem to mix old world / close-to-earth living (horse and buggy etc.) with new world-tech (solar/wind electricity generation). Each community has their own "rules" but it seems to be close to what you're describing (maybe minus all the religious stuff) I do see them at Wal-Mart ... so there's that.

athenot 9y ago

> You are investing time and money into maintaining primitive capabilities that are far inferior to the technology-enabled capabilities available to you in the modern world Except when it comes to food. Growing your own food and cooking it yields far better quality than what you can buy in stores or restaurants. Yes there is time involved, but with practice, your time is recouped in such a way that you're enjoying dishes on a similar level of taste as what you'd pay over $100 a head in a high-end restaurant. And you get to do that multiple times a week. This holds even for food you don't grow but still cook (for me: meats). The downside of course is that now it is very hard to enjoy food in a restaurant unless it's high-end or in an ethnic specialty I don't master. (raises pinky finger :) )

maxerickson 9y ago
You mill your own flour from your own grains? Don't cook with it?
- colanderman 9y ago
  EMPs aside (which throw a wrench into any modernly-convenient cooking technique), grinding wheat berries into flour is easy to do at home. (I have a stand mixer attachment I do this with often.) So is growing wheat; it's just grass after all. What's painstaking at home-scale would be threshing and winnowing, but it seems [1] that you can do this by hand too. [1] https://www.groworganic.com/organic-gardening/articles/grow-your-own-grain-harvesting-threshing-and-storing https://www.groworganic.com/organic-gardening/articles/grow-...
graphitezepp 9y ago
Being good at cooking makes it hard not to be a buzzkill sometimes at restaurants. My friends will be all excitedly praising a place and I'm just sitting there mad about how much I paid for something I could have done better myself.
convivialdingo 9y ago
This is essentially how I was raised. My father was a depression kid, and they lost everything. We kids had to learn how to grow, hunt, fish and survive. I spent the schoolyear like most kids, but summers we worked on the family ranch. Electricity was for an hour a day, only wellwater in a tank, shower with a wetcloth. Most workdays were on horse with one truck to haul equipment, water and food. We went to the store once a month - everything else was grown or stored. The family ranches were 30k acres in the mountains, so getting hurt or caught in the dark meant required survival skills - medical care, making a fire, etc. Civilization was a 4 hour drive, and the closest phone was an hour though dangerous canyon roads impassible at night (for the sane). I really enjoyed it as a kid - but I later realized that most people wouldn't want the hassle unless it was a family business of some kind. I recommend scouting, camping and gardening. Ranching and farming is expensive and a lot of hard work! It's very rewarding though if you can make it a living.