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What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)
- jagged-chisel 3mo agoWhat’s that first sentence? I can’t find the breaks.
- phrotoma 3mo agoSure sign of llm free writing, baffling sentence construction.
- WJW 3mo agoThem 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 3mo agoSo did Edgar Allan Poe. As a non-native speaker, it's, to say the least, a challenging read.
- phrotoma 3mo agoHonestly I'm so old that I'm not sure if this remark is satire or an actual attempt to tell me that I'm out of touch. Is writing like this considered normal now?
- WJW 2mo agoI meant it as satire, yes.
- owebmaster 2mo agoNot normal but some people just can't leave Reddit.
- watwut 3mo agoI dunno, claude generates pure linguistic puzzles in javadoc.
- rappatic 3mo agoFunnily enough, the underlying signal is what’s nonsensical; the individual sentences are always well structured
- watwut 3mo agoThey are not well structured. They are syntactically correct. But, if a person wrote them, you would say they are badly structured. I have seen tripple negatives and sentences that should be split into four.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ndnichols 3mo agoTook 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."
- skeledrew 3mo agoI had 0 issue reading it. Actually that's how I write as well.
- Avicebron 3mo agoIsn't this solarpunk in a nutshell?
- Morromist 3mo agoHumans 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.
- LanceH 3mo agoWe also don't want to die of pneumonia at 11.
- coldtea 3mo agoPeople 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.
- gswdh 3mo ago[dead]
- The_Blade 3mo agoi like breaking bad in RimWorld
- chaostheory 3mo agoCentralizing populations helps with energy and transportation efficiency, which is important if you care about the environment.
- senfiaj 3mo agoExcellent article, largely agree. Another related issue is that we are not evolved for the modern stress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo1A45ShcMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo1A45ShcMo
- cortesoft 3mo agoI 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.
- pmlnr 3mo ago> 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.
- cortesoft 2mo agoI am 43 years old and have been to many countries and locales. I have enjoyed nature plenty of times. I like short hikes, and pretty views, and seeing different types of nature. I just like to go home to a nice air conditioned room, with a warm shower and clean bed afterwards, and I only want to spend a smaller fraction of my time out in nature.
- Fr0styMatt88 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoThe "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.
- skor 3mo agoyour 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- watwut 3mo agoI definitely dont want any of that.
- pmlnr 3mo agoThey're pathetically pretechnological or brilliantly post-technological. - Stargate Atlantis ep. 14: Sanctuary
- fusslo 3mo agoisnt it a major part of a star trek movie too? The one with the purple space bazooka
- mohamedkoubaa 3mo ago>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 We don't all want that.
- stevenalowe 3mo ago“ 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
- fittingopposite 3mo agoI don't agree. It's a description of a simple hunter gatherer life. Why do you say this has never existed?
- stevenalowe 2mo agoWhy would you think that a neolithic existence is simple and free from politics etc. Still humans.
- dfxm12 3mo agoI don't know about all this. I want a society where I have healthcare and can safely eat a salad.
- fittingopposite 3mo agoHaha. That was a funny juxtaposition.
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- NoItsDanger 3mo agoI 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.
- Animats 3mo agoTitle 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?
- WillAdams 3mo agoA 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): https://bridgecitytools.com/products/pp-1-pencil-precision https://bridgecitytools.com/products/pp-1-pencil-precision
- bitwize 3mo agoI 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! 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_(fictional_species) (btw, RIP to the OG Yautja voice... Peter Cullen)
- slwvx 3mo agoMakes 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
- bluebarbet 3mo agoThe 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 3mo agoPopulation 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. Harnessing waste streams and up-cycling them, and doing the full "Earth shift" while still reaching for the stars!
- nkrisc 3mo agoThis 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 3mo agoI 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?
- nkrisc 3mo agoAnd the other key theme of the book is that our current trajectory is seemingly heading us straight toward ecological disaster, regardless of how comfortable our current way of life might be. Besides, his point is not that we need to return to barely living off the land, but to live with the land and with nature, not against it.
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- DarmokTanagra 3mo agoNonsensical drum circle naivety. Go to some of the poorer parts of the world and live the life of a subsistence farmer for a while. There is a reason people move to cities, and it generally involves their children not starving to death.
- dsign 3mo agoThere is a persistent point that this article makes really well: numbers. And here, bigger seems to be worse. More people equals feebler interactions, worse social life, more alienation between citizens and government. It's not the full story, but this simple rule is a very solid first approximation that has worked fine for me. The relatively small country where I moved has an ok government. Personally, I've found that small towns work well for me, and I've chosen job and residence based on that principle. I wouldn't mind a countryside cabin for hunting-gathering with friends during weekends :-) . At the same time, I like global shipping, the Internet, good highways, and I definitely hate tariffs. I don't think we need to be disconnected to be happy. We just need to make the right choices where it matters.
- fittingopposite 3mo agoWhat we yearn for is probably rather the social aspect of hunter gatherer life plus the proximity to nature rather than the technological. Wondering if there any life designs that work to bring both things together?
- m4rtink 3mo agoUnless you have some super-science auto-fab this is basically a tourist with better equipment, fully dependent on normal society for all the tech and its maintenance.
- GeoAtreides 3mo agoWhat we want is The Culture, or, more precisely: fully automated luxury gay space communism