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Daniel Suelo renounced money in 2000, left his last $30 in a phone booth and walked into the desert to start a new life in Moab, Utah. On his blog Suelo descri

Daniel Suelo renounced money in 2000, left his last $30 in a phone booth and walked into the desert to start a new life in Moab, Utah. On his blog Suelo describes his philosophy: I don't use or accept money or conscious barter - don't take food stamps or other government dole. My philosophy is to use only what is freely given or discarded and what is already present and already running (whether or not I existed). As well as quitting cash, he threw away his passport and driving license and changed his legal name, Shellabarger, to Suelo, Spanish for soil. Ever since then Suelo has lived outdoors, camped in the wilderness, lived in caves, stayed in communes and spent nights in stranger’s homes. http://factlets.info/Suelo http://factlets.info/Suelo

whitten 12y ago
Daniel Suelo sounds like he has given up a consumerist lifestyle with the limitation that he doesn't have any assets, such as a car or house or bulky belongings. I doubt that he would be able to work in a computer related industry at all, even if someone gave him a computer with free electricity and internet.
jacquesm 12y ago
One of the questions I always ask with endeavours like that is 'does it scale'. If everybody adopted this then pretty soon there would be no more roads, no more people to discard anything and so on. So even though I think this is quite the statement against consumerism I don't think it survives the 'does it scale' test. It's similar to how people in the UK live in 'eco-villages' that live of the discards of the rest of the society around them.
- general_failure 12y ago
  My understanding is that his goal is to show consumerism is overblown. He does so by taking it to extremes. You need one for such causes (like stallman who takes a completely overblown stance by not using anything non-free). And not that his way of life is what everyone should follow.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I don't think Stallmans stance is all that overblown. And his would definitely scale.
    - BillinghamJ 12y ago
      How? If everything were free, you hit the same problem that you're not investing into things like infrastructure.
      - drcube 12y ago
        "Free as in freedom".
    - dreamweapon 12y ago
      Which part would scale best: the sleeping in the office part? Or the not necessarily bathing (too often) part?
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        Attack the ideas and not the person, the sleeping in the office and bathing thing has been beaten to death many times over and has very little to do with the open source ideas that Stallman has been relentlessly promoting. Effectively he's given up a normal life in order to do this promotion. You could for the same money laugh hard at the military, monks and anybody else that has given up the comforts of regular life in order to commit to a life of service (whether or not I agree with any of those is besides the point, it's just that once you decide your vocation matters more than you do that luxuries cease to matter). Stallmans ideas are very much worth all our attention and his service has brought us as an industry enormous benefits.
    - MrDosu 12y ago
      Definatly. All aboard the rape/pillage/murdertrain -_-
- scarecrowbob 12y ago
  My intuition is that if you really universalized this, everything is discarded and the idea of ownership would have to change. How would pragmatically work, I don't know (probably terribly), but a maxim in which everyone suddenly stopped owning things beyond personal possessions at the same time took up an overriding ethical system which privileged ecology at least initially seems to be univeralizible. At least, it seems to "scale" better than "I will declare this land as mine to own and control even when I don't actively use it", which is one of our current maxims.
  - jkaunisv1 12y ago
    I'm currently reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin and it's a very interesting contrast between a society of ownership and one of no ownership.

whitten 12y ago

Daniel Suelo sounds like he has given up a consumerist lifestyle with the limitation that he doesn't have any assets, such as a car or house or bulky belongings. I doubt that he would be able to work in a computer related industry at all, even if someone gave him a computer with free electricity and internet.

jacquesm 12y ago

One of the questions I always ask with endeavours like that is 'does it scale'. If everybody adopted this then pretty soon there would be no more roads, no more people to discard anything and so on. So even though I think this is quite the statement against consumerism I don't think it survives the 'does it scale' test. It's similar to how people in the UK live in 'eco-villages' that live of the discards of the rest of the society around them.

general_failure 12y ago
My understanding is that his goal is to show consumerism is overblown. He does so by taking it to extremes. You need one for such causes (like stallman who takes a completely overblown stance by not using anything non-free). And not that his way of life is what everyone should follow.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I don't think Stallmans stance is all that overblown. And his would definitely scale.
  - BillinghamJ 12y ago
    How? If everything were free, you hit the same problem that you're not investing into things like infrastructure.
    - drcube 12y ago
      "Free as in freedom".
  - dreamweapon 12y ago
    Which part would scale best: the sleeping in the office part? Or the not necessarily bathing (too often) part?
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Attack the ideas and not the person, the sleeping in the office and bathing thing has been beaten to death many times over and has very little to do with the open source ideas that Stallman has been relentlessly promoting. Effectively he's given up a normal life in order to do this promotion. You could for the same money laugh hard at the military, monks and anybody else that has given up the comforts of regular life in order to commit to a life of service (whether or not I agree with any of those is besides the point, it's just that once you decide your vocation matters more than you do that luxuries cease to matter). Stallmans ideas are very much worth all our attention and his service has brought us as an industry enormous benefits.
  - MrDosu 12y ago
    Definatly. All aboard the rape/pillage/murdertrain -_-
scarecrowbob 12y ago
My intuition is that if you really universalized this, everything is discarded and the idea of ownership would have to change. How would pragmatically work, I don't know (probably terribly), but a maxim in which everyone suddenly stopped owning things beyond personal possessions at the same time took up an overriding ethical system which privileged ecology at least initially seems to be univeralizible. At least, it seems to "scale" better than "I will declare this land as mine to own and control even when I don't actively use it", which is one of our current maxims.
- jkaunisv1 12y ago
  I'm currently reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin and it's a very interesting contrast between a society of ownership and one of no ownership.