DOWNTIME

Vérité 5/16/2022 My late wife lived outdoors and off the land as much as possible—year round—that’s tough here in Montana. She preferred her cowhide-bound Bible (and all her other books to be hard copies)—it was very few Kindle ebooks for her. She stubbornly stuck with her paper and pens for the important stuff long after everyone else had happily adapted to word processors, email, text messaging and smartphone cameras. She cooked over her campfires, truly despising microwave ovens. She used backpacks to haul her gear and justifiably blamed ATVs for making many of her fellow outdoorsmen weak and flabby. She realized that so much of our world depends on its infrastructure and often lamented our collective dependence on all this expensive and vulnerable “cargo,” (a word she borrowed from the book “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” by Jared Diamond who had himself related it from Yali, a Papua New Guinean coastwatcher, politician, soldier, policeman, activist and prisoner). Now I’m thinking about how to best build OFFLINE scalable communities to start moving toward a world if not beyond today’s “technomania,” at least robust enough to survive should the technology fail.

I believe we need to do this both as a matter of sustainability and as a hedge against surviving any number of natural or manmade catastrophes. Right now I’m using the working name DOWNTIME as a loose reference to both the Australian aboriginal “dreamtime” and the common business idea of downtime procedures which keep things running if the data system becomes unavailable. If you are interested in collaborating, I’d first recommend printing this article (maybe single sided or double spaced so you can take notes). Next, comment and repost at the social media site where you found this.