The Pragmatic Hippy

So, I don’t really know where I’m going with this yet but stay with me.

There’s this divide. There’s The Society and The… Hippies, for lack of a better word. Eco people. Permaculturists. Communes and chicken raisers and gardeners and those returning to a ‘simpler’ life.

And it always struck me that there must be some middle ground.

Like, for me as a designer, the idea that we can grow our own veggies with relatively cheap LEDs is amazing. Why aren’t we all doing that? The idea that we have technology controlled fires that can burn 99% efficiently and not produce smoke with whatever fuel is inserted based on the realtime amount of oxygen we allow into the chamber is amazing.

The idea that we can use technology to solve a lot of very immediate practical problems like housing, food, clothing, heat, et cetera. just seems so inherent and obvious. I appreciate The Valley, but they’re often myopic about technology itself. We don’t need another restaurant review app.

But as soon as you venture even into a little bit of that ‘live off the land’ lifestyle you quickly fall into the hippy zone, which tends toward eschewing technology all together. Smash your phones with a big rock and leave them.

And that’s not bad — I think people can live however they want — but I think it’s a disservice to all the cool technology we could be using to maybe live simpler lives than we have now, but also not move so far to that extreme.

There’s a layer of technology in the middle.

We can 3D print planters out of recycled and mulched plastic from water bottles. Heck, we can build houses out of garbage dumps in impoverished areas with a lot of garbage and scrabbled shanty towns by making hollow plastic bricks in a hand-injection mold system.

We could use Arduinos to make greenhouses that open and close to allow perfect growing humidity and temperatures inside (I saw this in Iceland — it was more mechanical, like a thermostat, but the roof had this very organic sort of flutter to it as it adjusted for the interior temperature).

We can use vertical fish farms to produce a great variety of food that has enough of it’s own ecosystem that it keeps producing food with less and less intervention and work. It’s a self sustaining food generator.

And that’s the thing, I guess.

The whole live off the land lifestyle just seems like a lot of work to me.

I can appreciate work on the whole — I tend to run towards work in general — but if we have technology solutions, why wouldn’t we use them? Why wouldn’t we want fish to grow themselves and we merely take what we need instead of, say, the laborious process of raising chickens by manual effort.

Why wouldn’t we use LEDs and automatic water sensors to grow plants perfectly instead of throwing out half the crop when they’re over or under cared for. I love gardening, but why not go for 100% crop utilization.

Why wouldn’t we use solar to power computers so we can work and live on the internet as a method for income? Do you know how many chickens per hour I can buy doing design stuff for clients all over the world? It’s just more efficient to work in the modern world and live in the simple one — there’s a sort of arbitrage ability there, and since the hands on stuff is more automated, you get more time to live instead of merely toiling.

I’ve always wanted a smith in the woods. I don’t even know what I’d make, but I’ve always liked the idea of a cobblestone courtyard with a blacksmithery and a motorcycle mechanic shed and a huge wood shop. I’ve always liked the idea of pine needles in between brick floor grout and tall trees throwing soft shadows over modernist glass and concrete and wood. Soaring cream-white tarps that sort of glow with transparency to keep the direct sun off things. Tensile structures. Efficient architecture. Carbon fiber.

And there would be 3D printers. There would be laser cutters. I’m going to need one heck of an off-grid electrical system. But these things seem to combine so well in my brain and there’s no good examples of it out there.

There’s no real cyberpunk + forest combination. The narrative goes that if you want to live off grid you have to have composting toilets and dreadlocks. The narrative goes that if you want modern technology you have to live in an asphalt environment and deal with traffic and noisy neighbors and smog.

So. A new paradigm, or maybe an existing one that’s just been well-hidden from me for this long. Forestpunk. (I googled that — apparently it’s a band?)

Call it what you will.

High tech tree life.

Living in between the dichotomy.