Living off the (corporate) grid
I recently watched Life off the grid—a film about disconnecting on the public library streaming service Kanopy. It tells the stories of people across Canada, from BC to PEI, who for various reasons and in very diverse ways opted to live off the electricity grid. That meant of course solar panels and small wind turbines, and storage devices, but also adapting all energy consumption to the low-power and small-scale generation of electricity. Necessarily it meant that electricity is no longer something that magically comes out of a couple of little holes in the wall and all you need to know is how to plug something into them and how to flick a switch.
This in turn caused significant changes in lifestyle. But that's the whole point. You move some place remote, you build a house with very little capital, you generate your own electricity, you grow your own food or most of it, you pickle and can and make jam, and you find yourself working for yourself instead of working for someone else to make money to buy all those things.
One common characteristic of all these people was their willingness to learn whatever was needed to make their systems work. It's not that they knew a lot about electricity generation or battery storage or water pumps before they started. It's more that they were generally curious and willing to try out new things. They learned as they went along, and their systems grew organically as needed.
Now the reason I'm telling you this is that there is something in me that always likes to generalize new ideas and push them further, and in this case it occurred to me that the electricity grid is not the only one we are hooked up to and that we might consider going off.
My previous post about smart tvs is an example of this. I put it to you that the vast majority of us are plugged into a consumer technology grid, and all we need to know is what aisle in the store the thing is that we're looking for, and how to tap a credit card on a screen.
The problem is that increasingly the thing costs way too much, it spies on you and it feeds you advertising and propaganda to entice you to buy even more stuff. See also smart phones, smart cars, “artificial intelligence”, and anything with the word Google in it.
Let's continue with the example of TVs. Television takes off shortly after the end of World War 2, when all the electronic technology was ready. The business model for commercial television was simple: advertising. The primary purpose of television programming was not to provide entertainment or information; it was to hook the viewer and capture their attention long enough in order to feed them advertising. The world's first TV ad appeared in 1941, just before a baseball game, and it was just ten seconds long. You like baseball? That's great; here's a game, which in return will greatly increase the probability that you will go out and buy a Bulova watch.
(By the way, if you want to avoid all the surveillance and the ads that come with watching something on Youtube, here's a great desktop app with which to watch that ad.)
This has been the business model for television from day one. Now for this to work, the technology has be cheap enough, but no cheaper, for a large number of people to afford it, and the technology must satisfy two requirements:
It must be so simple that absolutely anyone can use it without any training; and
it must be incomprehensible, so that you have to buy it in order to use it. It must be, in engineering jargon, a black box. Like the electrical supply.
Returning to the question of whether we can disconnect from the (corporate) grid: yes, we can, if we are able to overcome those two requirements for successful, i.e. profitable, consumer technology. Just like the off-grid folks learning to set up solar panels, we have to be open to learning new things. The good news is that you don't have to go and live in the Yukon to do it, it's not incomprehensible, there is actually a lot of information out there, and a large and friendly community. Also, it's not all-or-nothing: every time you liberate yourself a bit from the corporate grid counts. Rest assured I will be writing a lot more about this in the future.
Thoughts? Do drop me a line at leastaction.rescuer598@passmail.net.