Telling us which high-level corporate conglomerates to reach you on in the notes of _THIS_ video. Ahh, irony... I think something Uncle Ted didn't articulate well was simply feeling like he couldn't have His Choice under His Terms. It seems childish, but... wasn't he though? He conflated freedom with having no oversight. That just allows other free people to overpower us. It's a childish idealism. Why does Monsanto have to pay lobbying $ to be able to spray Glyphosate? Don't they already have more power than any of the individuals wishing to *stop* them? Wouldn't they already be free if not for this oversight? Uncle Ted wasn't actually much better at thinking things through than most other people.
I read this book before, I'm sure everyone should read this because this important, no matter what views you have. Every ideology should be corrected to save nature
Kinda is, you don't control it, you depend on it entirely, so you're a slave to whomever controls it , Texas should've taught people a lesson, do not depend on things you cannot produce or control, manual power is something you can produce, does not rely on the government, the state or anyone else but you, electricity on the other hand is heavily reliant on the government. Some things of course you can't do without electricity, but our usage of it should be conservative use it only for things that have no other way of being done
In Swedish the word for stream also means eletricity (ström), and in English we use the word "current" so he's not the only one to make that connection.
First you move out into a house in the middle of nowhere... Now you're talking about Ted Kaczynski... I'd be surprised if you aren't on 10 FBI watchlists.
Keeping small vs large scale technology in mind becomes very ironic when I'm downloading a 30GB proprietary software from Xilinx to program their FPGA in the hopes of learning how to build my own 8-bit CPU in case the world ends.
This was the first Luke Smith video I watched, and I thought "He's nuts, I wonder if he's going to be the next unabomber"… And then after sometime I got into all the FOSS stuff and found myself right back here in Luke Smith's channel… and now, after some time, this video makes sense to me more than ever
Luke, I really enjoy your content. You are the most based person on the entirety of RU-vid and are opening my eyes. I came here for Linux content but now I am reconsidering my entire lifestyle.
Where i live we sometimes get scheduled electricity cuts for two hours (more if there is shortage of power on grid) It's really sad to see how many people get mad just because they don't have WiFi or battery life on their phone, missing out on Facebook points or whatever. I work in IT, I'm self proclaimed nerd, hecc I play vidya and I'm nearly Luke's age, and two hours without power is the most refreshing thing sometimes. If the power is out all day, you cook meals with gas or wood fire, boil water in pots on flame for coffee, bathing, washing etc. You end up spending time with the people around you talking, about stuff, anything - even if it's to complain about the government and no electricity. You read a book in the sun, play boardgames at night, hecc do some exercise and spend an hour meditating to embrace the gift of consciousness in the moment - far away from all the tweets and shills and chans and memes and news and and and
Such a great video. Exactly what I was trying to explain to a friend just the other day, but it just went in one ear and out the other. It's not about doing everything yourself. It's about minimizing your dependence on others. There are times when you are going to need someone's help, that's one of the reasons we live in societies with other people. But even when you are getting help from others, you should, whenever possible, at the very lest know how to do it yourself. Don't back yourself into a corner where you've given control of something important in your life over to someone who is looking to control you and doesn't have your best interests at heart.
I really enjoy your format, talking in front of your camera and without cut. I'm really impress by your work. Keep it up. lots of love from france edit : you also bring me to the linux world and this is epic
Also, re: refrigeration. They used to cut ice in winter and store it under ground through summer to have non-mechanical refrigeration. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icebox. So one can argue that refrigeration can be done in a small-scale technology way. Nothing stops a village from digging up a cave and filling it with ice and use it through summer.
For those interested in a recent critique of technology I recommend *Dmitry Orlov - Shrinking the Technosphere.* It covers Jacques Ellul and Ted Kaczynski (in Chapter 3 - Approaches and Departures). Orlov posits the Technosphere as an organism, _"an emergent intelligence that has enslaved and is destroying the biosphere - and us with it."_ It's a radical position but richly argued. He makes the distinction between good and bad technologies very crisp by providing a standard against which to rank them: the harm-benefit analysis table. This table of 32 dimensions may prove a little unwieldy, but Wendell Berry also had a set of 9 rules for technology. Speaking of which: _The lead scientist, Rabih Bashroush, calculated that five billion downloads and streams clocked up by the song Despacito, released in 2017, consumed as much electricity as Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic put together in a single year._ Let's not even mention the energy use of Bitcoin.
I bought this book a couple months ago after seeing this comment while re-watching this vid.. nice book overall, minus all the praising putin at the end
There is another important way to distinguish technology: technology to help you do things that cannot be done otherwise and technology to help you do things that you are simply too lazy to do. The older I get, the more I find that happiness is derived from the things you learn to create, not the luxuries that can be created for you. After all, anxiety isn't brought on by a negative situation, it's brought on by the realisation that you don't know how to better it.
I wonder if this could be mapped like dependency tree? Then you could map all of your dependencies for your distro, i mean life, and see what things are essential for the various run levels.
Most the food people consume nowadays. It hasn't been that way... well ... ever in the thousands years past??? And people were rather safely reliant on that
Serious stuff and bitter truth. Everybody needs to reconsider their though on new technology and identify whether it is using them or whether they are it.
11:04 "Thirty-year-old linguistic student found dead in his cabin in the woods. Early findings suggest a severe case of botulism likely stemming from his consumption of self-made, non-refrigerated foods found onsite."
Luke, I have agreed with your approach, a conclusion I have reached on my own and have been pondering for quite some time. Regarding media, I have valued having my own copies of music, movies, books etc ever since finding and using records and CDs as a young teenager. It's funny, I wanted to give my best friend's sister a birthday present a CD (she's in high school) and she said she has no way to play it. That incident shows you the generation gap. I don't dislike or envy any of the younger kids, but I do think it's funny how much a 10-year difference makes - I grew up with physical media and I'm sticking with it, while nowadays such is eschewed. (I found records and was reviving them, even as my parents were not interested.) I bought an iPhone to store my music on it, but then I discovered my library is way bigger than my iPhone 128 GB storage. So I have resorted to finding (that was a task in itself) old iPods - the classics, with click wheels. Then I have modded them with SD boards from iflash.xyz. Even though that process is sort of organizational-dependent, I feel that I have a good understanding of the iPod design and can repair them if something breaks. So that works for me. Similarly, I find streaming not conducive for me, as it is easier for me to pull up a song on my iPod than to find it on Spotify/RU-vid etc. The same applies to films. It might be relatively easy to find a song on RU-vid, but finding a way to stream a given movie (e.g., you want to see title X) is almost Herculean to navigate, as the plurality of streaming services and rights obscures finding the movie itself. I think it would be fun to make a video between me and one of the youths, where we are given some song titles and movie titles and whoever can bring them up first (CD/DVD or streaming or whatever) wins. Ciao
"In next weeks Linux tutorial, I'm going to show you how to make your own movies and tv shows in your backyard. Stop relying on others for your entertainment."
As a musician I think you can still buy the music you want to listen to. Apart from that this really made me think, in my job I'd love to use open source software but it's still lacking too many functionalities I need.. Something seems to slowly changing though
Mhm, so no electricity dependency then. As an alternative to mains and solar, wind makes you dependent on wind and other stuff. Yeah, it's a dependency hell in real life. Luke is parsing the dependencies in his life hahah
I hate the fact that I'm so reliant on 'organisation dependent technology'. I don't hate technology; I'm not a luddite. I love it and want to work in IT, but I hate what it already does to us and could do. Maybe it's just my irrational fear of a future transhumanistic overregulated smart city society that could be a direct result of this tech boom. Anyway I feel like if things did hit the fan, me, my family and my friends would be among the first to go down since we're already so reliant on physical 'organisation dependent technology'. Even digitally, most of what I use I couldn't make it myself. A computer, a compiler, an IDE or maybe analog things. I can freak myself out with those thoughts for days on end.. It's the yearning of wanting to know everything about anything and wanting to reinvent the wheel for everything and it's an itch I can't scratch. I want to be self-reliant and sufficient, digitally and irl. I'm just thinking out loud.
There should be an in-between scale where you have to source technology from massive organizations, but are not dependent on them for continued use. For example, solar panels, once you have then, they continue to function independent of the massive global system that produced them. As opposed to grid power, which does not function at all independent of large organization.
I was thinking that a similar in between level also exists. While I think that solar panels are still organization dependent (they can't be easily repaired without technologically advanced spare parts), I was thinking of something like metal hand tools. You can't really produce good alloy steels without either a lot of luck or an advanced metallurgy industry, not to mention the need for huge amounts of labor to collect enough ore. However, most people could keep their metal handtools maintained, and can do a moderate amount of repairs without technologically advanced spare parts. (For instance, if I have a nice steel axe and the handle breaks, I can probably fix that without an industrial organization, and if the axe head dulls, I can sharpen it myself. However, chances are I probably can't make the steel axe in the first place)
This is my first time running into this channel, and it seems interesting! I will have a look at some of your other videos. This one was probably recommended to me because I am starting to get back into Linux after a long time of Windows-only (I just installed a dual-boot of Kubuntu 19.04 on my new laptop). My Dad got a laptop off ebay for 80 quid and to my and his horror, it only had a tiny 50GB of storage, which was not even enough to allow Windows (being the resource hog that it is) to update! It is literally insecure out of the box! This must be one of those computers you mentioned where it is intended that you store everything on the cloud. I have never believed in cloud storage, except maybe for email services (which have obviously been on the cloud for far longer than that term has existed).
@@Tb0n3 Nope. It's quite an American thing to know. I don't expect you to know who Chikatilo was, for example. I found out about Columbine only because Marilyn Manson was involved in the controversy. Otherwise, it would be quite a specific thing to take interest in.
you brushed up against this at the end of the video - what's the relationship between lindy/non-lindy and smallscale/organization-dependent? C, make, grep, awk.. have been around for a long time, and i think they'll probably be around after all the big software companies of today are dissolved
Interesting video Luke. Hopefully in the future decentralized tech and widespread automation will help take these "X as a service" technologies away from companies and allow individuals to own the services instead.
I felt weird during watching this video. Somekind like watching Varg, but without something I couldn't name. :) Great video, keep going with that kind of videos Luke!
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as AnPrim, is in fact, Unaboomer/AnPrim, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Unaboomer plus AnPrim. Anprim is not an lifestyle unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Uncle Ted philosophy..
If you have access to a creek, small water stream or whatever the correct name is ( sry, i don't really know the right word) you could make a tiny hydroelectric power house. In fact that's one of my favorites projects to try before you know... zombies and etc.
I have been looking for this video. I have been trying to articulate the points made here, and now I have the vocabulary. The issue isn’t if the world is going to fall apart, it won’t. The problem is whether your corner of it will fall apart, and that’s very possible, if not probable.
If we are talking about a collapse, it would be more realistic to think in terms of Mad Max where you should gain knowledge about how to build technological devices out of scrap and other stolen or left by things. Just imagine how much you could get out of a car wreck. So that is small scale technology when you first have access to the materials and parts that exists in abundance, especially when most (unprepared) individuals will die like flies.
It's funny because I have thought about a lot of what he said. I never knew there was the terms small scale technology and organizational scale technology. I personally don't like streaming services for music and movies, i like downloading. When these streaming services go down or offline, you'll still have a the mp3 files.
I've thought about this a lot and it scares the poo out of me o__o It's an uncomfortable feeling knowing that I'm so dependent on all this technology that I could never create myself if I needed to.
Who's to say what is a natural and unnatural way of living though. Does through _nature_ evolving to communicate with a small number of nearby humans mean that method is _natural_ . If so many things today like medicine, varied diet, scientific education are things society has built by coming together can it not be seen as a historical status quo that we shouldn't necessarily feel the need to perpetuate. Mainly thinking as a devil's advocate but I shouldn't think history or nature should really be used as a comparison for us to decide what is natural or how it is _right_ for our society to interact. Edit: Rest of the points about the consequences of relying on an industrial network are worth a thought of course!
unnatural vs natural wasnt really a point though it was more focused on reliance/over-reliance on large faceless organizations(often for the sake of convenience) vs relying on yourself and neighbors/local people. Besides, medicine is the only thing you mentioned that is more dependent on large faceless organizations
I agree with you one hundred percent, but regarding music, you can always find the sites which allows you to download music when purchasing.. That way you can have it stored locally and not depend on any streaming service, and at the same time show your appreciation for artist's talent and effort :)
You should read "The Knowledge" by Lewis Dartnell. Is written under similar premise. You'll love it for sure! It was suggested by a RU-vidr who passed away recently.
i can see that in my envierement. most people simply minddead ordering nearly all of their stuff from amazon,while iam often first look on ebay and sometimes in the offline retailstore if im really interested in something.
This is one video I don't agree with. There is something inherent in all societies, no matter how small and that is division of labor. It is the reason why we advanced where we are now. Luke, at the end, fails to realize that even a saw, or a manual can opener is not something he has the knowledge or tools to create by himself. Sure, he doesn't require electricity to use them, but the fact of the matter is that, just like when the solar panels break and you are dependent on Chinese company to make new ones, you are dependent on others to make a new saw or a new can opener. I suggest everyone who agrees with his points to read "I, Pencil" by Leonard E. Read. Aside from the economics and political parts (which only come towards the end), this small essay will put into perspective, better than I can in a comment, the importance of the division of labor. The essay, if you are a slow reader, can be read in about 15 minutes and is available for free as in both beer and freedom.
To me power generation for independence goes: Public eletric < solar electric < wind | water < solar water heating | wind water pumping && water tower < use less power Copper is smeltable, but mining it is hard, but making a generator from scratch is doable. Mechanical parts are more plentiful, but if your using steal mechanism your'e only slightly better than copper motors. Solar water heaters are super easy to do it from scratch.
I think a productive solution to this is, along with reducing our reliance on technology for our survial first and foremost, is to develop ways to turn these large scale technologies into small scale technologies. For example, the printing press made copying text possible for individuals ending their reliance on (what could be considered an organizational technology) of monastical clerics copying them by hand.
Because of your videos im not connecting internet at home in 2020, i want to learn programming and foreign languages, at the end of year will post you how it went
On the topic of energy independence, have you seen these videos of people using streams and dams to run old busted up washing machines in reverse to generate enough electricity to live in? Pretty cool stuff