off-the-grid

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The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

Through the California energy crises of 2000–2001, through the 2003 East Coast blackout, through the rise of variable generation and the forced privatization of generation in many markets, they believed that something like business as usual might persevere through the rough times. People in America would always need electricity, and who better than they to continue managing its provision? What they didn’t see coming was grid defection. For so long, “off the grid” had been a suspect term. Going off the grid was something that longhairs ingigliated in clouds of pot smoke and right-wing alligator farmers did (both groups form a notable presence in the new Colorado). It was not something that would ever occur to regular folks, city folks, and reputable mainstream companies. Not since alternating current did away with private plants in the 1890s, and not since the consolidation of power in the 1910s brought whole regions under the purview of a single service provider, had it been fiscally sound to be electricity independent.

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When speaking of the far left coast it may be easy for the dubious reader to attribute a backwoods spirit of do-it-yourself libertarianism to this switch from believing in and relying upon the grid (such as it is). This is not, however, what happened along the Gale-flattened Pacific Coast in the wake of the 2007 storm. Not that there aren’t a fair number of “those people”—the off-the-grid types who live in compounds rather than houses and hold radical political opinions considered far right or far left. But most of the folks we might traditionally refer to as “off-the-grid” have been industriously producing their own power, light, and heat since the late 1960s, mostly by the insecure (if we listen to Straw’s and the DoD’s sound opinion on the matter) means of diesel generators, though one does find the occasional waterwheel converting the unending rain into a tidy stream of volts.

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Not only is it the most humid town in the nation (which is a nice way of saying that it rains all the time), but it was once, long ago, also voted the least good place in the United States to install solar panels. What this all means is that off-the-grid, then as now, is not the same thing as being ideologically “green.” Most people who produce their own power aren’t doing it because they feel deeply that the electricity they get from the national grid is environmentally pernicious, though some do. Rather, absenting themselves from government services—and thus also, ostensibly, from the government’s meddling—means producing power for themselves. Diesel gets you off the grid and so, too, does natural gas (an infrastructural network of another kind). To a certain extent, wood-burning stoves also accomplish this.

Lonely Planet Pocket San Francisco by Lonely Planet, Alison Bing

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, edge city, G4S, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, off-the-grid, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, Zipcar

(http://laboulangebakery.com; 1909 Union St; 7am-6pm; ; Fillmore St) 10 Mamacita Mexican $$ Offline map Google map Made-completely-from-scratch tortillas, tamales, and two-dozen fresh-daily sauces are among the secrets to this crowd-pleasing yet adventurous Mexican menu, which features dishes ranging from spit-roasted goat to duck carnitas . The knock-out cocktail menu lists 60 tequilas, which explains the room’s constant roar. Make reservations. ( 415-346-8494; www.mamacitasf.com; 2317 Chestnut St; dishes $10-18; dinner; 28, 30, 43) Local Life Off the Grid Food trucks circle like pioneer wagons every Friday night at Off the Grid Offline map ( http://offthegridsf.com; Fort Mason parking lot; dishes under $10; 5-10pm Fri; Marina Blvd) , SF’s largest mobile-gourmet hootenanny of up to 30 trucks (other nights/locations attract less than a dozen trucks; check the website). Arrive before 6:30pm or expect 20-minute waits for Chairman Bao’s clamshell buns stuffed with duck and mango, Roli Roti’s free-range herbed roast chicken, and dessert from The Créme Brûlée Man.

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Today’s spiffy Mex-Deco Marina was mostly built in the 1930s, using debris from the 1906 quake. Top Sight Golden Gate Bridge ( Click here ) Best of San Francisco Outdoors Crissy Field ( Click here ) Baker Beach ( Click here ) Architecture Golden Gate Bridge ( Click here ) Shopping Mingle ( Click here ) Past Perfect ( Click here ) Bargain Gourmet Off the Grid ( Click here ) Entertainment Fort Mason ( Click here ) For Kids Exploratorium ( Click here ) Getting There Bus 47 and 49 connect Marina to downtown; 41, 30 and 45 run to North Beach; 43 connects to the Haight; 22 runs to the Mission. Car There’s parking at Fort Mason and Crissy Field, and free parking in the adjoining Presidio.

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(www.lovethepalace.org; 3301 Lyon St; Lyon St) Local Life Fort Mason San Francisco takes subversive glee in turning military installations into venues for nature, fine dining and experimental art – including Fort Mason Offline map ( www.fortmason.org; cnr Bay & Franklin Sts; Marina Blvd) , a former shipyard that was the embarkation point for WWII Pacific troops. The military mess halls have been replaced by vegan-friendly Greens ( Click here ) and Off the Grid food trucks ( Click here ), and dockside Herbst Pavilion includes art fairs and wine-tasting in its arsenal (check the website for events). Warehouses now host cutting-edge theater at Magic Theatre and BATS ( Click here ) and the Long Now Foundation (http://longnow.org; bldg A, Fort Mason; 10:30am-5pm Mon-Fri, 11am-6pm Sat-Sun; Marina Blvd ), a non-profit sponsoring four-dimensional (time-based) art and technology projects.

Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community by Diana Leafe Christian

back-to-the-land, dumpster diving, en.wikipedia.org, hive mind, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peak oil

Earthaven doesn’t grow much of its own food yet, but Ecovillage at Ithaca (which also encourages bicycling, carpooling, and public transportation), has two CSA farms onsite. Yet so far only a few homes at EcoVillage at Ithaca have composting toilets or are off the grid. And while residents of Los Angeles EcoVillage recycle their trash, compost their kitchen scraps, and grow some fruits and vegetables in their apartment courtyard, they’re almost entirely dependent on grid electricity (so far only three apartments are off the grid), and they buy most of their food at local stores. But Los Angeles EcoVillagers are enthusiastic bicycle and public transportation activists — and get twenty dollars off on their rent if they don’t own a car!

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The Trends Research Institute, a network of interdisciplinary experts who forecast developing trends, echoes Darley’s prediction for “re-localization.” One of the hottest trends they see is a “rapidly growing desire of more people to be selfempowered, non-reliant, and off the grid,” in the broadest possible sense, as in “off the grid”of mainstream society. Such as, for example, ecovillages, sustainable intentional communities, and organized neighborhoods. “It’s time to return to the community,” says Pat Murphy, executive director of The Community Solution,“to clean up the mess and get back on the right path.”

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Who This Book is For This book is Šrst for “cultural creatives” — people who value environmentally sustainable living, cooperation, and a sense of community (and who perhaps have a spiritual practice) — but may not know much about ecovillages or intentional communities and would enjoy learning more. It’s for people who want to know more about folks who live off the grid, grow their own food, or create their own biodiesel fuel, for example, or who share meals with friends and neighbors, raise their children cooperatively with others, work at jobs they Šnd fulŠlling, create their own home-grown entertainment — and thrive. People exactly like this visit ecovillages and intentional communities every week.

The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs

air freight, Albert Einstein, car-free, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, compound rate of return, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Golden Gate Park, intentional community, job satisfaction, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, telemarketer, the rule of 72, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

He was able to get the building code changed in his county. You need to check your local codes. You also may be able to use salvaged wood in the structure of your house if it has been regraded. Living Off the Grid I was so touched by a story sent to me by a Simple Living subscriber, Kirk Nevin, that I decided to look further into this concept of living off the grid. Kirk’s story is reprinted on pages 136–137. Living off the grid means that you supply your own power and water and do not depend on public utilities to keep your house functioning. There are both financial and ecological reasons for choosing this kind of lifestyle.

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The ecological reason is that harvesting energy from the sun, water, and wind uses less energy and creates less pollution than does energy provided by a public utility. While off-the-grid equipment is more expensive than traditional equipment initially, you will save over time because your energy costs will be lower; once you are up and running self-sufficiently, you’ll have no monthly water, light, and electric bills to pay. Off-the-grid living is the most immediately cost efficient if you want to live in a remote area where it would cost more to run a power line to your property than to put together a power system of your own.

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Such a system can be highly cost effective, produces no pollution, and wastes no natural resources. (Some people with complete solar systems even have solar ovens.) Sometimes fuel is required to power a generator. Some appliances, such as a refrigerator, demand a lot of energy and are usually powered by a generator or are manufactured to use with propane. Off the Grid in Nevada Bert and Patti Reslock live off the grid in northern Nevada on a 12-acre parcel. Their two-story home is earth-bermed on the north and sits in a bowl with a beautiful valley for their front yard. This creative use of the natural landscape allowed optimum performance from the secluded home’s solar array, while giving up neither power nor creature comfort.

Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist by Ray C. Anderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centralized clearinghouse, clean tech, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, Easter island, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invisible hand, junk bonds, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, music of the spheres, Negawatt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, precautionary principle, renewable energy credits, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, urban renewal, Y2K

A year and a day after we bought the land (an interval dictated by the tax code), we signed an agreement with the Chattowah Open Land Trust to put seventy-nine of those acres into a “forever wild” conservation easement. Meanwhile, we had set about planning our off-the-grid log cabin in the mountains, and a division of labor had taken effect. Pat handled the aesthetics while I took on the construction and engineering. We both worked with our architect on the size and location of the rooms. High on my list of must-haves was for our cabin to be truly off the grid, meaning no connection to any of the public utilities we take for granted in the city: no utility power, no water or sewerage pipes, no natural gas.

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Round and Round They Go 9. Getting Out of the Breakdown Lane 10. The Circle of Influence, or Love on the Factory Floor 11. The Final Ascent 12. On Leadership, Programs, and Policies 13. Science and Skeptics 14. Awakening the Mind and Spirit 15. The Next Ascent 16. Every Reason for Hope Epilogue: Off the Grid in Lost Valley, North Carolina Appendix A: LCA Comparison of Two Carpet Tile Backing Types Appendix B: Master Evergreen Lease and Services Agreement Appendix C: The Interface Model Index Also by Ray C. Anderson Copyright Acknowledgments Patricia Adams Anderson (Pat), my wife of twenty-five years, leads this list for so patiently supporting me in my personal mission to tell the Interface story far and wide.

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First, we can actually generate green power on-site, as we do at our Bentley Prince Street facility in Southern California, at our factory in LaGrange, Georgia, and at our Dutch facility at Scherpenzeel. Or we can purchase green power from local utilities when they offer it. Every one of our European plants runs off 100 percent green power, straight off the grid. Third, we can invest in off-site renewables to green our energy mix. We’re not hooked up directly to windpower generating stations in North Dakota or New Zealand, but we can buy renewable energy credits (REC) from utilities that are. Whether we generate it ourselves or pay someone else to, the earth wins.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

“Systems Intelligence Self Evaluation,” Systems Analysis Laboratory, Aalto University, Finland, http://salserver.org.aalto.fi/sitest/2012/. Chapter 5: Stepping Aside 1. Walter Kirn, “The Tao of Robert Downey, Jr.,” Rolling Stone, May 13, 2010. 2. Tricia Drevets, “How to Make Money Living off the Grid,” Off the Grid News, June 25, 2014, http://www.offthegridnews.com/financial/how-to-make-money-living-off-the-grid/. 3. Heather Plett, “What It Means to ‘Hold Space’ for People, plus Eight Tips on How to Do It Well,” Heather Plett blog, March 11, 2015, http://heatherplett.com/2015/03/hold-space/. 4. Steve Wozniak, “Does Steve Jobs Know How to Code?

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It’s hard to imagine a computer taking over any part of what Gervais does to earn his pay. This is what stepping aside is: pegging your earning power to forms of value machines can’t deliver, and probably never will. Note that this poses a very different question than what work can I do without a computer? That question was answered recently by Off the Grid News (which we felt a little sheepish reading online). Without claiming to be exhaustive, it listed eleven ways to make money without tapping into shared utility infrastructures like the Web2: • carpentry • painting • remodeling • artwork (especially high-quality artisanal work) • beekeeping • herbs and traditional medicines • housecleaning • home delivery service or driving service • pet sitting • babysitting • animal care There are a lot of interesting jobs there, but to surface even more (and more high-paying) possibilities, we’re suggesting that the question be asked differently.

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But it is also true that empathy is valuable in any kind of work setting where one’s clients, coworkers, and other stakeholders are humans. Now try to think of another kind. Humor and empathy are just two “right brain” human capacities we would be awfully surprised to see computers excel at. As a fuller list, in the nonexhaustive spirit of Off the Grid’s, many stepping-aside jobs will also center on knowledge work that requires creativity, courage, and conviction. Ethics, emotions, and integrity. Taste, vision, and the ability to inspire. If anything proves that taste belongs on that list, it’s the empire of domestic goddess Martha Stewart. Does she use a computer?

Discover Hawaii the Big Island by Lonely Planet

Day of the Dead, land reform, Maui Hawaii, new economy, off-the-grid, sustainable-tourism

I’d also suggest the Waimea Cherry Blossom Heritage Festival (Click here) and the King Kamehameha Day parade (Click here) in North Kohala. Sleeping AKIKO’S BUDDHIST B&B Hostel $ ( 963-6422; www.alternative-hawaii.com/akiko; s/d $65/75, cottages $65-85) Appreciate the wonder of rustic simplicity at this peaceful, no-frills retreat. Rooms are simple – futons on the floor in the main house or twin beds in an adjacent house. Two off-the-grid cottages are teeny but wonderfully ensconced in tropical flora. For longer stays, ask about the artist’s studio. Rates are for shared bathroom and include breakfast. The best part of this B&B might be Akiko herself, a kamaʻaina (born and raised in Hawaii) who farms the 2-acre grounds, invites guests to join morning meditation, coordinates a popular end-of-year mochi pounding festival and hosts worthy cultural events.

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A fantastically verdant setting, complete with 120ft waterfall and swimming hole. Eight rooms (in two buildings) are exquisitely appointed with Asian antiques. The pagoda guesthouse is a worthy splurge and includes a kitchen, laundry facilities and 1.5 bathrooms. All power is hydroelectric and off the grid. The unlit 4-mile road can be tricky at night. See website for driving instructions. HOLMES’ SWEET HOME B&B $ ( 961-9089; www.holmesbandb.com; 107 Koula St; r incl breakfast $80-95; ) In a pleasant residential neighborhood about 2.5 miles from downtown, heading up Kaumana Dr and onto Ainako Ave, this friendly, lived-in B&B provides comfy rooms (both wheelchair accessible) with private entrances, plus a large common area with full-sized fridge and microwave.

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PUNA PUNA ITINERARIES PUNA HIGHLIGHTS DISCOVER PUNA Keaʻau & Around Pahoa Highway 132 Red Road (Highway 137) Highway 130 Top of chapter Puna Ask a Big Islander and they’ll tell you Puna is its own world, not far away but far out. The driving force is change. Here, the original plantation community has been replaced by a new, eclectic population: mainland retirees, nouveau hippies, off-the-grid minimalists, funky artists, New Age seekers, Hawaiian sovereignty activists, organic farmers and the odd pakalolo (marijuana) grower. While different (and sometimes dissonant) from one another, these Punatics relish the laid-back, wristwatch-free lifestyle. They share a deep affinity for the volatile land, which Kilauea Volcano has repeatedly slathered with lava and blessed with black-sand beaches, lava rock tide pools and soothing hot ponds.

Avogadro Corp by William Hertling

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, invisible hand, messenger bag, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, off-the-grid, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, standardized shipping container, tech worker, technological singularity, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

He let himself out, leaving Maggie full of questions. * * * From the time Mike arrived at the airport in Madison for the flight home, and periodically since he arrived back in Portland, he had tried to reach David by phone. Frustratingly, David had been off the grid in New Mexico. Mike knew that David always went to Christine’s family ranch for the holidays, and he knew that the ranch was off the grid, so he couldn’t claim any legitimate reason for feeling even more suspicious. Yet here he was, feeling manipulated by a software algorithm. David had sent Mike a copy of his itinerary by email weeks earlier, so he had David’s flight information.

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Though he didn’t talk about it, the sounds and smells of the processes — the clacking of the typewriter, the chemical agents used for the offset press, brought back happy memories of his teen years when he held a job working in a printing shop. He held up the first plate, reviewing the cover and back page images for defects. His newsletter, Off The Grid, had attracted thousands of subscribers. The newsletter combined tips on lifestyle design, financial planning, and even philosophy. Partly written by Gene, but combining content mailed in by readers, the newsletter helped make the case for living off the grid, taught people how to do it economically, how to become independent, and how to adjust socially. Some readers were ex-corporate types like Gene himself, while others were survivalists and back-to-land extremists.

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“However, I never received that email,” Mike said. “Instead, I received an email that sent me more than a thousand miles away on a wild goose chase, and thanks to the winter storm, it was a week before I got back. When I did, I found that my access to the ELOPe project had been removed, and David was on vacation, off the grid in New Mexico.” “Did ELOPe send you to New Mexico?” Sean asked, one eyebrow raised. “No, no, that was a planned vacation we do every year. When I got back from vacation, Mike and I discussed what had happened to him. We also discovered that my access to the ELOPe code had been turned off as well.

Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations by Garr Reynolds

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Hans Rosling, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

You are never too old to learn to play an instrument. • Get completely unplugged and off the grid—no iPhones or BlackBerrys, and the like. Go for a walk, a hike, a bike ride, or whatever it is that allows you to slow your busy mind. What if a brilliant idea hits you and you can’t record it? What if you see a remarkable example and can’t take a picture of it? Don’t worry about it. Getting off the grid and freeing up your mind (and pockets) is necessary for the flow of ideas, too. Your journey includes time off the grid too. istockphoto.com 000001067505 • When you go for walks in nature, keep a keen eye out for the balance, colors, lines, shapes, and so forth that most people never notice.

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The only competition is with yourself. Most of us never learned the design and visual communication strategies we need today. But it’s never too late to learn. Regardless of how old you are, you’re never “too old” to learn and improve. To evaluate your starting point—and later assess your improvement—you need to stop, take time off the grid, and reflect on where you are now and on how you want to improve. In Japan there is a reflection process called hansei, which is a kind of downtime of introspection and self-reflection during which people think about the current situation or project—even if things are going well—and brainstorm ways to improve it.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Urbanites are moving far beyond herbs and vegetables, by planting fruit trees, putting chickens in their backyards, and keeping bees. People are also going off the grid, with solar panels and passive solar design, geothermal pumps, windmills, and wood pellet and corncob stoves. The alternative energy movement is expanding beyond heat and electricity into appliances. Individuals are building solar ovens and fridges, and even biodigesters, machines that turn household waste into energy to fuel an eco-kitchen. These trends have new names, too: microfarming and microgeneration for self-produced energy. Fourteen percent of additions to solar capacity in 2008 were in off-the-grid installations. Self-provisioning is also getting popular in housing.

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A global movement called Transition Towns is helping small locales transform themselves to become self-reliant. The Post Carbon Cities network, which has a similar mission, is active from Spokane to Nevada City to Alachua County, Florida. There are also homegrown efforts. A few years ago, people in rural areas of Northern California began conversations to create an “off the grid” network of farms and businesses. One participant is Paul West, a maverick from a conservative Southern family who’d already been through one career as a successful public relations executive in Manhattan’s fashion industry, as well as a second at an environmental NGO. West became convinced that we are moving toward a radically different economy, and in 2007 joined others in Northern California to take part in a conversation that, in his words, had already begun to “think the unthinkable.”

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Backyard livestock has become so popular that some locales have even spawned mobile slaughtering businesses, trucks that move through neighborhoods to kill the animals on-site. A similar phenomenon is happening with energy. People are installing solar collectors and corncob and wood pellet stoves. They’re opting into green energy sources available from their utilities. Some are going off the grid, or tapping into wind and geothermal power. They’re insulating their homes, installing LEDs, downsizing their spaces, and designing smart buildings that take advantage of free cooling and heating from nature through wind, sun, and shade. They’re microgenerators rejecting the inevitability of fossil fuels.

Discover Maui by Lonely Planet

California gold rush, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, land reform, Maui Hawaii, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, sustainable-tourism, trade route

Further north, Hawaiian history and swanky exclusivity have formed an intriguing, sometimes uneasy, alliance in Kapalua, where a world-class resort preens between a lush mountain watershed, a PGA golf course, an ancient burial ground and several gorgeous beaches. To escape any semblance of a ‘scene,’ hunker down in Kahana or Napili, lovely seaside communities known for their condos and budget-friendly prices. For off-the-grid excitement, only one adventure will do – a breezy, sometimes hair-raising, drive around the untamed northern coast. Kapalua Beach (Click here) PHOTOGRAPHER: DOUGLAS PEEBLES/PHOTOLIBRARY Top of chapter West Maui Itineraries Two Days Kaʻanapali Beach (Click here ) Begin by jumping into the water at West Maui’s hottest spot for sand and sun.

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There are no formal opening hours, but the church is typically unlocked during the day. Sleeping & Eating TEA HOUSE Cottage $$ Offline map ( 572-5610; www.mauiteahouse.com; Hoolawa Rd; s/d $135/150) Built with walls recycled from a Zen temple, this one-of-a-kind cottage is so secluded it’s off the grid and uses its own solar power to stoke up the lights. Yet it has everything you’ll need, including a kitchen with gas burners and an open-air shower in a redwood gazebo. The grounds also contain a Tibetan-style stupa with a spectacular cliff-top ocean view and a second cottage that rents by the week ($500).

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This chapter starts with time-honored Hana, where you’ll relearn the meaning of s-l-o-w and talk story with people who actually take the time. Beyond Hana lies Wailua Falls, the most stunning roadside waterfall on the entire island, and the cool forested trails of ʻOheʻo Gulch. In sleepy Kipahulu, discover the gravesite of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and savor organic snacks at off-the-grid farms. A fitting finale to it all is the adventurous romp along the Piʻilani Hwy and through the cowboy village of Kaupo. Wailua Falls (Click here) PHOTOGRAPHER: DOUGLAS PEEBLES/PHOTOLIBRARY Top of chapter Hana & East Maui Itineraries One Day Hana Town Center (Click here ) If you’ve got one day it’s all about slowing down to experience Hana’s aloha.

Hawaii by Jeff Campbell

airport security, big-box store, California gold rush, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, company town, creative destruction, Drosophila, Easter island, G4S, haute couture, land reform, lateral thinking, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, risk/return, sustainable-tourism, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence

O’ahu, Kailua Bay (Click here) O’ahu, Waimea Bay (Click here) O’ahu, Makaha Beach (Click here) The Big Island, Hapuna Beach (Click here) The Big Island, Makalawena Beach (Click here) The Big Island, Waipi’o Valley (Click here) Maui, Big Beach (Click here) Maui, Ho’okipa Beach (Click here) Maui, Malu’aka Beach (Click here) Kaua’i, Hanalei Bay (Click here) Kaua’i, Po’ipu Beach (Click here) Kaua’i, Ke’e Beach (Click here) Moloka’i, Halawa Beach (Click here) Lana’i, Hulopo’e Beach (Click here) Ways to Go Green It’s easy to go green in Hawaii – and getting easier all the time. Here are some specific suggestions that show just how simple it is. For more on sustainable travel, Click here. Sleep off the grid on the Big Island: go primitive at Lova Lava Land (Click here) or plush at Waianuhea B&B (Click here). Rent a biofuel car on Maui: drive an eco-friendly VW Beetle from Bio-Beetle (Click here). Learn about Native Hawaiian culture in Honolulu: visit the Bishop Museum (Click here), take a class at Native Books/Nā Mea Hawai’i (Click here) and attend Waikiki’s Kuhio Beach Torch Lighting & Hula Show (Click here).

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Hawai′i is twice as big as the other islands combined. It’S the only island where you feel you’re on a road trip. Hawaii’S peoples have room to be themselves, and they ring the Big Island with personality: from multiethnic, working-class Hilo to Waimea’S paniolo (cowboy) country, from funkadelic Puna to rural, off-the-grid Ka′u, from South Kona’S Japanese coffee farmers to North Kohala’S writers and artists. Hawai′i is steeped in ancient history. The first Polynesians landed here, and Kamehameha was born here. So many ancient sites are preserved, and so well, that it takes little imagination to conjure helmeted warriors and Captain Cook, bays full of outrigger canoes and the terror of the gods.

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The relaxed common room has a library and large-screen TV (with DVDs), and there’S a lounge-worthy, secluded lanai. The delicious highlight, though, is the full, homemade organic breakfast. It’S between the 3- and 4-mile markers on Hwy 240. Waianuhea B&B (775-1118, 888-775-2577; www.waianuhea.com; 45-3503 Kahana Dr; r $195-400; ) Solar-powered, off-the-grid living doesn’t get more artfully luxurious than this. Enjoy magazine-quality interior design in each of the five rooms, with color schemes playing off dramatic art pieces. Amenities include flat-screen TVs, cell phones, robes and yoga mats; several have wood stoves, one a view from its soaking tub.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Amish religious belief is founded on the principle that they should remain “in the world, not of it” and so should remain separate in as many ways as possible. Being tied to electricity tied them into the world, so they forfeited electrical benefits in order to stay outside the world. Visiting many Amish households even today, you’ll see no power lines weaving toward their homes. They live off the grid. To live without electricity or cars eliminates most of what we expect from modernity. No electricity means no internet, TV, or phones, either, so suddenly the Amish life stands in stark contrast to our complex modern lives. But when you visit an Amish farm, that simplicity vanishes. Indeed, the simplicity vanishes even before you get to the farm.

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Previously, the Amish would build a shanty at the end of their driveway that housed an answering machine and phone to be shared by neighbors. The shanty sheltered the caller from rain and cold and kept the grid away from the house, and the long walk outside reduced phone use to essential calls rather than gossip and chatting. Cell phones are a new twist. You get a phone without wires, off the grid. As one Amish guy told me, “What is the difference if I stand in my phone booth with a wireless phone or stand outside with a cell phone? There’s no difference.” Further, cell phones have been embraced by women, who can keep in touch with their far-flung families, since they don’t drive. And the bishops have noticed that the cell phone is so small it can be kept hidden, which is a concern for a people dedicated to discouraging individualism.

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And the bishops have noticed that the cell phone is so small it can be kept hidden, which is a concern for a people dedicated to discouraging individualism. The Amish have still not decided on the cell phone. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say they have decided “maybe.” For people who live off the grid, without TV, internet, or books beyond one Bible, the Amish are perplexingly well informed. There’s not much I could tell them that they didn’t know about and already have an opinion on. And surprisingly, there’s not much new that at least one person in their church has not tried to use. In fact, the Amish rely on the enthusiasm of those early adopters to try stuff out until it proves harmful.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Despite these investments, the Frasers are not entirely off the grid yet. In 2007, they generated 35 percent of the energy they used over the course of the year. In winter months like December, when the days are short and cold, solar-generated energy accounted for only 7 percent of total household consumption. But in the month of May, solar power supplied over 94 percent of what they needed. By doubling the battery storage, the Frasers claim they could live off the grid for four months out of the year. And with the addition of a wind turbine generator, they could get off the grid completely. Not bad for Canada, where household heating is the largest single source of carbon emissions and a large share of the average family’s monthly budget.

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Second, governments have begun to offer serious incentives that could make decentralized energy production and self-sufficient homes and buildings a viable, even lucrative, proposition. Third, social entrepreneurs like One Block Off the Grid have come up with collective purchasing arrangements to help further lower the costs of solar technology for consumers. By using the Web to aggregate hundreds of potential solar customers in a given city, the San Francisco–based start-up claims it is able to lower the cost of installations by 15 percent. The company completed six hundred installations in ten cities in 2009 and expects to complete over five thousand in 2010. Even with innovative initiatives like One Block Off the Grid, there is still a major role for government in scaling green energy.

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Chapter 6 lays out the most daunting of challenges: weaning the world of its dangerous addiction to fossil fuels and building a new green energy economy that can sustain human civilization for centuries to come. You’ll learn why applying open-source principles to the energy grid is the best way to ramp up the supply of green power. We’ll also meet a new generation of energy prosumers that provide a signpost to a future where all homes and buildings generate enough of their own power to live off the grid entirely. Chapter 7 hones in on our broken, industrial age models of transportation. We explain how principles like openness, collaboration, and sustainability can help guide us toward a transportation system that is safe, efficient, intelligent, and networked. We’ll also take a peek at the car of the future and we’ll get the scoop on what über- entrepreneurs like Shai Agassi (former SAP exec and founder of Better Place) and Robin Chase (founder of Zipcar) are doing to usher in radical new models for personal transport.

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

A sense of opportunity, as wide as the country itself. A bone-deep conviction that something better will come. It’s just ahead, in the next town, the next gig, the next chance encounter with a stranger. As it happens, some of those strangers are nomads, too. When they meet—online, or at a job, or camping way off the grid—tribes begin to form. There’s a common understanding, a kinship. When someone’s van breaks down, they pass the hat. There’s a contagious feeling: Something big is happening. The country is changing rapidly, the old structures crumbling away, and they’re at the epicenter of something new. Around a shared campfire, in the middle of the night, it can feel like a glimpse of utopia.

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She wanted to construct an Earthship: a passive-solar home built using discarded materials such as cans and bottles, with dirt-filled tires for its load-bearing walls. Invented by radical New Mexico architect Michael Reynolds, who has been tinkering with them since the 1970s, Earthships are designed to sustain their inhabitants entirely off the grid. The tire walls act like batteries, absorbing the sun’s heat through a bank of south-facing windows during the daytime and then releasing it at night to regulate indoor temperature. Rain and snowmelt drain from the roof into a cistern, providing water that gets filtered and reused for drinking and washing, feeding indoor fruit and vegetable gardens and flushing toilets.

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“When I moved into the van, I realized that everything that society had told me was a lie—that I had to get married and live in a house with a white picket fence and go to work, and then be happy at the very end of my life, but be miserable until then,” he told me in an interview. “I was happy for the first time ever living in my van.” In 2005, Bob started CheapRVLiving.com. The website began as a modest collection of how-to articles for readers hoping to live in a vehicle on a shoestring budget. The key was “boondocking”: going off the grid rather than relying on the kind of hookups for water, sewage, and electricity that come with a paid spot in an RV park. (Though its informal usage has broadened, the word “­boondocking”—as purists will quickly point out—also implies that one is parked way out in the wilderness. Vehicle dwellers who are doing this sort of thing in cities are technically not boondocking—they’re “stealth parking” or “stealth camping.”

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

In the Middle of Nowhere To begin, I want you to imagine yourself and a frail old version of me sitting in the wilderness next to a campfire in the year 2055, exactly ninety-nine years since the story of artificial intelligence began at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1956. I’m telling you the story of what I have witnessed through the years of the rise of AI – a story that has led us both to be sitting here in the middle of nowhere. But I’m not going to tell you till the end of this book if we are there because we are staying off the grid to escape the machines, or if we are there because AI has relieved us of our mundane work responsibilities and allowed us the time, safety and freedom to just enjoy being in nature, doing what humans do best – connecting and contemplating. I won’t tell you yet simply because, at this current moment, I don’t know how our story with the machines will end.

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We are sitting in front of a campfire in the middle of nowhere and I told you that only by the end of the book will you know if we are here in the wilderness because we are hiding from the machines or because the machines have helped us build a utopia where we can feel safe everywhere, where we don’t have to work too hard and where we have an abundance of time to enjoy nature fully. I am guessing that you are now expecting it to be the former. I understand. Our fictional imagination has painted a grim outlook for how our future may manifest. But please don’t panic and try to escape off the grid just yet. Keep reading and allow me to explain the logic behind each of those inevitabilities, one by one, and when we agree on what is likely to happen, then we can discuss what we can do about it. Rest assured that, despite what we’ve gotten ourselves into, I am confident there is a path that can lead us out of it and into the utopia that we all deserve.

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But before I do, let me take you back to the Introduction of this book when I asked you to imagine that we are both sitting near a campfire in the middle of nowhere in the year 2055, as I tell you the way our story with superintelligence has unfolded up to then. I did not tell you at the beginning if we are sitting there because we need to be off the grid to hide from the machines or because the machines are taking such good care of us that we are living in a utopia where our planet’s nature is thriving and we no longer need to do mundane work, thus allowing us to spend time in nature doing what humans do best – connecting and contemplating. It’s time for you to find out why we are here.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

This bridging of worlds is apparent in RUNA’s advisers—a former executive, Tim Sullivan, who ran global logistics for PepsiCo and founded ZICO coconut water, as well as indigenous elders. GETTING OFF THE GRID As we’ve seen with Gib Bulloch’s experience in Macedonia or Tyler Gage’s adventure in the Amazon, time away can jump-start creativity and reflection because you are able to tune in to yourself at a deeper level. Increasingly, “hermit time” is sought by many young entrepreneurs who are finding inspiration by getting off the grid entirely, at least for short periods of time. “Digital detox” weekends and retreats, where people abandon technology and hold space for reflection, have become common.

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But what the New Hive story points to is the power that spending time outside of society can have in catalyzing creativity and entrepreneurial vision. “Being isolated gave us time and space to discuss our different ways of seeing the world, get a lot of work done undistracted, and meditate and brainstorm on long walks in nature,” Verdin shared. Their start-up has a more existential quality due to their time off the grid. While some start-ups may be solely looking to cash in on the next social networking craze or build a myopic app, New Hive feels like it has a bit more soul. “We are trying to maintain a place on the Web where the Internet can be truly weird,” Verdin told us. THE ITCH TO ESCAPE ISN’T just for hermit wannabes or aspiring entrepreneurs.

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The final tax-related observation is that some assets used for business purposes—including rental property—can be gradually depreciated for wear and tear, offsetting the income that the business manages to generate on other fronts. On the flip side, real estate is one of the few asset classes subject to a direct wealth tax. As most homeowners know, your state will send you a hefty annual tax bill for the privilege of owning property, even if it’s an off-the-grid cabin in the woods. * Naturally, inflation can have many causes. For example, prices can rise if there’s a reduction in the availability of raw materials used to manufacture goods. That said, such fluctuations are different from regulators setting explicit inflationary targets and tweaking monetary policy until they achieve the intended goal

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On the other hand, if you spend much of your waking hours at work or at school, the wisdom of keeping a bag of supplies locked in the bedroom closet should be called into question; putting some items in the trunk of the car may be a better bet. Unnecessary complexity in your plans should be called out too. For example, for short-term emergencies, ready-to-eat foods are far better than an elaborate off-the-grid cooking plan. Facing the Final Contingency As hinted in Chapter 2, you simply can’t cheat fate in some situations—and in such circumstances, a will is a natural extension of your “living” contingency plans. This is particularly important if your spouse, children, or other loved ones depend on you for support.

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Fridges filled to the brim with fine caviar notwithstanding, a more solemn example is a family that depends on lifesaving medical equipment that must remain plugged in at all times, or that needs to preserve perishable medications for everyday use. But in the general case, the payoff for whole-house generators or off-the-grid energy storage just isn’t there, making the pursuit of energy independence an interesting hobby for the affluent but an ill-advised expense for the average Joe. With the prices of batteries and solar panels coming down every year, this will eventually change. Until then, let’s have a look some of the more cost-efficient ways of dealing with a disruption to discretionary energy needs while stuck at home.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

carbon credits, different worldview, dumpster diving, energy security, full employment, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kim Stanley Robinson, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, urban decay, Works Progress Administration

But is that enough? The van won’t look weird to toll gates for not having the box, or anything like that?” “No. Not every vehicle has these things yet. So far, the total information society is not yet fully online. When it is, you won’t be able to do stuff like this. You’ll never be able to get off the grid, and if you did it would look so strange it would be worse than being on the grid. Everything will have to be rethought.” Frank grimaced. “Well, by then I won’t be involved in this kind of stuff. Listen, I think I’m going to take off now and get a few hours of driving in. It’ll take me all of tomorrow to get there as it is.”

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She glanced at him, hesitated, took another drink. She frowned, thinking things over again. Their knees were pressed together, and their hands had found each other on their own and were clutched together, as if to protest any plan their owners might make that would separate them. “I really think you should come with me,” she said. “Get off the grid entirely.” Frank struggled for thought. “I can’t,” he said at last. She grimaced. She seemed to be getting irritated with him, the pressure of her hand’s grip almost painful. Worse yet, she let go of him, straightened up. She was somehow becoming estranged, withdrawing from him. Even angry at him.

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It was not possible to sleep there, for instance, without security noticing and dropping by to check on him. Meanwhile his van was probably still GPSed and would be one of the ways that Edward Cooper was keeping track of him. He needed it for a bedroom and to get out to the Khembalis, and yet he wanted to be able to drop off the grid every day when he left work. He didn’t know. Show up to work, work, disappear, then show up again the next day. This was important, given the things that were happening. What would happen if he got Edgardo’s help to take all the transponders out of his van? But that would alert Cooper that Frank knew the chips were there and had removed them.

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The shadow tasks might fall equally on both sexes, but in the case of women, especially working wives and mothers, they land on shoulders already overburdened with other duties. LIFE OFF THE GRID, AND VERY MUCH ON IT Let’s consider two extreme examples of lifestyles that reject or minimize shadow work. They are polar opposites: One way of living keeps shadow work at bay with an ethic of self-sufficiency; the other delegates nearly all shadow work to others. Not surprisingly, the two occupy opposite ends of the country’s economic spectrum. The first alternative finds its purest form in those who live “off the grid”—in other words, without connecting to electric utilities and avoiding natural gas and heating oil.

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The rarified set wealthy enough to practice the DNY lifestyle, in Beverly Hills or anywhere else, can turn shadow work inside out. They delegate shadow tasks to their staffs and free their own time for their allegedly higher callings, as Elaine explained. These people exist at the antipode from the DIY pioneers living “off the grid.” As the two groups occupy opposite ends of the economic spectrum, in monetary terms, their time has a drastically different value. Yet both have dealt with shadow work, in one case by taking responsibility for everything, in the other by delegating it all to paid help. THE VALUE OF TIME Labor economists like Richard Freeman of Harvard University think constantly about the allocation of time.

Southwest USA Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, Columbine, Day of the Dead, Donner party, El Camino Real, friendly fire, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), low earth orbit, machine readable, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, Works Progress Administration, X Prize

Today, outdoorsy types hike and ski in the surrounding mountains while history buffs wander Carson’s home and the Taos Pueblo. Georgia O’Keeffe and DH Lawrence led the artists’ charge, and now more than 80 galleries line the streets. Carl Jung and Dennis Hopper? Maybe they came for the quirky individualism, seen today in the wonderfully eccentric Adobe Bar and the off-the-grid Earthship community. Earthship community PETER PTSCHELINZEW/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Carlsbad Caverns National Park 13 As the elevator drops, it’s hard to comprehend the ranger’s words. Wait, what? We’re plunging the length of the Empire State Building? I’m not sure that’s such a great idea.

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Not all are tourist attractions, but several offer unique experiences that may be among your most memorable in the Southwest. Marvel at the mesa-top views at Acoma, shop for jewelry at Zuni and immerse yourself in history at the Taos Pueblo – where the fry bread at Tewa’s makes a tasty distraction. ANN CECIL/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Hwy 50: The Loneliest Road in America 23 You say you want to drop off the grid? Are you sure? Test your resolve on this desolate strip of pavement that stretches across the white-hot belly of Nevada. The highway passes through a poetic assortment of tumbleweed towns following the route of the Overland Stagecoach, the Pony Express and the first transcontinental telephone line.

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Hwy 89/89A: Wickenburg to Sedona 120 miles The Old West meets the New West on this drive past dude ranches, mining towns, art galleries and stylish wineries. Billy the Kid Highway 84 miles This outlaw loop shoots through Billy the Kid’s old stomping grounds. Kayenta-Monument Valley Scenic Road 40 miles Star in your own western on an iconic drive past cinematic red rocks in Navajo Country. Highway 50: The Loneliest Road 320 miles An off -the-grid ramble mixing the quirky, historic and dry lonesome in tumbleweed Nevada. Million Dollar Highway 25 miles There’s gold in them thar mountain views, but don’t squint too hard or you might run off the ro-whoa! High Road to Taos 85 miles Drive into your own landscape painting on this picturesque mountain romp between Santa Fe and Taos.

Colorado by Lonely Planet

big-box store, bike sharing, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, East Village, fixed-gear, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, megaproject, off-the-grid, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Steve Wozniak, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, young professional

After hiking about a half-mile, the road curves up to the left and heads south to the Lucky Mine. The Mt Princeton Trail will be on the right; follow it all the way to the summit. Sleeping From free riverside campsites to sweet off the grid B&Bs to hot spring resorts big and small, you’ll find a nest that feels right. Las Manos B&B B&B $$ ( 719-395-4567; www.lasmanosbandb.com; 32889 Co Rd 371; ste $125-185; ) A simple and sweet B&B in an award winning green home, set off the grid outside of Buena Vista. Each of the two suites has blonde wood floors and features a large deck for taking in sweeping mountain views. Rates vary depending upon the time of year.

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If you’re driving between Denver and Rocky Mountain National Park, definitely consider this route. NEDERLAND POP 1100 / ELEV 8236FT From Boulder, the devastatingly scenic 17-mile route through Boulder Canyon emerges in the lively, ramshackle little berg of Nederland, a mountain-town magnet for hippies looking to get off the grid. These days, Nederland has a sagging, happenstantial quality to its weather-beaten buildings, which are not without a certain rugged charm. There are several worthwhile restaurants and bars which feed the hungry skiers and hikers heading to or from Eldora Ski Area, Indian Peaks Wilderness Area or coming down the Peak to Peak Hwy.

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It has free maps of all the area trails and campsites as well as complete information about degree of difficulty and trail conditions. Do not head up to the wilderness area without the proper information from the USFS and the appropriate equipment. THE MINTURN MILE If you’re itching to head off the grid, consider the Minturn Mile. One of the most famous ‘out-of-bounds’ ski runs in the world, you can access it from the top of chairs 3 or 7 on Vail Mountain (Click here). At the top of the turn on the ‘Lost Boy Trail’ take the access gate and begin a descent of 3 miles to Minturn. Advanced skills are a must as you’ll encounter a wide range of terrain – starting in a bowl and veering through the trees.

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen, Robert Vamosi

4chan, big-box store, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, connected car, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, incognito mode, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, Tesla Model S, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

The good news is that all three are interoperational. That means that no matter which version of PGP you use, the basic functions are the same. When Edward Snowden first decided to disclose the sensitive data he’d copied from the NSA, he needed the assistance of like-minded people scattered around the world. Paradoxically, he needed to get off the grid while still remaining active on the Internet. He needed to become invisible. Even if you don’t have state secrets to share, you might be interested in keeping your e-mails private. Snowden’s experience and that of others illustrate that it isn’t easy to do that, but it is possible, with proper diligence.

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All these steps are necessary to be invisible on a public terminal. CHAPTER NINE You Have No Privacy? Get Over It! At some point during the time that former antivirus software creator John McAfee spent as a fugitive from authorities in Belize, he started a blog. Take it from me: if you’re trying to get off the grid and totally disappear, you don’t want to start a blog. For one thing, you’re bound to make a mistake. McAfee is a smart man. He made his fortune in the early days of Silicon Valley by pioneering antivirus research. Then he sold his company, sold all his assets in the United States, and for around four years, from 2008 to 2012, he lived in Belize, on a private estate off the coast.

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Anyone can use this tool—it’s native in the file inspector on Apple OSX and in downloadable tools such as FOCA for Windows and Metagoofil for Linux—to gain access to the metadata stored in photos and documents. Sometimes it’s not a photo but an app that gives up your spot. In the summer of 2015, drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped from a Mexican prison and immediately went off the grid. Or did he? Two months after his escape—from Mexico’s maximum-security Altiplano prison—El Chapo’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Jesus Alfredo Guzman Salazar, posted an image to Twitter. Although the two men seated at a dinner table with Salazar are obscured by emoticons, the build of the man on the left bears a strong resemblance to El Chapo.

Hawaii Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, bike sharing, British Empire, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Easter island, Food sovereignty, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, Kula ring, land reform, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, Silicon Valley, tech billionaire

oAkiko's Buddhist Bed & BreakfastB&B, RENTAL HOUSE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %808-963-6422; www.akikosbnb.com; 29-2091 Old Mamalahoa Hwy; s/d incl breakfast from $65/75, cottage $65-85, house from $150; W)S Immersed in tropical foliage, this peaceful retreat offers a variety of lovely, fashionably austere accommodations. The B&B rooms, with shared bath, are simple and clean, while two off-the-grid studio cottages allow a rare indoor-outdoor experience. For those seeking more space and privacy, the well-kept Hale Aloha house, with full kitchen, three bedrooms and two baths, is great value. Most compelling might be owner Akiko Masuda, who invites guests to join morning meditation and coordinates a popular New Year's Eve mochi (Japanese rice cake) pounding festival.

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Green bursts through the soil and weaves itself into thick forests of wood rooted in lava soil. The ocean beats like a hammer on the Big Island’s easternmost cliffs, and edges back as lava flows into the ocean. Who lives here? Hippies, funky artists, alternative healers, Hawaiian sovereignty activists, pakalolo (marijuana) growers, organic farmers and off-the-grid survivalists. A nickname for all these folks, which they have adopted themselves, is Punatics. They exhibit a disconcerting blend of laid-back apathy to the world and intense emotions. Puna 1Sights 1Fuku-Bonsai Cultural CenterB1 2Kehena BeachC3 3Kumukahi LighthouseD2 4Lava Tree State Monument ParkC2 5Lava Viewing AreaB4 6MacKenzie State Recreation AreaC3 7Makuʻu Craft & Farmers MarketC2 8Star of the Sea ChurchC3 2Activities, Courses & Tours 9Ahalanui Beach ParkD3 10Jeff Hunt SurfboardsC1 11Kapoho Tide PoolsD2 12Kazumura Cave ToursA3 Kilauea Caverns of FireB2 13Pahoa Community Aquatic CenterC1 14Paradissimo Tropical SpaD1 4Sleeping 15Absolute Paradise B&BC3 16Butterfly InnB1 17Eco Hostel HawaiiB2 18Hale Moana B&BC3 19Hawaiian SanctuaryC2 20HedonisiaC3 21Jungle FarmhouseC2 22Kalani Oceanside RetreatC3 23RamashalaC3 5Eating 24FoodlandB1 25Hilo Coffee MillB2 26Hot Dog GuyC3 27Island NaturalsD1 28Kaleo's Bar & GrillD1 Keaʻau Natural FoodsB1 29Luquin's Mexican RestaurantD1 30Ning's Thai CuisineD1 31Pahoa Fresh FishC2 32Paolo's BistroD1 33Sirius Coffee ConnectionC1 6Drinking & Nightlife 34Black Rock CafeC1 35Uncle Robert's Awa BarB4 3Entertainment 36Akebono TheaterD1 37SPACEC3 7Shopping 38Big Island BookBuyersD1 39Dan De Luz's WoodsB2 SPACE Farmers MarketB4 THE JUNE 27 LAVA FLOW At the time of writing, a lava flow that erupted from Kilauea on June 27, 2014 was still creeping across Puna.

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This sparse littoral zone abuts the deep blue Pacific, itself a hazy band under an endless sky. We'll be frank: this isn't where you go for tons of warm aloha or, at least, not the openly given sort you find in more touristed areas. Here at the under-tip, locals fiercely protect their rural, stay-away-from-it-all culture, quashing coastal resorts, lobbying for protected land, pioneering off-the-grid living, and speaking lots of pidgin. In many ways this is an island within an island, adding intrigue to any itinerary. Ka‘u 1Top Sights 1Honomalino BeachA1 2Ka LaeB3 1Sights 3Green Sands BeachB3 Kalalea HeiauB3 4Kaʻu Coffee MillD1 5Kawa BayC2 6Lua ʻO PalehemoB3 7Manuka State Wayside & Natural Area ReserveA2 8Miloliʻi Beach ParkA1 9Punaluʻu Beach ParkC2 10Road to the SeaA2 11Whittington Beach ParkC2 12Wood Valley TempleD1 2Activities, Courses & Tours 13Glover & Kona TrailsB2 14Kula Kai CavernsA2 15Palm TrailB2 16Puʻu o Lokuana TrailB2 4Sleeping 17KalaekilohanaB2 DON'T MISS KAʻALAIKI ROAD If travelling between Pahala and Naʻalehu, get off Hwy 11 and take the mauka (inland) backroad.

Organized Simplicity by Tsh Oxenreider

Albert Einstein, Community Supported Agriculture, financial independence, off-the-grid

They offer smart moves toward a healthier planet and healthier families. But the basic problem beneath these trends is that they feel like they ask so much of us. These ideas ask us to move into a world that feels impossible for everyday families who still want to participate in Little League, and who don’t really want to live off the grid. Sell your cars and transport your family around on bikes. It’s a great idea if you live in a metropolis with convenient public transportation, or in a tiny town with errands no more than a few miles away. But more than 50 percent of Americans live in the suburbs.6 I’m not sure too many of those folks are privy to abandoning their motor vehicles.

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The items in our homes that we feel we absolutely “need” are downright extravagances within the global landscape. So if we keep these luxuries — our ACs, our gargantuan refrigerators, our deep freezers in the garage, and our clothes dryers — what does it really look like to simplify? Here’s What Simple Living Is Not 1. Living on a Homestead, Off the Grid, or Without Electricity or Cars It’s true — there are a few hardy, modern-day homesteaders in the Western world who manage to live without refrigerators, who ride bicycles everywhere (kids included), and who reuse their toilet paper. It’s what they want, and best wishes to them. Most of us can’t voluntarily swallow that pill.

San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Junior Foodies When spirits and feet begin to drag, there’s plenty of ice cream and kid-friendly meals to pick them back up – look for the symbol throughout this book. But discerning young diners may prefer finger sandwiches and tea cakes at Crown & Crumpet (Click here ) or the food-truck gourmet dining at Off the Grid ( Click here ). For more of a culinary challenge, 18 Reasons ( Click here ) offers classes on pickles and stinky cheeses, Humphry Slocombe ( Click here ) has freaky ice cream flavors, and the Ferry Building ( Click here ) lets kids graze gourmet goods from farmers and top chefs. Active Kids Golden Gate Park is a dream come true for kids with energy to burn.

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Chef Eskender Aseged’s Radio Africa Kitchen (www.radioafricakitchen.com) serves creative, organic Mediterranean-African fusion, Ken-Ken Ramen (www.twitter.com/kenkenramen) makes slow-cooked, sustainable Japanese noodles, and ForageSF (www.foragesf.com) makes dinner with foraged ingredients. Look for announcements on EaterSF (http://sf.eater.com) , Grub Street San Francisco (http://sanfrancisco.grubstreet.com) and Inside Scoop (http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com) for upcoming pop-ups. Food Trucks & Carts SF’s largest gathering of gourmet trucks is Off the Grid ( Click here ), where 30 food trucks circle their wagons. Trucks and carts are cash-only businesses, and lines for popular trucks can take 10 to 20 minutes. Look for prominently displayed permits as your guarantee of proper food preparation, refrigeration and regulated working conditions. For the best gourmet to go, try clamshell buns stuffed with duck and mango from Chairman Bao (www.facebook.com/chair manbao), free-range herbed roast chicken from Roli Roti (www.roliroti.com), organic Korean tacos from Namu (Click here ) and dessert from Kara’s Cupcakes ( Click here ) and the Créme Bruleé Cart (www.twitter.com/creme bruleecart) .

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Best for NorCal Cuisine Chez Panisse (Click here) French Laundry ( Click here ) Commonwealth ( Click here ) Jardinière ( Click here ) Delfina ( Click here ) Boulevard ( Click here ) Best al Fresco Frisco Boulette’s Larder ( Click here ) Café Claude ( Click here ) Starbelly ( Click here ) Il Cane Rosso ( Click here ) Cafe Flore ( Click here ) Belden Place ( Click here ) Best Meals under $10 Off the Grid ( Click here ) Rosamunde Sausage Grill ( Click here ) Blue Barn Gourmet ( Click here ) Saigon Sandwich Shop ( Click here ) Udupi Palace ( Click here ) Best Local Organic Fusion Namu ( Click here ) Slanted Door ( Click here ) Acquerello ( Click here ) Juhu Beach Club ( Click here ) Mission Chinese ( Click here ) Best for Foodie Gifts Bi-Rite ( Click here ) Loyal Army Clothing ( Click here ) Rainbow ( Click here ) Ferry Building ( Click here ) City Discount ( Click here ) Le Sanctuaire ( Click here ) Best for Dessert Humphry Slocombe ( Click here ) Chantal Guillon Macarons ( Click here ) Three Twins Ice Cream ( Click here ) Kara’s Cupcakes ( Click here ) Miette ( Click here ) Best for Brunch Out the Door ( Click here ) Brenda’s French Soul Food ( Click here ) Suppenküche ( Click here ) Butler & the Chef ( Click here ) Mission Beach Cafe ( Click here ) Best for Lunch Barbacco ( Click here ) Bocadillos ( Click here ) Sentinel ( Click here ) Boxed Foods ( Click here ) Split Pea Seduction ( Click here ) Best Taquerias & SF-Mex Chilango ( Click here ) Little Chihuahua ( Click here ) Mijita ( Click here ) Pancho Villa ( Click here ) Best Reinvented American Classics Burgers: Zuni Cafe ( Click here ) Fries: Spruce ( Click here ) Pizza: Zero Zero ( Click here ) Chili: Greens ( Click here ) Hot dogs: Warming Hut ( Click here ) PB&J: Michael Mina ( Click here ) Drinking & Nightlife No matter what you’re having, SF bars, cafes and clubs are here to oblige.

San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Junior Foodies When spirits and feet begin to drag, there’s plenty of ice cream and kid-friendly meals to pick them back up – look for the symbol throughout this book. But discerning young diners may prefer finger sandwiches and tea cakes at Crown & Crumpet (Click here ) or the food-truck gourmet dining at Off the Grid ( Click here ). For more of a culinary challenge, 18 Reasons ( Click here ) offers classes on pickles and stinky cheeses, Humphry Slocombe ( Click here ) has freaky ice cream flavors, and the Ferry Building ( Click here ) lets kids graze gourmet goods from farmers and top chefs. Active Kids Golden Gate Park is a dream come true for kids with energy to burn.

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Chef Eskender Aseged’s Radio Africa Kitchen (www.radioafricakitchen.com) serves creative, organic Mediterranean-African fusion, Ken-Ken Ramen (www.twitter.com/kenkenramen) makes slow-cooked, sustainable Japanese noodles, and ForageSF (www.foragesf.com) makes dinner with foraged ingredients. Look for announcements on EaterSF (http://sf.eater.com) , Grub Street San Francisco (http://sanfrancisco.grubstreet.com) and Inside Scoop (http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com) for upcoming pop-ups. Food Trucks & Carts SF’s largest gathering of gourmet trucks is Off the Grid ( Click here ), where 30 food trucks circle their wagons. Trucks and carts are cash-only businesses, and lines for popular trucks can take 10 to 20 minutes. Look for prominently displayed permits as your guarantee of proper food preparation, refrigeration and regulated working conditions. For the best gourmet to go, try clamshell buns stuffed with duck and mango from Chairman Bao (www.facebook.com/chair manbao), free-range herbed roast chicken from Roli Roti (www.roliroti.com), organic Korean tacos from Namu (Click here ) and dessert from Kara’s Cupcakes ( Click here ) and the Créme Bruleé Cart (www.twitter.com/creme bruleecart) .

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Best for NorCal Cuisine Chez Panisse (Click here) French Laundry ( Click here ) Commonwealth ( Click here ) Jardinière ( Click here ) Delfina ( Click here ) Boulevard ( Click here ) Best al Fresco Frisco Boulette’s Larder ( Click here ) Café Claude ( Click here ) Starbelly ( Click here ) Il Cane Rosso ( Click here ) Cafe Flore ( Click here ) Belden Place ( Click here ) Best Meals under $10 Off the Grid ( Click here ) Rosamunde Sausage Grill ( Click here ) Blue Barn Gourmet ( Click here ) Saigon Sandwich Shop ( Click here ) Udupi Palace ( Click here ) Best Local Organic Fusion Namu ( Click here ) Slanted Door ( Click here ) Acquerello ( Click here ) Juhu Beach Club ( Click here ) Mission Chinese ( Click here ) Best for Foodie Gifts Bi-Rite ( Click here ) Loyal Army Clothing ( Click here ) Rainbow ( Click here ) Ferry Building ( Click here ) City Discount ( Click here ) Le Sanctuaire ( Click here ) Best for Dessert Humphry Slocombe ( Click here ) Chantal Guillon Macarons ( Click here ) Three Twins Ice Cream ( Click here ) Kara’s Cupcakes ( Click here ) Miette ( Click here ) Best for Brunch Out the Door ( Click here ) Brenda’s French Soul Food ( Click here ) Suppenküche ( Click here ) Butler & the Chef ( Click here ) Mission Beach Cafe ( Click here ) Best for Lunch Barbacco ( Click here ) Bocadillos ( Click here ) Sentinel ( Click here ) Boxed Foods ( Click here ) Split Pea Seduction ( Click here ) Best Taquerias & SF-Mex Chilango ( Click here ) Little Chihuahua ( Click here ) Mijita ( Click here ) Pancho Villa ( Click here ) Best Reinvented American Classics Burgers: Zuni Cafe ( Click here ) Fries: Spruce ( Click here ) Pizza: Zero Zero ( Click here ) Chili: Greens ( Click here ) Hot dogs: Warming Hut ( Click here ) PB&J: Michael Mina ( Click here ) Drinking & Nightlife No matter what you’re having, SF bars, cafes and clubs are here to oblige.

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms by Danielle Laporte

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, David Heinemeier Hansson, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak

“Doing everything myself.” In Session 9, you’ll find “The Stop-Doing List.” Prepare for ecstatic liberation. 9. HOW MUCH MONEY WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE MAKING? Note: Heiresses and tycoons may be excused from this exercise. And possibly students. And anyone with money socked away. Oh, and forest dwellers living off the grid. It doesn’t matter what you do for a living or from where your money flows; declaring how much money you want to earn, attract, and throw down is mighty empowering. What you’re targeting is a number that would make you feel really happy. We want to avoid lurking fears of being a bag lady and zero-to-mogul delusions of grandeur.

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The brothers pray seven times a day in collective chanting and in solitude. True, most monks needn’t worry about organizing staff parties, their wardrobe stress is nil, and they’re not juggling Junior’s soccer practice and piano lessons. But the optimal concept here is passion coming before tasks. It doesn’t matter whether you’re living off the grid or high on the hog; devotion requires…devotion. How many mornings do we choose email over meditation, or let deadlines pull rank on stretching, cuddling, or a glass of water swallowed slowly and appreciated? How habitually do we override the call from the interior of our being? The call to pray, or listen, or just to be fully awake in noticing what is being said to us—whether it’s our heart, the dog, the trees, or our fellow humans speaking to us?

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

David Crane, 5th Annual ARPA-E Energy Summit, February 2014 Keep in mind that these comments are not coming from a solar energy company, but from inside one of the current market leaders in provision of retail electricity across the United States! If, however, we take homes, offices and factories off the grid, then storage of electricity becomes a critical element in the success of a distributed system. Recently, Tesla Motors, an automotive and energy storage company, announced that its new US$5-billion Gigafactory in Nevada will not only produce batteries for Tesla vehicles but will also sell batteries—called Powerwalls—for homes.

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Recently, Tesla Motors, an automotive and energy storage company, announced that its new US$5-billion Gigafactory in Nevada will not only produce batteries for Tesla vehicles but will also sell batteries—called Powerwalls—for homes. These batteries are designed to capture excess solar capacity throughout the day so that homes can continue to operate independent of the grid in the dark and in cloudy weather when solar capture is reduced. Figure 2.4: Will Tesla’s Powerwall be the device that powers the “off-the-grid” movement? (Credit: Tesla) Nine days after Telsa’s announcement, the company had already received 85,000 orders, worth more than US$800 million,15 for its new home battery, leading Tesla to announce that the battery is already sold out until mid-2016. The essential problem here is clear. With the adoption of solar energy and the deployment of the Tesla Powerwall or similar products, many homes will soon attempt to go off-grid.

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15 “Your voice is your passport,” STORES magazine, February 2015. 16 Recipients of the 2004 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine 17 ABC News Oakland, CA, December 2014 Conclusions: Life in the Smart Lane Living in an Augmented World Every aspect of our life will be augmented by technology. From devices that monitor our health, to the way we pay for goods and services, how we spend our spare time, how we move around, how we look for advice, how we interact and how we work—it’s all fair game in the Augmented Age. Living “off the grid” will severely restrict your options, if not be impossible, and digital literacy will be a more important life skill than algebra, writing or geography. The most advanced technologies will become less visible and less intrusive, becoming smart, embedded and predictive in nature. What is life going to be like in 2030 or 2040?

Destination Simple by Brooke McAlary

off-the-grid

So often we open our smartphone to take a look at something specific, but before we realise what’s happened we’ve spent twenty minutes scrolling through Instagram, checking work emails out of office hours or googling the name of the guy on The Walking Dead to see if he’s the guy from Love, Actually (for the record, he is). It’s so easy to act passively online … checking email isn’t necessarily responding or taking action, but we do it anyway. COURTNEY CARVER EXERCISE Unplugging 15–30 MINUTES 1. IDENTIFY A TIME Look at your daily schedule and find a block of 15–30 minutes when you can be off the grid. Choose a time of day when you are unlikely to receive urgent phone calls and when your boss won’t need you. 2. SCHEDULE IT Once you’ve nominated a block of time – preferably the same time each day – schedule it in your diary or calendar as your down time. 3. COMMIT TO IT Set a reminder alarm on your computer and phone.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

David Brooks, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, impact investing, invention of the printing press, iterative process, knowledge worker, market design, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

That twelve-year-old astronaut you once were is still there. Be curious about what else you might discover. Try making at least one of these plans at least a little bit wild. Even if it’s something you would never do in your right mind, write down your most far-fetched and crazy idea. Maybe it’s giving up all your worldly possessions and living off the grid in Alaska or India. Maybe it’s taking acting classes and trying to make it in Hollywood. Perhaps it’s becoming an expert skateboarder or devoting your life to adrenaline-producing extreme sports. Or maybe it’s hunting down that long-lost great-uncle and filling in the gaps of your family story.

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All we’re saying is that you recognize how important these people are and figure out an effective and appropriate role for them. Do try to avoid the mistake of leaving them completely out of it until the end. That seldom works out well, for a lot of reasons you can probably imagine. Surprising your wife with the fact that you’re prototyping living off the grid for the next year is not going to land well. The Team. These are the people with whom you’re sharing the specifics of your life design project and who will track with you on that project over time at regular intervals. The most likely candidates for your team are among the people you invited to your feedback session to present and discuss your three alternative five-year Odyssey Plans.

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

Facebook, Last accessed September 2014. https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-hate-battery-low/147670411993839 28 Hilary Lewis, “Here’s a Hard-Charging App,” New York Post, October 21, 2012. http://nypost.com/2012/10/21/heres-a-hard-charging-app/ 29 Caitlin McGarry, “iPhone 6 Pocket Problems: Some Buyers Report That Sitting Down Bends Phones,” Macworld, September 23, 2014. http://www.macworld.com/article/2687107/iphone-6-pocket-problems-some-buyers-report-that-sitting-down-bends-phones.html 30 “Over 200+ grown-up campers will go off-the-grid and take over Camp Navarro (a historic and nostalgic scouts camp) in the redwoods to celebrate what it means to be alive. Trade in your computer, cell phone, Instagrams, clocks, hashtags, business cards, schedules, and work-jargon for an off-the-grid weekend of pure unadulterated fun. Together we create a community where money is worth little . . . and individuality, self expression, friendship, freedom, and memories are valued most.”

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

He began to think about all his friends who had decamped to communes. It was easy to see why the communes grabbed hold of his imagination. Starting with the Summer of Love in 1967 and continuing through the annus horribilis of 1968, hundreds of thousands of young Americans, driven by hope and fear, went to live off the grid in self-sufficient collective communities. They sprouted villages with names like Drop City and Twin Oaks, in places like the New Mexico desert, the Tennessee mountains, and the Northern California forests. (By one estimate, the commune population swelled to 750,000 in the early seventies.) Sitting on the plane, Brand had the notion that he might drive a truck to these settlements to sell tools and other goods that would help the communards thrive.

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CHAPTER EIGHT: DEATH OF THE AUTHOR His lectures and speeches were gripping spectacles of intellect, punctuated by multimedia: Evan Osnos, “Embrace the Irony,” New Yorker, October 13, 2014. One magazine profile described him as “a kind of Internet messiah”: Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “Larry Lessig, Off the Grid,” New Republic, February 5, 2014. “Never before in the history of human culture had [creative culture] been as professionalized”: Lawrence Lessig, “Laws That Choke Creativity,” TED, March 2007. “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”: T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays 1917–1932 (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932), 182.

ECOVILLAGE: 1001 ways to heal the planet by Ecovillage 1001 Ways to Heal the Planet-Triarchy Press Ltd (2015)

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, do what you love, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, intentional community, land tenure, low interest rates, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, young professional

We gather knowledge from experts across the globe and integrate their insights into a holistic model of a peace culture. Our water retention landscape and permaculture practices offer solutions for landscape healing and sustainable food production in regions that are threatened by desertification. The Test Field of the Solar Village is off the grid, with a Scheffler mirror, biogas plant and solar collectors for everyday living. The Escola de Esperanza — School of Hope — is an international school, in the process of legalisation, and will also be available for local children. A stone circle and pilgrimage paths form a landscape shrine to communicate with the earth.

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This is what The Source does. The land holds them and the spirit of the land nurtures them. People who come to this demonstration village learn so much and are amazed that we, as a network of extended family and friends, can work and live together. We have created community kitchens, a nature school, off-the-grid living, an organic farm, the natural dye collective with local community women, a Farmers Market in Kingston, the Taino Camp, a Summer Literacy and Art Program, a Sunday Dinner Project, the Jamaica Sustainable Farm Enterprise Program (that just got funded by USAID) and many community development projects within St.

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, car-free, congestion pricing, COVID-19, crossover SUV, desegregation, Donald Trump, Elaine Herzberg, gentrification, global pandemic, high-speed rail, invention of air conditioning, Lyft, megacity, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, wikimedia commons

Richard Retting, “Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2017 Preliminary Data,” Governors Highway Safety Association, February 28, 2018, https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2018-03/pedestrians_18.pdf. 41. Atherton, telephone interview. 42. Geoff Boeing, “Off the Grid . . . and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design,” paper presented at the ninety-ninth annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC, January 12–16, 2020. 43. Boeing, “Off the Grid.” 44. Governors Highway Safety Association, “Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2018 Preliminary Data,” February 2019, https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedestrians19.pdf. 45.

Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away by Julien Saunders, Kiersten Saunders

barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, digital divide, diversification, do what you love, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, index fund, job automation, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lifestyle creep, Lyft, microaggression, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, passive income, passive investing, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, side hustle, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , young professional

Reading their blogs and listening to their podcasts was like watching financial X Games: it was different, shocking, and predominantly white. At first, we chalked it up to something “those” West Coast yuppies did and couldn’t envision ourselves or anyone who looked like us choosing this way of life. We thought, if you had a good job, why would you be in such a rush to leave it? And why would you go to such great lengths as living off the grid, not owning a car, or never going out to eat to do it so quickly? We thought we simply didn’t have to go to such lengths to achieve similar goals. But as we dug deeper, our perspective changed. Like veganism, we didn’t simply dismiss the merits of the lifestyle because it seemed unfamiliar, unnecessary, or extreme.

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It’s a key contributor to why the average personal saving rate is so low in the United States, why revolving credit card balances are so high, and why so many people aren’t able to cover the cost of emergencies without going into more debt. We wish we could offer you a mantra, patch, or trial period in a treatment center to curb your desires, but unfortunately those don’t exist. And sure, you could live off the grid, avoid technology altogether, and use cash to minimize the flood of marketing messages pointed in your direction, but we’re not confident that would solve the problem either. Over the years, we’ve learned that your greatest defense to avoid being trapped in a cycle of consumerism is to have a solid foundation of values, a community you can lean on for support, and rock-solid beliefs that guide your thinking about money.

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

So they either wind up moving in with other people that they know, a relative or friend, or if they’re lucky they can rent a place on their own, either through a private landlord or a company that doesn’t require a credit check. If they’re very very unlucky, they wind up on the street.” I said, it’s pretty bleak that people just disappear off the grid like that. “Yes,” he said. “The short answer is, nobody knows where they go. There is no safety net for these people. The social system is so strained at this time that it’s very difficult to find appropriate housing in the same amount of time that you’re being put out of your other house. I had a gentleman this morning, he’s being put out of his home because he can’t make his mortgage payments.

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According to Richard Bitner, an expert in the field as the owner of a subprime brokerage and author of a candid and very useful book about the industry, Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider’s Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance, subprime borrowers fall into four main categories.4 They have a history of being slow to pay; they are under-qualified, because they don’t have much credit history (as in the hypothetical Warren Buffett example above); they have had a bad thing happen to them, such as illness or bereavement, which caused them to go off the grid for a time; they’re plain unlucky and missed a series of utility payments because they were away and their house sitter forgot to open the envelopes; or they’re plain unlucky in another way, because they are on the margin between conforming and subprime and chose a mortgage broker who, because subprime loans pay more commission, deliberately arranged their application on the wrong side of the subprime line.

Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett

airport security, Burning Man, call centre, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, failed state, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Jane Jacobs, Julian Assange, late capitalism, megacity, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, place-making, shareholder value, Stephen Fry, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, white flight, WikiLeaks

It was also, ironically, probably a safer route than crossing the bridge over the Seine by foot at times. Exploration of derelict places in the city that led to sewers and cable runs in London and Paris, and the political implication of not only what space is ‘open’ to access but also the significance and affordances of ‘offlimits’ and ‘off the grid’ space on the whole, drove us to begin unravelling everything around us. Our gaze had been so indelibly altered that we could no longer see the city in the form presented; the spectacle was being recoded. The crew followed architect Alan Rapp in his assertion that ‘today’s infrastructure sustains the paranoid and waning civilization that will be tomorrow’s ruin.’35 Guy Debord wrote that the new existence he sought, full of adventure, mystery and mysticism, would be built on the ruins of the modern spectacle.36 Many of the subterranean places we accessed had clearly been empty for decades.

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The next day, in a different drain, a homeless guy told us, ‘Only dumb motherfuckers set off that alarm under Caesar’s.’ Touché. It became obvious through our encounters with various people that many were in the drains by choice. They had chosen to stop contributing to the system, chosen to gamble their lives away, chosen meth or heroin over family and stability, and chosen the freedom and danger of living off the grid, scamming tourists and casinos by silver-mining (hunting machines for leftover credits) rather than working a minimum-wage job. They chose to get high in drains until the scorching desert days cooled off, and then crawled out, delighted to run around this desiccated plasticland for another night.

USA's Best Trips by Sara Benson

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, cotton gin, Day of the Dead, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, if you build it, they will come, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, McMansion, mega-rich, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, the High Line, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

* * * TIME 2 days DISTANCE 50 miles BEST TIME TO GO May – Oct START Kidron, OH END Millersburg, OH * * * Start in Kidron, where Lehman’s sells non-electric products to locals in a 32,000-sq-ft barn. Stroll through to ogle wind-up flashlights, wood-burning stoves and hand-cranked meat grinders. If those are too off-the-grid, try the ecofriendly wooden toys or organic gardening books. Once you find your way out, head to the strip mall next door. The Hearthside Quilt Shoppe stocks locally made quilts, as well as fabric, patterns and notions for do-it-yourself types. Uninitiated in the patchwork ways? Take a class or join the chitchat during the monthly Tuesday-night Quilt Guild.

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Another option is driving the 12 miles east into Terlingua ghost town for dinner. Unlike at Shafter, many of the ruined clay-brick shanties here have been reinhabited. Before the mercury mines dried up in the 1940s, 2000 people lived here. Today hippies and hardcore desert dwellers form an interesting, off-the-grid community. The Starlight Theatre now plays host to both locals and tourists at dinner. Dishes like chicken fried antelope and pork with chipotle sauce star, and Thursday through Sunday there’s live music. Happy hour at the bar has a following, but those in the know usually just pick up a beer at the Terlingua Trading Company next door and hang out on the benches lining the long front porch to watch the sun go down.

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If you’re not up for skiing or boarding, spend the afternoon riding the lift up and sliding down the mountain’s tubing hill on an inflated rubber donut. Sun Valley’s top nightspot, Whiskey Jacques, is the place to unwind with smooth cocktails, live music and dancing come dark. Purported to have been one of Ernest Hemingway’s favorite watering holes, it’s a rustic, Old-West-saloon-style spot. * * * Want to really get off the grid? Go skiing on the moon – well, not the literal moon, but Idaho’s version. An hour’s drive southeast of Ketchum, Craters of the Moon National Monument is an 83-sq-mile volcanic showcase. Lava flows and tubes and cinder cones are found along the 7-mile Crater Loop Rd (closed to cars in winter, when skiers and snowshoers take control).

Fodor's Costa Rica 2013 by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

airport security, Berlin Wall, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, David Attenborough, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, place-making, restrictive zoning, satellite internet, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, urban sprawl

The Southern Zone has some of the country’s most impressive, though least accessible, national parks—towering Chirripó and mountain-studded La Amistad; and Corcovado, where peccaries, tapirs, and, more rarely, jaguars still roam. Stunning marine wonders can be found in the Golfo Dulce, the dive and snorkeling spots around Caño Island Biological Reserve, and Ballena Marine National Park, famous for seasonal whale migrations. The lodges around Drake Bay, together with the off-the-grid lodges of Carate and Cabo Matapalo, provide unequaled immersion in tropical nature. GOOD PRACTICES The signage you’ll often see in natural areas sums up ecotourism’s principal tenets: Leave nothing but footprints; take away nothing but memories. A few more tips: Walk softly on forest trails and keep as quiet as you can.

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Cons: older cabins are not fancy and have small, basic bathrooms. TripAdvisor: “wonderful staff,” “rustic but beautiful surroundings,” “fabulous for wildlife.” | Rooms from: $65 | 3 km/2 miles north of bridge into Dominical | 11909 | 2787–0003 | www.haciendabaru.com | 6 cabinas, 6 guest rooms | Breakfast. * * * Living Off the Grid Many hotels in the more remote areas of the South Pacific generate their own electricity, so don’t count on air-conditioning, using a hair dryer, calling home, checking your email, or paying with a credit card (unless it’s arranged in advance). Some lodges do have radio contact with the outside world and satellite phone systems you can use in emergencies, but bad weather can often block the satellite signal.

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You might not guess it from the rickety bicycles and ancient pickup trucks parked on the main street, but Puerto Jiménez is the largest town on the Osa Peninsula. This one-iguana town has a certain frontier charm, though. New restaurants, hotels, and “green” newcomers lend an interesting, funky edge. It’s also the last civilized outpost on the peninsula. Heading south, you fall off the grid. That means no public electricity or telephones. So make your phone calls, send your email, get cash, and stock up on supplies here. Be prepared for the humidity and mosquitoes—Puerto Jiménez has plenty of both. If you need a refreshing dip, head southeast of the airport to Playa Platanares, where there is a long stretch of beach with swimmable, warm water.

Western USA by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donner party, East Village, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, off grid, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Baker Beach BEACH ( sunrise-sunset) Unswimmable waters (except when the tide’s coming in) but unbeatable views of the Golden Gate make this former Army beachhead SF’s tanning location of choice, especially the clothing-optional north end – at least until the afternoon fog rolls in. Fort Mason HISTORIC SITE ( 415-345-7500; www.fortmason.org) Army sergeants would be scandalized by the frolicking at this former military outpost, including comedy improv workshops, kiddie art classes, and Off the Grid (http://offthegridsf.com), where gourmet trucks circle like pioneer wagons. Fort Point HISTORIC SITE ( 415-561-4395; www.nps.gov/fopo) Despite its impressive guns, this Civil War fort saw no action – at least until Alfred Hitchcock shot scenes from Vertigo here, with stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge from below.

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Eating Hope you’re hungry – there are 10 times more restaurants per capita in San Francisco than in any other US city. Graze your way across SF, with stops at the Ferry Building farmers market, Omnivore (Click here) for signed cookbooks, knife-skills workshops at nonprofit 18 Reasons (Click here) and gourmet food trucks at Off the Grid (Click here). Most of SF’s top restaurants are quite small, so reserve now. SOMA, UNION SQUARE & CIVIC CENTER Benu CALIFORNIAN FUSION $$$ ( 415-685-4860; www.benusf.com; 22 Hawthorne St; mains $25-40; 5:30-10pm Tue-Sat) SF has refined fusion cuisine over 150 years, but no one rocks it quite like chef Corey Lee, who remixes local fine-dining staples and Pacific Rim flavors with a SoMa DJ’s finesse.

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In-N-Out Burger BURGERS $ ( 800-786-1000; www.in-n-out.com; 333 Jefferson St; meals under $10; 10:30am-1am Sun-Thu, to 1:30am Fri & Sat; ) Serving burgers for 60 years the way California likes them: with prime chuck ground on-site, fries and shakes made with pronounceable ingredients, served by employees paid a living wage. Ask for yours ‘wild style,’ cooked in mustard with grilled onions. THE MARINA Off the Grid FOOD TRUCKS $ (http://offthegridsf.com; Fort Mason parking lot; dishes under $10; 5-10pm Fri) Some 30 food trucks circle their wagons at SF’s largest mobile-gourmet hootenanny (other nights/locations attract less than a dozen trucks; see website). Arrive before 6:30pm or expect 20-minute waits for Chairman Bao’s clamshell buns stuffed with duck and mango, Roli Roti’s free-range herbed roast chicken, and dessert from the Crème Brûlée Man.

Curation Nation by Rosenbaum, Steven

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, future of journalism, independent contractor, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Mary Meeker, means of production, off-the-grid, PageRank, pattern recognition, post-work, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Yogi Berra

Über-blogger Robert Scoble describes the flood of data that overwhelms him most waking hours: “I have TweetDeck running with the real-time streams and can see it flowing down the screen—and I’m only following 20,000 people out of two hundred million people on Twitter, so I’m just seeing a little water in the gutter compared to the Mississippi River that could be going through my screen. And we’re all trying to deal with this, we’re all trying to find interesting stuff and share it with our friends. People need ways to deal with this constant stream of information.” The solution isn’t to bail out, to get “off the grid,” as some weary netizens proclaim. Fred Wilson, a New York venture capitalist and one of the folks who’s got his pulse on the Web start-up community, routinely declares “e-mail bankruptcy” and empties his inbox. Overwhelmed with input, he waves the white flag of digital defeat and tells his potential correspondents they’ll simply need to write again.

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Think about that for a moment. That phrase a productive member of society used to mean you had a job, a car, and a family. But now, being a member of society means participating in the conversation, the commerce, and the curation of the data stream. That’s really significant—and exciting. Passive participants will be off the grid; their digital vote won’t count. And they won’t be helping to influence the tides and turns of our increasingly digital world. Then, as you walk down the block in Curation Nation, you’ll pass by an almost limitless number of digital shopkeepers. These shops will be the new front door through which you’ll enter a topic, a genre, a hobby, or any of an almost endless number of content niches and product categories.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

In a country like the United States, even people of relatively modest means are likely to have much more: car, TV, radio, music system, phone, camera, washer, microwave, running hot water, flush toilet, books, games, toys, pictures, ornaments, pets, kitchen gadgets, jewelry, best clothes, best crockery, sports equipment, plus any amount of unspecified junk that mysteriously accumulates in the garage and which one hopes will eventually go to a better home following the yard sale. There are, of course, people who are so poor that they have little or none of this sort of stuff. And there are communities like the Amish, as well as individuals who opt to live “off the grid” or who accept blogger Dave Bruno’s “100 thing challenge”29 and deliberately choose to do without the conveniences and accoutrements that others take for granted. But it remains an obvious truth that most of us living in the modern world do not think we would be happy with nothing beyond Epicurus’s “bare necessities.”

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The most important artists and writers of today participate in some sort of dialogue with their contemporaries, and their work speaks to contemporary issues. Few people would think it particularly admirable for a person to read books while refusing to watch films, or to listen to classical music while remaining ignorant of more recently evolved musical genres. But analogous arguments can be made with respect to lifestyle. To live “off the grid,” metaphorically speaking, may limit our understanding of and ability to participate in the world we happen to have been thrust into. On the other hand, champions of simple living can respond to this criticism with the well-taken point that it is no bad thing to be alienated from the worst aspects of contemporary culture—materialism, consumerism, individualism, technology fetishism, shallow hedonism, or the cult of celebrities.

Critical Failures III (Caverns and Creatures Book 3) by Bevan, Robert

off-the-grid

Don’t you think we’re in deep enough shit as it is?” “This dude just tried to fuck me against my will,” said Tim. “Yeah, I know, but –” “And do I have to remind you that he thought I was a kid?” “I’m only thinking about –” “You’re not thinking,” said Tim. “You and Chaz are missing the bigger picture here. We’re off the grid. If the cops get us on camera, get our fingerprints or whatever, who gives a fuck? We’re in deep shit all right. But here’s the good part. We’re in so deep that we get to act with a sort of impunity. We can’t live here like this. There are only two ways this can end. We get Mordred to change us back into our normal selves, in which case we’ll never be suspected of the crimes committed by the carnival freaks we currently are.

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He reclined his seat all the way back, but still had to crawl almost entirely onto the back seat in order to reach the tablet because of his short arms. Tablet in hand, he crawled back up front and pulled the lever to raise the seat back upright. “Make sure you log me out,” said Stacy. “I need to stay off the grid until I figure out what I’m going to tell my boss.” “I think your best bet is to just say you were sick or something, and never made it to work,” said Tim, logging into Facebook with his own account. “I don’t think there’s anything you can say that will adequately explain what he’s going to walk in on.”

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

It is easy to rent an acceptable apartment in a non-peripheral part of Berlin, not too far from a subway or streetcar stop, for a few hundred dollars a month. Food, too, is much cheaper than in the rest of Western Europe—cheaper than in most of the rest of Germany even. There are many thousands of people in Berlin simply living, on low rent, to “get by.” It’s the ultimate slacker city. The most extreme low-rent move is to go “off the grid.” For all the technological progress we have seen, a growing number of Americans are disconnecting from traditional water and electricity hookups and making their own way, often in owner-built homes, micro-homes, trailer parks, floating boats, or less elegantly in tent cities, as we find scattered around the United States, including in Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

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See also artificial intelligence (AI) Mechanical Turk, 148–49 mechanization, 126–27 media, 146 median incomes, 38, 52, 60, 253 Medicaid, 234–39, 250 medical diagnosis, 87–89, 128–29 Medicare, 232–35, 237–38, 242 Medication Adherence Scores, 124 Mediterranean Europe, 174–75 memory, 151–55 meritocracy, 189–90, 230–31 meta-rationality, 82, 115 meta-studies, 224–25 Mexico, 168, 171, 177, 242–43 microcredit, 222–23 microeconomics, 212, 225 “micro-intelligibility,” 219 mid-wage occupations, 38 military, 29, 57 Millennium Prize Problems, 207–8 minimum wage, 59, 60 modes of employment, 35–36 monetarist theory, 226 MOOCs (massive open online courses), 180 Moonwalking with Einstein (Foer), 152 Moore’s law, 10, 15–16 moral issues, 26, 130–31 morale in the workplace, 30, 36 Mormon Church, 197 Morphy, Paul, 106 motivation, 197–202, 203 movie ratings, 121 Moxon’s Master, 134 Mueller, Andreas, 59 multinational corporations, 164 Murray, Charles, 231, 249 music, 146–47, 158 Myspace, 42, 209 mysticism, 153 Nakamura, Hikaru, 80 Narrative Science, 8–9 natural gas production, 177 natural language, 7, 119, 140–41 Naum (chess program), 72 negotiations in business, 12–13, 73 Netflix, 9 Nevada, 8 The New York Times, 11–12 Newton, Isaac, 153 Ng, Jennifer Hwee Kwoon, 89 Nickel, Arno, 81 Nielsen, Dagh, 80 Nobel Prizes, 187, 216 non-tradeable sectors, 176 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 8 Northeast US, 241 “nudge” concept, 105 Obama healthcare reform, 237–38 Occupy Wall Street, 230, 251, 253, 256 O’Daniel, Karrah, 96 offshoring, 175. See also outsourcing “off-the-grid” living, 246–47 online dating, 9, 16, 95–98, 125, 144–45 online education, 179–85 opportunity cost, 184 options-pricing theory, 203 outsourcing, 162, 163–71 overseas labor markets, 59 “P vs. NP” problem, 101 particle physics, 211–15 patent law, 17 per capita income, 170 Perelman, Grigory, 208 performance evaluation, 104 Peri, Giovanni, 162–63 “the periphery,” 175 personal service sector, 31–32 petty entrepreneurship, 61 Pew Research Center, 248–49 pharmaceutical industry, 17 Ph.D. degrees, 40 physics, 211–15, 226 Player Piano (Vonnegut), 126, 247–48 Pocket Fritz (chess program), 147–48 Poincaré conjecture, 208 poker, 49 Polanyi, Michael, 215 Polgar, Judit, 108 politics, 10–11, 227, 251–59 poor population, 121, 236, 237 popular culture, 51 population growth, 51.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

There is nothing shaggy or uncareful about him. Taut, press shy, and disposed to choose his words with a pair of tweezers, Jesse, now in his fifties, prefers to do his work out of public view, and preferably from the one-room cabin where he lives by himself in the rugged hills north of San Francisco, off the grid except for a fast Internet connection. “Bob Jesse is like the puppeteer,” Katherine MacLean told me. MacLean is a psychologist who worked in Roland Griffiths’s lab from 2009 until 2013. “He’s the visionary guy working behind the scenes.” Following Jesse’s meticulous directions, I drove north from the Bay Area, eventually winding up at the end of a narrow dirt road in a county he asked me not to name.

…

I was disappointed my cardiologist had taken MDMA off the table but pleased that he had more or less given me a green light on the rest of my travel plans. Trip One: LSD At least on paper, nothing about the first guide I chose to work with sounds auspicious. The man lived and worked so far off the grid, in the mountains of the American West, that he had no phone service, generated his own electricity, pumped his own water, grew his own food, and had only the spottiest satellite Internet. I could just forget about the whole idea of being anywhere in range of a hospital emergency room. Then there was the fact that while I was a Jew from a family that had once been reluctant to buy a German car, this fellow was the son of a Nazi—a German in his midsixties whose father had served in the SS during World War II.

…

Fritz had gone up to the house to prepare our dinner, leaving me to make some notes about the experience on my laptop, when all at once I felt my heart surge and then begin to dance madly in my chest. I immediately recognized the sensation of turbulence as AFib, and when I took my pulse, it was chaotic. A panicky bird was trapped in my rib cage, throwing itself against the bars in an attempt to get out. And here I was, a dozen miles off the grid smack in the middle of nowhere. It went on like that for two hours, straight through a subdued and anxious dinner. Fritz seemed concerned; in all the hundreds of breathwork sessions he had led or witnessed, he had never seen such a reaction. (He had mentioned earlier a single fatality attributed to holotropic breathwork: a man who had had an aneurism.)

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

On the delivery of local services to the suburbs, see Arthur Nelson as cited in Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2013). For the UCLA study, by the California Center for Sustainable Communities, see Laura Bliss, “L.A.’s New ‘Energy Atlas’ Maps: Who Sucks the Most Off the Grid,” CityLab, October 6, 2015, www.citylab.com/housing/2015/10/las-new-energy-atlas-maps-who-sucks-the-most-off-the-grid/409135. Of course, nearly 20 percent of Bell’s population lives below the poverty line, which means that its residents use less air conditioning, fewer computers, and so on. On the overall cost of sprawl to the US economy, see Todd Litman, “Analysis of Public Policies That Unintentionally Encourage and Subsidize Urban Sprawl,” London School of Economics and Political Science, for the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate for the New Climate Economy, 2015, http://static.newclimateeconomy.report/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/public-policies-encourage-sprawl-nce-report.pdf. 15.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

One sunny day in June 2014, 5,000 London taxi drivers (says Transport for London, the regulator, while the organizers claim 12,000) halted traffic in Trafalgar Square for hours to protest the unregulated Uber service.10 Taxi drivers in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, and Rio de Janeiro mounted similar though smaller slowdowns, parking their vehicles in major intersections and immobilizing central business districts. The fight was between those who were abiding by the rules (the London cabbies) against those who had decided the rules no longer made sense and had gone off the grid (to drive unregulated for Uber). The congestion and media reporting were a boon to Uber. They reported nine times the number of app downloads between midnight and noon on the Wednesday of the London strike, compared to the same time period the week earlier. As they say, any press is good press.

…

As Dan pointed out to me, “Regulators think that by exerting more control, they will increase compliance. At some point, the opposite is true, a point you may see as counterintuitive. The heavy-handed rule maker is fighting the participants.” At a certain point many will choose to break the rules and go off the grid—like the subset of Uber drivers who were formerly part of the regulated industry. Dan continues, “At this point, the benefits of all the rules are lost, and best practices can’t spread, as they are hidden from central authority (or a platform). This is known as ‘shadow IT’ in the tech world, and as ‘black markets’ in economic terms.

Fodor's Big Island of Hawaii by Fodor’s Travel Guides

Airbnb, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, Easter island, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, polynesian navigation, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

One of the park’s best hikes, the Kilauea Iki Trail is a 4-mile loop that takes you down the crater walls and across an otherworldly landscape of a solidified lava lake dotted with steaming vents and alien-looking fumaroles. You climb up the crater wall along a zigzagging trail, ending back at the crater overlook. GO HORSEBACK RIDING IN WAIPIO VALLEY The Valley of the Kings on the Hamakua Coast owes its relative isolation and off-the-grid status to the 2,000-foot-high cliffs bookending the valley. Really, the only way to explore this sacred place is on two legs—or four. We’re partial to the sanctioned horseback rides that wend deep into the rain forest to a series of waterfalls and pools—the setting for a perfect romantic photo op.

…

Waterfalls drop thousands of feet from the North Kohala watershed to the Waipio Valley floor. The lush valley is breathtaking in every way and from every vantage, with tropical foliage, abundant flowers, wild horses, misty pastures, curving rivers, stands of ironwood trees and a wide, gray, boulder-strewn shore. Though almost completely off the grid today, Waipio (the word means “curved water”) was once a center of Hawaiian life. Somewhere between 4,000 and 20,000 people made it their home between the 13th and 17th centuries. In addition, this highly historic and culturally significant area housed heiau (temples) and puuhonua (places of refuge) in addition to royal residences.

Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation by Kord Davis, Doug Patterson

4chan, business process, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, en.wikipedia.org, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, performance metric, Robert Bork, side project, smart grid, urban planning

Society, government, and the legal system have not yet adapted to the coming age of big-data impacts such as transparency, correlation, and aggregation. New legislation is being drafted, debated, and ratified by governments all over the world at a rapid pace. Only a generation or two ago, one could fairly easily drop “off the grid” and disappear within the continental United States. Today, it would be nearly impossible for a person to do much of anything without generating a data trail that a reasonably knowledgeable and modestly equipped investigator could follow to its end (http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/).

Fodor's Costa Rica 2012 by Fodor's

Berlin Wall, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, David Attenborough, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, place-making, restrictive zoning, satellite internet, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, urban renewal, urban sprawl

The Southern Zone has some of the country’s most impressive, though least accessible, national parks—towering Chirripó and mountain-studded La Amistad; and Corcovado, where peccaries, tapirs, and, more rarely, jaguars still roam. Stunning marine wonders can be found in the Golfo Dulce, the dive and snorkeling spots around Caño Island Biological Reserve, and Ballena Marine National Park, famous for seasonal whale migrations. The lodges around Drake Bay, together with the off-the-grid lodges of Carate and Cabo Matapalo, provide unequaled immersion in tropical nature. Good Practices The signage you’ll often see in natural areas sums up ecotourism’s principal tenets: Leave nothing but footprints; take away nothing but memories. A few more tips: Walk softly on forest trails and keep as quiet as you can.

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You might not guess it from the rickety bicycles and ancient pickup trucks parked on the main street, but Puerto Jiménez is the largest town on the Osa Peninsula. This one-iguana town has a certain frontier charm, though. New restaurants, hotels, and “green” newcomers lend an interesting, funky edge. It’s also the last civilized outpost on the peninsula. Heading south, you fall off the grid. That means no public electricity or telephones. So make your phone calls, send your emails, get cash, and stock up on supplies here. Be prepared for the humidity and mosquitoes—Puerto Jiménez has plenty of both. If you need a refreshing dip, head southeast of the airport to Playa Platanares, where there is a long stretch of beach with swimmable, warm water.

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Outdoor Activities Isabel Esquivel at Osa Tropical (Main road across from Banco Nacional | 60702 | 2735–5062) runs the best general tour operation on the peninsula. Whatever travel question you ask the locals, they will usually say, “Ask Isabel.” Along with arranging flights, ground transport, hotel bookings, tours, and car rentals, Osa Tropical is the radio communications center for many of the off-the-grid Osa lodges and tour operators. Bird-Watching The birding around the Osa Peninsula is world renowned, with more than 400 species. Endemic species include Baird’s trogon, yellow-billed cotinga, whistling wren, black-cheeked ant tanager, and the glorious turquoise cotinga. There have even been sightings of the very rare harpy eagle in the last couple of years.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

* * * *1 The same minister the same year also published Day of Doom, America’s first bestseller, an extremely long and cheerfully terrifying poem about Judgment Day: “However fair, however square, your way and work hath been…Earth’s dwellers all…suffer must, for it is just, Eternal misery.” *2 Apart from the subdivisions actually called Walden Pond, the others are the product of the Suburban Development Name Generator, an entertaining app. 16 Fantasy Industrialized IN HIS BOOK ABOUT THE living-off-the-grid stunt, which he wrote after moving back to town, Thoreau declared that he was choosing “not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century.” From his high ground, he looked down on all the American clamor and vulgarity. “What are men celebrating?” He had a point. At that Walden moment, modern media and advertising and show business, all interdependent, were busy being born in America.

…

In left-bohemian milieux, parents decided that their children are not in this world to live up to expectations; that they must only and always do their own thing; and that tests and grades would turn them into drones of the corporate state. And in the 1970s the courts and state legislatures started deciding okay, whatever, do your own thing, Christian, hippie, it’s all good, school’s optional. Retreating to self-sufficient rural isolation, living off the grid, became a hippie thing in the 1960s before it took off as a right-wing conceit in the 1970s. The back-to-the-land movement, with the Whole Earth Catalog as its official almanac and souvenir program, floated along on dreams of agrarian utopia. (For a year or two around 1970, I was a teenage Walter Mitty with my own Whole Earth dream.)

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*5 2012 National Household Education Surveys Program. 36 Anything Goes—Unless It Picks My Pocket or Breaks My Leg AFTER EMERGING IN THE 1970S as the haunted, well-armed cousins of Whole Earth Catalog readers, survivalists steadily multiplied. They’re betting on a complete breakdown of the U.S. economy and government that they can and will survive by living as they imagine Americans lived centuries ago, in rural isolation and off the grid. Theirs is a dystopia-ready lifestyle, a fantasy given vivid form and encouraged by the three Mad Max movies that came out between 1979 and 1985. A great selling point was the Y2K panic, the fear in the 1990s that our new digital systems would all go haywire as 1999 turned to 2000, and the newly digital-dependent world would collapse.

REST API Design Rulebook by Mark Masse

anti-pattern, business logic, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, data acquisition, database schema, hypertext link, information retrieval, off-the-grid, web application

Stuart Rackham Thanks also to Stuart Rackham for AsciiDoc.[5] It is an awesome tool that made formatting this book a breeze. Personal My brother Mike Massé is a Web-based rock star. His music provided the soundtrack for all my writing sessions. Mike’s talents and passions have been a lifelong inspiration to me. Thanks to my family (daughter, mom, dad, and sisters) for their patience and support while I was off the grid working on this book. Finally, I thank Shawna Stine, for being the book’s first reviewer and biggest fan. * * * [2] Fielding, Roy Thomas. Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2000 (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm)

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

That engine powers the Slingshot water purifier, which can distill drinking water from any source, needs no filter, and can run on cow dung as a source of fuel. Kamen came full circle when he pitched the Slingshot to Komisar. Once again, though, Komisar is skeptical. Having traipsed around the developing world with a backpack himself, he thinks the machinery is too complicated for off-the-grid installations; when it stops working, it will wind up in a garbage heap. Whether this is an accurate forecast or a false negative remains to be seen. As an inventor, Kamen’s best bet is to blindly generate novel ideas and gather more feedback from fellow creators to hone his vision about which ones might prove useful.

…

As an inventor: Adam Higginbotham, “Dean Kamen’s Mission to Bring Unlimited Clean Water to the Developing World,” Wired, August 13, 2013, www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/08/features/engine-of-progress; Christopher Helman, “Segway Inventor Dean Kamen Thinks His New Stirling Engine Will Get You off the Grid for Under $10K,” Forbes, July 2, 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2014/07/02/dean-kamen-thinks-his-new-stirling-engine-could-power-the-world; Erico Guizzo, “Dean Kamen’s ‘Luke Arm’ Prosthesis Receives FDA Approval,” IEEE Spectrum, May 13, 2014, http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/biomedical/bionics/dean-kamen-luke-arm-prosthesis-receives-fda-approval. 3: Out on a Limb Out on a Limb: Susan J.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Our boss isn’t the guy in the corner office, but a PDA in our pocket. Our taskmaster is depersonalized and internalized—and even more rigorous than the union busters of yesterday. There is no safe time. If we are truly to take time away from the program, we feel we must disconnect altogether and live “off the grid,” as if we were members of a different, predigital era. Time in the digital era is no longer linear but disembodied and associative. The past is not something behind us on the timeline but dispersed through the sea of information. Like a digital unconscious, the raw data sits forgotten unless accessed by a program in the future.

…

They’re just too complex and would involve levels of agreement, cooperation, and coordination that seem beyond the capacity of humans at this stage in our cultural evolution, anyway. So in lieu of doing the actual hard work of fixing these problems in the present, we fantasize instead about life afterward. The crisis of global warming morphs into the fantasy of living off the grid. The threat of a terrorist attack on our office tower leads us to purchase an emergency personal parachute for easy egress, and to wonder how far up the org chart we might be promoted once everyone else is gone. The collapse of civilization due to nuclear accident, peak oil, or SARS epidemic finally ends the ever-present barrage of media, tax forms, toxic spills, and mortgage payments, opening the way to a simpler life of farming, maintaining shelter, and maybe defending one’s family.

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by Meredith. Angwin

airline deregulation, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, green new deal, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jones Act, Just-in-time delivery, load shedding, market clearing, Michael Shellenberger, Negawatt, off-the-grid, performance metric, plutocrats, renewable energy credits, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the map is not the territory, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, zero-sum game

When you read a “Beat the Peak” article, the first part of the article is usually about preventing the use of fossil fuels. For example, in Green Mountain Power’s August press release, the first part is about saving money and carbon with battery storage. Next, Green Mountain Power writes “the amount of stored energy deployed to beat the new peak last week was like taking up to 6,000 homes off the grid, and it offset about 21,120 pounds of carbon, the equivalent of not burning 1,078 gallons of gasoline.” In fairness to Green Mountain Power, near the bottom of the press release, they do describe the event in a more complete manner. “ISO-NE uses the yearly peak hour to calculate costs utilities pay toward the regional grid, so when utilities are able to lower demand during that key hour, they can create savings for customers.”

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Let’s look at fossil fuels, biomass, and other combustion sources of power. In terms of power plants on the grid, nobody wants unabated, high-particulate-release coal burning, or the release of large quantities of nitrogen oxides from unabated gas-fired plants. On the other hand, constant increases in pollution-control requirements will drive some types of plants off the grid as “uneconomical.” That is often the purpose of those requirements. That is, increased requirements for one technology are often supported by the lobbyists of rival technologies. In terms of nuclear energy, the constant increase in safety requirements for nuclear have the same effect as constant increases in pollution-control requirements for fossil plants.

Lonely Planet's Best in Travel 2020 by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Easter island, food desert, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), off-the-grid, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, trade route

www.wildsweden.com/kolarbyn-ecolodge Otentic, Mauritius The nation’s only glamping outfit eschews plastic and grows its own produce at its two idyllic locations. https://otentic.mu Bardia Ecolodge, Nepal Bed down at this affordable lodge made from local materials after a day tracking tigers in a remote national park. www.bardiaecolodge.com Jao Lodge, Botswana Be among the first to experience this newly revamped safari lodge from the sustainable- tourism-award-winning Wilderness Safaris Botswana collection. https://wilderness- safaris.com Feynan Ecolodge, Jordan Enjoy traditional Bedouin hospitality at this stunning off-the-grid eco-hotel pioneer in the rugged Dana Biosphere. https://ecohotels.me/feynan Nihi Sumba, Indonesia Running entirely on house-made biofuel, this luxe beachfront resort empowers locals to protect the environment. https://nihi.com 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, USA This conscious New York City option has egg timers in the showers, boxes for donating unwanted clothes and a monthly ‘dark sky’ night when candles replace lights. www.1hotels.com Mashpi Lodge, Ecuador Hang out with scientists at this beacon of sustainability in the Ecuadorian Choco. www.

Don't Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM by Sarah Berman

Albert Einstein, COVID-19, dark matter, Donald Trump, East Village, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Milgram experiment, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, systems thinking, TED Talk, white picket fence, work culture

Pam Cafritz, Karen Unterreiner, and Raniere all signed a decree that they would never operate another illegal chain distribution scheme. From that moment on, Raniere became a nonentity when it came to business records. He told his inner circle that because powerful forces were gunning for him, he needed to protect himself by not having a driver’s license, not owning any property or businesses, and basically staying off the grid entirely. Instead he encouraged the women around him to put their names and bank accounts on the line. CHAPTER FIVE When Keith Met Nancy (and Lauren) The beginning of NXIVM was also the beginning of the end of Keith Raniere’s relationship with Toni Natalie. In the wake of the Consumers’ Buyline shutdown, Raniere and Natalie redirected their efforts to a new multi-level marketing company that sold discounted nutritional supplements.

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Most former members didn’t know the extent of what was going on behind the scenes, but Keeffe had more dirt than anyone who’d ever left. And yet, even with Keeffe’s inside knowledge of alleged fraud, tax evasion, hacking, obstruction of justice, and other crimes, the two women probably understood that the path ahead wouldn’t be easy. Keeffe said she knew Clare Bronfman was socking away an “off the grid” fund for Raniere. “There was $2.5 million in it,” she told Bouchey. “Now I’m sure it’s ten times that.” This recorded conversation would eventually become evidence presented in court, but it wasn’t the allegations of tax evasion, fraud, or even the plot to have enemies thrown in prison in Mexico that would finally catch law enforcement’s attention.

Against All Enemies by Tom Clancy, Peter Telep

airport security, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Iridium satellite, low earth orbit, off-the-grid, operational security, Pepto Bismol, Recombinant DNA, US Airways Flight 1549

“Did you tell her we had the same question?” Moore asked, chuckling sardonically through his words. “Are you kidding? I can’t talk to her directly. This comes to me from your bosses.” “Oh, well, tell them I said she owes me a cup of coffee.” “Yeah, right, I’ll do that. She does offer some news. Dante Corrales is missing. Off the grid. His girlfriend with him. Vega confirmed that before she was killed. They murdered the desk clerk at Corrales’s hotel. That tells me they’re looking for Corrales.” “Maybe he screwed over the Guatemalans, and now he’s on the run from them and from his own cartel.” “That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

…

It’ll take two to three weeks to process this evidence, and then we have to hope that the judge finds Corrales credible, even though he’s clearly out for revenge—which doesn’t help our case. And during all that time, we need to hope that your buddy Gallagher doesn’t send word back that we’re trying to indict Rojas, because if he gets tipped off, he’ll disappear. I’ll bet he’s got properties all over the world that no one even knows about. He’ll drop off the grid, and it’ll take years to find him, if ever.” “We’ve got Sonia on the inside. He can’t go into hiding.” “There’s no guarantee Rojas will take her along. He’s kept his involvement in the cartel a secret from his own son. That’s made Sonia’s operation extremely difficult. She’s tried repeatedly to gather evidence, get into his computers, but she’s come up short every time.

…

The Agency still had no leads on Gallagher’s whereabouts (he’d obviously had his shoulder beacon surgically removed), although he had been identified as the man who’d hired the kid to paint the police cars. As a field agent, Gallagher had been trained to find people who didn’t want to be found and was an expert at dropping off the grid himself. Over the years, he’d studied all the different methods people used to conceal themselves—and he’d learned which ones had worked and which had not. Finding him would cost money, time, assets, and, Moore contended, a feverish obsession. Sometime later, Moore fell asleep and was awakened by the single attendant who asked that he sit up and fasten his seat belt.

Mastering Ember.js by Mitchel Kelonye

Firefox, information security, MVC pattern, off-the-grid, Ruby on Rails, single page application, web application, WebRTC, WebSocket

First, we find the position of the current, previous, and next cells, as follows: ++mag; var traversals = this.get('traversals.up'); var x = cell.get('x'); var y = cell.get('y'); var value = cell.get('value'); var nx = x + dir.x * mag; var ny = y + dir.y * mag; var px = x + dir.x * (mag - 1); var py = y + dir.y * (mag - 1); var pcell = traversals[px][py]; We then check to see whether the cell is off the grid: var nrow = traversals[nx]; // cell is x outbound if (!nrow) return ret(); var ncell = nrow[ny]; // cell is y outbound if (!ncell) return ret(); If the new cell is indeed outbound, we return the previous cell as the new position of the tile. However, if we encounter a tile, we test whether the two can be merged: // cell cannot be merged var nvalue = ncell.get('value'); if (nvalue && value && nvalue !

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant

back-to-the-land, off-the-grid, Silicon Valley, Skype

Except here, the wind is like a slash, cutting and slicing. “Return to your present,” my friends told me over dinner. “Pain is when you’re in the future in your head.” I’d been telling them what she’d said that day, about the men she wanted to date after me. Then, I switched the subject to what I might do. Go off to Mexico or somewhere, drop off the grid for a while. My friends are a long-married couple, Cheryl and Michael. They smiled. “One day at a time, honey,” she said. Cheryl Richardson, one of the wisest women I’ve ever met. “When you go to the future in your mind, just put your hand over your heart and say to yourself, ‘I return to this.

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

That because of that decision she will go from chronic poverty, living on a few hundred dollars a month in Social Security and a few hundred dollars’ worth of food stamps, to acute misery, from merely skimping on meals to actively missing them. Or what should be done with Cruzanta Mercado and her longtime boyfriend Paul Abiley, also residents, far off the grid, of the dense tropical rainforest side of Hawaii’s Big Island? It’s an extraordinarily beautiful part of the world, the lush green forest growing out of the highly fertile volcanic mud, except in the places where the lava flows have bubbled up out of the earth, creating miles-wide swaths of dead, black solidified lava fields.

…

For example: Over the past decade, we have regularly had oil price spikes that have been nothing more than a nuisance to the affluent, but have been cataclysmic to the poor—especially to retirees on fixed incomes and to the working poor in rural areas, who tend to work minimum-wage jobs and to drive long distances for those jobs, or who are more likely to heat their homes using old-fashioned oil-based heating systems. Witness, for example, the damage caused the precarious finances of John and Stephanie France, grandparents living off the grid on the edge of the rainforest on Hawaii’s Big Island, when gas prices in the state veered near $5 a gallon in the winter and early spring of 2012. John, a disabled air force veteran, and his wife lived on small Social Security checks and a couple hundred dollars a month in food stamps. “We have a generator, and I have to buy gas for the generator.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The structure, made mostly of tires and cob, belongs to an eighty-year-old German woman named Zena, who’d invited my friends and me to stay the night during a week we’d spent road-tripping and camping around the lower Rocky Mountains. The earthship she lives in is wedged into a big stretch of desert populated by dozens of other earthships—off-the-grid, passive energy homes extending for three miles all the way to the edge of an old airplane hangar which has recently been converted into a brewery. Towering over all of this in the distance are the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, still snowcapped in spring. Zena’s kitchen, sunken one floor into the hot earth, is full of big, happy plants soaking up geothermal heat by the east-facing window which takes up most of the front of her house.

…

I see the faces of the two men listening on either side of me, and then Eleanor looking at me over the fire and laughing, asking if this is a utopia, and I say, yes, why not, yes, I mean yes, anything that offers something other than capital and death. Sweeney’s head is in my lap and when I look up the stars are bright blue. Sweeney has gone remarkably silent, but partly because the baby daddy, Eleanor’s son’s father, this hippie kid who grew up off the grid, has been talking nonstop all night long. Because even in utopia it is often the case that men still talk so much and say so much stupid shit, like “there is no truth” or “your truth is my truth,” on and on and on. DIVINE UPSTATE Before I moved to the Catskills, I’d known that Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement had outposts up there, but I hadn’t realized how many: between 1930 and 1942, the movement built a total of thirty-one “heavens” in Ulster and Sullivan Counties.

The Oil Age Is Over: What to Expect as the World Runs Out of Cheap Oil, 2005-2050 by Matt Savinar

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, clean water, disinformation, Easter island, energy security, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, invisible hand, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Rosa Parks, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Y2K

The future is not going to be pleasant. A sense of humor will make it much easier to deal with. 103. Would it be a good time to look into buying a solar-powered home, if I have the financial resource to do so? George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Al Gore sure seem to think so. Each have state-ofthe-art solar-powered, "off-the-grid" homes. Bush's has been described as an "environmentalist's dream home." Cheney's house is equipped with state-of-the-art energy-conservation devices installed by Al Gore. Think they know something we don't? 104. How am I supposed to help stop the military-industrial complex that seems to have taken over the world?

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

(In all likelihood, government intelligence agencies knew about this, which could explain why the border agents had been so aggressive.) After his story was published, the detentions stopped. By one measure, Laura and I were a perfect match. We’re both workaholics; we often debated who put in longer hours. I used her as a sounding board for projects, and she did the same with me. In early August, she visited the solar-powered off-the-grid home I’d built in Northern California, overlooking the Pacific. The place is very remote, with the nearest utility lines some three miles away and the closest neighbor a half mile (as the spotted owl flies) across a canyon. We worked through the days and nights. I was finishing a book. Laura was editing The Program, a short documentary about William Binney, the NSA-veteran-turned-whistleblower.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

And even then—whatever steps they may have taken to secrete the traces of their existence from the network’s gaze, however blissfully unaware they may remain of its continuing interest in them—the dweller in a remote, off-the-grid cabin can be certain that data concerning them and their activities will continue to circulate indefinitely, turning up in response to queries and being operated on in unpredictable ways. That the network may know them primarily as a lacuna, that they may with a little luck evade its influence being brought to bear on their own body, does nothing to change the fact that its ambit is total. Any gesture of refusal short of going off the grid entirely will be still less likely to result in the desired independence from the processes of intimate, persistent oversight and management now loose in the world.

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The strategic goal has to be to change the game theory landscape so that the motivations for creepiness are reduced. That is the very essence of the game of civilization. Some Good Reasons to Be Tracked by the Cloud Given the way networks are structured now, one reaction to creepiness might be to pull back from connecting to cloud software. You might be tempted to go off the grid as much as possible to not be tracked. That would be a shame, because there are real benefits to using cloud computing, and there will be more and more benefits in the future. People already routinely tap “yes” to allow tracking options in their phones, and then expect the cloud to recommend nearby restaurants, keep track of their jogging, and warn about where the nearby traffic jams have formed.

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If you feel you can’t, you haven’t really engaged fully with the possibilities of who you might be, and what you might make of your life in the world. People still ask me every day if they should quit Facebook. A year ago it was just a personal choice, but now it has become a choice that comes with a price. The option of not using the services of Siren Servers becomes a trial, like living “off the grid.” It’s crucial to experience resisting social pressure at least once in your life. When everyone around you insists that you’ll be outcast and left behind unless you conform, you have to experience what it’s like to ignore them and chart your own course in order to discover yourself as a person.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

Deliberately storing personal details about rivals or enemies on devices that find their way into the hands of law enforcement will be a useful form of sabotage. No Hidden People Allowed As terrorists develop new methods, counterterrorism strategists will adapt accordingly. Imprisonment may not be enough to contain a terror network. Governments may determine, for example, that it is too risky to have citizens “off the grid,” detached from the technological ecosystem. To be sure, in the future, as now, there will be people who resist adopting and using technology, people who want nothing to do with virtual profiles, online data systems or smart phones. Yet a government might suspect that people who opt out completely have something to hide and thus are more likely to break laws, and as a counterterrorism measure, that government will build the kind of “hidden people” registry we described earlier.

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Given that today’s RFID chips can be easily fried in a microwave, the chips of the future will need a shield that protects them against tampering. (We assume there will be a technological cat-and-mouse game between governments who want to track the weapons with RFID chips and arms traffickers who want to deal the weapons off the grid.) When weapons with RFID chips were recovered, it would be possible to trace where they’d been if the chips themselves were designed to store location data. This wouldn’t stop the trafficking of arms but it would put pressure on the larger actors in the arms trade. States that donate weapons to rebel movements often want to know what happens to those arms.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Shahriar Chowdhury, Shakila Aziz, Sebastian Groh, Hannes Kirchhoff, and Walter Leal Filho, “Off-Grid Rural Area Electrification Through Solar-Diesel Hybrid Minigrids in Bangladesh: Resource-Efficient Design Principles in Practice,” Journal of Cleaner Production 95 (2015): 194–202, doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.02.062. 18.  Global Off-Grid Lighting Association (GOGLA), “Global Off-Grid Solar Market Report Semi-Annual Sales and Impact Data.” 19.  World Bank Group (WBG), “Solar Program Brings Electricity to Off-the-Grid Rural Areas in Bangladesh,” October 12, 2016, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2016/10/10/solar-program-brings-electricity-off-grid-rural-areas. 20.  Shahidur R. Khandker et al., Surge in Solar-Powered Homes: Experience in Off-Grid Rural Bangladesh (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2014). 21.  

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Sebastian Groh and Mathias Koepke, “A System Complexity Approach to Swarm Electrification,” University College London, 2015, http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1469412/1/283-290.pdf. 48.  Sara Baidei, “‘Swarm Electrification’ in Bangladesh Lets Neighbours Swap Solar Electricity,” Motherboard, November 29, 2016, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mesolshare-rural-bangladesh-swarm-electrification-off-the-grid. 49.  Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) “Off-Grid Market Trends Report 2016,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Lighting Global in cooperation with the Global Off-Grid Lighting Association, February 2016, http://www.energynet.co.uk/webfm_send/1690. 50.  Stephen D. Comello, Stefan J. Reichelstein, Anshuman Sahoo, and Tobias S.

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

They both want to be born again so as to be born yesterday, born into a former epoch before Nietzsche tried to persuade us that God had died; they want martyrdom before Weber’s prophecy that rational men and bureaucratic governments will disenchant the world can come true. Some join fundamentalist collectives, others cultivate a pioneer solitude, going “off the grid” to combat the “new world order” they believe is endangering the antimodern values they cherish.22 They may break their heads against time itself, but time has not been a friend to either religion or morals in recent centuries. Even the pragmatists who are prepared to live with what history delivers may seek deliverance from the lives they are bequeathed.

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The Gospel Music Association had to announce in 1994 that married Christian pop singer Michael English had gotten Marabeth Jordan, another man’s wife and a singer in the trio First Call, pregnant—proving perhaps that he who uses the tools of Devil McWorld is likely to be snared by the devil. 22. Philip Weiss offers a stunning account of new age reactionary drop-outs in his “Off the Grid,” The New York Times Magazine, January 6, 1995, pp. 24–52. 23. Charles B. Strozier has written a fascinating account of the apocalyptic side of fundamentalism; see Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). See also Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Beliefin Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations by Russell Anderson-Williams

business process, call centre, market design, off-the-grid, Skype

You can see this in the following screenshot with the same frame we looked at a moment ago. Now the grid in the center of the screen is a lot wider and shorter. If you're using a projector or screen that operates at the 16:9 ratio, then your frames and content need to fit inside the grid. Pressing the Ctrl + Shift + M keys again will switch off the grid view. If you're certain your Prezi will be projected, then use the Ctrl + Shift + M shortcut as soon as you create the new Prezi file. Why you need to know about ratios? Nowadays, most PCs and Laptops are widescreen. But the majority of projectors on the market have an aspect ratio of 4:3. The term aspect ratio refers to the ratio of a picture's width to its height.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

It shines especially intensely on Asia and Africa where energy demand is predicted to rise fastest. Unlike fossil fuel, it produces no pollution, and no miners get killed. Unlike nuclear fission, it leaves no radioactive waste. Solar energy is already competitive for the thousands of villages in India and Africa that are off the grid. But on a larger scale it remains more expensive than fossil fuels and only becomes economically viable due to subsidies or feed-in tariffs. But eventually these subsidies have to stop. If the Sun (or wind) is to become the primary source of our energy, there must be some way to store it, so there’s still a supply at night and on days when the wind doesn’t blow.

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Burning Man, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, false flag, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Future Shock, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, lifelogging, neurotypical, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, place-making, post-industrial society, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, the market place, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

About the Book Near-future Britain is not just a nation under surveillance but one built on it: a radical experiment in personal transparency and ambient direct democracy. Every action is seen, every word is recorded. Diana Hunter is a refusenik, a has-been cult novelist who lives in a house with its own Faraday cage: no electronic signals can enter or leave. She runs a lending library and conducts business by barter. She is off the grid in a society where the grid is everything. Denounced, arrested and interrogated by a machine that can read your life history from your brain, she dies in custody. Mielikki Neith is the investigator charged with discovering how this tragedy occurred. Neith is Hunter’s opposite. She is a woman in her prime, a stalwart advocate of the System.

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It makes no sense. What could Hunter possibly have to hide, that she would endure this, if not for ever, at least for just long enough? Surely no one is so wretchedly ornery as to die out of spite? She had a good life, a nice place to live. For social contact she had her neighbours, bartering and making trades off the grid, upcycling and retooling. She had her school for miniature refuseniks, the local kids to whom she read moderately inappropriate stories. Neith, indeed, remembers some of them from her own childhood: harmlessly wicked value-inversion jokes about kindly monsters and nasty knights. Diana Hunter was angry and formerly successful and where she was not loved she was mostly left alone.

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For a vertiginous moment she imagines Hunter coming down here, with some favoured child from her book club, to play with boats in the well, and no greater meaning than that. She sees herself still fretting at this puzzle in a decade, or in five, living here in ghostly echo of the subject of her investigation: an off-the-grid refusenik of no consequence, growling at the passage of time and at her own lost chances. Rebus, the fifth of four. Neith sways on the edge of the well and almost falls in, light-headed. How long has it been since she slept? Since she was safe? Well. Hunter survived longer, so she can do it too.

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

At its launch, Elon Musk said that he’s confident the batteries will reach a price of $100 per kWh by 2020 (the average price was $1,200/kWh in 2010). Tesla is also building a version of its battery technology for use in home and business, the Powerwall, which will allow homes that capture solar energy to be completely off the grid—not dependent on the utility company even to store energy. By the way, many new solar technologies are in development. For example, scientists are experimenting with a new material called perovskite, a light-sensitive crystal that has the potential to be more efficient, less expensive, and more versatile than any solar solutions to date.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

He was a writer, educator and so on, and I remember him sat in our big fireplace room one night with his laptop, with his face bathed in its light. And I remember sitting there and just having this moment where I thought: ‘That’s it. That’s perfect. You go to a place like Grindstone where you’re off the grid and you’re with your comrades and your extended political family but you’re also connected and you’ve got your tools with you and you can write.’ To see this proper tool there really kind of blew my mind and I thought, ‘Will I someday be able to sit in the hammock at Moonwatcher’s Point with a laptop on my lap?’

Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World by Jesse Krieger

Airbnb, always be closing, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, do what you love, drop ship, financial independence, follow your passion, income inequality, independent contractor, iterative process, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, search engine result page, Skype, software as a service, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, warehouse automation

CREATIVE CONSTRUCTS Take a Break, Do What You Crave Drop an Anchor and Ride the Waves… Creative Constructs are temporary lifestyle changes that draw on your interests and passions to shuffle the deck in the game of life. Whether this means traveling for the summer, living abroad for half a year, participating in an intensive learning program or going off the grid and working on an organic farm for a season, creative constructs are an integral part of a dream lifestyle. Creative Constructs consist of setting parameters that let you work, learn and play; meet new people, relax and have an experience that is long enough to be meaningful, but not so long that you’re committing to a whole different lifestyle long-term or indefinitely.

Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload by Mark Hurst

en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Google Earth, mail merge, off-the-grid, pre–internet, profit motive, social bookmarking, social software, software patent, web application

Important or not, read or unread, everything simply disappears, never to bother her again. When I expressed some concern about her method, she replied, “Oh, if it’s really important, they’ll write back.” There’s another possible misinterpretation of “let the bits go,” and that’s not to use bits at all. Live off the grid with no e-mail, no cell phone, no digital camera, no Internet access at all. Such a lifestyle might be appropriate for some people, but not for anyone who needs to work with digital technology. Bit literacy means engaging the bits, just as any discipline requires meeting the challenge, or the material, at hand.

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Big Tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, financial independence, Google Earth, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, TikTok, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Wall-E

[ 43 ] IGNORING PEOPLE It was useful to pretend to have no idea someone was trying to reach you when you could actually get away with it. How could you have known? You were out, you were sleeping, you were busy, you were away, you had an emergency, you didn’t get the message and you are only just hearing about this now. It was possible and believable to be off the grid. Someone else could pick up the landline when it rang and say you weren’t home. If you worked in the office, someone else could answer the phone and tell them you were unavailable. Sorry! Being online is like constantly being asked on a playdate with the kid you’ve been desperately trying to avoid, the kid who always manages to know where you are, lurking around the edge of your friend group, his mom cornering your mom at pickup time.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

A Bay Area package sorter went to work with a feeling of broken glass in her throat because she feared ending up homeless. An assistant manager at an infected Amazon warehouse on Staten Island was fired for leading a walkout after symptomatic colleagues had to keep working in order to be paid. “They’re in this building, getting sick,” he said. “And the people making all the money are comfortable off the grid somewhere, and they’re getting on TV and they’re saying everything is fine while we’re in the trenches. Jeff Bezos can kiss my ass.” An essential worker was a worker who would be fired for staying home with symptoms of the virus. Think about it enough and you realize that the miraculous price and speed of a delivery of organic microgreens from Amazon Fresh to your doorstep depends on the fact that the people who grow, sort, pack, and deliver it have to work while sick.

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hindcast, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Isaac Newton, means of production, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, post-Panamax, profit motive, Skype, standardized shipping container, statistical model, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman

There was also, among other things, a broken showerhead: when you turned it on, the showerhead and hose would pop from the plastic stall and fizz around like a demented snake. Pallister was anxious to finish all the repairs and return to Anchorage. He had people to call, donations to raise, an airlift to arrange. Out here in the wilderness, we were off the grid, incommunicado. The yacht’s sat phone was too expensive to use except in emergencies, and then, too, for the past few days, it had been on the fritz. Every extra day his crew spent out here cost Pallister more money. He was also racing against the seasons. Fall comes early to the Kenai Peninsula’s outer coast.

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Then I saw the silvery flock dive below the waves. Flying fish! I said to myself. Like the ones suspended over the plastic waves in the dolphin diorama at the American Museum of Natural History! By noon on that first day, the Hawaiian Islands, by some measures the most isolated islands on earth, had sunk below the northern horizon. We were off the grid, out of contact, out of sight, beating our way south, in oceans three miles deep. By dinnertime, we were fifty miles south of South Point, conducting our fourth sample of the day, letting the sails luff. The seas had moderated a little. According to Moore, we were now at sea state 5 on the Beaufort scale.

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, clean water, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, land tenure, mental accounting, microdosing, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, off grid, off-the-grid, Right to Buy, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

., estimated the temperature had climbed to 37 degrees, or as my mind translated it, almost 100. “Drink,” the water lab technician reminded me. I lifted my bottle to my lips and without thinking, drained it. A first-world privilege, this—to be thoughtless about water. We were at the ankles of the West Bank, far off the grid, in the cab of Ahmad’s dusty truck. Ahmad, twenty-nine, Palestinian, comes from a town northwest of Hebron called Halhul. With his light-brown skin, gelled hair, gold chain, slim-fitting jeans, and Nikes, he could pass for one of the Dominican guys in my neighborhood back home in New York City.

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We stuffed ourselves silly with qatayef, coffee, and dates until at last we were full. I gazed up at the sky, now punched through with a thousand stars, and streaked with meteors. Its perfect clarity made me gasp. That night felt free in part because no veil of light pollution obscured it. We were at the edge of the world, in the Milky Way. We were that far off the grid. Journey to the West Bank Mario Vargas Llosa 1. In the 1970s I was quite active in the defense of Israel, getting myself involved in many polemical exchanges. At that time in Latin America it was fashionable, not only amongst the far left but also the moderate left and a great number of centrist and right-wing organizations, to attack Israel.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Along the way, we’ve developed an ad hoc tolerance for these gestures, as well as a shared familiarity and understanding. Who hasn’t stopped an activity mid-stride so that a friend can send out some update about it? Who hasn’t done it himself? On the social web, the person who doesn’t share is subscribing to an outmoded identity and can’t be included in the new social space. If not off the grid, he or she simply isn’t on the grid that matters—he may have e-mail, but he’s not on Facebook, or he’s present but not using it enough. (The prevailing term for this is “lurker,” an old online message board term, slightly pejorative, describing someone who reads the board but doesn’t post.) It’s not uncommon to ask why a friend is on Twitter but rarely tweets, or why she often likes Facebook statuses but never posts her own.

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No one should be able to impose his definition of privacy on you. We also will have to reclaim privacy from the crowd that says it no longer exists—that it’s just a myth—and from nostalgists who tend to view it mythically, as some prelapsarian state that can be recovered. We can’t return to a pre-digital world of living off the grid, which never existed in the first place, but we can better understand the relationship between this flood of personal data and its uneasy relationship with privacy. WHAT EXACTLY IS PRIVACY? Privacy remains a difficult subject in part because there’s no standard conception of what it is.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

biofilm, bioinformatics, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Drosophila, energy security, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Hernando de Soto, hygiene hypothesis, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, peak oil, pneumatic tube, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker, women in the workforce

But compared with his voluble, flamboyant mentor, Miller comes across as very much the Protestant baker, spare with his pronouncements and something of an ascetic. Though he used to own bakeries and manage employees (including Chad Robertson), for the past seven years he has stripped his vocation down to its Thoreauvian essentials: one man, some sacks of wheat, a couple of machines, and an oven. Miller’s Bake House is almost completely off the grid: Solar panels power the mill and the cold room where he retards his loaves, and the Italian deck oven is fired with wood that he chops himself. I asked if the wood imparted flavor to the bread. “It’s not about the flavor. It’s that I would rather not be a party to wars for oil.” The afternoon I visited, Miller was agonizing over whether to add a pinch of ascorbic acid—often used to strengthen low-protein flours—to his Kamut dough.

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As with cooking, it offers your body an energy savings. Unlike cooking, however, the energy required to ferment food does not need to come from burning wood or fossil fuel. It is self-generated, by the metabolism of microbes breaking down the substrate. Fermentation can easily be done off the grid, a quality that commends it to the enviros, anarchists, and peak-oil types who help make up the subculture. “The historical bubble of refrigeration may not last,” Katz likes to point out. When that particular bubble bursts, you’re going to want to know people like Sandor Katz and microbes like L. plantarum.

Fodor's Oregon by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, off-the-grid, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, tech bro, tech worker, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

(Ch. 3) 3 Crater Lake’s blue waters Crater Lake reaches depths of nearly 2,000 feet and sunlight filters down 400 feet, making it one of the most striking sights in the West. (Ch. 8) 4 Drive Oregon’s byways For a wild road trip, check out Oregon’s lesser-known scenic byways, which loop through river gorges, the sunny high desert, and off-the-grid territory far from the reaches of cell towers. (Ch. 4, 6) 5 Stroll the Gardens Portland is blessed with several beautiful gardens and stopping at the International Rose Test Garden and Japanese Garden in Washington Park is a fragrant must. 6 Time travel at the Painted Hills Part of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, the distinctive stripes seen in the Painted Hills represent more than 30 million years of geological history.

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Le Guin set this award-winning 1971 novel in a futuristic and dystopian version of Portland (in 2002). There have been two TV movies made from the book. LEAVE NO TRACE The critically acclaimed 2018 movie is based on the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock—itself inspired by a true story—and follows the plight of a military veteran and his daughter who live off the grid in Portland’s expansive Forest Park until being found and relocated to a Christmas tree farm in rural Oregon. MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO Locally based LGBTQ+ indie director Gus Van Sant’s 1991 drama, starring Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix, was filmed primarily in Portland, with many scenes at what is now the posh Sentinel hotel.

Fodor's Hawaii 2013 by Fodor's

big-box store, carbon footprint, Easter island, gentrification, global village, Maui Hawaii, new economy, off-the-grid, out of africa, polynesian navigation, three-masted sailing ship, urban sprawl

While Mother Nature rarely gives her itinerary in advance, if you’re lucky, a hike or boat ride may pay off with spectacular views of nature’s wonder. Sunrise and sunset makes for the best viewing opportunities. Go horseback riding in Waipio Valley. The Valley of the Kings owes its relative isolation and off-the-grid status to the two-thousand-foot cliffs book-ending the valley. Really, the only way to explore this sacred place is on two legs—or four. We’re partial to the horseback rides that wend deep into the rain forest to a series of waterfalls and pools—the setting for a perfect romantic getaway. Kauai Tour Napali Coast by boat.

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. | 1 mile inland from Hwy. 19 en route to Akaka Falls State Park | 96728. Fodor’s Choice | Waipio Valley. Bounded by 2,000-foot cliffs, the “Valley of the Kings” was once a favorite retreat of Hawaiian royalty. Waterfalls drop 1,200 feet from the Kohala Mountains to the valley floor, and the sheer cliff faces make access difficult. Though completely off the grid today, Waipio was once a center of Hawaiian life; somewhere between 4,000 and 20,000 people made it their home between the 13th and 17th centuries. To preserve this pristine part of the island, commercial-transportation permits are limited—only five outfitters offer organized valley trips and they’re not allowed to take visitors to the beach: environmental laws protect the swath of black sand.

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The large common room with its stunning ocean views and lava-rock fireplace is a big attraction, especially at the wine tasting–and–hors d’oeuvres hour each evening. Pros: eco-friendly hotel; hot and healthy breakfast; beautiful views. Cons: very remote location; unreliable phone access. TripAdvisor: “a gorgeous getaway,” “beautiful and tasty breakfasts,” “off the grid.” | Rooms from: $210 | 45-3503 Kahana Dr. | Honokaa | Honokaa | 96727 | 888/775–2577, 808/775–1118 | www.waianuhea.com | 4 rooms, 1 suite | Breakfast. Waipio Wayside. $ | B&B/INN | Nestled amid the avocado, mango, coffee, and kukui trees of a historic plantation estate (circa 1932), this serene inn provides a retreat close to the Waipio Valley.

The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs by Nicolas Pineault

Albert Einstein, en.wikipedia.org, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, off-the-grid, precautionary principle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter

Dirty Electricity: Electrification and the Diseases of Civilization. iUniverse © 2017 N&G Media Inc. 12 Instead of staying within the usual 50-60 Hz range, Dirty Electricity is a bum who likes to emit a lot of EMFs in what are called the intermediate frequencies — ranging from 300 Hz to 10 MHz.12 What this all means in plain English: when the electricity in your home or workplace is dirty, it constantly irradiates these spikes of intermediate frequency Electric Fields which can have serious health effects according to Miller — especially those between 2 kHz and 100 kHz in the Radio Frequency (RF) range. 13 12 See Magda Havas’ video “Dirty Electricity Explained” at youtube.com/watch?v=vbebpRvwd8k © 2017 N&G Media Inc. We Live In A Big EMF Soup Unless you decided to live off the grid, never use a smartphone, destroy your wifi router and stick to candlelight inside your home — you’re constantly getting exposed to man-made EMFs, at levels millions of times higher than what you would naturally be exposed to in nature. As I’m writing these lines, my cool-looking wireless mouse is emitting a 2.4 GHz RF signal at a pulse of 500 times a second13 in order connect with my MacBook Pro laptop.

Simply Living Well: A Guide to Creating a Natural, Low-Waste Home by Julia Watkins

airport security, big-box store, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, demand response, Mason jar, microplastics / micro fibres, off-the-grid

The recipes and tips in this book reflect those values every bit as much as they offer ways for individuals to reduce their personal waste while demanding responsibility from businesses and governments. My first encounter with zero-waste was in Africa, nearly twenty years ago. I was serving in the Peace Corps and living in a remote village in the West African country of Guinea. Rural, roadless, and entirely off the grid, life in my village was resolutely zero-waste—mostly because there was so very little to waste in the first place. Practically everything was made by hand, often from materials drawn directly from the natural world. Manufactured goods that did find their way to the village, once they’d fulfilled their intended function, were repurposed and reused, usually until they had nearly disintegrated from so much wear and tear.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

The final phase in Catherine’s plan is the “trial separation”—a twenty-four-hour period in which you don’t use your phone at all. (I’m an overachiever, so I aimed for forty-eight hours.) I booked an Airbnb on a farm a few hours away, set my out-of-office autoresponder, and my wife and I took off for a weekend of off-the-grid leisure. A phone-free mini-vacation involved some complications. Without Google Maps, we got lost and had to pull over for directions. Without Yelp, we had trouble finding open restaurants. But mostly, it was an amazing two days, filled with the kinds of small, subtle pleasures I hadn’t experienced in years.

Costa Rica by Matthew Firestone, Carolina Miranda, César G. Soriano

airport security, Berlin Wall, centre right, desegregation, illegal immigration, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the payments system, trade route, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

If you’re not traveling with a buddy, a pocket mirror will also help as these little buggers have a habit of turning up in some rather uncomfortable places. Return to beginning of chapter Getting There & Around The best option for exploring the peninsula in depth is to have your own private transportation. However, you will need to bring a spare tire (and plenty of patience): roads in Osa are extremely poor, as most of the peninsula is still off the grid. Major towns in Osa such as Golfito and Puerto Jiménez are serviced by regular buses, though public transportation can get sporadic once you leave these major hubs. Unpaved roads can also make for a long and jarring bus ride, so it’s probably best to bring a rolled-up fleece for your bottom and an mp3 player for your sanity.

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Offshore in the bay itself, schools and pods of migrating dolphins flit through turquoise waters. Of course, one of the reasons why Bahía Drake is brimming with wildlife is that it remains largely cut off from the rest of the country. With little infrastructure beyond dirt roads and the occasional airstrip, most of the area remains off the grid. However, Bahía Drake is home to a number of stunning wilderness lodges, which all serve as ideal bases for exploring this veritable ecological gem. And of course, if you’re planning on visiting Sirena ranger station in Corcovado (Click here), you can trek south along the coastline and enter the park at San Pedrillo ranger station.

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With so much virgin nature at their disposal, kids can be kids as they swim, snorkel, hike, ride and boat their way through the great outdoors. Accommodations are also varied, allowing you to either spoil your family with eco-luxury, or win them over with rustic charm. Return to beginning of chapter Sleeping & Eating This area is off the grid, so many places do not have electricity (pack a flashlight) or hot water. Reservations are recommended in the dry season (mid-November to the end of April). While budget and midrange options are available, accommodations in Bahía Drake are heavily skewed toward the top end. But, you can expect tremendous quality and service for your dollars, especially as you ascend the price ladder.

Lonely Planet Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy, Kevin Raub

California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, Colonization of Mars, company town, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, QR code, rewilding, satellite internet, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence

NATURE Parque Nacional Chiloé and Parque Tantauco protect rainforest with native wildlife. To meet Magellanic and Humboldt penguins, visit Monumento Natural Islotes de Puñihuil. Click here Northern Patagonia Culture Outdoors Nature CULTURE Long the most isolated part of Chile, Patagonia’s northern region is a cowboy stronghold. Visit rural settlers off the grid who live in harmony with a wicked and whimsical mother nature. OUTDOORS Land the big one fly-fishing, raft wild rivers or mosey into the backcountry on a fleece-mounted saddle. Scenery and real adventure abound on the Carretera Austral, Chile’s unpaved southern road. NATURE Patagonia can get pretty wild.

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Fishing, trekking and horseback riding are king here and each offers days of satiating adventures in the area. LLANADA GRANDE & BEYOND After the lake crossing at Tagua-Tagua, the gravel road continues by mountainsides peppered with patches of dead coigüe trees (killed by fire but tragically pretty) and lands still traversed by gaucho families on horseback. This is Llanada Grande – you are now off the grid. A system of pioneer homes and rustic B&Bs is in place for travelers here (inquire at Campo Eggers), making your treks and horseback rides feel a little less touristy, a little more cultural. The road is being slowly forged all the way to Argentina, though Argentina has no plans to continue it on their side.

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Expresos Tenaún ( 09-9500-3305) runs four buses between Castro and Tenaún Monday to Saturday (CH$1500, 1½ hours), and two on Sunday, stopping in Dalcahue along the way. The schedule is posted on the window of Minimercado Ita on the main road through town. About 3km before Tenaún coming from Dalcahue is the turn off for San Juan, a tiny village even more off the grid. After 6km, the road plunges into a serene bay surrounded by picturesque pastoral countryside, leading to Iglesia de San Juan Bautista (1887), another Unesco wooden house of worship sitting in the tiny grassed village square. Hospedaje Elizabeth ( 09-8866-6570; hospedaje.elizabeth-sanjuan@hotmail.com; r without bathroom CH$5000) is dead simple and cramped but offers both sea and church views.

Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Depending on the waves, winds and tide, the tones emitted by the organ can sound like nervous humming, a gurgling baby or prank-call heavy breathing. Fort Mason HISTORIC SITE ( 415-345-7500; www.fortmason.org) Army sergeants would be scandalized by the frolicking at this former military outpost, including comedy improv workshops, vegetarian brunches at Greens (Click here) and Off the Grid ( Click here ), where gourmet trucks circle like pioneer wagons. THE PRESIDIO Presidio Visitors Center HISTORIC BUILDING ( 415-561-4323; www.nps.gov/prsf; cnr Montgomery St & Lincoln Blvd; 9am-5pm) San Francisco’s official motto is still ‘Oro in Paz, Fierro in Guerra’ (Gold in Peace, Iron in War), but its main base hasn’t seen much military action since it was built by conscripted Ohlone as a Spanish presidio (military post) in 1776.

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The Grove AMERICAN $ ( 415-474-1419; 2016 Fillmore St; dishes $8-12; 7am-11pm; ) Rough-hewn recycled wood and a stone fireplace give this Fillmore St cafe ski-lodge coziness for made-to-order breakfasts, working lunches with salads, sandwiches and wi-fi, and chat sessions with warm-from-the-oven cookies and hot cocoa. THE MARINA & COW HOLLOW Off the Grid FOOD TRUCKS $ (http://offthegridsf.com; Fort Mason parking lot; dishes under $10; 5-10pm Fri; ) Some 30 food trucks circle their wagons at SF’s largest mobile-gourmet hootenanny (other nights/locations attract less than a dozen trucks; see website). Arrive before 6:30pm or expect 20-minute waits for Chairman Bao’s clamshell buns stuffed with duck and mango, Roli Roti’s free-range herbed roast chicken, or dessert from The Crème Brûlée Man.

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Screamin’ Mimi DESSERT $ ( 707-823-5902; www.screaminmimisicecream.com; 6902 Sebastopol Ave; 11am-10pm) Delish homemade ice cream. Drinking & Entertainment Hardcore Espresso CAFE ( 707-823-7588; 1798 Gravenstein Hwy S; 6am-7pm; ) Meet local hippies and art freaks over coffee and smoothies at this classic Nor-Cal off-the-grid, indoor-outdoor coffeehouse that’s essentially a corrugated-metal-roofed shack surrounded by umbrella tables. The organic coffee is the town’s best. Hopmonk Tavern PUB ( 707-829-7300; www.hopmonk.com; 230 Petaluma Ave; 11:30am-10pm, later weekends) Always-fun beer garden with 76 craft brews, several housemade.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Acxiom Corporation, “Personicx Online Guide: 06 Casual Comfort,” 2014. 4. If you’re not sure how important this is, read security expert Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). Twenty bucks says you’ll want to throw your phone in a river and move to a cabin off the grid by the time you’re done. 5. Andrew J. Hawkins, “Uber Wants to Track Your Location Even When You’re Not Using the App,” Verge, November 30, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/30/13763714/uber-location-data-tracking-app-privacy-ios-android. 6. Jon Russell, “Uber’s Moral Compass Needs Recalibration,” TechCrunch, November 19, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/uber-off. 7.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

I began to sleep better, and old songs would randomly pop into my head as the available space in my brain got freed up. I also became less anxious and more present in my daily life. According to the people around me, including my mother-in-law, the results were noticeable—I’d officially got my old, “pre-phone” self back. And it felt good. To this day I still take weekends off the grid and try to have entire days without any electronic gadgets. Obviously, I’m not saying that technology is all bad. My career and life have clearly been transformed by YouTube and that whole universe, but there certainly seems to be a weird link between today’s hyperpartisan divisions and our mass, 24-7 connectivity.

The Weed Runners: Travels With the Outlaw Capitalists of America's Medical Marijuana Trade by Nicholas Schou

facts on the ground, failed state, fixed income, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan

Hoxter’s girlfriend was a stunner, and the happy couple was soon in Vancouver unloading four hundred pounds of pot, which is how Hoxter met a friend of a friend nicknamed Art Nouveau, who became his partner in crime for the next twenty-five years. Thanks to his connections in Vancouver, a group of hippies who were the biggest pot dealers in British Columbia, Hoxter was never short of work when it came to smuggling weed. He spent most of the 1970s living off the grid at the Family’s commune in Montana, raising chickens and pigs and running pot across the border, one thousand pounds at a time. Every month a truck would come from Southern California, full of marijuana from Mexico. Hoxter had a collection of US Forestry Service topographical maps, and knew all the unused service roads that led to the Canadian border.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Perriello’s office put them in touch with officials in Richmond, who said that food-grade canola wouldn’t qualify for a stimulus grant. Instead, Red Birch was encouraged to apply for a grant toward the purchase of a microturbine, which could generate electricity from the glycerin waste left over from making biofuel, take the refinery off the grid, and create a new income stream when Red Birch sold some of the power to other users. Dean got the application in just a few minutes ahead of the deadline. In January 2010, Perriello came to Martinsville to announce the award of $750,000 in federal stimulus funds for Red Birch to buy a microturbine.

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He had known for years, though he had told only a couple of people, always saving it up as his last thought at night before falling asleep. First, he would build a great big house, a mansion, just like the one Moses Cone, the nineteenth-century denim baron of Greensboro, built looking out over the Blue Ridge Mountains, with gables and dormers and huge front porches all painted white. Dean’s would be off the grid, with geothermal heat and air-conditioning, and solar panels on the roof. Then he would fill this sprawling house with abandoned children. The house would sit on a farm, a working farm, so that he could teach these children whom no one else wanted the skills and the ethic of that life—teach them to be Jefferson’s cultivators of the earth, the most valuable citizens, the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

Why wouldn’t they just dispose of it?” “I don’t know. Possibly they intended to use it again and didn’t know about the Saturnian tracking system.” “I don’t like it.” “Neither do I.” “Maybe this ship is from the unaffiliateds,” Swan said. “Off record from the start.” “Are there ships entirely off the grid?” Wahram asked. “Yes,” Genette said briefly, plugging cords from Passepartout into ports on one of the consoles. “I have its data,” Passepartout said. “Let’s get out of here,” Genette said. “Passepartout says the balloons holding this thing up have been punctured. They’re big, but we need to get out of this thing before it starts falling fast.”

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She looked slightly electrocuted, one might say. She had been on Earth for the reanimation, so no doubt that had made her happy. But there was also a new set to her mouth, a little chisel mark between her eyebrows. “Wahram sent me to say you need to get out to a meeting on Titan,” she said. “It’s Alex’s group, and they’re meeting off the grid to discuss something important. Something about qubes. I’m going to go too. So can you tell me what this is all about?” Buying a little time to think it over, Genette brought the boat about and had Swan change pontoons. Once set on the new course, a tug on the mainsheet tilted her upright. She grinned a little fiercely at this sailor’s evasion, shook her head; she would not be distracted.

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, clean water, glass ceiling, hindcast, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), LNG terminal, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, profit motive, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method

If, in the future, those industries are able to overcome the many intractable problems involved in making dilute, unreliable energy into cheap, plentiful, reliable energy on a world scale, that would be fantastic. But it is dishonest to pretend that anything like that has happened or that there is a reason to think it will happen. To be sure, solar, wind, and biomass may have their utility for niche uses of energy. If you’re living off the grid and can afford it, an installation with a battery that can power a few appliances might be better than the alternative (no energy, or frequently returning to civilization for diesel fuel), but they are essentially useless in providing cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for 7 billion people—and to try to rely on them would be deadly.

And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East by Richard Engel

East Village, friendly fire, invisible hand, Mohammed Bouazizi, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, satellite internet, Skype, Yom Kippur War

Then an equal number of ISIS teenagers, wearing sand-colored clothes and tan headscarves, filed past the stage, with a soundtrack of musical chants giving them a heroic air. They mounted the stage, each taking a place behind one of the soldiers, pointed handguns at the Syrians’ heads, and pulled the triggers at the same time. ISIS had become more than a savage terrorist group; it had also become a state of mind, a place off the grid of humanity where only ISIS rules mattered. While most of the horrific acts given an ISIS label were committed by “core” members in the caliphate, a growing number were carried out by “branches,” “offshoots,” or “affiliates” inspired by ISIS—or lone-wolf copycats turned on by ISIS snuff videos.

Girl Walks Into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle by Rachel Dratch

Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, East Village, Haight Ashbury, off-the-grid, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, the High Line

Little did we know the dog show we were going to weren’t no Westminster. I think it was some sort of preliminary round to get to the big time. We walked in and found it was held in this superdepressing arena that had rooms but looked like a warehouse. Unkempt people who looked as if they’d been living “off the grid” sat in canvas folding chairs surrounded by dog paraphernalia. Bumper stickers and old signs hung everywhere saying I HEART MY WESTIE or CAUTION—WIGGLEBUTT ZONE! and MY NEWFIE IS SMARTER THAN OUR PRESIDENT! Larger breeds like mastiffs and Saint Bernards were splayed out on the floor, eyes rolling up as if to say, “Get me the hell out of this stank hole.”

The Quantum Curators and the Fabergé Egg: A Fast Paced Portal Adventure by Eva St. John

3D printing, Berlin Wall, clean water, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, off grid, off-the-grid, performance metric

The more you use it, the better it understands how you think and helps make the leaps for you.’ Julius’ jaw dropped. That sounded incredible, and he hit Google for early Beta versions of it, but came up blank. ‘Is it spelt Tiresias, like the blind Greek seer?’ ‘Yes, but don’t bother trying to find it. This is completely off the grid.’ Julius glared into his coffee and returned to the keyboard. As the hours past he became more engrossed in various leads, but nothing seemed to be making sense. He was aware of Neith working alongside him, but her concentration was also fixed on the screen. As well as trying to break the clue, the other three were trying to see if the egg had surfaced anywhere, or if they could track the location of Paul.

The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty by Ethan Sherwood Strauss

Broken windows theory, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, Gavin Belson, hive mind, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, Larry Ellison, off-the-grid, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs

If you wish to use your phone, say, to continue important communication with your wife about the day’s schedule, you’re in for an inundation of You. There’s no avoidance possible, if you wish to live in modernity. Waste is spilling into the ego’s reservoir no matter what. Only the Luddite, with his off-the-grid rainwater buckets, can sufficiently guard peace of mind. Following your reputation is a path to madness. Deep down I’d always known there was a dark side to the narcissism that keeps me checking Twitter mentions, but my defects were never so obvious as when scaled up like this. Your heart pounds as you watch these clips of talking heads debating your reputation.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

The company’s most promising tools are making it possible for anyone to invent, and Scott started describing them. For instance, Lobe, a company Microsoft acquired in 2018, enables people with limited technical skills to build machine learning–powered programs. One of Lobe’s cofounders—with little knowledge of the underlying AI—used it to build a program that monitors the water tank levels in his off-the-grid house. With a web camera and some labeling, Scott told me, Lobe was able to identify a weight on the tank connected via rope to a float inside. As the weight moved up the tank, the program understood the water was going down, and updated the tank’s levels. “You feed these images into a machine-learning system.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh

East Village, illegal immigration, index card, messenger bag, off-the-grid, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, rent control, white picket fence

I didn’t mind at all that when Reva finally came home and wrestled the bathroom door open, she shrieked, expressed her grave concern for my sanity, all while rushing me out the door, I guessed, because she had a stomach full of junk she wanted to puke up. I left the pills with her, all but the Infermiterol. At home, I called a locksmith, arranged a meeting with Ping Xi for the following afternoon, and called Dr. Tuttle to tell her I was going off the grid for the next four months. “Hopefully I won’t ever need to see you again,” I told her. “People say that to me all the time,” she said. That was the last time we spoke. Seven “ARE YOU SURE you won’t wear this stuff? What if I stretch something out, and then you want it back?”

Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path by Erin Loechner

clean water, fear of failure, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, Kintsugi, late fees, Mason jar, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is nearly midnight, and I have almost forgotten. As we wait for our driver, Washington, to pull the van around, I dig past our passports to find my phone. I will be deleting four apps this week: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. With each click of the X on an app’s upper right-hand corner, I feel farther from home. I am off the grid, in another country. I am stepping into a world that was created for me. I am stepping away, briefly, from the world I have created for myself. Washington pulls to the empty curb in a big white van with pink dust collected on the hubcaps. “Welcome to Ecuador,” he says with a wide smile as he gathers our bags.

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar

anti-communist, disinformation, off-the-grid, Skype, Tunguska event

When I wasn’t in school, you could find me fishing or surfing in the warm coastal waters. In the summer of 1987, when I was fifteen, I took a trip with my father to the surfers’ playground of Costa Rica. It was my first trip out of the country, and at a time when tourists were not yet flocking to Central America. The resources available to off-the-grid travelers were limited, and my dad and I had to rely on mail-order maps to direct us to the country’s best surf beaches. When the maps arrived, I’d spread them out on the kitchen table and study the curves of the coastline and the comically specific instructions that hinted at adventure: “Pay off the locals with colones to access this gate” or “look for huge tree near river mouth to find wave.”

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

While the British had made an attempt to prohibit western migration through the Proclamation of 1763, the Revolutionary War removed such barriers and acquiesced to the flood of poorer migrants. Both crackers and squatters—two terms that became shorthand for landless migrants—supposedly stayed just one step ahead of the “real” farmers, Jefferson’s idealized, commercially oriented cultivators. They lived off the grid, rarely attended a school or joined a church, and remained a potent symbol of poverty. To be lower class in rural America was to be one of the landless. They disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down (occupied tracts without possessing a land title) anywhere and everywhere. If land-based analogies were still needed, they were not to be divided into grades of soil, as Jefferson had creatively conceived, but spread about as scrub foliage or, in bestial terms, mangy varmints infesting the land.4 The plight of the squatter was defined by his static nature and transient existence.

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She rejected the idea that anyone could escape the cycle of poverty—not if it meant leaving one’s “homeland,” “family,” and “roots.” The tribal nature of poor whites was their strength. The sense of place and of land was their only ballast.11 Over the next fifteen years, Chute’s politics sharpened. In 1985, she did not call herself a redneck, but by 2000 she did. She lived off the grid, without modern plumbing, and until 2002 without a computer; she continued to wear work boots and bandanas. By now, “redneck” was a symbol of working-class populism for Chute. She organized her own Maine militia group, supported gun rights, and became an outspoken critic of corporate power. There was, she wrote in a postscript to the revised version of The Beans of Egypt in 1995, a “dangerous chasm in the classes [that] is alive and well in the United States of America.”

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

Start your visit at the Salton Sea History Museum, located at 72–120 South Lincoln Street, Mecca. 33.253533 115.710179 Sun-bleached and over-salinated, Salton Sea turned from a resort paradise to a wasteland. Slab City NILAND An elephant made of shredded tires and scrap metal holds court at East Jesus, an off-the-grid artists’ community in the Sonoran Desert. Known to its residents as “the last free place,” Slab City is an isolated, off-the-grid desert community of squatters. Established in the early 1960s on a former United States Marine Corps training base, it is home to a motley mix of artists, travelers, retirees, and snowbirds. There is no local government, no running water, and no waste disposal system.

Frommer's San Francisco 2012 by Matthew Poole, Erika Lenkert, Kristin Luna

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, El Camino Real, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, off-the-grid, place-making, Port of Oakland, post-work, San Francisco homelessness, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration, young professional

• Best Cafe: If you want to know what life was like before Starbucks, spend some time at North Beach’s beloved Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store, 566 Columbus Ave. ( 415/362-0536), and Caffe Trieste, 601 Vallejo St. ( 415/392-6739). Fine dining on the sidewalk. Sample this cart and nearly 30 others Friday nights at Off the Grid, Fort Maison Center. • Best Food Truck Sampling: Food truck fans, we have found your Utopia, and it is called Off the Grid, a daily roving food court of trucks. Go to http://offthegridsf.com for locations and participants. Fridays sample nearly 30 vendors, 5 to 10pm at Fort Maison Center. Price Categories The restaurants listed below are classified first by area, then by price, using the following categories: Very Expensive, dinner from $75 per person; Expensive, dinner from $50 per person; Moderate, dinner from $35 per person; and Inexpensive, dinner less than $35 per person.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

—DAN RATHER CHAPTER 1 Closet of Secrets Times Square, Manhattan I was still covered in dust when my editors told me to surrender my devices, take an oath of silence, and step into Arthur Sulzberger’s storage closet in July of 2013. Just days earlier I’d been driving across the Maasai Mara in an open jeep, wrapping up a three-week trek across Kenya. I had hoped a few weeks off the grid would help repair nerves frayed by two years covering cyberterrorism. My sources kept insisting that this was just the beginning—that things would only get worse. I was only thirty then, but already felt the immense burden of my assigned subject. When I got the call to join the New York Times in 2010, I was writing magazine cover stories from Silicon Valley about venture capitalists who, by sheer luck or skill, had invested early in Facebook, Instagram, and Uber and were now all too aware of their celebrity status.

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“He quit his job and has been hiking the Appalachian Trail.” The Fed wouldn’t give me his name. But he did tell me this: he was not Israeli. And he’d never worked for Cellebrite. He was just another American hacker moonlighting as a mercenary. The whole time I’d been hunting for him in Miami, he was off the grid, walking a lonely narrow dirt path somewhere between Georgia and Maine. PART VI The Twister The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking … the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. —ALBERT EINSTEIN CHAPTER 17 Cyber Gauchos Buenos Aires, Argentina Our cab charged through a red light, knocking the bumper off another car.

Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Car-campers and travelers in RVs (recreational vehicles) won't have that same solitude; California’s state and national parks fill up every weekend in high season. Still, with such a diversity between the regional, state, county and federal campgrounds, there are campgrounds near and far to get you off the grid. Even RVs are (sometimes) accommodated at the super-basic (but often free!) national forest campgrounds. If you didn’t bring a tent, you can rent or buy camping gear in most cities – find good deals at REI (www.rei.com) in San Francisco and Sacramento. NO RESERVATIONS? If you can’t get reservations, call or show up to the campground between 10am and noon, when other campers are leaving.

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Taylor Maid FarmsCAFE ( GOOGLE MAP ; %707-634-7129; www.taylormaidfarms.com; 6790 McKinley St, Barlow; h6:30am-6pm Sun-Thu, to 7pm Fri, 7am-7pm Sat)S Choose your brew method (drip, press etc) at this third-wave coffeehouse that roasts its own organic beans. Exceptional seasonal drinks include lavender lattes. Hardcore EspressoCAFE ( GOOGLE MAP ; %707-823-7588; 81 Bloomfield Rd; h5am-7pm Mon-Fri, 6am-7pm Sat & Sun; W)S Meet local hippies and artists over coffee and smoothies at this classic NorCal, off-the-grid, indoor-outdoor coffeehouse, south of downtown, that’s essentially a corrugated-metal-roofed shack surrounded by umbrella tables. 7Shopping Antique shops line Gravenstein Hwy S toward Hwy 101. Funk & FlashCLOTHING ( GOOGLE MAP ; %707-829-1142; www.funkandflash.com; 228 S Main St; h11am-7pm) Disco-glam party clothes, inspired by Burning Man.

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Other facilities in the village don’t start operating until mid-May. oSequoia High Sierra CampCABIN$$ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %866-654-2877; www.sequoiahighsierracamp.com; tent cabins without bath incl all meals adult/child $250/150; hmid-Jun–mid-Sep) A mile's hike deep into the Sequoia National Forest, this off-the-grid, all-inclusive resort is nirvana for those who don’t think luxury camping is an oxymoron. Canvas bungalows are spiffed up with pillow-top mattresses, feather pillows and cozy wool rugs. Restrooms and a shower house are shared. Reservations are required, and there's usually a two-night minimum stay.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

One of the smartest immunological strategies to mimic is the ability to operate at full capacity even during the heat of battle. This resilience involves a level of humility and acceptance unusual for the military mind-set common to cybersecurity outfits. But as Forrest’s research indicates, it may be the only safe way forward, short of following In-Q-Tel executive Dan Geer’s example and simply staying as far off the grid as possible.17 PS: Making Peace with Chaos, or Expecting the Unexpected I have a personal relationship with this principle because I was raised to value strength, but the circumstances of my adult life have required a unique degree of resilience. In January 2008 my son was diagnosed with “global developmental delays.”

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

• Divert gasoline to the region’s filling stations. There were fuel shortages in the Katrina evacuation. • In an authentic emergency, most people can’t leave fast enough, but you have to worry about three classes of stragglers: those who refuse to go; those who can’t evacuate without help (they’re disabled or in hospitals); and those so off the grid that they won’t hear about the evacuation (probably, many of them homeless or elderly). As a legal and practical matter, there’s not much that can be done when a resident chooses to stay behind. Efforts are better spent canvassing neighborhoods for people who want to evacuate but need help. Put into service all the existing dial-a-ride vans and ambulances, as they have special facilities for the frail and disabled

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Since the muses of ancient Greece and accounts of Jehovah’s invention of the world, creativity has been linked to divinity, and even in modern secular circles, it’s often romanticized as mostly talent. Many other qualities are important to it, however, beginning with the capacity for both highly targeted, knowledge-based “convergent” thinking that searches for logical solutions to a problem and especially the freewheeling “divergent” type that ranges far off the grid to find new options. Along with knowledge, motivation, discipline, intelligence, confidence, and risk-taking, creativity calls for attention, from the almost subliminal awareness of a gestating idea to the conscious top-down “Eureka” on its realization. When we imagine Einstein coming up with E=MC2 or Michelangelo sketching the design for the Sistine ceiling, we envision these protean creators lost in rapt attention to their great breakthroughs.

Rigged Money: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game by Lee Munson

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, call centre, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, follow your passion, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, High speed trading, housing crisis, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, off-the-grid, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, power law, price discovery process, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, short squeeze, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, too big to fail, trade route, Vanguard fund, walking around money

Figure 9.2 $100,000 Gold Certificate Printed by the U.S. Treasury in 1934 It reminds me of a book, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder. I was researching this book while spending time in a Taos Earthship, The Dobson House. Unlike people, earthships are types of homes that don’t need gold to survive; they are off the grid and made of old tires and beer bottles. I was searching for the meaning of money, but only found a warm hot spring. The book is a factual account of the 1857 sinking of the SS Central America. A passenger ship retuning from the California Gold Rush, it was carrying what was then around $2 million in gold.

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

This is key to how India’s urban dual economy functions. A smal base of employers who can afford to make cal s effectively subsidizes a massive base of service staff who can’t afford it but have no other way to be connected. Being poor in India isn’t about money. It’s about having no permanence, identity, and living off the grid. The cel phone is the lifeline, in the same way that education is the way out and connections are the way up. Telecom is the greenfield opportunity India got right, and that’s mostly because of a few scrappy private companies, not the government. There is concern about the proliferation of towers dotting the cityscapes, but those are problems to solve later.

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

According to Eberstadt, growing reliance on government for help is undermining Americans’ “fierce and principled independence,” our “proud self-reliance.” Is this really reason for concern? Eberstadt’s alarm stems from his deployment of a misleading dichotomy. In his view, people are either givers or takers—taxpayers or benefit recipients. But this is mistaken. Each of us is both a giver and a taker. Every American who doesn’t live entirely off the grid pays some taxes. Anyone who is an employee pays payroll taxes, and anyone who purchases things at a store pays sales taxes. Likewise, every American receives benefits from government—if you or your children have attended a public school, if you’ve driven on a road, if you’ve had a drink of tap water or taken a shower in your dwelling, if you’ve deducted mortgage interest payments or a business expense from your federal income taxes, if you haven’t been stricken by polio, if you’ve never had a band of thugs remove you from your home at gunpoint, if you’ve visited a park or lounged on a beach or hiked a mountain trail, if you’ve used the Internet, and on and on.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

He wanted to prevent any claim that he was some type of a foreign agent, which would be easier to make had he spent this period in hiding. He had set out to demonstrate, he said, that his movements could be accounted for, there was no conspiracy, and he was acting alone. To the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities, he looked like a normal businessman, not someone skulking off the grid. “I’m not planning to hide what or who I am,” he said, “so I have no reason to go into hiding and feed conspiracy theories or demonization campaigns.” Then I asked the question that had been on my mind since we first spoke online: Why had he chosen Hong Kong as his destination once he was ready to disclose the documents?

Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

But today things seem different—in degree if not always in kind—now that every click, every move has the potential to count for something, for someone somewhere somehow. Is data about you yours, or should it be, now that data collection has become an always-everywhere proposition? Try to spend a day “off the grid” and you’d better leave your credit and debit cards, transit pass, school or work ID, passport, and cell phone at home—basically, anything with a barcode, magnetic strip, RFID, or GPS receiver.2 In short, if World War II helped to usher in the era of so-called Big Science, the new millennium has arrived as the era of Big Data.3 For this reason, we think a book like “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron is particularly timely.

438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea by Jonathan Franklin

Air France Flight 447, fixed-gear, off-the-grid, Skype, the long tail

Alvarenga scanned the waves and set his course at 280 degrees west-northwest. The radio in his bucket was beeping but Alvarenga never noticed because it was buried with his clothes. Many fishermen used the radio nonstop, like truck drivers chatting on the CB, but for Alvarenga life at sea meant going off the grid. He often spent two days at sea without a single call to shore. Alvarenga sought a total escape from the static and confusion of day-to-day life onshore. As he blasted through the waves and the mountains of the coast began to hunch toward the horizon, Alvarenga was relaxed. He did not realize he was traveling west at roughly the same pace at which a huge Norteño was stealthily forming and advancing from the northeast.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

• • • • • Jaron Lanier wrote that “one good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.” This seems a good gauge to me. And I know that dropping out of our current information economy would indeed damage my livelihood, put me at odds with the “ordinary” lives of my peers. It’s this fact of the hassle—the incorrectness of dropping off the grid—that solidifies my ambition to do it. I decide that I will take that sabbatical from the future. For thirty days, I will return to something akin to the technological circumstances of my childhood. No Internet. No mobile phone. No Twitter or Facebook or text messages; no self-diagnosis of pneumonia on Mayoclinic.org.

The Lunatic Express by Carl Hoffman

airport security, low cost airline, Mercator projection, off-the-grid, out of africa, Rubik’s Cube

Except for Drew Fenton, the loudmouth on the cell phone, Greyhound was the dregs of America, the poorest of the poor. My ticket from L.A. to D.C. was more than two hundred dollars; surely I could have found a flight for more or less the same. In America if you had an Internet connection and you wanted to get somewhere you found the lowest fare and flew, but the people on the bus were people off the grid. “We’re busiest around the first of the month,” said the driver. Which meant that its passengers traveled on government checks or whatever they could scrounge. A man boarded in Vegas with nothing but a plastic sack of Coke cans and he hadn’t showered in days, along with a skinny, sickly woman with a neck covered in tattoos.

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Berlin Wall, Black Swan, business process, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, full employment, illegal immigration, index card, information security, Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, McMansion, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, off-the-grid, PageRank, personalized medicine, recommendation engine, RFID, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, workplace surveillance

For most of us, in truth, this won't make much difference. Our faces will show up along the same trails drawn by our airplane tickets, credit card bills, and—above all—our cell phones. Yet these facial images could prove vital for police. They could capture data on people who are struggling mightily to stay off the grid. A photo reader might find, for example, that the same green-eyed man with a bump in his nose and a scar on his lip has traveled at least three times this year between Newark, the rough Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, and Cairo. Does that face pop up on other databases? A global snooping network is already emerging.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, blue-collar work, cognitive dissonance, late fees, medical malpractice, obamacare, off-the-grid, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, working poor

We received one letter from the school district informing us that I had collected so many unexcused absences that my parents might be summoned before the school or even prosecuted by the city. We found this letter hilarious: One of my parents had already faced a prosecution of sorts and hardly possessed any walking-around liberty, while the other was sufficiently off the grid that “summoning” him would require some serious detective work. We also found it frightening: Without a legal guardian around to sign the letter, we didn’t know what the hell to do. But as we had with other challenges, we improvised. Lindsay forged Mom’s signature, and the school district stopped sending letters home.

Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby

4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, disinformation, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, fiat currency, Firefox, incognito mode, Julian Assange, litecoin, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, off-the-grid, operational security, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, power law, profit motive, Right to Buy, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, trade route, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

He struggled to figure out how to set the site up, and nearing the end of 2010 despaired that he still didn’t have a site, let alone a server. He asked questions on technical forums and tinkered with his idea until, eventually, he had the genesis of an anonymous online black market. But first, the owner-operator of this new black market needed something to sell. He set up a lab in a cabin ‘off the grid’ where he produced several kilos of high-quality psilocybin mushrooms, also known as magic mushrooms, a popular psychedelic. Now he had a marketplace and he had a product. It was time to find the customers. That wouldn’t be hard. The internet was rife with websites where like-minded people got together to talk about getting high.

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

In this model, the government would grant communal rather than individual leases, and residents would group together, perhaps a dozen neighbouring houses at a time, and take joint loans for the improvements they want to make. Instead of being plugged into the grid, San Agustín could be a district that operates off the grid, with solar power and a degree of autonomy. ‘Why can’t models developed for the elites function for the poor?’ asks Brillembourg. ‘Our idea was to take the worst place in the city and make it the most unique place in the city.’ This was a line of thinking that began in Petare. With Teolinda Bolívar’s research to hand, they noticed that people in Caracas’s biggest barrio tended to parcel land among family and friends.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

Grainy film prints of the place depict a veritable Eden—children of all races blissfully play as their parents braid each other’s hair and befriend the neighboring wildlife. In one image, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Maria Katsaris (one of Jones’s lovers and a member of his innermost circle) grins while placing a genial index finger on the tip of a toucan’s beak. Scrap the historical context, and it looks like the sort of humble, off-the-grid elysium where I could’ve seen any number of my progressive LA pals going to escape the Trump administration. A pet toucan sounds nice. Today, most Americans have at least heard of Jonestown, if not the name, then the iconography: a commune in the jungle, a manic preacher, poisoned punch, corpses piled in the grass.

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

Online sleuthing emerged from the untapped powers of tech, and its future will follow this same course, expanding in parallel with the standard uses of digital inventions. Environmental damage is an obvious area for future scrutiny as the climate emergency produces ever more visible effects. Open-source investigation only hits a limit with events that happen off the grid – bombings in remote parts of Afghanistan, for example, are hard to study. An extreme example came in March 2014, with the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Unless a fisherman had taken a photo that day and caught the plane going down in the background, we would never find anything.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

In the 1970s, a period of deep crisis, people joined communes or became farmers in the “back to the earth” movement. This vision of retreat is thriving today. Wistful articles detail the staying power of the Amish way of life, while YouTube is full of videos of people talking about their van life, or tiny home, or off-the-grid lifestyle. (Interestingly, most people who pursue a minimalist way of life, at least the ones we see on YouTube, seem to get rid of nearly everything except their smartphones.) As a personal or a family strategy, to retreat and get rid of or strictly limit phones as a way to deal with the issues raised here is perfectly acceptable.

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

The same man invited into the White House for photos with the president, feted as a leading North Korean human rights campaigner, and praised as the creator of what had become an international organization to help North Koreans was now “armed and dangerous” and wanted on felony crimes. In the weeks prior to the arrest, Adrian sent out a last round of messages to close friends. The messages were mostly brief: he was facing serious issues because of the Spanish case, and the situation might require him to go off the grid. After Ahn was arrested, his communications went silent. He and Sam Ryu severed ties to everyone. Within Free Joseon, members had been working to establish a protocol for exactly this situation. The plan had been fine-tuned in the weeks since the Spain operation as the relationship with the FBI had gone south and details about the storming of the embassy had begun to trickle out in the international press.

USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Dress warmly, buy gas in Tucson (the nearest gas station is 30 miles from the observatory) and note that children under eight years of age are not allowed at the evening program for safety reasons. The picnic area draws amateur astronomers at night. If you truly want to get away from it all, you can’t get much further off the grid than the huge and exotic Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument ( 520-387-6849; www.nps.gov/orpi; Hwy 85; per vehicle $8) along the Mexican border. It’s a gorgeous, forbidding land that supports an astonishing number of animals and plants, including 28 species of cacti, first and foremost its namesake organ-pipe.

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For the best pictures of the bridge itself, park at the rest area on the western end of the span. Earthships NEIGHBORHOOD (www.earthship.net; Hwy 64; adult/under 12yr $5/free; 10am-4pm) Just 1.5 miles west of the bridge is the fascinating community of Earthships, with self-sustaining, environmentally savvy houses built with recycled materials that are completely off the grid. You can also stay overnight in one. Activities During summer, white-water rafting is popular in the Taos Box , the steep-sided cliffs that frame the Rio Grande. Day-long trips begin at around $100 per person; contact the visitor center for local outfitters, where there’s also good info about hiking and mountain-biking trails.

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Downtown San Francisco Top Sights Asian Art Museum C7 Coit Tower D3 Davies Symphony HallB7 Ferry Building F4 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art E6 Sights 1 14 Geary E6 2 49 Geary E6 3 77 Geary D6 4 Aquarium of the Bay D2 5 Aquatic Park BathhouseB2 6 Art Institute C3 7 Beat Museum D4 8 Cartoon Art Museum E6 9Catharine Clark GalleryE6 10Children’s Creativity MuseumE6 11Chinatown GateD5 12 Chinese Culture Center D4 13 Chinese Historical Society of America Museum D5 14 City Hall B7 15 Contemporary Jewish Museum E6 16 George Sterling Park B3 17 Grace Cathedral C5 18 Hyde Street Pier Historic ShipsB2 19 Musée Mécanique C2 20 Museum of African Diaspora E6 21Museum of Craft & Folk ArtsE6 22 Pier 39 D1 23San Francisco Maritime National Historical ParkB2 24 Transamerica Pyramid E4 25Union SquareD6 26 Uss Pampanito C2 Activities, Courses & Tours 27 Adventure Cat D2 28Alcatraz CruisesD2 29 Blazing Saddles B2 30 City Kayak G6 31Meeting Point for Fire Engine ToursB2 Sleeping 32 Golden Gate Hotel D5 33 Hotel Abri D6 34 Hotel BohèmeD4 35 Hotel des Arts D5 36 Hotel Rex D5 37 Hotel VitaleF5 38 Orchard Garden HotelD5 39 Pacific Tradewinds E5 40 Petite Auberge C5 41 San Remo Hotel C3 42 Stratford Hotel D6 Eating 43 Bar JulesA8 44 BenuE6 45 Bocadillos E4 46 Brenda's French Soul Food B6 47 Cinecittà D3 48 CoiE4 49 CotognaE4 50 Crown & Crumpet B2 51 FarmerbrownD6 52 Farmers Market F4 53 Gitane E5 Gott's Roadside (see 52) Hog Island Oyster Company (see 52) 54 In-N-Out Burger C2 55 JardinièreB7 Mijita (see 52) 56 Molinari D4 57 Off the Grid A2 58 Saigon Sandwich Shop C6 Slanted Door (see 52) Drinking 59 Aunt Charlie'sD6 60 Endup E7 61 Rebel Bar B8 62 Smuggler's CoveB7 63 Stud D8 64 Tosca Cafe D4 Entertainment 65 111 Minna E5 66 American Conservatory Theater D6 67AT&T ParkG7 68 Cat Club D8 69 Club Fugazi D3 70 Harlot E5 71 Mezzanine D7 TIX Bay Area (see 25) 72 War Memorial Opera House B7 73 Yerba Buena Center for the ArtsE6 Shopping 74 City Lights Bookstore D4 SOMA Cartoon Art Museum MUSEUM Offline map Google map ( 415-227-8666; www.cartoonart.org; 655 Mission St; adult/child $7/5; 11am-5pm Tue-Sun) Comics earn serious consideration with shows of original Watchmen covers, too-hot-to-print political cartoons and lectures with local Pixar studio heads.

Bali & Lombok Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, first-past-the-post, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, sustainable-tourism

King-size beds and separate dressing areas and terraces primed for meals make for good retreats. There are Mediterranean accents throughout including on the restaurant's menu. Aas Once you've reached Aas, hole up for a spell and give your behind a rest. oMeditasiGUESTHOUSE ( GOOGLE MAP ; %0828 372 2738; www.meditasibungalows.blogspot.com; Aas; r 300,000-500,000Rp) Get off the grid and take a respite from the pressures of life at this chilled-out and charming hideaway. Meditation and yoga help you relax, and the eight rooms are close to good swimming and snorkelling. Open-air baths allow you to count the colours of the bougainvillea and frangipani that grow in profusion. 5Eating & Drinking As noted, most places to stay have cafes.

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Bali BrioBOAT ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %0828 9710 2336; Sama Sama Bungalows; h9am-9pm) Blue Water ExpressBOAT ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; h9am-9pm) Gili CatBOAT ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %0361-271680; www.gilicat.com; h9am-9pm) PeramaBOATS ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %0370 638 514; www.peramatour.com; h9am-8pm) Scoot Gili Meno %0370 Gili Meno is the smallest of the three islands and the perfect setting for your desert-island fantasy. Even in high season Meno still feels right off the grid. Most accommodation is strung out along the east coast, near the most picturesque beach. Inland you'll find scattered homesteads, coconut plantations and a salty lake. Some lonely stretches of the west coast can feel scrubby and even desolate, yet they evoke a mood all their own. Gili Meno 1Sights 1Turtle SanctuaryC3 2Activities, Courses & Tours 2Blue Marlin Dive CentreC2 3Divine DiversB1 4Gili Meno DiversC3 5Mao MenoC3 4Sleeping 6Adeng AdengB1 7Ana BungalowC1 Diana CaféB2 8Jepun BungalowsC2 9Kebun Kupu KupuB2 10MahamayaB1 11Mallias BungalowsC3 12Paul's Last ResortC1 13Tao KomboC3 14Tropicana HideawayC2 15Villa NautilusC3 5Eating Adeng AdengB1 16Rust WarungC2 17Webe CaféB1 18Ya Ya WarungC2 19Zoraya CafeC2 6Drinking & Nightlife 20Diana CaféB2 7Shopping 21Art Shop BotolC3 rBeaches Ringed by sand, Gili Meno has one of the best strips of beach in the Gilis at its southeast corner.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day