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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

Together, these two strategies have accounted for virtually all the progress over the last century in delivering electricity to those who did not previously have it. Because off-grid solutions have had little success in improving energy access in the past, they contend, strategies for the future should largely ignore off-grid solar. The critics hold that off-grid solutions are bound to fail for two reasons. First, power from the grid is much cheaper than power from off-grid sources because the grid benefits from economies of scale, whereas decentralized alternatives do not.4 Todd Moss at the Center for Global Development has argued forcefully against directing U.S. development aid in Africa toward off-grid solar projects. He contends that for the same number of dollars ($10 billion), the United States could attract several times as much private investment in centralized natural gas–fired power plants that would bring electricity to 90 million people than would be invested in off-grid solar systems that would serve just 20 million.5 The right course of action is a no-brainer, according to Moss, and the hype over off-grid solar is not only distracting, but damaging.

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International Energy Agency (IEA), Africa Energy Outlook, 2014, https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/WEO2014_AfricaEnergyOutlook.pdf. 14.  Global Off-Grid Lighting Association (GOGLA), “Global Off-Grid Solar Market Report Semi-Annual Sales and Impact Data,” October 2016, https://www.gogla.org/sites/default/files/recource_docs/global_off-grid_solar_market_report_jan-june_2016_public.pdf. 15.  PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), “Electricity Beyond the Grid,” May 2016, https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/energy-utilities-mining/pdf/electricity-beyond-grid.pdf. 16.  Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), Lighting Global, and Global Off-Grid Lighting Association, “Off-Grid Market Trends Report 2016,” February 2016, http://www.energynet.co.uk/webfm_send/1690. 17.  

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Third, governments should coordinate efforts to expand central grids with entrepreneurial activity to deploy off-grid solar systems, ensuring that the grid is a complement—not a competitor—to off-grid solar. Fourth, they should use public procurement to further drive down the cost of off-grid system components, like energy-efficient appliances. And, finally, governments can help by developing a trained workforce to support a thriving off-grid solar sector. When Past Is Not Prologue Despite its recent growth, off-grid solar is not free of controversy. Some development experts argue that it is a distraction, diverting resources and attention from concerted efforts to extend a country’s central grid and encourage people to move into cities where power grids make the most economic sense.

Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge by Ted Conover

autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fixed income, gentrification, George Floyd, McMansion, off grid, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, place-making, social distancing, supervolcano

Without it, “I’d probably still be in Chicago struggling, still trying to get away from my ex.” Prairie life, she said, had been of a piece with the education she’d sought. “Being off-grid, you learn that there is things that you need to be prepared for in order to be off-grid the right way.” She’d thought a lot about self-sufficiency, about spending thoughtfully. “When I finally moved to Alamosa people was like, ‘You been off-grid for six months? You don’t smell like it!’ I said, because I didn’t buy gallons of vodka—that’s why I don’t smell like prairie. I got six kids. I can’t afford to have that. I got to pay for water and take care of them, that’s why.

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I liked the varieties of people, many of whom you probably wouldn’t find in a big city. And I appreciated the less-pressurized feel of life among those less set on leaving their mark than my circle in New York. It was a beautiful, wild, and mysterious world, home to the semi-destitute. Most simply, of course, off-grid meant not connected to public utilities. Many people associate “off-grid” with “green,” and credit off-gridders with trying to live lightly off the earth by reducing their needs, unplugging from utilities and rejecting conspicuous consumption. The model for upscale green living was headquartered just about an hour away, outside Taos: Earthship Biotecture was renowned for the creative ways their houses, known as Earthships, incorporated cast-off materials such as bottles and tires, and for their efforts to conserve and recycle water inside the house.

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But I also noticed how expensive Earthships were—far too costly for most people I’d met in the valley. The paradigm had another flaw: most of the Earthships seemed to have propane tanks out back, painted tan for camouflage, which seemed like cheating. Earthships were just one kind of upscale off-grid living. I experienced another on a weekend expedition to the Sangre de Cristos, where a young couple I’d met had built their own off-grid place on land in the mountains, with trees. It was more expensive than living down on the flats but also felt more protected. My hosts invited me along to a weekly potluck meal farther up their unelectrified valley, and there I saw something I hadn’t imagined: a full-sized suburban-style ranch house with an expansive lawn and enormous solar panels on racks that swiveled to follow the sun and massive batteries that stored all that energy.

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

While the under- E C O V I L L A G E S : F O R F U T U R E G E N E R AT I O N S 33 the-radar ecovillages are doing the best they can to live out their sustainability values (perhaps waiting for zoning regulations and building codes to become more progressive), they’re not able to serve as model demonstration sites and share what they’re learning with the public, for fear of exposure. In other examples, both Dancing Rabbit and Earthaven have off-grid power, natural buildings, and homemade composting toilets, the last of which is Šne with their local counties where most rural folk have outhouses (or at least remember them). Dancing Rabbit also encourages bicycling, operates a car-pooling car co-op which runs on biofuels, and doesn’t allow privately owned cars.

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. • The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, Albert Bates, New Society Publishers, 2006. thegreatchange.com 36 F I N D I N G C O M M U N I T Y changing our culture, and not just for us, but for generations to come. At O.U.R. Ecovillage in British Columbia, you can learn permaculture and natural building. At The Farm’s Ecovillage Training Center in Tennessee, you can learn permaculture, ecovillage design, and setting up off-grid power systems. At Earthaven you can take workshops ranging from natural building to natural birth control. At Los Angeles Eco-Village you can learn how to build a bicycle from recycled parts, or set up an urban community land trust. At Lost Valley Educational Center in Oregon you can take the “Ecovillage and Permaculture CertiŠcate Program.”

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Ecovillages are also increasingly being seen as potential “lifeboat communities”during the widely predicted hard times ahead. In Powerdown (New LEARNING IN AN ECOVILLAGE SETTING Each of these organizations or individual ecovillages offers workshops and courses on subjects ranging from permaculture design to natural building, organic gardening, off-grid power, and starting your own ecovillage. • Living Routes Study Abroad in Ecovillages, Amherst, Massachusetts. Interdisciplinary academic and internship programs in Scotland, France, Senegal, India, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and the US. livingroutes.org • Gaia Education. Global Ecovillage Networksponsored and United Nations-affiliated handson courses and workshops held onsite in “living and learning centers” in ecovillages worldwide, according to a curriculum worked out by a consortium of 12 leading ecovillage founders and educators from ecovillages in Europe, Australia, and South and North America. gaiaeducation.org • Gaia University.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

And once you’ve resettled, you’ll want to resurrect basic technological infrastructure as far as possible, beginning with a localized electricity network. OFF-GRID ELECTRICITY Unlike food or fuel, electricity cannot be stockpiled—it is provided as a continual flow, and so will disappear when the grid goes down within a matter of days after the apocalypse. To retain an electricity supply, the community of survivors will need to generate their own, and we can learn a lot about what is needed by looking at those choosing to live in a self-sustaining “off-grid” way today. The simplest short-term solution will be to scavenge a bunch of mobile diesel-powered generators from roadwork or construction sites.

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Washington, DC, on the other hand, will face the opposite problem, as it was built on former swampland that will begin to revert to its original state with the loss of drainage. I suspect, therefore, that you’ll find it far easier to leave the cities for good and move to a more appropriate site: a rural location with fertile, cultivable ground and older buildings better suited for off-grid habitation. The sort of location that would be good for settling again would be coastal—although be mindful of the inevitable sea-level rises due to continuing climate change—allowing access to sea fishing, and near woodland. As we will see, trees have an enormous number of different uses, not just as firewood or timber for construction.

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In fact, one of the first places you’ll probably want to head to after the apocalypse is the golf course, not for a relaxing 18-hole round to help ease the stress of the end of the world as we know it, but to gather a crucial resource. Car batteries are very reliable, but are designed to give a high-current, brief burst of power to spin the starter motor. They’re poorly suited to providing the sustained, steady supply of electrical energy that you would need for powering your new off-grid life; in fact, they are easily damaged if persistently allowed to discharge by more than about 5 percent. An alternative design of rechargeable lead-acid battery, known as a deep cycle, discharges at a much slower rate and can have almost its entire capacity repeatedly drained and recharged without problems.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

A truly national grid would be prohibitively expensive, which is why the country is experimenting with rural off-grid solar, as are Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam, Ecuador, Tanzania, Indonesia, Kenya, Brazil, Ghana and numerous other countries. China is also forging ahead with ambitious grid-solar projects. The new world power is building a thin-film solar power plant in the Mongolian desert that’s larger than Manhattan. When completed it should power three million homes. A few months after I meet Tracy, Larry and Rick, something catches my eye. The town of Fowler, Colorado (the same state where Xcel got into trouble over its proposed solar power surcharge), announces plans to go off-grid with a combination of solar power, homegrown biofuel and gas derived from manure.

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It’s not a flexible application, but because the material can be put in the vacuum between double glazing it enjoys a lifetime of between fifteen and twenty years, allowing a building to generate power as long as there’s light hitting the windows. It’s one example of something your electricity supplier probably doesn’t want you to think about – going off grid.’ ‘Phones went wireless and Internet went wireless and the only thing that’s left that you have to find a wire for is power,’ says Rick. ‘You think about the developing world and what happened with communications. They skipped wires and went straight to wireless. I think for power they’re going to do the same thing.’

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Solarbuzz, a solar industry research and consultancy firm, estimates demand for solar energy ‘has grown at about 30 per cent per annum over the past 15 years.’ But these figures come from a world where ‘grid parity’ has yet to be achieved. What happens when solar starts to get cheaper than the alternatives? It’s not unreasonable to speculate that in a decade, solar will get much cheaper, possibly stimulating a radical shift to local off-grid energy generation, and achieve grid parity in many countries. Would we then see solar demand growing not by thirty per cent per annum, but fifty per cent? An annual growth rate like that would see solar quickly match all our needs, turning a sideshow today into the main feature tomorrow. It’s instructive to look at the growth rate in Japan – one of the countries pretty much all analysts think will see grid parity in the near future.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Some are taking massive open online courses (MOOCs), taught by professors at the best universities, and often receiving college credit, for free. All one needs is a smartphone, a service provider, and an electrical outlet to power up. More and more people around the world are also generating their own solar and wind electricity for use off-grid and/or for sale back to the grid, again at near-zero marginal cost. The sun and wind have yet to send a bill. Increasing numbers of millennials are sharing homes, rides, clothes, tools, sporting equipment, and an array of other goods and services. Some of the sharing networks like Uber are capitalist provider/user networks where the marginal cost of connecting riders and drivers is nearly zero, but the providers command a price for temporary access to the service.

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Microsoft and SAP have been 100 percent powered by renewable energy since 2014.22 AT&T, Intel, and Cisco, among others, are quickly integrating renewable energy into their companies’ business operations.23 Given that solar and wind are now cheaper than coal and head-to-head with oil and natural gas, and within just a few years will be far cheaper, and with the marginal cost of generating solar and wind near zero, the upfront financial commitment to decouple from fossil fuels and reinvest in renewable energies is, simply speaking, a smart business decision. Add to the equation the need to be able to secure data centers and other sensitive operations if the power grids and electricity lines go down (more likely with the increasing incidence of climate events and cyberterrorism), so that these companies’ off-grid data center facilities and other operations will remain secure. The Renewable Energy Internet Unbeknownst to most government leaders, a large swath of the business community, and a majority of the public, solar and wind energy generation have both been on a steeply declining exponential cost curve, not unlike the exponential curve experienced earlier by the computer industry.

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There is at a minimum an agreement on one factor—that is, the key to cybersecurity rests in deepening resiliency and, that, in turn, requires an expansion of distributed power in every community. The installation of microgrids will be our nation’s frontline insurance. Were a cyberattack to happen anywhere in the country, homeowners, businesses, and entire communities would be able to quickly go off-grid, reaggregate, and share electricity neighborhood to neighborhood, which would allow society to continue functioning. It would be difficult for anyone to argue that the threat of cyber warfare against the nation’s power and electricity grid is any less a national security issue. Just as the ever-present threat of a cyberattack demands continuous vigilance, so too does the threat of catastrophic climate events that are escalating exponentially across the country, resulting in tens of billions of dollars in damage to local ecosystems and loss of property, human life, and commerce.

Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities by Diana Leafe Christian

A Pattern Language, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Community Supported Agriculture, double entry bookkeeping, intentional community, land reform, off grid, search costs, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, urban sprawl

It hopes to provide housing, work opportunities, and social and spiritual opportunities on-site, creating as self-sufficient a community as possible. Typically, an ecovillage builds ecologically sustainable housing, grows much of its own organic food, recycles its waste products harmlessly, and, as much as possible, generates its own off-grid power. Sirius Ecovillage near Amherst, Massachusetts, grows a large percentage of its organic food, generates a portion of its own offgrid power, and offers tours and classes on sustainable living. EcoVillage at Ithaca has built the first two of its three planned ecologically oriented cohousing communities on 176 acres near Ithaca, New York, and operates its own organic Community Supported Agriculture farm for members and neighbors.

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Items at the top of a list on “ecological values,” for example, might include: “Buy organic produce,” “Recycle trash,” and “Compost kitchen scraps.” Farther down you’d find actions that take more effort or commitment, such as: “Eat vegetarian;” or “Flush the toilet rarely.” The bottom, listing the most “radical” actions, might say “Use only off-grid power,” “Build only with recycled lumber,” and “Don’t use a car unless you’re car-pooling.” When your list is complete, give everyone as many red dots each as the number of items on the list, and ask each person to put dots by the actions they are personally willing to actually do in their daily lives (not actions that they simply support theoretically).

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By the end of the next year they’d cleared an area and built an opensided pavilion for workshops and meetings, and three small huts for interns, none with electricity or running water. By the third year they had cleared more land and built a second road, a kitchen-dining room with solar electricity and running water, a composting toilet, and more huts for interns. By the fourth year they had built more roads, more huts, and increased their amount of off-grid power, but only interns and a few members lived on the land. By the sixth year they’d built more roads and a community building that was usable but not finished. More members had moved to the property, living in huts and temporary shelters. By the end of 2002, fully seven years after land-purchase, while several permanent homes were under construction, only one was finished.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

They claim to have sold more than 12 million solar light and power products across sixty-two countries, the aim being to provide cheap, solar-powered electricity to 100 million people by 2020. Another operator in the field is Off-Grid, whose model is similar to that of M-Kopa, the company providing the financing as well as the infrastructure to consumers. In Tanzania customers pay a deposit of around thirteen dollars to buy Off-Grid’s cheapest starter kit: a panel, a battery, a few LED lights, a phone charger and a radio. They proceed to pay approximately eight dollars a month for three years, after which they own the products. Off-Grid’s most popular bundle – for about twice the monthly price and a larger down payment – includes a few more lights and a flat-screen TV.

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All of this is made possible by the experience curve in solar cell and lithium-ion technology – as was the case with mobile phones over the last two decades – and it represents only the beginning for extreme supply in energy. Just as solar technology has been getting cheaper, its performance has also been improving, and Off-Grid are planning for a point in the near future when their products are sufficiently powerful to have applications in industry such as pumping water for irrigation or milling cacao. This is partly thanks to the fact that solar is modular – you can simply add more capacity over time – as well as prolonged and impressive falls in its price–performance ratio.

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See also resources MinION sequencer, 148 M-Kopa, 109 mode of production, 195 modern welfare state, 213 molecular assembly, 180 Monetary Policy Committee, 229 Moon Express, 124, 125–6, 127, 130 Moore, Gordon, 42–4, 46 Moore’s Law, 41, 44–5, 81, 143, 145 Moravec’s Paradox, 81, 82 Mosa Meats, 172 M-Pesa, 109 municipal protectionism, 207, 212, 213, 216 music industry, 234–5 Musk, Elon, 119–21, 135 MX1, 125 MX9, 125 Myconius, Friedrich, 240 Napster, 154 NASA, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 131, 137 National Energy Investment Banks (NEIBs), 219, 221 National Health Service (NHS), 210, 213 nationalisation, 213 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), 38–9, 130–1 NEAs (near-Earth asteroids), 38–9, 130–1 NEIBs (National Energy Investment Banks), 219, 221 neoliberalism, 26–7, 228 neoliberalism, break with Carillion, 201–3 decarbonisation, 217–23 East Coast Main Line, 203–4 Grenfell Tower, 206–8 Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), 205 Preston Model, 208–11 Universal Basic Services (UBS), 213–17 worker-owned businesses and banks, 211–12 New Labour, 207 Newcomen, Thomas, 33 Newton, Isaac, 32 NHS (National Health Service), 210, 213 nickel, 118 Nigeria, 107–8 Obama, Barack, 2, 9, 21, 128 Off-Grid, 109–10 One Planet Tax, 222 Orwell, George, 19 Osborne, Michael, 87 OSIRIS-REx study, 131 ouroboros, 205 Outer Space Treaty (1967), 127, 136 outsourcing, 202–4, 207, 217 ‘Oxi’ vote, 28 Passivhaus, 114 ‘peak copper’, 118 peak horse, 72–4 peak human, 74–8 PECO engine, 125 Perfect Day Foods, 178 Peter, 5–6 PETMAN, 82–3 petrol vehicles, 105 phenylketonuria (PKU), 147, 147n Philips, 77–8 phosphorus, 118 photography, 402 photosynthesis, 168 photovoltaic (PV) cells, 47, 102–15 PKU (phenylketonuria), 147, 147n Planetary Resources, 129, 130, 132, 135, 136–7 Podemos party, 27–8, 30 political transformation, vehicles for, 194 politics of anti-austerity, 201 of energy transition, 218 green, 188–92 red, 188–92 relationship between technology and, 237 population, 139–40 The Population Bomb (Ehrlich), 166 populism, 187–8.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

And more often than not, the sale gets made, eventually. Back in the regional capital of Soubré, I watch for a few moments as Off-Grid’s champion Ivorian salesman winds up his third contract of the morning, on the way to nine for the day. He’s tall and handsome in designer jeans and a dashiki-style shirt he had made in the company’s colors. His name is Jean Anoh, but he’s decided that that name is “too old, too soft.” “Call me Stevens Ironman Never-Tired Killer,” he says—in between pitches, he’s checking his phone for the constantly updated standings in Off-Grid’s continent-wide sales championship and sending trash-talking WhatsApp messages to his Tanzanian competitors.

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While Europe, North America, and South America are pretty close to fully electrified, and Asia is heading briskly in the same direction, the absolute number of Africans without power keeps increasing as population growth beats back the (minimal) efforts of the continent’s utilities—a World Bank report that came out in May 2017 predicted that, based on current trends, there could still be half a billion Africans without power by 2040.2 That’s because conventional grids are expensive to build and maintain, and Africa is poor. “The belief was you’d eventually build the U.S. grid here,” said Xavier Helgesen, CEO of one of the most dynamic start-ups, Off-Grid Electric. “But the U.S. is the richest country on Earth and it wasn’t fully electrified till the forties, and that was in an era of cheap copper for wires, cheap timber for poles, cheap coal, and cheap capital. None of that is so cheap anymore, at least over here.” But solar—solar is suddenly cheap.

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He didn’t actually do a stint at Silicon Valley’s most famous incubator (his wife did), but that’s his lineage, the same one that produced Airbnb and also the company that wants to embalm your brain so you can be digitally scanned and reimplanted in an android. The Y Combinator T-shirt reads, “Make Something People Want,” which pretty much defines cheap solar power. Africans are desperate for electricity. * * * “This is how the solar revolution happens,” Kim Schreiber, Off-Grid’s communications director, whispers to me. “One hot sales meeting at a time.” She and I, and the company’s sales manager, Max-Marc Fossouo, are squeezed onto a bench in a courtyard outside of a hut in the Ivorian village of Grand-Zattry, which is not so grand. We’re listening in as one of the company’s newest salesmen, Seko Serge Lewis, tries his pitch.

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community by Karen T. Litfin

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collaborative consumption, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, degrowth, glass ceiling, global village, hydraulic fracturing, intentional community, megacity, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, publish or perish, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, urban planning, Zipcar

While most of the world’s heat and electricity are generated by coal, oil, and natural gas, ecovillagers primarily use renewable solar, wind, wood, and micro-hydro energy. Besides technological changes, they also decrease their consumption by making changes in their behavior. Decades ago, the badge of honor for green living was “off-grid”: fully self-sufficient for energy and water. So I was surprised to find that among the ecovillages I visited, only Earthaven, with solar panels on most of its buildings and two hyper-efficient turbines in its creeks, wore that badge. The dearth of off-grid ecovillages is not a sign they’ve been co-opted, however; rather, it means the mainstream is catching up. Most of the ecovillages I visited are grid-tied because they generate more energy than they use and are selling it back to the grid.

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What follows in this chapter is not so much an investigation as a glimpse of each of the fourteen communities I visited. In-depth discussions of the issues will come in later chapters. Earthhaven, USA My first stop was Earthaven, a picturesque ecovillage with earthen-plastered homes in the Blue Ridge Mountains about an hour’s drive from Asheville, North Carolina. Established in 1994, Earthaven is an off-grid community and educational center with about 50 members who share an affinity for permaculture. I explore permaculture in greater depth in the next chapter. For now, suffice it to say that it is a radical ecological approach to designing settlements and agricultural systems that is thought to be permanent because it attempts to follow the functioning of nature.

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Monogamy and even celibacy have become viable options, and many residents seem to be less focused on sexuality than on spirituality. Sieben Linden, Germany Sieben Linden, which is named for seven linden trees on the land, is another ecovillage that sprouted in the fertile soil of East Germany after reunification. Founded in 1997, this off-grid community of about 150 now occupies roughly 200 acres of farmland and pine plantation. The community’s tiny ecological footprint, just over 25 percent of the German average, rests in part on its labor-intensive commitment to vegan agriculture and its “Peace Contract with Animals,” which I discuss in chapter 3.

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

“I’m too old,” he said. Binney paused, then repeated the words for emphasis. “I’m too old.” As all this unfolded, Dale was traveling. Though we were careful to avoid discussing the news by phone or online, it was clearly at the forefront of both of our minds. In one email, Dale explained he was working from his off-grid home in California, using his cellphone as an internet hotspot. “I write via Verizon (Spy-on-youzon?) from Humboldt,” he quipped. I waited until he was back in New York and we could meet in person. Then I raised the obvious question. “All that stuff was in the box?” “Yes.” “There must have been other boxes?”

…

“Should I check it in a bag or take it as carry-on?” “Carry it,” Laura said. She gave me a withering look: to her, that was a silly question. “What about security?” “They won’t notice it.” “Do you think they know?” “If they knew, none of this would be happening.” I still worried about being busted. I wanted to get home to my off-grid place and stash the item as fast as possible. But as I flew across the continent, with a copy of everything Snowden had sent us in an overhead bin,* a crown popped off one of my molars. I spent the next few days stranded in Sacramento, waiting to see a dentist. Meanwhile, on June 6, the Washington Post broke its first Snowden story, which made me extremely anxious.

…

The Box We used to look back with dread on the days immediately following the Snowden leaks. Over time, those memories softened around the edges, coming to feel like a long, strange dream. The tense moments were tempered by gentler days that followed — in particular, one blue-sky summer afternoon at Dale’s off-grid home in California. More than three years had passed since Dale had cached a copy of the Snowden material in a Douglas fir. For a brief window of time, we weren’t preoccupied with worry. Assange hadn’t been indicted yet. It appeared that Laura and the other players were safe. Snowden seemed to be settling into his new home in Moscow, where he’d been joined by his partner, Lindsay Mills.

Slow by Brooke McAlary

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, imposter syndrome, Lyft, off grid, Parkinson's law, Rana Plaza, retail therapy, sharing economy, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, uber lyft

* * * Technology boundaries: no screens at the table screen-free bedrooms no screens in the morning minimal technology during the week remove notifications remove visual reminders create a pre-bed, post-wake-up ritual only check social media on one device only check emails when you have time to answer them leave your phone behind set time limits take a digital sabbatical go off-grid remove apps from your phone. * * * Slow living is about quality time, and making things count. These conversations matter. We listen to each other. We annoy each other, sure, but we love each other immensely and we turn up. Screen-free bedrooms Ben and I have never had a TV in the bedroom because I knew it would impact our sleep, but somehow I’d never considered that our phones or iPads would have the same (if not greater) effect on our ability to get good rest.

…

Taking a long break—anywhere from a long weekend to many months—is an opportunity to let the stimulus slowly dissipate, revealing a whole other layer of thoughts and feelings that aren’t given light when we’re constantly connected. The added benefit of peace, creativity and rest mean my productivity has always been much improved after a digital break. Go off-grid If you can’t take a full sabbatical, perhaps head out of town for a few hours to somewhere you know has no internet reception and revel in the peace it can bring. Even a few hours of uninterrupted offline time is restorative in a way that surprises me. It makes me realise just how much I underestimate the energy cost of being constantly connected.

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Your version of slow living might include: sustainability waste-free living selling all your stuff and going on an adventure a tiny home permaculture quitting your job and starting something new changing your diet to reflect the slow food philosophy meditation yoga slow travel home-schooling self-sufficiency country living city living. These can all fit comfortably under the umbrella of ‘Slow’, because slow living isn’t a list of rules to abide by. Your version of slow living may well include an off-grid home in the countryside, hand-knitted socks, working remotely, camping holidays, a big veggie garden, volunteering at the nearby nursing home and a small brood of farm animals. Or it could be a studio apartment in the middle of the city. Public transport, farmers’ markets, a 60-hour week in a job you’re passionate about, a vibrant group of interesting friends, an ethical wardrobe, ocean swimming twice a week and meditation each night.

Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili

airport security, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bletchley Park, Carrington event, cosmological constant, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Attenborough, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, pattern recognition, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Turing test

She couldn’t risk getting in touch with her parents herself, so she had asked Hashimi if he could do so as surreptitiously as possible, letting them know she was OK and warning them to go dark. She knew full well that they would have been watched very closely by Savak, but the one thing she was confident of was that her parents were more than capable of disappearing off-grid for a few days. She guessed they would know how to shake off Savak surveillance and head up to the mountains north of the city where they had friends they could rely on to hide them. She had begged Hashimi to share with them only the sketchiest of information – enough for them to take the matter seriously.

…

The alarm had been raised by her school party earlier that evening when her roommate had returned to the hotel from a shopping trip to find her not there. But, as the officers were very keen to stress, she could well have just gone out for a walk without telling anyone, although they acknowledged it was strange that she had also gone off-grid. Within an hour of talking to the police he was back in his Geneva hotel making arrangements to fly to London – Sarah had insisted on accompanying him and the two of them had packed as quickly as they could. He’d clung to the hope that Evie would return, that she had just gone for a walk and got lost.

…

Still, she was a tough kid and if they got through all this, then there’d be time to worry about any lasting psychological scars. He had to keep telling himself that this was not his fault and that at least she was safe now. It had been quickly decided that families and loved ones of all key personnel connected with the Odin Project would be taken off-grid and moved into secret protective custody until after Ignition. But he missed Evie, now more than ever. He listened to Sarah’s soft breathing in bed next to him and turned to face her. She looked even more beautiful when she was sleeping. Had they just spent the night together because they might never get another chance?

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

Partly spurred by the massive R&D that companies like Tesla are investing in battery technology, fuel cells, and thermal storage models, the mobility and effectiveness of storage capacity are improving rapidly while costs are steadily falling. This could eventually allow full energy independence. One can imagine an off-grid community that collectively owns a blockchain-managed decentralized solar generation plant, creating a system for storing, transporting—via self-driving electric cars—and exchanging batteries with other off-grid communities. This spells opportunity for all sorts of communities: those off-grid Indian villages with their 300 million electricity-poor residents; sovereign indigenous communities such as Native Americans in the United States or Aboriginals in Australia who seek energy independence; or farmers and other users in low-density rural areas who are cursed by their low level of community demand and for whom the cost of installing transmission lines and relay stations can be extremely burdensome.

…

The blockchain can assure that only one receipt has been generated for each deposit of crops and can keep an immutable record of how much of the deposit has been pledged and to whom. It’s yet another way that blockchains prevent double-spending. And in the field of solar energy, a team that Michael’s leading is exploring a model that would capture usage rights to energy generated in a communally owned microgrid as a way to funnel collateralized financing to off-grid communities that don’t have well-established legal and property title systems. Already, a team composed of IoT startup Filament, Nasdaq, and a team from IDEO Colab has found a way to integrate signals from a smart meter device with a blockchain so as to prove that a uniquely identified photovoltaic panel has produced and delivered a verifiable, measurable amount of solar power.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

The former would become more engaged and the latter even less so, leaving politics more open to capture from a tech elite along the lines I suggested in Chapter Five about monopolies. If this came to pass, large numbers of people would start to see machines as forces of control and repression rather than of liberation.* Are there not already signs that people are turning against technology? Witness the rise in ‘the digital detox’, off-grid communities and anti-Uber protests over the past few years. Imagine what might happen when driverless cars and Starsky trucks turn up – does anyone seriously think that drivers will passively let this happen, consoled by the fact that their great-great-great grandchildren will probably be richer and less likely to die in a car crash?

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* Once questions of freedom and the human spirit are invoked, it’s impossible to know how far opposition can go. Between 1978 and 1995 the ‘Unabomber’, aka Ted Kaczynski, sent 16 bombs to targets that included universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. Kaczynski, a Harvard maths prodigy who had disappeared to live off-grid in his twenties, was motivated by a belief that technological change was destroying human civilisation and would usher in a period of dehumanised tyranny and control. He set out his ideas in a 30-thousand-word anti-tech manifesto entitled Industrial Society and Its Future. Once you get past Kaczynski’s casual racism and calls for violent revolution, his writings on digital technology now seem uncomfortably prescient.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

Contrary to centralization, it might actually spur a kind of “Hezbollahization,” a splintered, tribalized world where everyone has access to the latest technologies, where everyone can support themselves on their own terms, where it is far more possible for anyone to maintain living standards without the great superstructures of nation-state organization. Consider that a combination of AI, cheap robotics, and advanced biotech coupled with clean energy sources might, for the first time in modernity, make living “off-grid” nearly equivalent to being plugged-in. Recall that over just the last decade the cost of solar photovoltaics has fallen by more than 82 percent and will plunge further, putting energy self-sufficiency for smaller communes within reach. As electrification of infrastructure and alternatives to fossil fuels percolate, more of the world could become self-sufficient—but now equipped with an infrastructure of AI, bio, robotics, and so on, capable of generating information and manufacturing locally.

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Openness is the default, imitations are endemic, cost curves relentlessly go down, and barriers to access crumble. Exponential capabilities are given to anyone who wants them. This heralds a colossal redistribution of power away from existing centers. Imagine a future where small groups—whether in failing states like Lebanon or in off-grid nomad camps in New Mexico—provide AI-empowered services like credit unions, schools, and health care, services at the heart of the community often reliant on scale or the state. Where the chance to set the terms of society at a micro level becomes irresistible: come to our boutique school and avoid critical race theory forever, or boycott the evil financial system and use our DeFi product.

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See disinformation/misinformation Mitchell, Melanie, 73 Model T, 24 Modern Turing Test, 76–77, 78, 115, 190, 210 Mojica, Francisco, 129–30 Montreal Protocol (1987), 45, 263 Moore, Gordon, 32–33, 35 Moore’s Law, 32–33, 67, 81, 108 Motorwagen, 24 Mumford, Lewis, 29, 217 mutually assured destruction, 43 N nanotechnology, 101 narrow path, defined, viii National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences (China), 122 nation-state fragility amplifiers, vii, 11 AI and, 166–67 authoritarianism and, 158–59 bad actor empowerment and, 165–66, 168 cyberattacks and, 160–63 democracies and, 158, 185 disinformation and, 169–73 fragility and, 152–54 globalization and, 155–56 inadvertent, 173–77 military applications and, 167–69 power and, 163–64 technological unemployment and, 177–81 nation-states containment and, 143, 159 economic inequality and, 153–54 equilibrium of, 147 functions of, 158 importance of, 151–52 regulation and, 230–31 technology symbiosis with, 156–58 trust and, 152–53 See also geopolitics; governments; nation-state fragility amplifiers Neuralink, 91 neural networks, 59, 64 See also deep learning 1984 (Orwell), 196 Nobel, Alfred, 35 Nordhaus, William, 30–31 North Korea, 44, 161 NotPetya, 161–62, 163 Noyce, Robert, 32 nuclear technology arms race rhetoric and, 126 catastrophe and, 205 containment of, 42–45, 264–65 development of, 41–42 ego and, 141 safety and, 241 NVIDIA, 130, 250, 251 O Odin, 82 offensive vs. defensive capabilities, 157, 234 off-grid living, 198 off switches, 244–45 omni-use technology, 105, 110–12 AI and, 111, 130 containment and, 233 contradictions and, 202 power and, 182 regulation and, 229–30 OpenAI, 62, 64, 69, 251 openness imperative, 127–29 opioids, 36 Oppenheimer, J.

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Specifically, the $1.5 billion commitment made by these donors is guaranteed to be used to purchase a vaccine that meets minimum effectiveness criteria under a given price ceiling, providing an incentive to pharmaceutical companies to undertake vaccine development. A similar approach might work for an advance purchase of vaccines for AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. The advance purchase model might also be used to purchase new seed varieties with particular attributes designed to increase yields in Africa, for example, or to buy off-grid renewable power sources that could work reliably and cheaply in developing country settings. Another approach is that of using prizes to provide an incentive to research. Prizes played a role in the development of accurate timepieces required to measure longitude at sea; they also provided the incentive for Charles Lindbergh to fly across the Atlantic nonstop.

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And if these traditional methods can be replaced with electric heating and cooking systems powered by alternative energy sources such as solar or wind, both the local and global pollution costs can be reduced to near zero. There is a role for direct support to countries to roll out sustainable energy networks, then, but also for a significant level of indirect support in areas such as technology development at the global level to reduce the cost and complexity of on- or off-grid renewable power provision.16 AIDING THE RIGHT AREAS OF DEVELOPMENT We have seen that aid to promote stronger institutions has a somewhat mixed record, perhaps in part because “institutional technologies” do not flow easily across borders. At the same time, we have seen that invented technologies and ideas appear to be central both to sustaining the global escape from the Malthusian trap and to improving quality of life worldwide.

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

However, despite the many homes that they built over the years, the Forestry Co-op struggled financially. After six and a half years of barely breaking even and sometimes going for weeks with no pay, they disbanded the business. While this was sad for many, it also resulted in several young members having solid income-earning skills, from carpentry and home-building to electrical work, off-grid solar design and installation, water and propane plumbing, and sustainable forestry. Andy Bosley and Julie McMahon of Yellowroot Farm, a biodynamic CSA farm at Earthaven. Differing Interests My mom and I began visiting regularly in late 2000, became members in 2002, and built a small house and moved onsite in 2003.

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Two younger members are raising money through loans from older members and friends to buy out the buildings and infrastructure of two departing members: one young member wants to revive a dormant small farm, and the other wants to create a cottage industry offering onsite lodging and dining for visitors. Younger and older members raised the money for a shared off-grid renewable power system which will improve the amount and reliability of electricity in their neighborhood. And several young parents have created two shared childcare and home-schooling programs for members’ and neighbors’ children. Earthaven Ecovillage couldn’t have existed and continued without the energy, vision, and motivation of its older members who founded the project, designed its permaculture-based site plan and innovated its EarthShares Fund.

The Satsuma Complex by Bob Mortimer

messenger bag, off grid, Right to Buy

‘Leave it with me,’ she said, with a hungry look in her eye. ‘Oh, and could you take Lassoo for a quick walk? My bones are not up to it and he’s desperate.’ I agreed to take him with me to the coffee shop. ‘Any joy getting information about those coppers on your computer?’ I asked. ‘Nothing. I got bored to be honest, they must be well off-grid, or maybe you gave me the wrong names. I was actually wondering if they might be journalists. That might make sense. They’re always nosing about in someone’s misery. This new task sounds much more fun, though. Now clear off and don’t tug on his lead.’ As usual, Lassoo took his own sweet time and then livened up when we reached the play area.

…

I had a quick drink with him last Friday night and the following day two blokes, who said they were coppers, called at my flat and told me he had been found dead.’ ‘Fuck off they did.’ ‘No, seriously. I found out later that they weren’t coppers and obviously he hasn’t been murdered but it just feels strange being told that just before he goes off-grid.’ ‘I wouldn’t worry yourself, mate. This sounds like typical Brendan nonsense. He’s obviously upset someone, which he has a knack of doing, and they want a word. They were hoping you would speak to Brendan and in doing so would be delivering a message veiled with the threat of violent retribution.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

“Title 10: Conservation and Development, Chapter 023, Air Pollution Control,” 10 V.S.A. § 578, passed 2005, amended 2007, Vermont General Assembly, https://legislature.vermont.gov/statutes/section/10/023/00578. 33. Kristin Carlson, “Green Mountain Power Is First Utility to Help Customers Go Off-Grid with New Product Offering,” Green Mountain Power, December 20, 2016, https://greenmountainpower.com/news/green-mountain-power-first-utility-help-customers-go-off-grid-new-product-offering. 34. “ACEEE 2018 State Energy Efficiency Scorecard,” American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, October 4, 2018, https://aceee.org/press/2018/10/aceee-2018-state-energy-efficiency. 35.

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Along with Vermont senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, he urged Vermont legislators in 2005 to commit to reducing emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, and 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2028, through the use of renewables and energy efficiency.32 Vermont’s main electric utility helped customers go “off-grid” with solar panels and batteries,33 and the state’s aggressive energy efficiency programs ranked fifth best in the nation for five years in a row.34 But instead of falling 25 percent, Vermont’s emissions actually rose 16 percent between 1990 and 2015.35 Part of the reason emissions rose in Vermont is that the state closed its nuclear power plant, something McKibben advocated.

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

I will see some of them again, I’m sure, but this sadness is an inevitable consequence of nomadic living. People come and go in your life. You don’t get to hang onto them forever. Here is Linda May, everyone’s surrogate mother, who fed us French toast and made us laugh. There is no one who doesn’t love Linda. She is off to find a piece of land where she plans to build a sustainable, off-grid Earthship home. I have promised to help build it (i.e., pound dirt into lots of tires), just so I can spend time with her again. AFTER LEAVING HER FRIENDS, Linda traveled 380 miles southeast to the deserts of Cochise County, Arizona, where building codes were loose and land was cheap. She hoped to find a few acres for her Earthship but, after hours of exploring, felt disappointed.

…

Still I wasn’t understanding the story on the level I’d hoped for just yet—I hadn’t gotten close enough to truly grasp their lives. Doing that would require a fuller immersion, spending months among them, day in and day out, becoming a regular at some of their encampments. With my tent, I’d been able to live off-grid in the desert, but not out in the backcountry where most of the people I was writing about were boondocking. Tent campers were only allowed in areas near outhouses. That meant I ended up sleeping four miles away from the site of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, then commuting over to visit. To actually join the nomads I would need a more robust portable shelter—something that I could sleep, cook, and write inside, with at least a rudimentary toilet setup.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

Absent any public fact-checking of these claims, or accountability for these promises, both continue to grow apace. Five years after promising Tesla owners they could drive anywhere using only the power of the sun, Tesla still had yet to provide proof that even a single Supercharger was actually fully solar-powered . . . and yet new promises of off-grid Superchargers were still coming. Whether these promises are noble aspirations or cynical lies almost doesn’t matter at this point. The promises themselves, rather than their realistic fulfillment, seems to be what Tesla owners and investors want from Tesla. And Elon Musk is only too happy to deliver.

…

Teslamotorsclub.com, June 2, 2015. https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/blogger-claims-teslas-battery-swap-a-scam.48158/page-2#post-1027921 119Tesla regularly releases updates on the amount of carbon: Fred Lambert. “Tesla claims its owners saved ~2.5 million tons of CO2 – releases new map of its fleet’s impact.” Electrek, September 29, 2017. https://electrek.co/2017/09/29/tesla-global-fleet-carbon-emission-saved-map/ 119and yet new promises of off-grid Superchargers were still coming: Fred Lambert. “Tesla plans to disconnect ‘almost all’ Superchargers from the grid and go solar+battery, says Elon Musk.” Electrek, June 9, 2017. https://electrek.co/2017/06/09/tesla-superchargers-solar-battery-grid-elon-musk/ Chapter 10 120As Ashlee Vance tells it: Ashlee Vance.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

You might barter for your groceries on the street, or join the “full-time scavengers living off food retrieved from supermarket bins.” As Rosen admits toward the end of his article, many of his suggestions will strike people as comical. I guess that’s the point. We have allowed our lives to become open books for marketers and snoops, so much so that resistance at this point seems ridiculous. To go “off grid” now, you pretty much have to turn yourself into a counterespionage operative, a secret agent living in a yurt and nibbling the bruised leaves of a discarded cabbage. THE SOCIAL GRAFT November 6, 2007 “ONCE EVERY HUNDRED YEARS media changes,” boy-coder turned big-thinker Mark Zuckerberg declared today at the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City.

…

., 226 video games and, 94–97 Merholz, Peter, 21 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 300 Merton, Robert, 12–13 message-automation service, 167 Meyer, Stephenie, 50 Meyerowitz, Joanne, 338 microfilm, microphotography, 267 Microsoft, 108, 168, 205, 284 military technology, 331–32 Miller, Perry, xvii mindfulness, 162 Minima Moralia (Adorno), 153–54 mirrors, 138–39 Mitchell, Joni, 128 Mollie (video poker player), 218–19 monitoring: corporate control through, 163–65 of thoughts, 214–15 through wearable behavior-modification devices, 168–69 Montaigne, Michel de, 247, 249, 252, 254 Moore, Geoffrey, 209 Morlocks, 114, 186 “Morphological Basis of the Arm-to-Wing Transition, The” (Poore), 329–30 Morrison, Ewan, 288 Morrison, Jim, 126 Morse code, 34 “Most of It, The” (Frost), 145–46 motor skills, video games and, 93–94 “Mowing” (Frost), 296–300, 302, 304–5 MP3 players, 122, 123, 124, 216, 218, 293 multitasking, media, 96–97 Mumford, Lewis, 138–39, 235 Murdoch, Rupert and Wendi, 131 music: bundling of, 41–46 commercial use of, 244–45 copying and sharing technologies for, 121–26, 314 digital revolution in, 293–95 fidelity of, 124 listening vs. interface in, 216–18, 293 in participatory games, 71–72 streamed and curated, 207, 217–18 music piracy, 121–26 Musings on Human Metamorphoses (Leary), 171 Musk, Elon, 172 Musset, Alfred de, xxiii Muzak, 208, 244 MySpace, xvi, 10–11, 30–31 “Names of the Hare, The,” 201 nanotechnology, 69 Napster, 122, 123 narcissism, 138–39 Twitter and, 34–36 narrative emotions, 250 natural-language processing, 215 Negroponte, Nicholas, xx neobehavioralism, 212–13 Netflix, 92 neural networks, 136–37 neuroengineering, 332–33 New Critics, 249 News Feed, 320 news media, 318–20 newspapers: evolution of, 79, 237 online archives of, 47–48, 190–92 online vs. printed, 289 Newton, Isaac, 66 New York Public Library, 269 New York Times, 8, 71, 83, 133, 152–53, 195, 237, 283, 314, 342 erroneous information revived by, 47–48 on Twitter, 35 Nielsen Company, 80–81 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 126, 234–35, 237 Nightingale, Paul, 335 Nixon, Richard, 317 noise pollution, 243–46 Nook, 257 North of Boston (Frost), 297 nostalgia, 202, 204, 312 in music, 292–95 Now You See It (Davidson), 94 Oates, Warren, 203 Oatley, Keith, 248–50 Obama, Barack, 314 obsession, 218–19 OCLC, 276 “off grid,” 52 Olds, James, 235 O’Neill, Gerard, 171 One Infinite Loop, 76 Ong, Walter, 129 online aggregation, 192 On Photography (Sontag), xx open networks, profiteering from, 83–85 open-source projects, 5–7, 26 Oracle, 17 orchises, 305 O’Reilly, Tim, 3–5, 7 organ donation and transplantation, 115 ornithopters, 239 orphan books, 276, 277 Overture, 279–80 Owad, Tom, 256 Oxford Junior Dictionary, 201–2 Oxford University, library of, 269 Page, Larry, 23, 160, 172, 239, 268–69, 270, 279, 281–85 personal style of, 16–17, 281–82, 285 paint-by-number kits, 71–72 Paley, William, 43 Palfrey, John, 272–74, 277 Palmisano, Sam, 26 “pancake people,” 242 paper, invention and uses of, 286–89 Paper: An Elegy (Sansom), 287 Papert, Seymour, 134 Paradise within the Reach of All Men, The (Etzler), xvi–xvii paradox of time, 203–4 parenting: automation of, 181 of virtual child, 73–75 Parker, Sarah Jessica, 131 participation: “cognitive surplus” in, 59 as content and performance, 184 inclusionists vs. deletionists in, 18–20 internet, 28–29 isolation and, 35–36, 184 limits and flaws of, 5–7, 62 Paul, Rand, 314 Pendragon, Caliandras (avatar), 25 Pentland, Alex, 212–13 perception, spiritual awakening of, 300–301 personalization, 11 of ads, 168, 225, 264 isolation and, 29 loss of autonomy in, 264–66 manipulation through, 258–59 in message automation, 167 in searches, 145–46, 264–66 of streamed music, 207–9, 245 tailoring in, 92, 224 as threat to privacy, 255 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty), 300 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 215 phonograph, phonograph records, 41–46, 133, 287 photography, technological advancement in, 311–12 Pichai, Sundar, 181 Pilgrims, 172 Pinterest, 119, 186 playlists, 314 PlayStation, 260 “poetic faith,” 251 poetry, 296–313 polarization, 7 politics, transformed by technology, 314–20 Politics (Aristotle), 307–8 Poore, Samuel O., 329–30 pop culture, fact-mongering in, 58–62 pop music, 44–45, 63–64, 224 copying technologies for, 121–26 dead idols of, 126 industrialization of, 208–9 as retrospective and revivalist, 292–95 positivism, 211 Potter, Dean, 341–42 power looms, 178 Presley, Elvis, 11, 126 Prim Revolution, 26 Principles of Psychology (James), 203 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor), 238 printing press: consequences of, 102–3, 234, 240–41, 271 development of, 53, 286–87 privacy: devaluation of, 258 from electronic surveillance, 52 family cohesion vs., 229 free flow of information vs. right to, 190–94 internet threat to, 184, 255–59, 265, 285 safeguarding of, 258–59, 283 vanity vs., 107 proactive cognitive control, 96 Prochnik, George, 243–46 “Productivity Future Vision (2011),” 108–9 Project Gutenberg, 278 prosperity, technologies of, 118, 119–20 prosumerism, 64 protest movements, 61 Proust and the Squid (Wolf), 234 proximal clues, 303 public-domain books, 277–78 “public library,” debate over use of term, 272–74 punch-card tabulator, 188 punk music, 63–64 Quantified Self Global Conference, 163 Quantified Self (QS) movement, 163–65 Quarter-of-a-Second Rule, 205 racecars, 195, 196 radio: in education, 134 evolution of, 77, 79, 159, 288 as music medium, 45, 121–22, 207 political use of, 315–16, 317, 319 Radosh, Daniel, 71 Rapp, Jen, 341–42 reactive cognitive control, 96 Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, 91 reading: brain function in, 247–54, 289–90 and invention of paper, 286–87 monitoring of, 257 video gaming vs., 261–62 see also books reading skills, changes in, 232–34, 240–41 Read Write Web (blog), 30 Reagan, Ronald, 315 real world: digital media intrusion in, 127–30 perceived as boring and ugly, 157–58 as source of knowledge, 313 virtual world vs., xx–xxi, 36, 62, 127–30, 303–4 reconstructive surgery, 239 record albums: copying of, 121–22 jackets for, 122, 224 technology of, 41–46 Redding, Otis, 126 Red Light Center, 39 Reichelt, Franz, 341 Reid, Rob, 122–25 relativists, 20 religion: internet perceived as, 3–4, 238 for McLuhan, 105 technology viewed as, xvi–xvii Republic of Letters, 271 reputations, tarnishing of, 47–48, 190–94 Resident Evil, 260–61 resource sharing, 148–49 resurrection, 69–70, 126 retinal implants, 332 Retromania (Reynolds), 217, 292–95 Reuters, Adam, 26 Reuters’ SL bureau, 26 revivification machine, 69–70 Reynolds, Simon, 217–18, 292–95 Rice, Isaac, 244 Rice, Julia Barnett, 243–44 Richards, Keith, 42 “right to be forgotten” lawsuit, 190–94 Ritalin, 304 robots: control of, 303 creepy quality of, 108 human beings compared to, 242 human beings replaced by, 112, 174, 176, 195, 197, 306–7, 310 limitations of, 323 predictions about, xvii, 177, 331 replaced by humans, 323 threat from, 226, 309 Rogers, Roo, 83–84 Rolling Stones, 42–43 Roosevelt, Franklin, 315 Rosen, Nick, 52 Rubio, Marco, 314 Rumsey, Abby Smith, 325–27 Ryan, Amy, 273 Sandel, Michael J., 340 Sanders, Bernie, 314, 316 Sansom, Ian, 287 Savage, Jon, 63 scatology, 147 Schachter, Joshua, 195 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 229 Schmidt, Eric, 13, 16, 238, 239, 257, 284 Schneier, Bruce, 258–59 Schüll, Natasha Dow, 218 science fiction, 106, 115, 116, 150, 309, 335 scientific management, 164–65, 237–38 Scrapbook in American Life, The, 185 scrapbooks, social media compared to, 185–86 “Scrapbooks as Cultural Texts” (Katriel and Farrell), 186 scythes, 302, 304–6 search-engine-optimization (SEO), 47–48 search engines: allusions sought through, 86 blogging, 66–67 in centralization of internet, 66–69 changing use of, 284 customizing by, 264–66 erroneous or outdated stories revived by, 47–48, 190–94 in filtering, 91 placement of results by, 47–48, 68 searching vs., 144–46 targeting information through, 13–14 writing tailored to, 89 see also Google searching, ontological connotations of, 144–46 Seasteading Institute, 172 Second Life, 25–27 second nature, 179 self, technologies of the, 118, 119–20 self-actualization, 120, 340 monitoring and quantification of, 163–65 selfies, 224 self-knowledge, 297–99 self-reconstruction, 339 self-tracking, 163–65 Selinger, Evan, 153 serendipity, internet as engine of, 12–15 SETI@Home, 149 sexbots, 55 Sex Pistols, 63 sex-reassignment procedures, 337–38 sexuality, 10–11 virtual, 39 Shakur, Tupac, 126 sharecropping, as metaphor for social media, 30–31 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 88 Shirky, Clay, 59–61, 90, 241 Shop Class as Soulcraft (Crawford), 265 Shuster, Brian, 39 sickles, 302 silence, 246 Silicon Valley: American culture transformed by, xv–xxii, 148, 155–59, 171–73, 181, 241, 257, 309 commercial interests of, 162, 172, 214–15 informality eschewed by, 197–98, 215 wealthy lifestyle of, 16–17, 195 Simonite, Tom, 136–37 simulation, see virtual world Singer, Peter, 267 Singularity, Singularitarians, 69, 147 sitcoms, 59 situational overload, 90–92 skimming, 233 “Slaves to the Smartphone,” 308–9 Slee, Tom, 61, 84 SLExchange, 26 slot machines, 218–19 smart bra, 168–69 smartphones, xix, 82, 136, 145, 150, 158, 168, 170, 183–84, 219, 274, 283, 287, 308–9, 315 Smith, Adam, 175, 177 Smith, William, 204 Snapchat, 166, 205, 225, 316 social activism, 61–62 social media, 224 biases reinforced by, 319–20 as deceptively reflective, 138–39 documenting one’s children on, 74–75 economic value of content on, 20–21, 53–54, 132 emotionalism of, 316–17 evolution of, xvi language altered by, 215 loom as metaphor for, 178 maintaining one’s microcelebrity on, 166–67 paradox of, 35–36, 159 personal information collected and monitored through, 257 politics transformed by, 314–20 scrapbooks compared to, 185–86 self-validation through, 36, 73 traditional media slow to adapt to, 316–19 as ubiquitous, 205 see also specific sites social organization, technologies of, 118, 119 Social Physics (Pentland), 213 Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise, 243–44 sociology, technology and, 210–13 Socrates, 240 software: autonomous, 187–89 smart, 112–13 solitude, media intrusion on, 127–30, 253 Songza, 207 Sontag, Susan, xx SoundCloud, 217 sound-management devices, 245 soundscapes, 244–45 space travel, 115, 172 spam, 92 Sparrow, Betsy, 98 Special Operations Command, U.S., 332 speech recognition, 137 spermatic, as term applied to reading, 247, 248, 250, 254 Spinoza, Baruch, 300–301 Spotify, 293, 314 “Sprite Sips” (app), 54 Squarciafico, Hieronimo, 240–41 Srinivasan, Balaji, 172 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 68 Starr, Karla, 217–18 Star Trek, 26, 32, 313 Stengel, Rick, 28 Stephenson, Neal, 116 Sterling, Bruce, 113 Stevens, Wallace, 158 Street View, 137, 283 Stroop test, 98–99 Strummer, Joe, 63–64 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), xxiii Such Stuff as Dreams (Oatley), 248–49 suicide rate, 304 Sullenberger, Sully, 322 Sullivan, Andrew, xvi Sun Microsystems, 257 “surf cams,” 56–57 surfing, internet, 14–15 surveillance, 52, 163–65, 188–89 surveillance-personalization loop, 157 survival, technologies of, 118, 119 Swing, Edward, 95 Talking Heads, 136 talk radio, 319 Tan, Chade-Meng, 162 Tapscott, Don, 84 tattoos, 336–37, 340 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 164, 237–38 Taylorism, 164, 238 Tebbel, John, 275 Technics and Civilization (Mumford), 138, 235 technology: agricultural, 305–6 American culture transformed by, xv–xxii, 148, 155–59, 174–77, 214–15, 229–30, 296–313, 329–42 apparatus vs. artifact in, 216–19 brain function affected by, 231–42 duality of, 240–41 election campaigns transformed by, 314–20 ethical hazards of, 304–11 evanescence and obsolescence of, 327 human aspiration and, 329–42 human beings eclipsed by, 108–9 language of, 201–2, 214–15 limits of, 341–42 master-slave metaphor for, 307–9 military, 331–32 need for critical thinking about, 311–13 opt-in society run by, 172–73 progress in, 77–78, 188–89, 229–30 risks of, 341–42 sociology and, 210–13 time perception affected by, 203–6 as tool of knowledge and perception, 299–304 as transcendent, 179–80 Technorati, 66 telegrams, 79 telegraph, Twitter compared to, 34 telephones, 103–4, 159, 288 television: age of, 60–62, 79, 93, 233 and attention disorders, 95 in education, 134 Facebook ads on, 155–56 introduction of, 103–4, 159, 288 news coverage on, 318 paying for, 224 political use of, 315–16, 317 technological adaptation of, 237 viewing habits for, 80–81 Teller, Astro, 195 textbooks, 290 texting, 34, 73, 75, 154, 186, 196, 205, 233 Thackeray, William, 318 “theory of mind,” 251–52 Thiel, Peter, 116–17, 172, 310 “Things That Connect Us, The” (ad campaign), 155–58 30 Days of Night (film), 50 Thompson, Clive, 232 thought-sharing, 214–15 “Three Princes of Serendip, The,” 12 Thurston, Baratunde, 153–54 time: memory vs., 226 perception of, 203–6 Time, covers of, 28 Time Machine, The (Wells), 114 tools: blurred line between users and, 333 ethical choice and, 305 gaining knowledge and perception through, 299–304 hand vs. computer, 306 Home and Away blurred by, 159 human agency removed from, 77 innovation in, 118 media vs., 226 slave metaphor for, 307–8 symbiosis with, 101 Tosh, Peter, 126 Toyota Motor Company, 323 Toyota Prius, 16–17 train disasters, 323–24 transhumanism, 330–40 critics of, 339–40 transparency, downside of, 56–57 transsexuals, 337–38 Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, The (Merton and Barber), 12–13 Trends in Biochemistry (Nightingale and Martin), 335 TripAdvisor, 31 trolls, 315 Trump, Donald, 314–18 “Tuft of Flowers, A” (Frost), 305 tugboats, noise restrictions on, 243–44 Tumblr, 166, 185, 186 Turing, Alan, 236 Turing Test, 55, 137 Twain, Mark, 243 tweets, tweeting, 75, 131, 315, 319 language of, 34–36 theses in form of, 223–26 “tweetstorm,” xvii 20/20, 16 Twilight Saga, The (Meyer), 50 Twitter, 34–36, 64, 91, 119, 166, 186, 197, 205, 223, 224, 257, 284 political use of, 315, 317–20 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 231, 242 Two-Lane Blacktop (film), 203 “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (Frost), 247–48 typewriters, writing skills and, 234–35, 237 Uber, 148 Ubisoft, 261 Understanding Media (McLuhan), 102–3, 106 underwearables, 168–69 unemployment: job displacement in, 164–65, 174, 310 in traditional media, 8 universal online library, 267–78 legal, commercial, and political obstacles to, 268–71, 274–78 universe, as memory, 326 Urban Dictionary, 145 utopia, predictions of, xvii–xviii, xx, 4, 108–9, 172–73 Uzanne, Octave, 286–87, 290 Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 277 vampires, internet giants compared to, 50–51 Vampires (game), 50 Vanguardia, La, 190–91 Van Kekerix, Marvin, 134 vice, virtual, 39–40 video games, 223, 245, 303 as addictive, 260–61 cognitive effects of, 93–97 crafting of, 261–62 violent, 260–62 videos, viewing of, 80–81 virtual child, tips for raising a, 73–75 virtual world, xviii commercial aspects of, 26–27 conflict enacted in, 25–27 language of, 201–2 “playlaborers” of, 113–14 psychological and physical health affected by, 304 real world vs., xx–xxi, 36, 62, 127–30 as restrictive, 303–4 vice in, 39–40 von Furstenberg, Diane, 131 Wales, Jimmy, 192 Wallerstein, Edward, 43–44 Wall Street, automation of, 187–88 Wall Street Journal, 8, 16, 86, 122, 163, 333 Walpole, Horace, 12 Walters, Barbara, 16 Ward, Adrian, 200 Warhol, Andy, 72 Warren, Earl, 255, 257 “Waste Land, The” (Eliot), 86, 87 Watson (IBM computer), 147 Wealth of Networks, The (Benkler), xviii “We Are the Web” (Kelly), xxi, 4, 8–9 Web 1.0, 3, 5, 9 Web 2.0, xvi, xvii, xxi, 33, 58 amorality of, 3–9, 10 culturally transformative power of, 28–29 Twitter and, 34–35 “web log,” 21 Wegner, Daniel, 98, 200 Weinberger, David, 41–45, 277 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 236 Wells, H.

Do Improvise: Less push. More pause. Better results. A new approach to work (and life) (Do Books) by Poynton, Robert

Berlin Wall, complexity theory, Gene Kranz, Hans Rosling, iterative process, off grid, Skype, TED Talk, Toyota Production System

They will have changed, added or improved things in a way that I wouldn’t think of. So don’t be limited by what I say, don’t be shy to mess around with them and don’t be slow to get in touch and tell me what happened. I am afraid we don’t have any idea where we learned this one. About the Author Robert Poynton (www.robertpoynton.com) lives in an off-grid, solar-powered house just outside the small town of Arenas de San Pedro in the province of Avila, in rural Spain. From there he helps run On Your Feet, a small consultancy conveniently based in Portland, Oregon, that he co-founded with Gary Hirsch (see www.oyf.com). On Your Feet uses improvisational ideas, tools and experiences to help people in organisations work together more effectively and creatively.

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

‘Our applications for building permission are stuck with the authorities,’ she says, as we walk through constellations of wooden shacks and run-down caravans. ‘Therefore we still have to live very temporarily.’ Everyone is fed up with living in caravans. People have few possessions: some have battered television sets, a few books and second-hand clothes. They aren’t completely off-grid here, but everything is just a little worn out. In addition to living in temporary accommodation, the typical Tamerian day can be long and hard. It often starts with some form of meditation (although some attend God Point). Then, depending on the role, it’s on to the day job. Monika shows me the pottery workshop, with two people hard at work designing a sculpture for the community centre.

…

‘Hey, you know what? We could have done them a deal!’ replied the first. ‘Haha!’ Activists are always caught in this hypocrite-or-fanatic bind. It’s difficult to unplug entirely from the modern world. They want to have a holiday and also need a laptop. When they do they’re hypocrites. If they go off-grid or refuse to fly, they’re fanatics. The activists understood Merthyr Tydfil’s problems. They knew it used to be a bustling, successful centre of iron mining and that it now ranks as one of the worst places to live in the United Kingdom. They knew that Ffos-y-fran has created jobs and a community fund.13 The coal industry is dying, and the activists chanted that they want better (greener) jobs for these miners and called for more government investment in the region.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

So rather than consider SPS as a competitor to one-thousand-megawatt municipal nuclear or natural-gas-fired power plants providing cheap bulk power, it might be better to think of it as a technology for supplying power on demand to remote locations, replacing the one-to-ten-megawatt-class diesel generators that are currently used to provide power to off-grid Arctic oil drilling sites or isolated military bases at great expense, logistical difficulty, and, in some cases, serious risk. Such customers might well be happy to pay the higher SPS price to get the power they need. Instead of one-thousand-megawatt SPS units with a mass of eight thousand tons trying to compete with cheap grid power, SPS designs should focus on five-megawatt systems weighing forty tons, providing premium power to off-grid customers who really need it and are willing to pay the price. Small-scale power grids in isolated developing-sector locations are also a potential market.

The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power by Keith Barnham

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Arthur Eddington, carbon footprint, credit crunch, decarbonisation, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, wikimedia commons

My alternative suggestion for extending the solar revolution outside Europe and North America is to encourage the governments and international financiers to fund wind turbine and solar panel factories in the sun-rich countries. These factories can produce electricity generators that are suitable for both on-grid and off-grid applications. They can also supply the PV cells to power replica solar factories and self-sustaining greenhouses; both are technologies that deserve sections on their own below. When the artificial leaf has been developed, PV systems will be able to generate solar fuels with their excess electrical power.

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They are not so keen on PV because their urban elite prefer central power generation in cities. Ironically, the mobile networks, often powered by PV are now facilitating democracy movements in many of these countries. This is introducing the mass of the population living far from a grid to the benefits of solar power. CPV will be even more suitable for these off-grid power applications. The sunlight concentrators and three times higher cell efficiency will eventually make CPV cheaper than PV in sun-rich areas. CPV provides more electric power for a given area. Also the CPV system, mounted on a pillar, can track the sun throughout the day, unlike a fixed PV system.

Zest: How to Squeeze the Max Out of Life by Andy Cope, Gavin Oattes, Will Hussey

emotional labour, fake news, hedonic treadmill, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kintsugi, mirror neurons, off grid, Richard Feynman, science of happiness, Snapchat

Our aim was to write this chapter so you can consider creating some sort of mental green belt, a space for clear thinking that resists the encroaching build-up of communication. Simply reducing your phone use by 30% might be a good start. Remember Deresiewicz’ ‘most excellent sheep’? Lambs to the slaughter? I have a sneaky feeling that being unGoogleable is the ultimate in chic. Off grid. Unconnected. Rogue. Googling yourself and finding zero results. A ‘tech-no’. Going forward, that has to be the cooooolest thing ever. Part 7 Daringly Happy Thought for the day Thank goodness they got the design for the drawing board right first time! First Up, a Story … Dances?

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

These activities, the tinkering as much as more formal constructions, are collectively known as grid edge, a term that encompasses everything from hooking up a generator to a house or adding some solar panels to the garage roof or using a 50-MW acronymically named S.P.I.D.E.R.S. microgrid for your base, to building a wind farm, a substation, and private lines into your corporate headquarters. It is here, at the thick black border between being on-grid (and thus reliant upon an infrastructure that belonged solely to the electric company) and being off-grid (and thus having no power, as my own father did during the 1970s), that alternative visions and structures for power production are taking root. It is here, at the grid’s edge, that microgrids blossom and grow. It is here that unstable environments are reworked into stable ones and that brittle is being remade in the idiom of resiliency.

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any piece of it: A couple of the Straws’ neighbors to the south, the Yoxulls, have been off the grid since they built their house eighteen years ago because they didn’t want to pay the utility $20,000 to extend the existing system of lines to a new pole. “of a typical tactical operations center”: Adams III et al. (2010), 46. “meet power requirements”: According to Adams III et al., “[the] inherent advantage of [renewables for deployed off-grid operations] over conventional petroleum-fueled systems is that combined with demand reduction, they greatly reduce and even eliminate the need to provide fuel logistic to remote sites, saving manpower, funds, and most importantly decreasing the risk to forces delivering supplies over contested lines of communication.”

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

They are immune to divestment campaigns, regulations requiring them to explain the risks to their asset valuations resulting from climate policies, and theatre companies or art galleries that refuse to accept their sponsorship.’ A more fruitful path, he argues, is to change consumer energy consumption by investing in new low-carbon technologies that will help shift consumer behaviour – things like LED lighting, smart energy meters in the home, or ways of storing solar energy off grid. Many oil and gas companies are putting their hopes into carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) technologies, where carbon emissions are captured then stored underground, potentially indefinitely. The IEA has called on governments to help support innovation in this field, as it estimates that it could support 7 per cent of the emissions savings required to comply with the Paris Agreement.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

Even in deserts where the wind doesn’t blow, the sun continues to shine unhindered by clouds, providing a reliable source of electricity, which is particularly useful because desert communities are often remote and far from power stations. Indeed, solar power proves far more reliable than grid power in many developing countries. During India’s frequent blackouts, it is often the poorest off-grid villages with recently installed solar panels that have uninterrupted power, enabling them to continue to pump water for crop irrigation, for example. The sun supplies our planet with a constant flow of 120,000 terawatts of energy, which powers our entire world from bacteria to plants and animals, to weather systems and chemical cycles.

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The sun supplies our planet with a constant flow of 120,000 terawatts of energy, which powers our entire world from bacteria to plants and animals, to weather systems and chemical cycles. Humanity uses around the same amount of energy in a year as the sun provides in an hour. The problem is that the sun’s energy is dispersed, whereas we need to use it in a concentrated form. Desert solar power is one way of doing that. Companies have been quick to see the market in off-grid homes that need phone juice, and a variety of pay-as-you-go solar options have sprung up across Africa and the Indian subcontinent. They are aimed at the very poor, who cannot afford the capital investment of solar panels, and who pay the most for energy because, without access to cheap grid electricity, they are forced to buy kerosene or diesel to power their homes.

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

Could they go to Phil Chase and lay out the whole story, and get him to root out Caroline’s ex and his whole operation, whatever it was? Root it out from the top down? Were the spy agencies so imbricated into the fabric of the government (and the military) that they were beyond presidential control, or even presidential knowledge? Or inquiry? If it weren’t for his going-off-grid status, he would have called up Edgardo to ask his opinion on this. As it was he could only continue to think, and worry, and drive. Somewhere in New Jersey it occurred to him that as he was on the road north, he must therefore have decided to go. He had decided something! And without even trying.

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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. It was better the way it was, perhaps, so that he could find them and remove them when he really had to, and then travel off-grid. He might need the van if Caroline went back to Mount Desert Island and he wanted to drive up to see her. In general it was an advantage. That was what Edgardo had meant. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t figure it out, and he had no place to stay. What to do, how to live. Always a question, but never more so than now.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The European Union and other governments, by contrast, are deploying a distributed smart grid—or Energy Internet—that lessens the potential threat and damage that can be inflicted by a massive cyberattack. Even if the electrical transformers were to flame out, if a fully functioning Energy Internet were operational across every region of the country, local communities could go off-grid and continue to generate their own green electricity, sharing it with their neighbors and businesses on microgrids, keeping the power and lights on, at least long enough to keep society functioning. Interestingly, a similar concern about the vulnerability of America’s communications network inspired, at least in part, the creation of the Internet.

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The reason this is done is so power and utility operators can control how the power is dispersed along the grid. They worry that with dynamic pricing monitoring meters available at every micropower site—alerting the owner about moment-to-moment changes in the price of electricity—small generators of electricity might program their system to only sell to the main grid when the price is high and go off-grid and use their electricity when they choose. The shortcomings of this system became apparent in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, when electrical power on Long Island and in the New Jersey coastal towns went out. Many homes and offices with installed solar panels on their roofs were unable to deploy them.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

Teams shooting three-pointers aren’t trying to right some wrong. They’re looking for a better way to win. Bentoism doesn’t force any specific values beyond a greater awareness of what’s going on. You can be a fast-food chain and make a Bentoist choice. You can be an environmentalist and make a Bentoist choice. You can live off-grid or you can be a pop star. You can be a Christian or a Muslim. Bentoism doesn’t tell you who to be. It helps you see how your own values line up with the situation at hand, and empowers you to make more self-coherent, values-based choices. This way of thinking is growing. As I write this, the country-turned-pop star Taylor Swift has signed a new major label record deal.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Perhaps we should look to who inhabits the abandoned spaces (social or physical) of the information economy once it starts to recede. Or, following the logic of the Coal Era and the Oil Century, maybe we should look to the next energy source for our clues. Increasingly, many individuals will be looking to move “off grid”—providing as much as possible of their own, self-sufficient power through wind, solar, and other means. So, the pendulum from our networked society may swing back from intravidualism to individualism once again. But who knows? It is hard enough trying to divine what is happening now, without making predictions about an economy yet to come.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

In the 3000 years predating the agrarian revolution, new cities and towns emerged and often failed after a time, as if people were struggling to stabilise settled centres of population. It seems that all too often, without the necessary anchors of society, people were prepared to walk away (Scott 2017). Scott is fascinated by anarchistic societies challenging the power of the state. Today we’re witnessing an emerging movement for living “off grid” as people choose to pursue less complicated, often less connected lives away from resource-hungry power sources. This movement is tiny but its ability to influence has been magnified among the global audience of the internet. In our more recent past, the role of religion in the underpinning of working patterns has been crucial.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

The place was, I read on the company’s website, “strategically and centrally located in one of the safest areas of North America,” at an altitude of about 3,800 feet and some one hundred miles from the nearest known military nuclear targets. “Vivos security team can spot anyone approaching the property from 3 miles away. Massive. Safe. Secure. Isolated. Private. Defensible. Off-Grid. Centrally located.” (It was not intuitively clear to me how a place could be both isolated and centrally located, but then such claims were no more lavishly contradictory than the sort of thing you’d come across in even the most mundanely pre-apocalyptic of property listings. At any rate, if pretty much the entire rest of the world had perished—nuclear attacks, cannibalism, paroxysms of miscellaneous savagery—any settlement of living humans would have legitimate grounds to proclaim itself centrally located.)

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

’ #30 Neith – Beta Earth I was running across the bridge now and almost at Julius’ last known location. It was the same place where Paul’s wrist brace had switched off its geo-tag. I carried on talking to Ramin. ‘This is madness, but I’m going to play along. You can explain later, but I’m alerting Clio. She needs to know that Paul has gone off grid.’ Opening up a direct channel to Clio, I told her what Ramin had just said, leaving off the bit that he wasn’t currently trusting her either. ‘I think Ramin’s right. Why else would Paul have switched his comms off? And it would explain who’s been running interference.’ It explained nothing as far as I was concerned.

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

He was dressed in a black polo shirt, a TOOOL logo prominently displayed on his chest, with dozens of laser-printed “love picking” leaflets slipped neatly into the pockets of his cargo shorts. Wrapped on one wrist was a magnetic bracelet to which he could affix his picks, swapping one tool out for another in an instant, a performative mix of off-grid survivalist gear wed with the quirks of urban maker culture. “Love picking,” as I was shortly to learn, is by no means universally sanctioned among the lockpicking crowd. A vigorous and far from polite discussion had been developing on the social news website Reddit for the past month. The event on the Brooklyn Bridge had initially been proposed as a kind of antigraffiti gesture by an otherwise anonymous Redditor called Bobcat; Bobcat is a get-off-my-lawn, gun-rights type who had been roused to anger by what he considers a blatant misuse of city infrastructure.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

The greening of the Empire State Building presently under way in New York City is self-financing through savings in utility bills and will achieve the emissions reduction equivalent of taking nineteen thousand cars off the street. Even poor cities can change citizen and consumer behavior, leapfrogging to low-carbon, off-grid solutions such as distributed power networks that draw from multiple sources of energy. In Mexico City, the World Resources Institute ran a program mostly funded by the Shell Foundation to retrofit diesel metro buses with catalytic converters. All the efforts under way to control Western emissions will be a quaint sideshow if they aren’t copied in China, where hundreds of state-owned companies shun environmental regulations and are impervious to external scrutiny and shame as each year they build enough coal-fired plants to power Italy.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

The night-light method has been used to gain a better understanding of the massive informal economy in India, a country of 1.3 billion people where more than 90 percent of the working population toils outside the formal sector. One could theoretically ask electricity companies how much power they sell in each district. But satellite imagery provides a more accurate picture, since official figures don’t count small off-grid schemes powered by solar or hydro. Nor do electricity companies properly account for the power that trickles away via inefficient grids or is stolen by poor communities adept at tapping power from overhead cables. Light-intensity data has another advantage: it tells you more about economic activity at a local level than conventional data.

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All by Chris Goodall

3D printing, additive manufacturing, carbon tax, clean tech, decarbonisation, demand response, Easter island, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, gigafactory, Haber-Bosch Process, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Ken Thompson, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Negawatt, off grid, Peter Thiel, rewilding, Russell Ohl, smart meter, standardized shipping container, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons

They can deliver, when required, a large number of kilowatts compared to the total number of kilowatt hours in store: like a bath of water that cannot hold very much but which has a large plug hole. Cars need this sort of power. Other types of battery will be required to provide a consistent power level for many hours, perhaps during the night hours in order to power an off-grid village. It’s my guess that a completely different type called a ‘flow’ battery will meet this need. Flow batteries can hold a lot of energy but only dispense a relatively small amount each hour. By contrast to the lithium ion batteries, this is a large bath with a smaller outlet. Lithium ion We can thank the car manufacturers for much of the recent progress in lithium ion electricity storage.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

In economics-speak, friction is the opposite of flow. Friction is whatever impedes the data flowing from you and all that you do, to the interested parties who want to make money out of you, and/or control/nudge your behaviour. It is as simple as that. * * * Or am I just an analogue human who likes the idea of being off-grid sometimes? At present that is still possible if you leave your phone at home, walk wherever you want to go, pay cash where there is no CCTV (both increasingly difficult moves, I admit), don’t browse the internet for a few days. Soon, though, as smart devices and smart implants become normal, you won’t be logging in.

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

BEFORE Dumb City: The Neighbourhood That Logged Off 7 July 2021 Neeta Singh BBC News magazine In a hip neighbourhood in Bristol, a controversial group of anarchists are rebelling against the smart city by blocking out the internet. Neeta Singh visits the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft to find out what life off-grid looks like in the centre of one of the UK’s most connected cities. The whole world around me is cycling with colours—every building down this busy Bristol street is covered with animated patterns: flocks of birds scroll across their surfaces; intricate, alien-looking plants burst forth from the architecture; and stylised faces look down on me with cool disdain.

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

(There were fears it would reach 1.5 billion tons by 2020.)437 As for the United States, the second-largest emitter, here is one encouraging statistic: electricity use in that country has been flat since 2007, even though the economy has grown substantially. One reason, depressingly, might be manufacturing plants closing their doors as jobs shift overseas. But another, more encouragingly, could be off-grid electricity generation—people heating their homes with solar panels, for instance—and energy conservation.438 For all three of these highest-emitting countries, and the rest of the world, major advances in battery storage capacity to preserve energy generated by solar and wind could lessen the need for fossil fuels overall.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

‘You are 9% of the world’s population, this group is for people to discuss and meet with people whom [sic] want to reverse this trend, this group is anti-birth control, pro-polygamy’. 7 members. Others include ‘Christian Identity’ and ‘GamerGate Veterans’. Some users appear to be bored, others lonely. One messages me, ‘I want a family too, I live off grid in Canada on 120 acres,’ and gives me his exact ancestry. ‘I am English Acadian French, Scottish, Belgian, Irish and Norwegian.’ Others are more straightforward with their political goals: ‘My dream is to create a social movement for the formation of a “European Israel”. I would love to see it grow from secret society to social club, to political party, to nation.’

The Cohousing Handbook: Building a Place for Community by Chris Scotthanson, Kelly Scotthanson

Buy land – they’re not making it any more, card file, index card, intentional community, land bank, off grid, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering

• Conditional use requirements ✦ daycare, for instance • Development permit requirements ✦ site plan review ✦ design review Utilities If we expect to use local utilities, what utilities are available at what cost and what schedule? • Sewer • Municipal system timing and/or requirements • Individual or site specific system requirements • Potential for neighborhood collaboration • Water • Municipal system timing and/or requirements • Individual or site specific system requirements • Power • Local system • Off grid • Communications ☞ 87 THE COHOUSING HANDBOOK 88 You wouldn’t want to do a full Feasibility Analysis on land you have not yet tied up (completed an agreement to purchase) because it can be both time consuming and costly. If you do enough of them, and they don’t result in land that works, it will also get frustrating.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

Thanks especially to everyone in the Institute for Social Futures and all those who chipped in their thoughts at the Global Futures events, where nearly all the themes in this book have had an airing. Thanks to Matt Lloyd and all at CUP for confidence in the concept, patience, and of course great edits. All the mistakes are mine. Three sheds let me escape from the noise and haste, and were critical for perspective. One is at the end of my garden. One is an off-grid metal box on Colonsay, my favourite Scottish island. The third is the unforgettable Sunrise on the Cumbrian West Coast, to which Chris and Elaine Lane very kindly lent me the key. Most of all, as always, thanks to Liz, Bill and Rosie for putting up with the whole process and dad’s grumpy pre-occupation.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability by David Owen

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, delayed gratification, distributed generation, drive until you qualify, East Village, Easter island, electricity market, food miles, Ford Model T, garden city movement, hydrogen economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, linear programming, McMansion, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, Murano, Venice glass, Negawatt, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, peak oil, placebo effect, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, unemployed young men, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

Supplies of those fuels are finite, too, and they are subject to the same peak effects as oil, but their current relative abundance will allow the party to go on for some time. A full transition to renewables will have to take place at some point, but we have a very long way to go. As of the end of 2007, the installed generating capacity of all the photovoltaics in the United States, both off-grid and grid-connected, added up to less than half of the generating capacity of the Hoover Dam. Some economists dismiss the notion of catastrophic energy peaks. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in the revised and expanded (2006) edition of their best-selling book Freakonomics , write:What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives.

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, additive manufacturing, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Free Software Foundation, game design, global supply chain, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lifelogging, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off grid, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, TED Talk, the long tail, the market place

I stumbled upon Josh’s artwork on crowdfunding site Kickstarter where he raised a record amount of funds for a sculpture project called Crania Anatomica Filigre, a white, plastic ornately filigreed 3D printed skull. When we spoke on the phone, I learned that he grew up in the Mississippi River valley in Illinois. He described his bohemian childhood as one that “included post ‘60s off-grid communal living, Hell’s Angels babysitters, complete artistic immersion, and family tragedy.” Today he’s a full-time artist and a leading digital sculptor. Josh explained, “Most of what I do is digital.” Josh learned how to use design software and 3D printers several years ago when he owned and managed a boutique design firm.

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

The batteries can be recharged whenever there is a system surplus, and in particular at night. The charging process exploits the variance in the other electricity system demands. In theory, no new power stations might be needed for the system.[8] It would just use the existing power stations more of the time. It gets even better. In theory, the charging could be ‘off grid’ altogether. Since it does not matter when the batteries are charged, the intermittency of renewables would not matter. The batteries could be charged when the wind blows and during the day for solar panels. The point is that the overall system costs might be remarkably low compared with the instant fast charging.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

They work so well, in fact, that modern economies need payments as much as they need water, power and energy. Without smooth-functioning payments, financial markets, commerce, employment, even unemployment, would all be compromised. Look at who your country identified as key workers during the Covid-19 lockdown and you’ll probably find payments staff are listed. Unless you live off-grid in splendid and completely self-sufficient isolation, you need to be able to pay and (most of us at least) need to be able to get paid. If access to the payment system is critical for everyone, then our modern, monetary-based societies have first to ensure that they have a good system and, second, that everyone has access to it.

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

Both of my grandparents had come over from South Korea, hiding in the hull of a small fishing vessel,’ Son recalls. They had nothing to eat, no place to stay and could not speak the Japanese language. You could not even say they were starting from square one, such was their situation. They were facing an uphill struggle just to reach zero. ‘The grounds were completely off-grid. It was the sort of place only homeless people would go to.’ Son’s grandfather, and others like him who had come over from South Korea, collected bits of galvanised iron sheets and built a shelter as protection against the elements, and in doing so formed a small colony. As the plot of land was not registered it was illegal to live there and Japanese National Railways employees would routinely burn the place down as if they were carrying out just another controlled burn of company lands.

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

bioinformatics, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deepfake, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hyperloop, independent contractor, job automation, low earth orbit, messenger bag, mirror neurons, off grid, pattern recognition, phenotype, ride hailing / ride sharing, supervolcano, time dilation

Your destination is approximately two thousand feet north-northwest of your current position. Kara turned off the car. I stepped outside. My door slam echoed through the pine forest. Kara got out, went around to the trunk, popped it open. I walked over, saw that she had her duffel bag open. She was pulling out a Garmin minisatellite communicator for off-grid GPS tracking. She handed it to me. “Can you put the coordinates in?” While I programmed 36°33′45″N, 106°13′04″W into the device, Kara palmed a magazine into a Glock, which she slipped into a hip holster and secured with a magnetic clasp. Then she loaded shotgun slugs into the same weapon she’d used to shoot me out of the vivarium.

SAM: One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize the Way We Build by Jonathan Waldman

Burning Man, computer vision, Ford paid five dollars a day, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Hyperloop, industrial robot, information security, James Webb Space Telescope, job automation, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, off grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing, Yogi Berra

Painstakingly, he built wooden boats and much of the furniture in his house by hand. He missed the days when buying cheese led to a conversation with the grocer rather than the impersonal beep of the bar code. Yearly, he went fishing near the headwaters of the Kennebec River, always staying at a Wi-Fi-less, cell-service-less, off-grid lodge that, for most of its refrigeration, uses two-hundred-pound blocks of ice cut from a nearby lake every January and stored in cedar shavings. II. Apparently, it did not bother the government that Parsons, on the government’s dime, had built the factories in which those same chemical containers were filled sixty years earlier. 10.

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa by Calestous Juma

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, double helix, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, export processing zone, global value chain, high-speed rail, impact investing, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, land tenure, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, non-tariff barriers, off grid, out of africa, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, Recombinant DNA, rolling blackouts, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, total factor productivity, undersea cable

However, a majority of farmers lacked Internet access. In 2010, an innovative platform called “iCow” sought to use increasingly popular and accessible mobile technology to bridge the gap. iCow started out as “Mkulima F.I.S.H,” or Farmer Information Service Helpline, as a way to educate farmers over the phone. Mkulima F.I.S.H. was designed to be an off-grid agricultural wiki for mobile phone users. One component of the platform was the cow calendar, which eventually won an Apps4Africa competition. Subsequently, a team of developers and a customer service team worked closely with farmers on the ground so that farmer challenges were prioritized, and smart solutions were designed and 204 THE NEW HARVEST developed to address these problems.

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

Black Lives Matter, gentrification, Kickstarter, off grid, place-making, sexual politics, Snapchat

But you’ll get there! Queenie I guess Kyazike Ah, fam. I know it’s mad, still, but you’ll be back to yourself in no time. Trust me. In the meantime, you ain’t missing out on anything. I haven’t even been on any dates I can entertain you with Queenie Ha Queenie I think I’m going to go off-grid for a bit, if that’s all right. Talking to you just reminds me that I’m a shell of the Queenie you were friends with Darcy You’re Queenie! You don’t have to be one way or another for us to love you. But you take your time. We’ll always be here. Xxxxxx Kyazike Exactly. What Darcy said. Love, fam That night and the night after, I lay awake, thinking about how best to approach the introduction of counseling to my grandparents.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

We are approaching the crossover point where installing solar panels is more cost advantageous for many homeowners: the MOP (electricity generation equipment) is being commoditized by huge robotic solar panel factories building cheap solar panels. The process is not complete, since most home solar installations simply feed into the central grid. However, the price of batteries continues to drop, 22 so before too long, consumers will be able to go “off grid”—producing all their own electrical energy needs. Individual home owners will own the MOP to produce their own electricity. That is, we will see the rise of millions of “energy factory owners”: people producing their own energy from their solar MOP. Again, my neighbors will have little incentive to buy electricity from me when they can buy cheap solar cells and produce their own electricity.

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

Unfortunately, while the DARPA researchers managed to miniaturize the components required such that the scanner could be carried, they weren’t able to sufficiently reduce the power requirements. Generating the x-rays required a lot of energy—enough to be noticed by authorities and more than could be supplied by fuel cells or other off-grid generators. The project was a dud, and its researchers moved on to more promising fields. However, some ideas are like zombies: they never die. The 3-D printer eventually found its way into Union Orbital’s factories via a NASA PPI program, but the advanced scanner only saw the light of day through plain carelessness.

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

(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. If enough homes do so over the next 20 to 30 years, existing utility companies will lose money and will certainly be unable to maintain or service the grid, leading more homes to rely on newer technologies as the grid fails. The two decades-long transition away from fossil fuel-based generation has already started.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

But there are many kinds of middle class, even in the UK, and I hope this book will strike a chord with all of them. From the first-generation middle classes who followed the entrepreneurial path set out by Margaret Thatcher right through to the crustiest scion of the landed gentry. From the brand-new estate outside Bishop’s Stortford to the tumbledown off-grid eco-cottage outside Totnes. I mention Little Venice because anyone reading this book deserves to know about the niche in the class system I am writing from, but I am only too aware that there is more than one way of being middle-class. In my case, I am also middle-class because my parents are. Both my grandfathers were in the services, one rising to be a colonel in the army and the other to be a captain in the navy.

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

It’s a win-win proposition. Almost every city and town in Vermont has the potential for one or more Community Supported Energy projects. Perhaps you can get one started in your community. 134 chapter 6 : Small is Beautiful Dave Smith, the “Smith” in Smith & Hawken, presently runs an independent bookstore and lives off-grid. Friends Meeting by Dave Smith W hile the Vietnam War was still in its infancy, two little old ladies arrived at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, every Saturday morning at 11:00 and stood silently at the entrance for an hour protesting the war. They were there every Saturday without fail, and they were alone in their protest for months.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Energy requirements in developing countries will more than double over the next thirty years, and meeting this demand will be central to raising incomes and reducing poverty. Developing countries need to find cleaner, more abundant, and cost-effective energy sources, including technologies aimed specifically at their particular circumstances (such as small-scale off-grid hydro, solar, or wind sources for remote regions). New advancements in health will be needed to continue to fight disease and halt the spread of antimicrobial resistance. Climate change adds to the urgency and complexity of each of these issues. Technology alone will not solve these problems. New technologies will bring progress only in conjunction with strong global leadership and effective institutions and governance within developing countries.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

As with any weapon, it’s safer to have robots than to trust the other side not to. If in future wars millions of kamikaze drones will destroy conventional armies in minutes, they’d better be our drones. If World War III will be over in seconds, as one side takes control of the other’s systems, we’d better have the smarter, faster, more resilient network. (Off-grid systems are not the answer: systems that aren’t networked can’t be hacked, but they can’t compete with networked systems, either.) And, on balance, a robot arms race may be a good thing, if it hastens the day when the Fifth Geneva Convention bans humans in combat. War will always be with us, but the casualties of war need not be.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

His idea soon grew into the Global Village Construction Set, which aims to demonstrate step-by-step how to build from scratch 50 universally useful machines, from tractors, brick makers and 3D printers to sawmills, bread ovens and wind turbines. The designs have so far been recreated by innovators in India, China, the US, Canada, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Italy and France. Based on these successes, Jakubowski and his collaborators have since launched the Open Building Institute, which aims to make open-source designs for ecological, off-grid, affordable housing available to all.81 ‘Our goal is decentralized production,’ he explains. ‘I’m talking about a business case for efficient enterprise where the traditional concept of scale becomes irrelevant. Our new concept of scale is about distributing economic power far and wide.’82 Open-source design also promises large social benefits and vast cost savings for state-funded institutions in every country, says Joshua Pearce, a leading academic and engineer in free open-source hardware.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

But what about the technology itself? If the increased complexity of computer systems means increased insecurity and unwanted interdependency, what can we do about that? There are two ways to deal with the problem of computers running human affairs. One is to make things simpler. Some of us may aspire to go ‘off grid’, simplifying our lives by going back to nature, throwing away our smartphones or unplugging from the Internet. I suspect, however, that only a few would choose that path, and those who did would soon discover the huge challenges of practically cutting themselves off from the civilised world. For better or for worse, humanity can only move forward and deal with such complexities by using the only realistic means available.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

Banks and other lending companies could provide lower interest rates for businesses and homeowners that install solar panels. Assuming an average of eight to nine years for payback on the energy savings from the installation, businesses and homeowners holding a twenty-year mortgage would be generating all of their own electricity off grid for the last eleven to twelve years of their loan. The monthly savings on the electricity bills could be leveraged against the monthly mortgage payment and be the basis for a reduced interest rate. The reconfiguration of the building as a power plant, in turn, appreciates the assessed value of the real estate holding.

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, anti-bias training, autism spectrum disorder, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, deplatforming, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, off grid, Overton Window, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech bro, young professional

As one MGTOW blogger, calling himself ‘The Observer Watches’, summarises: The MGTOW drops out of society altogether. He minimises contact with the blue-pill world and seeks to further his own ends on his own terms. For all intents and purposes, he does not exist. A urbanite might keep to his own apartment, while someone further out may simply head into the wilderness and go off-grid. Those who achieve this ultimate isolation are known as ‘ghosts’ and treated as legends within the community. But they appear to be in a minority, and most MGTOW seem happy hovering somewhere around level 2. The majority of MGTOW discussions online tend to centre more on classic manosphere complaints, like the various evils of women and ‘misandry’ (hatred of men).

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

This is a favorite, self-affirming aphorism truckers love to repeat—I hear it constantly—but it has the benefit of being true. From the big appliances of our lives to the smallest bite of food, every single staple, butter knife, copper wire, or ceramic mug comes via truck. This is true whether you order online next-day delivery for your milk or opt to live off-grid and self-sufficient. If you build it yourself, the parts you use for building arrived on a truck. If you grow it, the seeds, organic fertilizer, and baling wire for your compost bin arrived that way too. Trucking as an industry is gargantuan: 10.7 billion tons of freight per year get moved around this great land on trucks, which breaks down to 54 million tons a day, or 350 pounds per man, woman, and child.

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

But outside the Whole Foods–rich triangle (four and counting), little opportunity beckoned for Tim’s patients, most of whom were thirsty, hungry, unhoused, and divorced from mainstream health care. Tim’s patients aren’t well enough to make it to the clinic where he works during the day, let alone apply for Apple’s jobs in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and software engineering. They have lived off-grid and in the shadows for too long. The state pledged $845 million in tax incentives, and the county $20 million. But for the people in Tim’s practice, no such investment is being made. Street medicine is low-tech and high-touch, the antithesis of Apple. But more than most of the programs I’ve witnessed in my decade of reporting on the overdose crisis, Tim’s low-barrier approach works—not always the first time, and not for everyone, but, eventually, for many.

The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover

airport security, Atahualpa, carbon footprint, Deng Xiaoping, East Village, financial independence, Google Earth, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal

Fifteen years later, for reasons involving a girlfriend named Margot, my work as a writer, and perhaps a strain of counterphobia in my personality, I became a resident of Brooklyn. One cold weekend in January, my friend Seth came to town and, to get some fresh air, we decided to walk the length of Manhattan. Broadway seemed the logical route. On a sunny Sunday morning, we rode the subway to the financial district downtown. Its off-grid, short streets would have been more congenial to pedestrians 150 or 200 years earlier; on this frigid morning, the high-rise office buildings channeled the wind and blocked the sun. The most imposing of these, of course, were the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. They stood a block west of Broadway between Liberty and Vesey streets, just about ten minutes into our fourteen-mile walk.

Tcl/Tk in a Nutshell by Paul Raines, Jeff Tranter

AltaVista, functional programming, iterative process, off grid, place-making, Silicon Valley

wm grid window [baseWidth baseHeight widthInc heightInc] Request that window be managed as a gridded window. BaseWidth and baseHeight specify the number of grid units that the current requested size of window represents. WidthInc and heightInc specify the number of pixels in each horizontal and vertical grid unit. Specifying all values as empty strings turns off gridded management for window. If the arguments are omitted, their current values are returned (or an empty string if window is not gridded). wm group window [pathName] Add window to the group of related windows led by window pathname. The window manager may use this information to unmap the entire group of windows when the leader window is iconified.

The Great Lakes Water Wars by Peter Annin

clean water, Donald Trump, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), off grid, Ronald Reagan, urban sprawl

The low-water period lasted so long that many scientists, policymakers, and property owners began to wonder: Is this what climate change looks like on the Great Lakes? Some of the most alarmed stakeholders were cottage owners on Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay, a stunningly beautiful section of the Great Lakes Basin that is home to some 30,000 islands, numerous parks, gin-clear waters, and thousands of venerable off-grid cottages, many of which have been in families for generations. By definition, island properties are only accessible by boat. When low water levels render docks useless, getting to the family cottage with a boatload of summer supplies suddenly becomes a major logistical operation. Many cottagers spent thousands of dollars on dredging to access their docks.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

Even though I was finished at the company myself, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss, that this was how a company whose future had been so bright might finally come to an end—not through governmental hearings and oversight, but through the power of Facebook. The next day, Saturday, March 17, I headed out early with others from Restart to help with the recovery effort in rural areas of the island. I had no connectivity through most of the day as we worked with a group called Off Grid Relief to set up retractable solar panels in the countryside. For months upon months, people there had lived without electricity, and therefore no refrigeration or lights, let alone internet and phone service. It felt good to get my hands dirty again, to put my shoulder to an effort that directly helped others.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Everything here is strung together, recycled or borrowed, and this makeshift approach to life, together with the shared communal space and the rotas setting out chores, gives the community the feel of a New Age hippie encampment. But the people of the Nuevo 14 dump are not economic outsiders seeking a new way of living off-grid: all the men and women here work, holding down full-time jobs in rich neighbourhoods such as Las Condes and Vitacura. SANTIAGO’S NEW MIDDLE CLASS ‘We live here because it is our best option to be close to work,’ says 24-year-old Melissa Neira. Santiago is a sprawling commuter city and travelling to jobs in the central districts takes around 90 minutes by bus (Nuevo 14 takes its name from stop number 14 on a ‘new’ bus route launched many years ago).

The Awoken: A Novel by Katelyn Monroe Howes

Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, clean water, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, life extension, lock screen, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Silicon Valley, stem cell

“They still have time,” Eliza qualified. “Come on,” Gina ordered. “Let’s take the stairs, it’s a ways to go.” Twenty-three floors down, to be exact. These cryo facilities used the subterrane to efficiently maintain the freezing temperatures. The most advanced facilities, like this one in New York, used geothermal and off-grid solar power to be completely self-sustaining in keeping the bodies on ice, but anything beyond keeping the dead preserved required more power. Hence the importance of Damien and Samson’s mission. The monotony of our descent through the dark stairwell exacerbated the bone-chilling feeling that we were entering some sort of underworld.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

He now quickly built up the government’s program, which for the first time funded substantial amounts of solar research. It was Maycock who, out of his DOE budget, paid for the solar water heater that adorned the roof of Jimmy Carter’s White House. But solar cells were the main focus. “It was proved beyond a doubt that PV could be a very reliable, cost-effective, off-grid source of electricity,” recalled Maycock. The challenge was to bring the cost of PV down and the efficiencies up, so that they could compete with the grid. “We put in place a structured program for cost reduction,” said Maycock. Spurred on by grants, companies large and small charged into the field, exploring different ways to increase efficiency.

…

By 2010 there were fewer than two dozen stations in the entire state selling hydrogen fuel.28 Another possibility is a fuel cell powered by natural gas rather than hydrogen—so-called solid oxide fuel cells. Some think, however, that natural gas fuel cells are better suited for stationary uses, such as off-grid power generation, rather than as power sources for automobiles. WHAT ABOUT NATURAL GAS? A potential rival to the EV would be the NGV—otherwise known as the natural gas vehicle. This is a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine but that uses natural gas, instead of gasoline or diesel, as fuel.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Triple-Entry Accounting: Privacy Is for Individuals, Not Corporations Triple-entry accounting is not without skeptics. Izabella Kaminska, a Financial Times reporter, believes mandating triple-entry accounting will lead to an increasing number of transactions moving off balance sheets. “There will always be those who refuse to follow the protocol, who abscond and hide secret value in parallel off-grid networks, what we call the black market, off balance sheet, shadow banking.”69 How does one reconcile non-transaction-based accounting measures, particularly the recognition of intangible assets? How are we going to track intellectual property rights, brand value, or even celebrity status—think Tom Hanks?

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

He then quickly added that he worked for the local volunteer fire department, which was why he had one. (Sure!) But, his dad chimed in, if cell phones are accepted, “there won’t be wires running down the street to our homes.” In pursuit of their goal to remain off the grid yet modernize, some Amish have installed inverters on their diesel generators linked to batteries to provide them with 110 off-grid volts. They power specialty appliances at first, such as an electric coffeepot. I saw one home with an electric copier in the home office part of the living room. Will the slow acceptance of modern appliances creep along until, 100 years hence, the Amish have what we have now (but will by then have left behind)?

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

China’s Suning is building new low-energy data centers in all its business hubs. Hanoi, the city where today you are most likely to get hit by a motorcycle, plans to ban motorcycles and build a subway by 2030. The Philippines has begun to install tidal-power plants to harness oceanic wave energy that will allow entire islands such as Capul to be powered entirely off grid. And Adelaide, Australia, which over the past decade has transitioned to generating more than half its energy supply from renewables while promoting local agriculture through wastewater irrigation, has much to teach the rest of Asia about maximizing urban resources. Asia is the world’s largest food-producing and -consuming region, but few Asian countries use the modern machinery, irrigation techniques, and fertilizers required to get the most out of their farms.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

To give one example among millions, people who rage against Wal-Mart still shop there, or at other stores equally a part of the global predation chain, because they feel they cannot afford to pay double the price or to do without. And what of the electricity that powers my house—coal ripped out of the tops of mountains? What of the gas that gets me places and gets deliveries to me if I go “off-grid”? I can minimize my participation in the world-devouring machine, but I cannot avoid it entirely. As people become aware that merely living in society means contributing to the evils of the world, they often go through a phase of desiring to find a completely isolated and self-sufficient intentional community—but what good does that do, while Rome burns?

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

During peak use, over two hundred transactions per second and 20 percent of Kenya’s GDP streams through the M-Pesa network.23 It is being rolled out across India, where it could eventually bring banking to hundreds of millions of poor people. Most of the world’s cities are now lit up by some kind of wireless service. But as Ericsson, a leading supplier of network equipment, points out, “Reaching the next billion subscribers means expanding to rural off-grid areas.”24 The company has developed highly efficient solar-powered cell towers for use in outlying areas where there is no electric-power infrastructure. On the consumer side, in 2010 Vodafone launched a $32 solar-powered phone in India.25 Presumably, the arrival of modern telecommunications in the countryside might provide new local economic opportunities and slow migration to cities.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

As he grew further from his Canadian roots and became a Californian, Camp grew his hair past his shoulders, affecting a kind of neo-hippie vibe. He looked as if he’d be just as comfortable hanging out with a surfboard in Long Beach as he would hunched in front of a MacBook Pro at the Creamery. Camp later became an annual regular at Burning Man, the weeks long off-grid bacchanal in the Nevada desert attended by thousands of techies and hippies from all across the West Coast. StumbleUpon was his claim to fame, a kind of early social network conceived back when he was in college in Calgary, long before the rise of Facebook. The site was perfect for the days of the desktop web; StumbleUpon flicked users between different websites at random, promising to offer surprising and delightful suggestions for users to “stumble upon” and enjoy.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

In 2011, Wightman estimated that, although around 60 per cent of Scottish land titles were in the register, the proportion of land area that was registered was far lower, because registration rates were much higher for small urban sites than for larger rural ones: ‘Since most of the 1,500 estates that dominate rural Scotland are not yet on the Land Register, the extent of land registered is only around 18 per cent.’3 New land registration legislation, introduced the following year, tried to hurry things along.4 But it has not been effective. For many owners, registration remains voluntary, and hence most of the large estates mentioned by Wightman remain ‘off grid’. At mid 2017, the estimated proportion of land registered in Scotland had inched up to only 29 per cent.5 Furthermore, gaps in title registration are only part of the visibility problem where British private landownership is concerned – and perhaps not the biggest part. Even where ownership is recorded, the identity of the ultimate, ‘real’ owner often remains obscure.

A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul

Anthropocene, assortative mating, coronavirus, COVID-19, Elon Musk, Google Earth, jitney, long peace, low earth orbit, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, off grid, phenotype, quantum entanglement, SpaceX Starlink, the scientific method

The remaining hawk traveled down the Gulf coastal plain of eastern Mexico, through the narrow waist of Central America and south along the eastern slope of the Andes. Once in Argentina, it continued on to La Pampa Province, a board-flat land that bears a remarkable resemblance to Kansas, with squared-off grids of farm fields, pastures and shelterbelts at rigorous right-angles, and small planted groves, or montes, of exotic eucalyptus trees. That winter, Brian and two of his former field assistants traveled down there, expecting to conduct some basic life-history research—nothing earthshaking, just some ground-floor biology, since almost no one had ever studied Swainson’s hawks in their nonbreeding range.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

Critics saw seasteading as dangerous and reactionary—and also just kind of goofy. The founding of the institute “should live on in internet lore for confirming the dream that two guys with a blog and a love of Ayn Rand can land half a million dollars to pursue their dream, no matter how off-kilter or off-grid it might seem,” Wired wrote. NPR ran a tongue-in-cheek report that began with joking promotional copy: “Tired of the rat race and following all the rules imposed by the man? Tired of being denied the opportunity to live on a floating ocean capsule?” host Mike Pesca asked. Gawker mocked Freidman relentlessly, mining his confessional blog and social media stream for the most ridiculous bits of inanity. libertarian utopianist patri friedman wants to be your baby’s daddy was one headline in reference to his polyamory.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

The GBNers spoke in an inside-baseball patois, and Brockman watched as Brand chuckled warmly, breathing it all in. Brockman felt bewildered by the familial warmth Brand showed toward what he thought Brand in the past had seen as a faceless and antihuman corporate world. In Brockman’s eyes, Brand still affected an off-grid vibe; his custom-sheathed knife was omnipresent on his hip, certainly not typical dress wear among the GBN crowd, but instead of a signifier, it suddenly seemed like a barnacle. As GBN grew, Brand’s transformation became more evident to many of those who had known him in the days of tepees and Garnerville.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Telecom companies spent $2 trillion on mobile infrastructure between 2009 and 2014 and will deploy another $4 trillion by 2020 to expand access and raise connectivity speeds worldwide.1 Connective infrastructure companies are expanding into digital empires. Google began as a Web browser but has become a global data utility. In the race to provide pervasive and low-cost connectivity, Internet service providers are effectively becoming telecoms themselves, with Google launching Wi-Fi Zeppelin blimps to connect off-grid populations to its services; meanwhile, Internet-based telephony such as Skype or WhatsApp has all but eliminated calling charges; there is no “roaming” on the Internet. No matter how much they compete for eyeballs and data, Google and Facebook agree that there is no higher virtue than expanding connectivity, hence their partnership to launch more satellites to serve the “Other Three Billion.”*1 In the most remote corners of the world where there are neither hospitals nor electricity people have solar or motion-powered mobile phones.

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

The cool air was perfumed by the lavender shrubs growing beyond the veranda where the table was set. Our shadows grew elongated like figures in an El Greco painting, and then our shadows were gone. Twilight, the magic hour. “Is it time yet? Can we eat now?” asked twelve-year-old Yusef. He sat at the table next to his father, Ali A., a shepherd from one of the off-grid communities Comet services, a place called Tuba. Ahmad S. consulted his watch, and then the slip of the moon in the indigo sky. He clapped his hands. He looked so much more energized than he had on our depressing day in Susiya. His eyes twinkled like the stars that were starting to show. It was time.

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

This is one of the reasons why many countries require companies to be registered so that their identity can be verified and thereby linked to certain rights. A bank account containing money would need to be in the name of someone or something. To this extent, some form of registry for AI may be an inescapable requirement for AI to hold rights. A human may be able to just about survive “off-grid”, without a social security number and outside of the knowledge of authorities, but in developed economies this is increasingly difficult. In order to access many basic goods and services, some form of local, federal or national identity verification is required. The same bottlenecking principles could be applied to AI.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

The appeal of solar has been enormous ever since. As Professor Martin Green, a leader in solar research for decades, puts it, “The whole photovoltaic technology itself is a bit magical. Sunlight just falls on this inert material and you get electricity straight out of it.” But for many years the markets for PVs remained niche for off-grid uses—to bring electricity to isolated homes or remote locations or, for that matter, to marijuana growers, who did not want oversized utility bills to call the attention of law enforcement to their illicit businesses. The first introduction to solar power for many people was the solar-powered pocket calculator.1 What catapulted solar into the mainstream was the marriage of Germany’s environmental politics with Chinese manufacturing prowess.

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

D Rooms from: $315 E 1021 Desperado Trail, Sisters P 541/549–5900 w fivepinelodge.com a 44 rooms X Free Breakfast. Metolius River Resort $$$ | RESORT | Each of the cabins set amid the pines and aspen at this peaceful resort has splendid views of the sparkling Metolius River, decks furnished with Adirondack chairs, a full kitchen, and a fireplace. Pros: peaceful forest setting; feels truly off-grid; wake up to the sound of the river. Cons: no visitors allowed; no cell-phone service; minimum stay requirements. D Rooms from: $225 E 25551 S.W. Forest Service Rd. 1419, Sisters j Off U.S. 20, northeast 10 miles from Sisters, turn north on Camp Sherman Rd., stay to left at fork (1419), and then turn right at only stop sign P 877/632–7007 w metoliusriverresort.com a 12 cabins X No Meals.

Smart Grid Standards by Takuro Sato

business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, data acquisition, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, exponential backoff, factory automation, Ford Model T, green new deal, green transition, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Iridium satellite, iterative process, knowledge economy, life extension, linear programming, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, OSI model, packet switching, performance metric, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, Thomas Davenport

In order to bring renewable material, construction, and maintain costs to a reasonable level, further improvement is required in renewable research and development and the Smart Grid Standards 74 commercialization of these technologies. Owing to the increasing interest of various countries in renewable energy technologies, it is expected that the overall cost will be very competitive in the coming years. 2.3.2 Integrating Renewable to the On-Grid The off-grid system is simple as it does not require integration with the existing power grid. However, most of the renewable technologies, such as small-scale wind and solar PV systems are connected with the existing grid (on-grid system), which has the ability to add thousands of power units to the nation’s power system.

Lonely Planet Nicaragua (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Greg Benchwick

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Day of the Dead, land reform, liberation theology, Multics, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, traveling salesman

But when night falls, and the magnificent views disappear with the setting sun, it reverts to a rather lackluster small town where gossiping is the main form of entertainment. Most travelers burn their San Carlos hours by exploring the old Spanish fortress, planning river and island adventures, stocking up on córdoba and checking emails one last time before they drop off-grid for a while. San Carlos Sights 1 Fortaleza de San Carlos B2 Sleeping 2 Gran Lago Hotel A3 3 Hospedaje Peña B3 4 Hotel Carelhys B2 5 Hotel-Cabinas Leyko A1 Eating 6 Comedor Alondra C1 7 Restaurant Mirador B3 8 Restaurante Kaoma B3 9 Soda La Fortaleza B3 Sights & Activities San Carlos is less a tourist destination and more a place to wait for your ship, or panga (small motorboat), to come in, but there is beauty here – particularly on the grounds of Centro Cultural Jose Coronel Urtecho , which is set within the crumbling walls of Fortaleza de San Carlos OFFLINE MAP ( 9am-5pm) .

Lonely Planet Sri Lanka by Lonely Planet

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, digital map, European colonialism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, off grid, off-the-grid, period drama, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, urban sprawl

The highway is dotted with the odd roadside restaurant, and some tea plantations have cafes. EcolankaLODGE$$$ ( GOOGLE MAP ; %051-223 3133; www.ecolanka.com; Maussawa Estate, Pundaluoya; s/d from €42/60, cottages €90; W) In a remote location 28km north of Nuwara Eliya, this rustic lodge is just the place to get all off-grid and don your walking boots – you'll find several good trails nearby. Some rooms have shared bathrooms, or book the deluxe cottage for more comfort. There are gorgeous views of central Lanka's rolling hills, and fine nutritious food is prepared. 8Getting There & Away Buses (regular/express Rs 250/180, 3½ hours) connect Kandy and Nuwara Eliya every 45 minutes or so.

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

He could wander without revealing his presence in any obtrusive way. He ate from food stalls that didn’t have cameras, and bought other food from Migros, and spent his days in parks where the cameras were few. Thus he lived a life that was not much registering in the system, but was not flagrantly off-grid either. Just low profile. No doubt after kidnapping a UN ministry head and forcibly entering her apartment and spending a night haranguing her, he was the subject of a big police search. Not to mention what had happened down at Lake Maggiore. Salzman might have to be abandoned. But for a good while, at least, he could hide just a kilometer or two from the minister’s apartment.

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

Soon criminals, terrorists, hacktivists, and rogue governments will no longer need to commandeer the satellites of others; they will be able to just launch their own. New technologies, such as miniature CubeSats, are about the size of a shoe box and don’t cost billions or millions of dollars but rather can be built and launched for under $100,000. These devices could be operated “off grid,” meaning that they could be launched and controlled outside the purview of government, opening up channels for private encrypted satellite communications. Already the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin has announced its plan to take the Internet “beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.”

Self Build Simplified by Barry Sutcliffe

carbon footprint, off grid, systems thinking, the payments system, Wall-E

You may be able to use your phones and other devices to give you everything you need. If not, as far as I am aware at the time of writing (unless you have a poor credit rating, or there could be fraud involved), BT have an obligation to provide a service to any property that requests it, no matter how far off grid it is. 2) Drainage and Drainage connections: There are three common types of mains drainage: Foul water (for all the nasty stuff). Surface water (for rainwater and the cleaner stuff). Combined foul and surface water. If any of these are available close to your project, you will usually be looking to connect to them.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

The smart intergrid is made up of three critical components. Mini-grids allow homeowners, small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), and large-scale economic enterprises to produce renewable energy locally—through solar cells, wind power, small hydropower, animal and agricultural waste, and garbage—and use it off-grid for their own electricity needs. Smart metering technology allows local producers to more effectively sell their energy back to the main power grid, as well as accept electricity from the grid, making the flow of electricity bidirectional. The next phase in smart grid technology is embedding sensing devices and chips throughout the grid system, connecting every electrical appliance.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

He calls his effort “an organized artistic intervention.”35 Perhaps most poignant is the Backslash Tool Kit: “a series of functional devices designed for protests and riots of the future,” including a smart bandana for embedding hidden messages and public keys, independently networked wearable devices, personal black-box devices to register abuse of law enforcement, and fast deployment routers for off-grid communication.36 Backslash was created as part of a master’s thesis project at New York University, and it perfectly reflects the contest for the third modernity that this generation faces. The designer writes that for young, digitally native protesters, “connectivity is a basic human right.” Yet, he laments, “the future of technology in protests looks dark” because of overwhelming surveillance.

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

Try to make contact in advance, as the office may be closed for outings. With rave reviews, ecocamp and hostel Un Destino No Turistico ( 098-756-7545; www.destino-noturistico.com; Camino Laguna La Manga Km1; campsites per person CH$4500, dm/d CH$9000/22,000) provides a lovely countryside getaway. Owners Rocio and Manuel are active educators, teaching off-grid living and sharing their useful innovations. The hostel is impeccable, with comfortable beds, each with its own reading lamp, in addition to solar showers and composting toilets. It’s situated 1.5km from town, but all downhill when you leave. Cars should park outside the entrance gate. Lakeside adventure lodge Terra Luna ( 067-431-263; www.terra-luna.cl; campsites per person CH$5000, 2-person huts CH$30,000, d/tr/q CH$80,000/90,000/110,000; ) presents the option of perfect repose or an adrenaline rush.

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

Taos Ski Valley SKIING ( 866-968-7386; www.skitaos.org; lift ticket adult/teen 13-17 & senior/child $71/60/42) With a peak elevation of 11,819ft and a 2612ft vertical drop, Taos Ski Valley offers some of the most challenging skiing in the US and yet remains low-key and relaxed. The resort now allows snowboarders on its slopes. Sleeping Earthship Rentals BUNGALOW $$ ( 575-751-0462; www.earthship.net; Hwy 64; r $120-160) Experience an off-grid overnight in a boutique-chic, solar-powered dwelling. A cross between organic Gaudí architecture and space-age fantasy, these sustainable dwellings are put together using recycled tires, aluminum cans and sand, with rain catchment and gray-water systems to minimize their footprint. Half-buried in a valley surrounded by mountains, they could be hastily camouflaged alien vessels – you never know.

Egypt Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, late fees, low cost airline, off grid, place-making, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

The freshly squeezed lime juice is excellent and you can request beer (E£12) and sheesha. Fatri el-WadiEGYPTIAN FAST FOOD ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; Sharia as-Sawra al-Khadra; mains E£20-60; hdinner) Fresh-from-the-oven fiteer, made to order by a friendly crew. 8Information Mut is a great place to practise life off-grid. Internet connections here have been known to approach courier-pigeon speed. Bank MisrBANK ( GOOGLE MAP ; Sharia Al-Wadi; h8.30am-2pm Sun-Thu) Has an ATM, exchanges cash and makes cash advances on Visa and MasterCard. Internet CafeINTERNET ( GOOGLE MAP ; Sharia Basateen; per hr E£2; h11am-midnight) Gets you online, if you're patient.