5 ms·

I'll just leave this here.. http://www.freightfarms.com/ http://www.freightfarms.com/ it's an example of how the startup ecosystem is attempting to disrupt so

I'll just leave this here.. http://www.freightfarms.com/ http://www.freightfarms.com/ it's an example of how the startup ecosystem is attempting to disrupt some of the areas of concern that fuel the 'survival culture'. here's another example: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/10/built-in-brooklyn-gotham-greens-turns-rooftops-into-urban-farms/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/10/built-in-brooklyn-gotham-gr... I personally can't wait to see this urban agriculture technology arrive in every city coast to coast, so that collectively we aren't so dependent on "just in time shipping" grocery store infrastructure. I do think that this day is on the horizon, but until then I personally try not to think of people as 'crazy' when they feel the need to get their beans, bullets, and band-aids squared away.

f- 11y ago
Oh, I don't think that trying to prepare for historically plausible contingencies is crazy - quite the opposite - but it's definitely easy to approach it in a haphazard, disorganized, or wasteful way. The Bay Area culture definitely has a distinct aura of invincibility to it, though; we have many young folks, including immigrants with no familial safety nets and a messy legal status, living paycheck to paycheck while working in a very volatile industry on exorbitant salaries. And all that next door to an active seismic fault =) Elsewhere, especially in rural America, the prepper culture seems a lot stronger, perhaps owing to the echoes of the Cold War. It always shocked me that the movement is virtually non-existent in Europe (where I grew up); if you look at their history, they certainly have more to worry about.
- hackercomplex 11y ago
  I wonder though, do we really have a "prepper culture", or is that phrase merely a rebranding, of traditional (pre WWII) American farm/household values ? For example when I talk to my 80 year old grandmother about what it was like growing up 20 miles outside of a major American metro, she speaks about canning, maintaining a very large pantry, community agriculture, raising animals, making their own clothing, hunting deer and preserving the meat long term, making their own bullets, etc. My suspicion is that what you're observing in rural america is merely a continuation of the ordinary way of life that has always existed here. What I suspect is that over decades PR firms and major brands have executed a rebranding of the old ways, attempting to recast it as 'paranoia culture' or some form of political radicalism. Their campaign likely involves emphasizing the small paranoid faction of this much larger culture on their TV shows and pop media. I hope that doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory, because that's not at all what I mean, it's just an effective marketing technique. After all families who are oriented towards saving for a rainy day don't come into the grocery stores to buy the expensive pre-packaged foodstuffs which drive all the margins. Therefor in order to increase shareholder value you have to find ways to break down the traditional values (and way of life) so that it can be replaced with predictable consumer behaviors and 'brand loyalty'. My point is that the reason why you don't see this in europe isn't because the behaviors are different but merely because the advertising techniques are different in America so the lexicon is different. All of this is starting to change though. A new culture is forming thanks the Internet, and people are starting to care again, about issues like community agriculture. You can start to see it being recognized (in satire) even on the major TV networks. Their airwaves are starting to be jammed by our Internet meme culture, and as a consequence people are beginning to care, again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIWQE4ZpMWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIWQE4ZpMWI YES IT'S LOCAL GODDAMNIT
  - f- 11y ago
    I honestly don't know; it's interesting that in Europe, the same culture - certainly present in the nineteenth century - has atrophied very quickly after WWII. I'm not sure how to explain that; urbanization? The expansion of the welfare state? Faith in the EU as the promise of enduring peace and prosperity? It happened in most of the Soviet Bloc countries, too, so perhaps the welfare state aspect is key. In the US, my first guess is that it might have been kept alive, even in suburban and urban communities, because of the exposure to the Cold War paranoia, school drills, and so on. "The Russkies" and the specter of the nuclear apocalypse left an ominous mark on the American psyche. But you are right, the desire to capitalize on the phenomenon might have played a role, too. On the flip side, Europe is not a very different market; the buyers are a bit more smug and you can't sell guns, but that's about it - so why aren't we seeing more of the "new" prepper culture cropping up on the other side of the pond?
    - hackercomplex 11y ago
      > so why aren't we seeing more of the "new" prepper culture cropping up on the other side of the pond? Maybe it's because there's not as much individual land ownership in Europe because there isn't as much land. In America we have a vast frontier so to speak, plus we've had the act of homesteading as a the cornerstone of our traditional values for a long time. There's room for everyone to have their own little homestead, at least thats been the feeling culturally for a couple of hundred years, and so people today are also prone to think along the lines that traditional homesteaders thought.. well water, garden, dogs, fishing, shotgun, shovel, plow, etc.. maybe even horses if you can afford it. One difference is today people also care about an Internet connection. In my view these people aren't paranoid at all they're just passing on the traditional values.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > On the flip side, Europe is not a very different market; the buyers are a bit more smug and you can't sell guns, but that's about it - so why aren't we seeing more of the "new" prepper culture cropping up on the other side of the pond? It is, slowly. We have a lot of gun enthusiasts, even though they're not gun owners. They visit the shooting range regularly instead. ASG is a popular sport too, and that's pretty much as much firearms combat training as you can get without actual firearms. In my country (Poland), there was a visible uptick of survivalist narratives when the war in Ukraine started (after all, we're next-door neighbors). And while HAM radio is not very popular (though my friends are doing some serious work in changing that), a lot of drivers have CB radios (installed primarily to facilitate breaking traffic laws).
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > Elsewhere, especially in rural America, the prepper culture seems a lot stronger, perhaps owing to the echoes of the Cold War. It always shocked me that the movement is virtually non-existent in Europe (where I grew up); if you look at their history, they certainly have more to worry about. I always felt the US prepper culture is primarily driven by the gun culture, as it mixes with American individualism / self-made man mythos. There you are, alone with maybe only family to protect, as the society around you burns down to the ground. You have your farm and your shotgun, now you're the boss. You know you'll overcome any challenge fate throws in your way, and if some pesky other humans want to dance, well, that's what the shotgun is for. Europe is less individualistic. And without guns. People trust in institutions more. Which means, if the societal collapse hits us, we're fucked. But maybe it makes the society ever so slightly more resilient. And it also means that, sadly, you can't make zombie/alien invasion movies in Europe - the protagonist won't be stumbling upon assault rifles in every other abandoned house. Though I really wish someone tried to make a movie like that - I'd like to see how it could play out in a place with less cars and much less guns.
  - hackercomplex 11y ago
    I see where you're coming from, but you emphasize a widely held stereotype about the 'american prepper' which I think A. isn't true, and B. makes it seem almost fatalistic, which is the idea of "every family for himself". I think in reality what you have in the rural US are communities that are ready to band together in hard times. Perhaps a more clear way to think about the situation is in terms of distributed computing and graph theory. As many of you know, in theoretical computer science, the CAP theorem states that it is impossible for a distributed computer system to simultaneously provide all three of the following guarantees: Consistency (all nodes see the same data at the same time) Availability (a guarantee that every request receives a response about whether it succeeded or failed) Partition tolerance (the system continues to operate despite arbitrary partitioning due to network failures) I think that some individuals in the United States (the ones who live in large metros) prefer to optimize for Consistency and Availability by living in populous areas. There are more firefighters, paramedics, and power company linemen ready to step up quickly to restore services in the event of an emergency. People who live in rural areas in the United States are optimizing for Partition tolerance, but that doesn't mean they expect to one day become completely independent nodes (that's merely a stereotype), instead they anticipate that eventually a few vertexes up the graph there may be some unexpected latency, or even a network partition. The prepping culture can be thought of a distributed systems protocol which enables "self healing" characteristics so that a temporarily cut off part of the cluster can avoid downtime just by shedding a little consistency. (Guns help them reject corrupted messages from outside of their sub-graph during a partition, it's a form of security isolation) One could argue that large metros also have this capability just that their RAFT leader election process takes longer (gangs shooting it out) whereas rural communities have an easier time with it because there's less chatter on the network. Prepper communities have more caching, and they store more shards on every node. ;) In Europe they have more of a monolithic architecture from what I gather although they've enjoyed pretty decent uptime.
jakejake 11y ago
I personally think the "crazy" label kicks in when the person has severely diminished their actual, real life in order to prepare for an unlikely future scenario. Especially when that scenario is strangely specific and seems more like fantasy where the preparer will become a vigilante hero in the new world. Simply being prepared for emergencies is certainly not crazy. Saving money for an employment emergency seems like the most real threat to most of us. But I guess that's not as much fun as stock-piling guns and ammo for a zombie apocalypse.
- froo 11y ago
  > But I guess that's not as much fun as stock-piling guns and ammo for a zombie apocalypse. Don't forget limitless quantities of beer and jerky.
- dnautics 11y ago
  There's a lot of things you can do that are even sometimes better for your well-being. Buying gold, for example, can be a relatively safe hedge against unemployment (and even science-fiction-level economic collapse).
  - goblin89 11y ago
    Honest question: how does one buy currency with gold even under current circumstances? Let’s even forget the doomsday for a moment. OP mentions gold as safe non-crazy way to protect savings against long-term inflation and depressions. However, from what I understand, any outsider would be extremely lucky to sell it at a rate anything close to the market, and common sense suggests that if dollar plunges it’d become proportionately trickier. If selling it isn’t as tricky as it seems, then the reverse question comes up: how to buy it now without being ripped off?
    - dnautics 11y ago
      Gold is used as carrying currency in places like zimbabwe where the official currency is too unreliable. People directly measure out quantities and weigh them, like in mining days but with more accuracy (digital scales). Presumably other forms of exchange are used for smaller denominations (goods for barter etc)

f- 11y ago

Oh, I don't think that trying to prepare for historically plausible contingencies is crazy - quite the opposite - but it's definitely easy to approach it in a haphazard, disorganized, or wasteful way. The Bay Area culture definitely has a distinct aura of invincibility to it, though; we have many young folks, including immigrants with no familial safety nets and a messy legal status, living paycheck to paycheck while working in a very volatile industry on exorbitant salaries. And all that next door to an active seismic fault =) Elsewhere, especially in rural America, the prepper culture seems a lot stronger, perhaps owing to the echoes of the Cold War. It always shocked me that the movement is virtually non-existent in Europe (where I grew up); if you look at their history, they certainly have more to worry about.

hackercomplex 11y ago
I wonder though, do we really have a "prepper culture", or is that phrase merely a rebranding, of traditional (pre WWII) American farm/household values ? For example when I talk to my 80 year old grandmother about what it was like growing up 20 miles outside of a major American metro, she speaks about canning, maintaining a very large pantry, community agriculture, raising animals, making their own clothing, hunting deer and preserving the meat long term, making their own bullets, etc. My suspicion is that what you're observing in rural america is merely a continuation of the ordinary way of life that has always existed here. What I suspect is that over decades PR firms and major brands have executed a rebranding of the old ways, attempting to recast it as 'paranoia culture' or some form of political radicalism. Their campaign likely involves emphasizing the small paranoid faction of this much larger culture on their TV shows and pop media. I hope that doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory, because that's not at all what I mean, it's just an effective marketing technique. After all families who are oriented towards saving for a rainy day don't come into the grocery stores to buy the expensive pre-packaged foodstuffs which drive all the margins. Therefor in order to increase shareholder value you have to find ways to break down the traditional values (and way of life) so that it can be replaced with predictable consumer behaviors and 'brand loyalty'. My point is that the reason why you don't see this in europe isn't because the behaviors are different but merely because the advertising techniques are different in America so the lexicon is different. All of this is starting to change though. A new culture is forming thanks the Internet, and people are starting to care again, about issues like community agriculture. You can start to see it being recognized (in satire) even on the major TV networks. Their airwaves are starting to be jammed by our Internet meme culture, and as a consequence people are beginning to care, again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIWQE4ZpMWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIWQE4ZpMWI YES IT'S LOCAL GODDAMNIT
- f- 11y ago
  I honestly don't know; it's interesting that in Europe, the same culture - certainly present in the nineteenth century - has atrophied very quickly after WWII. I'm not sure how to explain that; urbanization? The expansion of the welfare state? Faith in the EU as the promise of enduring peace and prosperity? It happened in most of the Soviet Bloc countries, too, so perhaps the welfare state aspect is key. In the US, my first guess is that it might have been kept alive, even in suburban and urban communities, because of the exposure to the Cold War paranoia, school drills, and so on. "The Russkies" and the specter of the nuclear apocalypse left an ominous mark on the American psyche. But you are right, the desire to capitalize on the phenomenon might have played a role, too. On the flip side, Europe is not a very different market; the buyers are a bit more smug and you can't sell guns, but that's about it - so why aren't we seeing more of the "new" prepper culture cropping up on the other side of the pond?
  - hackercomplex 11y ago
    > so why aren't we seeing more of the "new" prepper culture cropping up on the other side of the pond? Maybe it's because there's not as much individual land ownership in Europe because there isn't as much land. In America we have a vast frontier so to speak, plus we've had the act of homesteading as a the cornerstone of our traditional values for a long time. There's room for everyone to have their own little homestead, at least thats been the feeling culturally for a couple of hundred years, and so people today are also prone to think along the lines that traditional homesteaders thought.. well water, garden, dogs, fishing, shotgun, shovel, plow, etc.. maybe even horses if you can afford it. One difference is today people also care about an Internet connection. In my view these people aren't paranoid at all they're just passing on the traditional values.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > On the flip side, Europe is not a very different market; the buyers are a bit more smug and you can't sell guns, but that's about it - so why aren't we seeing more of the "new" prepper culture cropping up on the other side of the pond? It is, slowly. We have a lot of gun enthusiasts, even though they're not gun owners. They visit the shooting range regularly instead. ASG is a popular sport too, and that's pretty much as much firearms combat training as you can get without actual firearms. In my country (Poland), there was a visible uptick of survivalist narratives when the war in Ukraine started (after all, we're next-door neighbors). And while HAM radio is not very popular (though my friends are doing some serious work in changing that), a lot of drivers have CB radios (installed primarily to facilitate breaking traffic laws).
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> Elsewhere, especially in rural America, the prepper culture seems a lot stronger, perhaps owing to the echoes of the Cold War. It always shocked me that the movement is virtually non-existent in Europe (where I grew up); if you look at their history, they certainly have more to worry about. I always felt the US prepper culture is primarily driven by the gun culture, as it mixes with American individualism / self-made man mythos. There you are, alone with maybe only family to protect, as the society around you burns down to the ground. You have your farm and your shotgun, now you're the boss. You know you'll overcome any challenge fate throws in your way, and if some pesky other humans want to dance, well, that's what the shotgun is for. Europe is less individualistic. And without guns. People trust in institutions more. Which means, if the societal collapse hits us, we're fucked. But maybe it makes the society ever so slightly more resilient. And it also means that, sadly, you can't make zombie/alien invasion movies in Europe - the protagonist won't be stumbling upon assault rifles in every other abandoned house. Though I really wish someone tried to make a movie like that - I'd like to see how it could play out in a place with less cars and much less guns.
- hackercomplex 11y ago
  I see where you're coming from, but you emphasize a widely held stereotype about the 'american prepper' which I think A. isn't true, and B. makes it seem almost fatalistic, which is the idea of "every family for himself". I think in reality what you have in the rural US are communities that are ready to band together in hard times. Perhaps a more clear way to think about the situation is in terms of distributed computing and graph theory. As many of you know, in theoretical computer science, the CAP theorem states that it is impossible for a distributed computer system to simultaneously provide all three of the following guarantees: Consistency (all nodes see the same data at the same time) Availability (a guarantee that every request receives a response about whether it succeeded or failed) Partition tolerance (the system continues to operate despite arbitrary partitioning due to network failures) I think that some individuals in the United States (the ones who live in large metros) prefer to optimize for Consistency and Availability by living in populous areas. There are more firefighters, paramedics, and power company linemen ready to step up quickly to restore services in the event of an emergency. People who live in rural areas in the United States are optimizing for Partition tolerance, but that doesn't mean they expect to one day become completely independent nodes (that's merely a stereotype), instead they anticipate that eventually a few vertexes up the graph there may be some unexpected latency, or even a network partition. The prepping culture can be thought of a distributed systems protocol which enables "self healing" characteristics so that a temporarily cut off part of the cluster can avoid downtime just by shedding a little consistency. (Guns help them reject corrupted messages from outside of their sub-graph during a partition, it's a form of security isolation) One could argue that large metros also have this capability just that their RAFT leader election process takes longer (gangs shooting it out) whereas rural communities have an easier time with it because there's less chatter on the network. Prepper communities have more caching, and they store more shards on every node. ;) In Europe they have more of a monolithic architecture from what I gather although they've enjoyed pretty decent uptime.

jakejake 11y ago

I personally think the "crazy" label kicks in when the person has severely diminished their actual, real life in order to prepare for an unlikely future scenario. Especially when that scenario is strangely specific and seems more like fantasy where the preparer will become a vigilante hero in the new world. Simply being prepared for emergencies is certainly not crazy. Saving money for an employment emergency seems like the most real threat to most of us. But I guess that's not as much fun as stock-piling guns and ammo for a zombie apocalypse.

froo 11y ago
> But I guess that's not as much fun as stock-piling guns and ammo for a zombie apocalypse. Don't forget limitless quantities of beer and jerky.
dnautics 11y ago
There's a lot of things you can do that are even sometimes better for your well-being. Buying gold, for example, can be a relatively safe hedge against unemployment (and even science-fiction-level economic collapse).
- goblin89 11y ago
  Honest question: how does one buy currency with gold even under current circumstances? Let’s even forget the doomsday for a moment. OP mentions gold as safe non-crazy way to protect savings against long-term inflation and depressions. However, from what I understand, any outsider would be extremely lucky to sell it at a rate anything close to the market, and common sense suggests that if dollar plunges it’d become proportionately trickier. If selling it isn’t as tricky as it seems, then the reverse question comes up: how to buy it now without being ripped off?
  - dnautics 11y ago
    Gold is used as carrying currency in places like zimbabwe where the official currency is too unreliable. People directly measure out quantities and weigh them, like in mining days but with more accuracy (digital scales). Presumably other forms of exchange are used for smaller denominations (goods for barter etc)