Saturday, April 26, 2008

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: An Intentional Community

Our Intentional Community on the outskirts of The Dalles, Oregon.

Seven years ago, in 2008, twelve of us were hired as data center technicians at the world's largest and most important server farm, the Google Data Center in The Dalles Oregon. (see the original job posting we answered here). We decided to create an intentional community to help share child care, operate a fish catching boat, and share the cost of home based server and telecom equipment.

Recently higher fuel and food prices have been a challenge. Alongside economic hardships the nation-state has collapsed in its ability to provide services, and anarchy is on the rise. Our commune has grown to 37 people total, and we decided to put more intentional in our community.

With some under the table money from one of the town's larger data centers, we began to outfit our intentional community designed for warring and trading (Viking means "warring and trading"). We decided warring and trading is fundamentally an informational economy, so our protection of the Google Data Center and running our home telecom fit perfectly well with 21st century viking.


Our vehicular arsenal includes an old bio-diesel Unimog, seen in the photo transporting one of our 10 cargobikes, and an assortment of diesel motorbikes. We have a varying amount of junk off-road four-wheelers we recast as drones with self-detonation or fire-spreading as their main mission. We finished off the dorms ( full of anti-technology students destined be powerful bureaucrats working for peaceful homeostasis ) at Reed and Evergreen State driving these drones with mouse/keyboard from this desk.

While we harvest protein from the Columbia River, we need vegetables and other food stuffs. The Northwest abounds in pacifist, luddite, vegan intentional communities, and we have little resistance taking food from these people. We abide by the rule of any good tribute system, and allow them enough sustenance to live on to grow us more food. These communities are off-grid anyway, so essentially no longer equals or constituents in the informational economy. We occasionally get representatives of European human rights organizations staying in town and asking about our activities. There are no pure humans working in town, only bio-robot hybrids strongly allied with our ethics. The Old World humans are easily contained.

In our early years, before the collapse of the nation-state, we read this and this for inspiration. Of course the ultimate inspiration is always the Google cloud infrastructure.

Thanks to Antioch University in Seattle for inspiring this meme.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Way to go intentional on their arses!

"four-wheelers we recast as drones with self-detonation or fire-spreading as their main mission"

It's like they were intelligently designed for that purpose. The Cloud be Praised!

Ryan Hawkes said...

watch out as the pacifists learn how to spike their roads and build EMP's to tame the robots and 'non-violently resist'...especially in threat to your great cloud. once the civilization collapses i think pacifism is out the window...

privilege provides the populace painless pacifism.