"Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society"
What happens when you attempt to live within society and they treat you poorly? The ability of people to freely associate with the society of their choice is supposed to be their right. There are many different societies throughout the world. Living independently when the society you happen to be geolocated with should not be a negative so long as you are not actively harming them.
I’ll add to this, many places in America and I’m assuming other places in the world, society might not be serving you. Where I grew up I knew multiple people living off well water because there was no water main anywhere near them and the closest city/utility said they would be happy to install a pipe in their direction but at cost to them.
I would also argue living off grid isn’t abandoning society if you’re still paying taxes.
Yeah I was thinking something similar -- overall it's easy to conflate government, society, community, and lifestyle (urban, rural, off-grid). There are also different reasons people live off-grid; it can be primarily a financial decision. It can also be an extremely engaged social decision, in the sense that some people want to be part of a society that is less oriented around resource extraction, commercialization, industrialization, etc -- and they are becoming the change they want to see. In any case, solipsistic isn't the right word.
This is exactly the point they're making though. This is an exercise only available to the privileged. It is not available to people who haven't worked in tech for some amount of time, if not actively working in tech or holding equity like the homesteader above us.
It takes for granted the concentrated specialization of production that is modern, "on-grid" cities to produce things like microprocessors and food safety and insulin. This lifestyle is not available to masses of people, and we have a word for a society where everyone lives off-grid: "hunter-gatherers".
There can be other value in doing this, like Hundred Rabbits' exploration of how tech itself could be made more resilient given different macroeconomic conditions / incentives. But talking about this as if it's about how The Man just doesn't want you to be an independent free thinker is a misunderstanding of why most people live in the societies that they do.
Living somewhat independently is available to most people. Most people just don't want to make the tradeoffs to do it. You might have to give up stuff like electronics and move to a cheaper area you don't want to be in, but is is generally possible.
"But talking about this as if it's about how The Man just doesn't want you to be an independent free thinker is a misunderstanding of why most people live in the societies that they do."
Now apply these concepts to an individual who isn't being served by their society.
No, they're in post-colonial conditions and intentionally prevented from developing economically via a relationship of economic dependence on the imperial core. And as a result, they can't produce their own chemotherapy, insulin etc. and have to import it from developed parts of the world system.
If the imperial core spontaneously disappeared, they would begin developing - and that development would take the form of centralization and specialization and state-driven investment in underdeveloped sectors. Look at what Burkina Faso is doing right now for example: they went from contracts with French companies to export gold and uranium for a thousandth of their market value to now climbing the value chain by developing their own gold refineries.
To keep the example but circle back to the original point: If you lived in a future Burkina Faso that successfully developed its economy, proposing that they go back to small-scale production with worse economies of scale would be a step backwards, and yes the logical conclusion of that in any country is hunter-gatherers. There can be other important learnings from doing this as a constrained experiment within a development model, like resiliency. But thinking this is a development model in itself is a cargo cult mentality that misunderstands industrial production as some evil external imposition on humanity rather than the system that proved most effective at feeding the most people.
Depending on how solar progresses, along with other renewables, "grid power" may become as archaic as running copper lines to people's houses so their phone can ring.
If somebody views “escaping” the industrial-corporate-government grinder, still operating on 18th century mystical conceptions of rights and property as giving up, then there’s nothing to argue against
What happens when you attempt to live within society and they treat you poorly? The ability of people to freely associate with the society of their choice is supposed to be their right. There are many different societies throughout the world. Living independently when the society you happen to be geolocated with should not be a negative so long as you are not actively harming them.