I thought the folks here would get a kick out of this - a group of anarchists infatuated with the transition technologies of a collapsing civilization.
Get issues one through four, including their survival guide to the apocalypse!
Hopefully I won’t have to kick myself off this forum for wandering too far away from rewilding…
hmm… 
that is wicked awesome. I think there is a little steampunk even in a lot of re-wilders - we just think would instead of metal and little simpler, but every age has its inventors …
hmmm… oracle ideas 
Moderation in all things yo… even moderation 
okay, that made me laugh. very clever, my friend. 8)
Does it make me a masochist if I keep hoping jason will pop in here and give the steampunk thing what-for?
Anyway, I’ve got to go fix my steam-powered jetpack. It makes a clicking sound when I apply full-throttle. 8)
I’ll be honest and tip my hand. This is more what I’m really about.
I figure that even as we’re back on our way to tribal life, we’re going to live through the transition. Also, I think that we may find ways to “wild” certain technologies. An undoing of industrialization. So I look at rewilding as a baseline, and then I think about what else could be included with that without breaking the peace.
I’m all over this steampunk stuff.
I even think that steam power could be done small scale in a primitive fashion. I think that garage industries repurposing the leftovers of civ will be what get us through the collapse to the wild future on the other end. I think that just as some of us will take to the forests, some of us will stay in the cities, and that those cities will develope strange new ecosystems in the absence of control. I think we’ll have hundreds or thousands of tools and techniques our paleo ancestors didn’t use. In the end, so long a technology can be used locally, sustainably, without an industrial base to support it and without destroying viable culture, then it’s cool. But I also think that these things are peripheral to the concept of rewilding as a whole. In the end, it’s unimportant if thr tribe makes their knives out of flint or ceramic. It’s important how you relate to the land.
Hrm. I hope everybody here feels free to talk about what revs their engine, so to speak. I think Rewilding perfectly allows for the transition technolog/decreasing complexity angle.
Man, think Howl’s Moving Castle. How about that for an animist relationship to steam-power?
Anway, for the while, I need to tend my machines with respect, in these last years. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Lightning Boy, my laptop. I drop him, beat him up, curse at him, all while grieving and laughing over his keyboard. For a long time I blamed him for some of my troubles. Now I know he and I just walk a razor’s edge - like a relationship with a wild animal, it requires sensitivity, boundaries, and maturity to partner with a modern machine. In the end, I know I will lose a some of my wild in trade for what he allows me to do. I accept that. When I hear folks finding this board, or their heartfelt reactions to the many rewilding blogs, I accept the trade fully.
In the end, it's unimportant if thr tribe makes their knives out of flint or ceramic. It's important how you relate to the land.
I agree. The Land will determine what and who we can partner with to make our tools, shelter, clothes. In the meanwhile, I just keep on focusing on the relationship with whatever I touch.
Sorry Lightning Boy. :’( I still kinda hate you, but I’ll get better at owning my own choices.
I guess steampunk is just taking an animist relation to machines, and it too longs for a simpler age, just one a little more complicated than we do. I think that Abram said that human made objects have spirits too, sometimes they’re just not as interesting because the are made purely for function. I think that steampunk gets around this and find the spirit in the machine again - as they say, “steampunk machines are real, breathing, coughing, struggling and rumbling parts of the world” and if that isn’t an animist approach to machines, I don’t know what is. I totally agree that it is all about maintaining relationships with the things and people we are interacting with and knowing if those relationships are working or not.
And in the end, “I’d rather have trees, birds, and monstrous mechanical
contraptions than an endless sprawl that is devoid of diversity”
So much of their stuff appeals to the anarchist within me too. By that I mean that this kind of ‘hard core’, passionate anarchist manifest really hits a chord with me - it is just so, I don’t know, it just resonates.
See, that’s what I’m talking about. An animist approach to machinery. It’s also a craftsmans approach, and the two are interconnected. If you make it yourself, the item in question has more personality and spirit, because it is individual.
Willem, it’s not that I don’t feel free, per se, to talk about these things, it’s more that , this is a rewilding forum, not a steampunk forum. Though I have heard tell of a dude who was banned for talking excessively about nanotechnology, which does make me want to hold back a little. I’m a technophile at heart, I love all these little shiny bits of machinery that do things. It’s nifty. But I love them in a “thats so neat, how does it work, can I build a better one” sense, rather than the gizmo-collecting, matching Ipod and car modern technogeek sense. I pull broken digital cameras out of the trash to decorate my hat with its pieces. I kitbash bikes from parts I pull of the curb. I buy old laptops and then teach myself both computer hardare and linux at the same time, using nothing but my pocketknife and an internet connection. I look at experiments with wind-powered robots and self-replicating machines and wonder how long it would take such “non-biological” creatures to become a part of an ecosystem. I think a lot of technology could “escape” during a crash and take on a life of it’s own.
In my dream of the future, I see a scout, dressed in leather, carrying a spear, and with what looks kinda like a blackberry on his belt next to his knife. He walks through a desert, coming to a specific place and gathering the computer parts left there by industrial nanites that escaped from a factory a thousand years ago and became a part of the ecosystem. Techno-wild. Transhumanist primitivism.
This is what I have always enjoyed about hanging around old school hillbilly rednecks. They may not be able to talk or write about physics but they often have understanding of it that is just mind blowing.
When I lived in N. Idaho some of those guys built their own logging equipment and all kinds of cool stuff for moving large heavy objects.
I used to work hooking logs for a gypo logger with a home made “jammer”.
It was two big winches with 1000 ft. of 1" steel cable and two spars made out of larch logs. The whole thing was powered by an old Ford 360 V8 and mounted on the back of a WW II Army 6x6. He built the whole deal himself. I saw all kinds of home made equipment there. Everything from your basic gin pole to stuff as complex as that jammer.
I worked for a time with a horse logger there too. I sawed, he skidded. Watching him work with his Belgian was so cool. He weighed about 125 lbs and never spoke in more than a normal speaking voice to his horse.
Like you all have been saying, it’s about having a relationship with the tools.
At the Institute for Applied Piracy, aka Pirate Lands (famous among punks in Seattle, in fact a little too successful), there is a crank-powered cell phone charger. No electricity…
Thanks for the link, Willem!
Steam itself is interesting from a transition tech and possibly primitive tech perspective. Steam engines require a heat source and an enclosure strong enough to build up pressure. Well, we’re going to have fire for a long time to come. So long as we have metalworking, we’ll be able to make steam engines. Maybe longer, if we can make the enclosures out of ceramics.
[quote=“heyvictor, post:9, topic:776”]a home made “jammer”.
It was two big winches with 1000 ft. of 1" steel cable and two spars made out of larch logs. The whole thing was powered by an old Ford 360 V8 and mounted on the back of a WW II Army 6x6. He built the whole deal himself.[/quote]
Keep in mind a lot of those parts are dependent on an industrial complex and scale to create and supply. Your friend did not build all those things. The cable, the engine, none of that would be possible without civilization and its scale in mining and processing the ore into steel and then casting it into the individual precision parts needed for all that stuff.
Also post collapse all that steel will start to rust away and without industrial society to replace it, there wont be anymore or any good way to get so much of it out of the ground and shipped across the earth.
There simply wont be the availability of making lots of complex machines more than wood, banbu, and stone and cordage for the most part. Copper will become very valuable to find and trade, aluminum would be very challenging though it doesn’t rust.
In the long run that might be true. In your lifetime?
In Cuba they still drive Chevy’s that were built before Castro’s time. In Mexico I’ve seen old Honda motorcycles from the mid 60’s still being used every day. I was talking to a guy about parts one day and he said that he has to make a lot of his own parts. He makes new clutch plates out of masonite every few weeks!
Fuel will be the biggest immediate problem in these collapse scenarios.
In my story about the loggers in Idaho I was mainly referring to the ingenuity and know how of the people there, to be able to design and build the tools that they need out of societies leftovers.
Dont forget water wheels, and animal driven powersources. shop blacksmiths will continue, and even small scale specialities, like jewlers, simple electronics, and even local telegraph offices
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