What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)

Title is unrelated to content.

If you want "a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools" read "Walkaway", by Cory Doctorow. This is the 3D printer fantasy future, where everything can be made easily with small and easily available high-tech equipment. It sort of works in the story. But in reality, 3D printers aren't that good. Somewhere, you need aluminum smelters, steel mills, and copper mines. Those don't scale down well to desktop size.

What this article is talking about is the classic pastoral dream, along the lines of Thoreau's "Walden". Walden is a bogus hermit life. Thoreau had income from a publisher in New York and well-off friends nearby he could and would visit for dinner. Or perhaps the hippie / Whole Earth Catalog dream. We know that doesn't work all that well.

Arguably, we've achieved pastoral life at scale. It's called suburbia. All the pastoral elements are there, in miniature. For a lot of people, that's good enough. If you scale up your own space beyond that, the maintenance gets out of hand. I have a friend who has ten acres and horses, and she's always painting or hauling hay or dealing with some water or power problem. If you farm, it's even harder.

How does the author propose that this work?

I always feel so disconnected to my fellow humans when I hear people longing for "simpler times" where they are just out in nature with no technology or modern tools.

I would be miserable living simply like that. I don't like spending too much time in nature, I get hot and sweaty and itchy and bothered by bugs. I am always wishing to be building something with electronics, or playing a game, or watching a show or movie.

I also want freedom from work, but I wouldn't use that freedom to "live simply" or get away from technology.

“ The visions are filled with communities of mutually loving people, the elimination of middlemen from transactions, where everyone knows the true you, the nonexistence of bureaucracy, the existence of a social good that’s identifiable by looking around. Essentially, the simple life.”

Except none of that ever existed

There is a persistent point that this article makes really well: numbers. And here, bigger seems to be worse. More people equals feebler interactions, worse social life, more alienation between citizens and government. It's not the full story, but this simple rule is a very solid first approximation that has worked fine for me. The relatively small country where I moved has an ok government. Personally, I've found that small towns work well for me, and I've chosen job and residence based on that principle. I wouldn't mind a countryside cabin for hunting-gathering with friends during weekends :-) .

At the same time, I like global shipping, the Internet, good highways, and I definitely hate tariffs. I don't think we need to be disconnected to be happy. We just need to make the right choices where it matters.

The conundrum, as I see it. To master our environment and achieve comfort, we needed the "congealed intellect of our multi billion population". But we also had to trash ecosystems, on which we remain stubbornly dependent (if not for literal survival then certainly for our quality of life). With 8 billion of us, we now have no option but to pool our impacts and live in massive anonymous cities. Even that is damage control. Notwithstanding the fantasies of tech utopians, the only possible solution to all this is to get humanity's population back down to a sustainable level. At which point we can have all the "cobbled villages" we apparently want.

Nonsensical drum circle naivety.

Go to some of the poorer parts of the world and live the life of a subsistence farmer for a while.

There is a reason people move to cities, and it generally involves their children not starving to death.

Isn't this solarpunk in a nutshell?

This makes me think back to Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Whether or not you agree with all his points I do think he has one very good point that’s worth reflecting on: the way we currently live is not the only way to live.

I think another important point to take away from the book is that even if we are not currently on the right path, agriculture and civilization are not inherently exclusive to living in such a way that is in harmony with the world.

There is a world that is possible where we live as good citizens of nature while still retaining civilization and agriculture.

So tying it back to article I think a middle ground is possible, but whatever that might look like, there are other ways to live.

Excellent article, largely agree. Another related issue is that we are not evolved for the modern stress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo1A45ShcMo

I want to be able to freely move around the globe in a floating glass orb with its own WiFi and power outlets, and enough room to put some entertainment stuff in.

What’s that first sentence? I can’t find the breaks.

Makes me think of the short story "With friends like these..." by Alan Dean Foster, in which one aspect of the story has people on a future Earth living what appears externally to be a very simple (maybe hunter-gatherer) lifestyle, while still having (hidden) powerful tech

Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people.

No wonder we love minecraft and Satisfactory and playing murder-hobos in ttrpgs. I would be in favor of restructuring society to be in smaller units, communities where people know and understand eachother, but nobody has that power.

One thing I disagree with "We won’t live in small villages with cobbled streets en masse anymore because we need the giant glass skyscrapers and the congealed intellect of our multi billion population to move ahead"

Do we? What is "moving ahead"? I would say there's a good chance our way of life is simply going to waste all the resouces that sustains it and collapse over a long period of time without moving on to a "higher" state. I know lots of people working in tech, none of whom actually advance useful technology. Instead they advance technology that makes their bosses rich and makes people consume more for no real benefit. That's actually the opposite of useful. The glass skyscrapers are not helping us move ahead.

>We want to live in a hunter gatherer mode where we get to follow our curiosities and our ambitions and our vibes and our likes until it reaches the natural conclusion

We don't all want that.

    They're pathetically pretechnological or brilliantly post-technological.
    - Stargate Atlantis ep. 14: Sanctuary

I don't know about all this. I want a society where I have healthcare and can safely eat a salad.

I definitely dont want any of that.