{"id":61583,"date":"2022-01-21T06:45:16","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T11:45:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61583"},"modified":"2022-01-21T06:45:16","modified_gmt":"2022-01-21T11:45:16","slug":"living-without-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61583","title":{"rendered":"Living without \u2018machines\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Living without \u2018machines\u2019<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Quite early on in Mark Boyle\u2019s book\u00a0The Way Home<\/em>, about living \u2018off grid\u2019, without what we might call modern technologies, he finds a dead pigeon by the road, recently killed. He takes it home, plucks it, guts it, and\u2014concluding that it is less than one day dead\u2014cooks it.<\/p>\n

A page or so later, his partner says it would be nice to to have a hot tea in the morning without having to make up the fire, and he knocks up a rocket stove from an empty Guinness keg his neighbour has to hand and some lengths of pipe. (Rocket stove?\u00a0Explained here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

He has, earlier, built from the ground up the cabin where they are both living.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

As a reader, I\u2019m not clear how he learned all of this, or remembers it, or whether it\u2019s in one of the books he has.<\/p>\n

\u2018Technologies\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although the definition of \u2018technologies\u2019 is deliberately imprecise, it generally covers anything powered by electricity (so: no internet; no mobile phone; no television; no radio) and anything powered by petrol (no van).<\/p>\n

When he wrote the book, in 2017, Boyle was in his late 30s, and had bought a smallholding in rural west Ireland. He\u2019s had some practice in removing himself from our industrial complex, since he had previously lived for a year without money. The book about that paid for the smallholding.<\/p>\n

(Small amounts of money do change hands in\u00a0The Way Home<\/em>. He makes something from a column in\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>, written in pencil and delivered by post; there are occasional pints drunk at local bars.)<\/p>\n

Money and machines<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is worth piecing together his explanation of what constitutes technology, as well as what it is he is trying to escape from:<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Living without \u2018machines\u2019 Quite early on in Mark Boyle\u2019s book\u00a0The Way Home, about living \u2018off grid\u2019, without what we might call modern technologies, he finds a dead pigeon by the road, recently killed. He takes it home, plucks it, guts it, and\u2014concluding that it is less than one day dead\u2014cooks it. A page or so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[21065,6927,786,7429],"class_list":["post-61583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-andrew-curry","tag-machines","tag-technology","tag-the-next-wave"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61583"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61584,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61583\/revisions\/61584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}