Observations

Off the Grid?

Off the grid. Is this even possible in this day and age? I seem to remember hippie types in the early 70’s living commune style, paying no rent, no utilities and living off the land through their own ingenuity. Seemed pretty cool in those days. I doubt if any of them are still living that way today. To do anything today requires one to be connected into the system. To buy anything requires a sum of money. This money is presumably gainfully acquired through work. To get work one needs an address, phone number and the once secret social insurance number to be shared with the employer. So the connection is made between you, the employer and government. This connection is also made with a bank, as your pay cheque is probably instantly deposited on payday to your account. If you don’t have an account, you have to get one, which again requires the name of the employer, your address, phone number, email address and social insurance number. Payroll doesn’t like cash, unless you are a casual day labourer, and these days printing cheques to hand to employees seems outdated. Individual identification is through the social insurance number, a government driver’s license and a credit card, where all three numbers are in data banks listing everything about you, particularly your credit and criminal history. If one wants to sell their own home grown produce at market, registration and a business license is required and there you are, part of the whole system again. All land has title, even squatters have to deal with that. There appears to be no way around it. So, to buy anything, to get a loan for anything, to get any service from anyone, to do anything, requires that you be plugged in. What can you do off the grid?

If you have no fixed address, no phone number, no credit card, no Facebook or Twitter account, no email address, no drivers license, no bank account and no social insurance number and no health care card from the government you are off the grid. You probably work on a day to day basis for under the table cash only, probably at minimum wage or less and so pay no taxes. Working for more would mean having to pay income tax and be back on the grid with government. Same is true for accommodation. To stay off the grid requires no fixed address that would need to pay for utilities, television or municipal taxes, which means living on the street and in the bushes, in other words, homeless. And how is homelessness viewed?

Homelessness is seen as an illness, you must be mentally ill, unstable or somehow unfit for society and in great need of some form of intervention to overcome it. It’s not ‘normal’ to be homeless, not tied down to place, to be a drifter, a transient of no fixed address. Who are you? What can and do you contribute to society? What kind of a person can you be without these responsibilities? What are you avoiding and what are you afraid of? What is wrong with you if you are not part of the grid? Don’t you want the benefits of Big Brother or Big Sister? There are books, TV shows and movies about this, the 1980’s television series “Max Headroom” and a character in it named ‘Blank Reg’ come to mind, as well as Orwell’s classic book, “1984”.

We can’t allow too many people to be off the grid, that would harm the system. More people may opt to be off the grid if it can be shown as a viable alternative way of living. Three hundred years of civilizing and socializing ‘primitive’ subsistence cultures into the fold of an ever more integrated world would be for nothing, so serious anachronism is not to be tolerated. A few hippies and a small percentage of homeless is okay, they are just sick in the head social deviants, the odd religious group, the Amish and Hutterites for example, are allowed as they do peripherally still operate within the system, but whole functioning societies are to be made into the fold. Indigenous groups the world over are seeing their cultures assimilated, acculturated, homogenised, even extinguished by the steady and heavy pull of modernity over time. A steady drain on already threadbare resources leaves these cultures vulnerable over the long term.

Society, which is government at all levels, law enforcement, business, banks, insurance, education and all other aspects of the modern human community, spends and withholds no small sum of its resources to ensure people be on the grid and stay there. No other viable lifestyles or social systems allowed.

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