Rural Social Tech and How It Works
A stamp-collecting series on the little ways that strengthen the fabric of our communities
For many luxuries ‘there’s an app for,’ I hear people ask “how did people exist before app-based ride share?” halfway between rhetorically and in earnest. It’s a pretty simple answer—with ride sharing (unmarked). It’s understood that several technologies have been developed to stitch together the fabric of life for people who are atomized in cities. And this is excellent—living is better when the fabric is tight. But people often hear my “… unmarked X” with surprise: the common alief seems to be that stitching-together-app style technology has been developed from a void. That people didn’t have a way to book a dog walker before Rover.com. That one couldn’t get a ride to the airport. That if a store didn’t have what you wanted, you’d do without.
And when stopping to consider for a second, of course everyone says “oh, yeah, I guess you could ask your village/neighbors/community/family.” And this is true but it’s underspecified. Communities don’t just miraculously manifest. Before apps, and continuing both with and without apps, load-bearing technologies stitch together the fabric of rural life. These technologies are simple, some more visible some less visible, but they’re all discussable.
Audience
Some folks are interested in these social tech almost as anthropologists. Others may want to stitch together villages in spite of or outside of cities. For both of these groups of readers, I aim to assemble a stamp collecting1 series detailing various of these techs that I use or that I’m aware of. For examples I’m sharing, I genuinely feel them to be valuable or of persistent usefulness in the modern era, and if you want tips or extra understanding, please always ask. (Maybe I’ll occasionally throw in some obsoleted techs that I heard about from my grandparents, but I’ll label these.)
Index
Community-building
Potlucks: how potlucks 1, never test a recipe on guests, aligned incentive structures
Hosting: knife bifurcation
Distributed Skillshare: circuit riders
“Homesteading” (hobby farming)
DIY: project pail
Gardening: fail gardening, fail gardening followups
Mindset cultivation
Problem-solving: PvP v PvE
Task completion: knife switches (kaCHUCK)
Request
If there’s a technology you’ve heard of and want more detail about, request a post on it. Same if there’s an outcome you want and you’re not sure of what tech would supply it. I can conjecture what others want to know, but direct questions from friends are a guiding light.
Stamp collecting:
derisively (in the sense of Rutheford?)
or…
[Stamp] collecting is the essence of autodidact learning, since it requires nothing more than the set of things in a domain already encountered and an improvised scheme for organizing them in memory (in the sense of ribbonfarm ?)
The second possibility is to engage in forms of research that seek to locate and preserve the information that is indexical to a situation, rather than attempting to create global knowledge at all. That is the goal of the tiny field of ethnomethodology, for example. This kind of science is still rare. There’s a proverb to the effect that biology without Darwin was just stamp collecting. I don’t know how much hope there is for social science to stop hallucinating Darwins everywhere, and go back to honest stamp collecting, but I suspect that it is the only way toward social science knowledge that would be genuinely valuable. These methods look more like watching reality with heightened attention, acquiring from each situation the tools with which to understand it, rather than devising contrivances to advance narratively compelling theories.
(in the sense of carcinisation ?)
Finally, we will need to collect new methodologies for advancing knowledge. These may include: 1., Stamp collection—compiling an excessive amount of examples, such that taxonomy and theory follows naturally and effortlessly from their features. (in the sense of suspended reason ?)
I aspire to the latter,—I’m open to feedback!