Pushing Buttons—Off and Otherwise

Buttons are everywhere. And we are pushing them all the time. Above all, there is one special button: the off button. The funny thing, however, is that talking about pushing the off button is exactly what pushes a lot of technology users’ metaphorical buttons!

There are many objections to pushing the off button on your personal computer-GPS-camera-surveillance device (I mean, your smartphone), but safety is often among the first objections: “What if someone needs to get ahold of me in an emergency?” And if—Google forbid!—you were not only to turn it off but leave it at home for a walk, what might happen to you? You might see a rare bird fly over and not be able to take a picture of it. You might decide you need a Starbucks, and find yourself with no Apple Pay. You could get hit by a car and die in the road, with no one else surviving or witnessing the accident, unable to call 911. Worst of all, the interwebs would feel lonely without you—as Microsoft Edge puts it when not connected to the Internet: “Let’s get you reconnected: the Internet just isn’t the same without you!” 

The truth is, you are not the same without the Internet. Rather than it being unsafe to go phoneless, the last few years have seen an exponential growth of books, blogs, and other media regarding the dangers of technology use. Two notable authors are social scientist Jon Haidt chronicling the linkage between social media and the plummeting mental health of teens, and Freya India, a voice in the wilderness of her own Gen Z peers who have abandoned themselves to a never-ending cycle of self-referential chronicling. The critics of the multilayered digital sludge are no longer few and far between. They can be found on a host of blogs, podcasts, and videos. Ironically, one place it’s harder to find them, though, is off of those very mediums they are concerned about.

Enter the lanky Eric Brende. Thirty years ago, Eric and his newly-wed wife, Mary, stepped entirely off the grid for a year to see what two people could do in a year using zero watts. Tentatively received by an Amish community, the couple discerned how much technology is enough. Eric, ironically a graduate of MIT, decided that almost none is enough. He tells his story in Better Off, a chronicle of that year, the events that led up to it, and how he decided to take what he had learned out of the Amish village and into the suburbs of St. Louis.

I met Eric at the conference New Polity hosted this past spring. In addition to buying his book (with cash), I listened to Eric give a presentation on his current way of life. Between driving a bicycle rickshaw and hand making soap and selling it at a farmers’ market, Eric often makes less than $20k on paper per year. Having bought his fixer-upper house outright, made the right friends, and learned how to do almost anything with his hands, his cash flow doesn’t need to be big. He has sufficiently stepped outside of the system so as to no longer need it.

Better Off is an excellent book by an excellent man. Of particular note is his radical nuance. When I hear “we must be nuanced” in the talk about tech, it’s usually code for “let’s not be radical while still feeling pretty good about ourselves.” But Eric manages to combine radical low-tech decisions with levelheaded common sense. For example, he allows that there were several times when it was appropriate and proportional to use a power drill in renovating his garage because the angle or type of wood made using his hand drill too difficult.

Better Off is not a nerds’ handbook of power drill quibbles, though. It is a rambunctious account of what life looks like if you want to live comfortably without a power bill, without a gas budget, without an insurance premium, without a bank account, credit card fees, or a phone in your pocket.

Eric’s overarching question (with origins in childhood car sickness) focuses on when so-called labor-saving devices’ need for “fuel, space, money, and time” makes them labor-creating rather than otherwise. “The conviction was growing in me that the besetting problem was our culture’s blindness to the distinction between the tool and the automatic machine,” Eric writes. He continues:

Everyone tended to treat them alike, as neutral agents of human intention. But machines clearly were not neutral or inert objects. They were complex fuel-consuming entities with certain definite proclivities and needs. Besides often depriving their users of skills and physical exercise, they created new and artificial demands.

Seeing the ballooning demands a machine like a car imposes on an ordinary man—initial cost, taxes, plate registration, tire rotations, oil changes, insurance, and, of course, fuel—Eric wonders if life wouldn’t be easier without having to constantly maintain such complex systems of needs, originally sold to us under the pretext of making our life easier and more fun.

Ostensibly to answer the question for his master’s thesis, Eric and Mary embarked on an 18-month sojourn with an Amish-like community. No running water. No electricity. To most, this “primitive” way of life conjures up images of Monty Python’s peasants gathering muck: backbreaking, dirty, and inefficient subsistence farming. 

But Eric, helped by the watchful but discreet neighbor from whom he is renting property, discovered that once his garden was in order and he was integrated into the community dynamic of bartering, the daily time needed for actual “work” settled down to about four hours. 

Better Off is full of humor, inventiveness, and insight, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you want a taste of Eric’s style, head over to Eric’s blog. His what? you ask. Eric wants to publish a second book. In the twenty years since his first book’s publication, publishers now require authors to possess a number of online followers. Eric continues to wonder, however, if this is the right move. What do you think?