wouldn't a hacker hippie commune be more about building a robotic plow and spending your, now spare, time OCRing and analyzing old farmers almanacs to determine the optimal time to plant/rotate/water crops?
In today's culture, it might be dreamed up on facebook, funded on kickstarter, promoted on twitter, picked up by 10,000 blogs that all poach from each other and then abandoned by the next semester because the earth-water-sun interface is ancient and suffers from significant design issues whose tickets never get responded to by the upstream provider.
I'm tempted to start blogging up the project proposal for a hippie arcology to be built on a south facing slope in southern Oregon with geothermal backup heat and a fiber optic connection to the internet for the remote workers whose economic contributions exempt them from the maintenance duties that the less skilled have to do (hey, someone needs to turn the compost heaps and feed the tilapia you know). The basic design concept is to have one largish thermal envelope that encloses multiple garden and dwelling spaces that are kept at a relatively constant temperature year round.
I would really like to bring the Whole Earth Catalog hacking tradition full circle.
> I would really like to bring the Whole Earth Catalog hacking tradition full circle.
Sort of a tangent, but the Whole Earth Catalog scene and the tech scene were surprisingly inter-related in the 60s-80s, which is something I didn't know until recently. Ted Nelson, who had coined the word "hypertext" about three years before the first WEC was published, was greatly influenced by it for his 1974 book Computer Lib / Dream Machines, and Steve Jobs was an avid reader as well. There was even briefly a software version in the 80s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Software_Catalog_an...
I think I was surprised to find a connection mainly because in 2010 I associate the Whole Earth Catalog more with anti-technology primitivists, which doesn't seem to have originally been the case--- seems plenty of technologists were also interested in it, since DIY doesn't have to mean primitivism.
> hey, someone needs to turn the compost heaps and
> feed the tilapia you know
Now I'm just picturing the Dharma Initiative, and Ben's burnt-out, drunken father that came to 'the island' thinking that he was going to be a part of something special, only to find out that they wanted him to be the janitor.
many years ago, i've lived on non-hacker hippie communes. there's actually several outside of austin in texas. it makes sense given all the cheap ranch land in rural texas.
ideally, you have a "main house" with the kitchen and where everybody meets up. then you have little cottages all over the ranch with bunk beds where everybody sleeps and works. when people need to buy stuff, they drive into town.
for hackers that just need a roof over their head and a few meals so they don't starve, it's not a bad idea.
Wow, only on hacker news would my flippant, but secretly serious, comment lead to an actual working implementation of something great. Are you involved with the sproutrobot? Super cool idea and I've just signed up!
