“Prepper” is a negatively loaded word, raising images of funny people storing canned food and ammo. This is how a declining civilization likes to dismiss everyone questioning its fall.

Real preppers, on the other hand, are those who identify technological suits fit for a de-industrialized world, working for the installation of these and the knowledge needed to run them.

All this has immediate practical importance for those who happen to live in a civilization that’s skidding down the curve of its decline and fall—ours, for example. In such a time, as noted above, one critical task is to identify the technological suites that will still be viable in the aftermath of the decline, and shift as much vital infrastructure as possible over to depend on those suites rather than on those that won’t survive the decline. In terms of the charts above, that involves identifying those technological suites that will still be in category A when the lines stop shifting up and to the left, figuring out how to work around any bottleneck technologies that might otherwise cripple them, and get the necessary knowledge into circulation among those who might be able to use it, so that access to information doesn’t become a bottleneck of its own.

 

That sort of analysis, triage, and salvage is among the most necessary tasks of our time, especially for those who want to see viable technologies survive the end of our civilization. – John Michael Greer

So if you want to make something useful of your life, get up and identify post-industrial technological suits. Maybe you won’t be able to implement much of them in the real world, as this is partially illegal and will be opposed by governments and believers in progress. But to identify these suits and to spread knowledge about these technologies is an important first step. As the decline of industrial civilisation gather speed, the existence of this knowledge will be crucial, and they can be installed when it’s obvious to everyone that there are no alternatives.

If you are lucky you might be able to install some of these technologies yourself, or even better, making a demonstration lot for future appropriate technologies.

A are useful and affordable technologies. B are affordable but useless technologies. C are useful but unaffordable technologies. D are both useless and unaffordable technologies.

Currently a huge amount of technologies belong to category A.

In the future only a few technologies will be found useful and affordable, diminishing sector A radically from the current state. Your mission, if you want to make a point of your life and not waste your life as a player for the current system, is to identify the technologies, and most of all the technological suits these technologies are part of, so that they can be installed for a post-industrial society.

Please read the whole essay by John Michael Greer:

– Dark Age America: The Fragmentation of Technology

Now, reading this, get out and get to work! The survival of your children depends on your actions now! For every useful technology you identify, and the steps you take to preserve the knowledge and skills for these technologies, and hopefully installing some of them, is of enormous importance.

A low tech washing machine that might become useful again in the near future.