Owning hardware might be less expensive in the long run, but it is not a simple thing to figure out. What if you could save 10% on your electricty bill by getting your own generator? All you have to do is clean the air filter, change the oil, lubricate the bearings and monitor the transformer temperatures every hour. Does that sound like a good use of your time? It makes a lot more sense to use your time making a product or delivering a service that your customers want.

I think Doctorow’s right about this. We need a computer network
that’s resilient enough, in a time of Peak Oil and economic collapse,
to survive a long period of rolling brownouts and cascading Chapter 11
bankruptcies.

That means primarily, IMO, resilient local meshworks organized on a
last-mile basis, including local bulletin board systems, that will
make it easier for people to link their hard drives via local user
networks when centralized server networks collapse or are
intermittently functional. In such an eventuality, the data stored on
hard drives may be the equivalent of the manuscripts stored in the
monastic libraries after Rome fell.