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- Photo by Nicolas Hoizey on Unsplash Last week, I wrote about what I called a new Dark Age . Basically, data is fragile; the internet could be wiped out, and we’d be stupid to just assume that the powers that be won’t monkey with the information on it when we’ve seen them do it already.
But the truth is that this is just part of the problem we have in this country.
It goes beyond our data and into our everyday lives.
Tilting At Windmills is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I’m calling this the American Heirloom Project.
First, America itself is an heirloom we hand down to our children. We have an obligation to make it something worth handing down. That means continuing the fight to preserve our rights, our culture, and our national identity. That’s a fight I engage in pretty much every single day here, but still…
The second thing is that we need to recognize how fragile our entire world is. Not the planet so much as everything else. While our planet matters, it can heal from just about anything we throw at it. Our world, on the other hand, exists on hard drives that are extraordinarily frail in the grand scheme of things. Even being etched on glass would likely be more durable in the long term.
We need to migrate ourselves away from everything being digital and only accessible so long as some entity beyond our control does what it’s supposed to do. This isn’t just about important records, either, but also about our entertainment. Pay for a movie that will stream, and then watch as it vanishes some time in the future because you didn’t actually own it. Electronic books supported by a bookstore are fast and easy to store, and I love my Kindle, but the reality is that if Amazon wanted my entire library to vanish tomorrow, it would vanish. Hardcopy books, to start with. Journalist to document the day-to-day of our lives and our world. Commonplace books to document who said what and when, or to store the odd recipe you picked up from a friend, or any number of other things you want to have on hand, but would have just bookmarked in your browser before. For the record, and I are working on something to potentially help with that, but no one should trust us to do it all. Creating new heirlooms of knowledge for our children is a key part of moving forward here, and it doesn’t take much. Just a few minutes here and there, and you get it all. Still, that’s not enough.
We need to look at our stuff, our things, and while I love that we have cheap goods available—a sign that the free market works because the poor of today have more furnishings than kings of days gone by—we, as consumers, have an obligation and a duty to demand better from producers. Once upon a time, even the poorest farmer, alone in the wilderness 250 years ago, may not have had the most stuff, but it was all stuff meant to last. There might only have been a single chair, but that chair was built to still be around. We deserve better than tables that sag, chairs that crumble, or bookshelves that fall apart and spill your library across half the room.
Those products are heirlooms, be they newly made or products of the past. We deserve that quality in our lives.
But there’s a problem.
See, how we should probably be living is with fewer but better-made things. People don’t want to live like that today. They might be down with having better-made things, so long as they can fit them within their lifestyles, but they won’t make do with less. That’s fair because society has marched on from that.
What the American Heirloom Project really is, at its heart, is an attempt at creating a cultural movement. It’s about crafting a better world for our children, a better life for them, and pushing back on the era of waste that has dominated the West for far too long.
And it’s about trying to find a way to do it affordably. It’s easy to have the best-made stuff when you’ve got Elon Musk’s money, but none of us do. I checked, and Elon doesn’t subscribe to me, unfortunately, so I’m confident that none of us has his bank account balance. That means we need to figure out how to do it with fewer financial resources.
It can be done.
More than that, it has to be done.
Our system’s fragility is its weakness, but our entire civilization is also at risk. All civilizations collapse, and the similarities between our own and the Roman Empire before its fall are terrifying. What I can’t say is when it will collapse. While it may not even be in my grandkids’ lifetimes, it will happen.
Our society needs to be an heirloom, which means being able to preserve it all, including ourselves. Food security, physical security, and information security are all vital aspects of this. Having houses that can endure for generations without a societal support system available for repairs, understanding simple agriculture that doesn’t need constant trips to the garden store, and the means to meet threats and end them all factor in as well.
This isn’t something you just sign off on and call it a day. This requires action. It requires it from me, from you, and from a million other people throughout the nation.
So what does this mean beyond me pontificating about stuff? Writing is easy. Doing is the hard part, and I just said it requires action. Where does someone start? How do you actually apply this yourself?
That’s why this project is more than just a post. Every couple of weeks, I’ll be including a Saturday post. It’ll be free, at least for the short term—everything goes behind the paywall after about a month—and it’ll be guides to do some of this yourself. It’ll start simple, then expand.
I encourage you to read them, share them broadly with people, and to print them out and put them in a binder or something . Make them physical copies so you can access them no matter what.
Or copy them into a commonplace book, if you want. I’d actually be honored by that, but whatever fits your needs, just so long as it’s physical media.
Understand that I’m not an expert in every field. I cannot tell you how to take up ceramics and make all your plates, bowls, and cups from the ground up. That’s not my wheelhouse. What I can do, though, is look at what makes some ceramics more durable than others, or guide you on how to find a craftsperson to make things for you, and I can talk to people. I can interview experts and tell you what they say about making stuff.
My goal is to give you the tools to start you on your way, with actual plans, and to do so at various price points so you can take the steps that will fit your situation best.
The truth of the matter is that, as I write this, there is a battle going on via social media about air conditioning, of all things. The mayor of New York City wants people to be uncomfortable despite having AC, all because a group decided that cheap, clean nuclear power was bad and the grid can’t keep up with the current demand without it.
How long before these same people make living our current lifestyles impossible, all because they’re convinced that the world is ending and we need to go back to living in straw huts to save it? How long until they start trying to take down the internet because it’s too resource-intensive? How long until they go from destroying the beauty of our world by installing solar and wind farms to demanding more of your very soul?
Get out of that system. Stop depending on it. Stop trusting the state to look out for your best interests. The truth is that the state should never be trusted to do anything well.
So let’s be a resilient society. Let’s make it so that it’s harder and harder for anyone to destroy our lives and our lifestyles. Share Tomorrow is our 250th Independence Day.
Let’s create a new kind of independence in honor of it. Let’s cut off much of the same world that demonizes us for living. Let’s remove China’s ability to influence American society by cutting off the flow of goods designed specifically to keep us funneling money back to them, a country that ultimately wants to supplant us on the world stage.
Let us be well and truly free.
Who’s with me?