A Video News Re­port from 2030....

An­chor: Tout­ing their move­ment as a com­bi­na­tion of the eco­nomic the­o­ries of Ma­hatma Gandhi and the po­lit­i­cal sci­ence of Buck­min­ster Fuller, the Un­plugged have now re­duced the en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact of the United States of Amer­ica by 8 per­cent over their 15-year pro­gram.

Op­po­nents of the move­ment call Un­plug­ging an un­sci­en­tific and cult-like po­lit­i­cal move­ment, but pro­po­nents say that "Un­plug­ging" was the best de­ci­sion they ever made. Let's hear from Jack Hous­ton, a for­mer in­vest­ment banker...

Cuts to video

[Screen opens to Jack Hus­ton, a mus­cu­lar early-40s New Yorker.]

Pre­sen­ter: Jack, could you ex­plain what Un­plug­ging did for you?

Jack: Well, first we've got to cover briefly how Un­plug­ging works. The core of the the­ory is that we can all live off the in­ter­est gen­er­ated by our sav­ings, or the prof­its from our in­vest­ments, if we pos­sess enough cap­i­tal - and gen­er­a­tions of Cap­i­tal­ists have dreamed of "get­ting off at the top" - mak­ing enough money to cash out of the work­place and live as they like for the rest of their lives.

Pre­sen­ter: But what does that have to do with liv­ing in a hous­ing pod in the mid­dle of Ore­gon?

Jack: Well, it comes down to the na­ture of cap­i­tal. Wealth stored as dol­lars was es­sen­tially a share in Amer­ica's na­tional econ­omy - a credit note backed by the US Gov­ern­ment. But Buck­min­ster Fuller showed us that wealth-as-money was a spe­cial­ized sub­set of Wealth - the abil­ity to sus­tain life.

To "get off at the top" re­quires mil­lions and mil­lions of dol­lars of stored wealth. Ex­actly how much de­pends on your lifestyle and rate of re­turn, but it's a lot of money, and it's volatile de­pend­ing on eco­nomic con­di­tions. A crash can wipe out your cap­i­tal base and leave you help­less, be­cause all you had was shares in a ma­chine.

So we Un­plug­gers found a new way to un­plug: an in­de­pen­dent life-sup­port in­fra­struc­ture and fi­nan­cial ar­chi­tec­ture - a so­ci­ety within so­ci­ety - which al­lowed any­body who wanted to "buy out" to "buy out at the bot­tom" rather than "buy­ing out at the top."

If you are will­ing to live as an Un­plug­ger does, your cost to buy out is only around three months of wages for a fac­tory worker, the price of a used car. You never need to "work" again--that is, for money which you spend to meet your basic needs. How­ever, there are plenty of life sup­port ac­tiv­i­ties to keep you busy, and a lot of basic re­search and sci­ence to do. Un­plug­ging is not an off-the-shelf so­lu­tion, it's a re­search ca­reer!

Pre­sen­ter: So tell us about your house over here? It looks pretty weird!

Jack: Un­plug­gers don't have our own man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties for these yet, so we shop them out to fabs in Turkey. The shell is alu­minum and aero­gel, 50 per­cent col­lec­tor pan­els, 12 volt ap­pli­ance wiring, su­per-in­su­lated win­dows with liq­uid crys­tal shades for in­ter­nal tem­per­a­ture con­trol. Heat comes from ei­ther a wood stove or a peltier solid state heat pump run­ning off ground heat, de­pend­ing on how much power we need. Cool­ing, sim­i­larly. We cook in the solar oven on the side some­times, but mainly on woodgas or in the mi­crowave.

The houses - or "Pods" as you call them - have a rep­u­ta­tion as being "one size fits all poorly" but, in fact we found that 90 per­cent of peo­ple got on very well with one of three basic de­signs. The economies of scale made mass man­u­fac­ture of those mod­els more cost ef­fec­tive but peo­ple still do cus­tom work for about one unit in ten.

We're work­ing to­wards local fabs for a lot of this stuff now, but that's hard to or­ga­nize with­out wind­ing up with in­ter­nal in­dus­tries which run on grid power and com­mer­cial sup­ply chains, both of which are no-nos for our way of life: you can't be an al­ter­na­tive if you still rely on the in­dus­trial in­fra­struc­ture for your basic daily lifestyle needs. So we build the hous­ing pods in Turkey as part of the "Final Pur­chase" process - where a per­son be­com­ing an un­plug­ger buys their home, tools and land, to sup­port them and their fam­ily for the rest of their life, and then dis­con­nects from the na­tional econ­omy.

It's not per­fect. We're still using the re­sources of the in­dus­trial world to dis­con­nect from it. But until we have green fabs for the col­lec­tor pan­els and other ne­ces­si­ties, it's what we have to do.

Pre­sen­ter: Can you ex­plain what this has to do with Fuller and Gandhi?

Jack: Gandhi's model of "self-suf­fi­ciency" is the goal: the free­dom that comes from own­ing your own life sup­port sys­tem out­right is im­mense. It al­lows us to dis­con­nect from the na­tional econ­omy as a way of solv­ing the prob­lems of our planet one human at a time. But Gandhi's goals don't scale past the lifestyle of a peas­ant farmer and many west­ern­ers view that way of life as un­sus­tain­able for them per­son­ally: I was not going to sell my New York condo and move to Ore­gon to live in a hut, you know?

Pre­sen­ter: Ok.... with you so far.... what about Fuller?

Jack: Gandhi's Goals, Fuller's Meth­ods, if you like.

Fuller's "do more with less" was a method we could use to at­tain self-suf­fi­ciency with a much lower cap­i­tal cost than "buy out at the top." An in­te­grated, whole-sys­tems-think­ing ap­proach to a sus­tain­able lifestyle - the houses, the gar­den­ing tools, the mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems - all of that stuff was de­signed using in­spi­ra­tion from Fuller and later thinkers in­spired by ef­fi­ciency. The slack - the waste - in our old ways of life were con­sum­ing 90 per­cent of our pro­duc­tive labor to main­tain.

A thou­sand dol­lar a month com­bined fuel bill is your life en­ergy going down the drain be­cause the place you live sucks your life way in waste heat, which is waste money, which is waste time. Your car, your house, the por­tion of your taxes which the Gov­ern­ment spends on fuel, on elec­tric­ity, on waste heat... all of the time you spent to earn that money is wasted to the de­gree those sys­tems are in­ef­fi­cient sys­tems, be­hind best prac­tices!

Pre­sen­ter: Wow! So tell us about the Hu­mane Human Foot­print.

Jack: The Human Foot­print is sim­ple: it's the share of the world's re­sources you can use with­out re­ally harm­ing any­body sim­ply by ex­ist­ing. We call it the Human Foot­print as op­posed to the In­hu­man Foot­print. You take the sus­tain­able har­vest of the earth - the bounty we can con­sume with­out re­duc­ing next year's har­vest or re­duc­ing the re­silience of the earth in other ways - and your share of that is one Human Foot­print. The earth's Wealth - its life-giv­ing power - is like a trust fund split be­tween seven bil­lion hu­mans and a gazil­lion other liv­ing crea­tures. That which con­sumes more than its share is de­fraud­ing all the rest of their right to life. And this isn't re­li­gion, this is com­mon sense: if there are win­ners and losers, we're in a race for sur­vival. If there are only win­ners, we're all artists, sci­en­tists, lovers and schol­ars.

I know how I want to live.

Pre­sen­ter: So how close to your Human Foot­print are you, Jack?

[Jack looks un­com­fort­able.]

Pre­sen­ter: I've heard five times over is a typ­i­cal num­ber for Un­plug­gers...

Jack: Well, it de­pends how you mea­sure it but yes, about that. I have three chil­dren, so my fam­ily foot­print is about 11.2x HF but my per­sonal foot­print is about 7.3x. I'm work­ing on it, though. It's hard to make the ad­just­ment, and we only have a few tens of thou­sands of peo­ple at 1.0x or lower.

Pre­sen­ter: So let's talk pol­i­tics. Un­plug­ging is also a po­lit­i­cal move­ment - you your­self are mayor of a town­ship here, and your "town" is the local Un­plug­ger pop­u­la­tion plus a few hold outs in ghost sub­urbs east of here. Why play at pol­i­tics if all you wanted to do was drop off the Grid?

Jack: Be­cause po­lit­i­cal as­sump­tions wire every­thing. Build­ing codes dic­tate how you can build, which dic­tates the size of your hous­ing cost, which is the pri­mary fac­tor in your Un­plug Cost. Our san­i­tary sys­tems are greatly more ef­fec­tive than those of the Grid but, be­cause we fer­til­ize food with human waste after ex­tract­ing what en­ergy we can from it, some say our food isn't suit­able for human con­sump­tion - even though, in fact, there is no sci­en­tific ev­i­dence what-so-ever of any dis­ease or­gan­isms in the fer­til­izer stream. Just the idea of fer­til­iz­ing using processed human waste freaks peo­ple out, even though it is how hu­mans al­ways lived. And this pat­tern re­peats for water, our med­ical prac­tices, all of it. You would think that pre­ven­ta­tive med­i­cine was a crime!

Be­cause we are dif­fer­ent, the ex­ist­ing legal in­fra­struc­ture works against us at every hand and turn. To cre­ate change, we have to play pol­i­tics. But we are care­ful to sim­ply use our small-but-grow­ing clout to open doors for our cho­sen lifestyle, not to close doors on other peo­ple's choices. We aren't ecostal­in­ists. Gandhi's ap­proach: vol­un­tary en­list­ment in the army of truth, if you want to think about it that way, has proven to be the only ef­fec­tive model of po­lit­i­cal change which is con­sis­tent with all of our shared val­ues. We em­brace some parts of Gandhi's model more than oth­ers - as with Bucky - but you can't argue with the his­tor­i­cal suc­cess of his ap­proach: India, South Africa, Amer­ica, Poland, Mex­ico... the list goes on.

Pre­sen­ter: Even my kids have an Obey Em­peror Gandhi bumper sticker. What's that about?

Jack: It's an Un­plug­ger joke. We call Gandhi "Em­peror Gandhi" be­cause in our way of look­ing at things, he was the po­lit­i­cal leader of India - a net­work of King­doms - and there­fore tech­ni­cally he was an Em­peror [laughs]. In that role, he or­ga­nized col­lec­tive de­fense against the in­va­sion of India by rais­ing a vol­un­teer army of peo­ple who bought noth­ing from the in­vad­ing colo­nials, made salt, and got beaten while main­tain­ing rigid dis­ci­pline - just like an army. All they did not do was leave home or use vi­o­lent meth­ods to re­sist their in­vaders. The fact Gandhi him­self didn't own much of any­thing and ad­vised self-re­liance as a key­stone of free­dom makes him the John Locke of our move­ment. But we don't take the Em­peror Gandhi thing se­ri­ously, you know. It's just a bit of our cul­tural humor.

Pre­sen­ter: The threat of "Mom, keep yelling at me and I'll get a job de­liv­er­ing chi­nese food and then Un­plug when I've saved up!" has kept many a par­ent up at night...

Jack: Un­plug­ging isn't re­ally some­thing you can sus­tain from youth­ful re­bel­lion: kids who don't choose this way of life for them­selves as adults are usu­ally re­ally poor Un­plug­gers - they don't take soil met­rics se­ri­ously, they don't re­ally un­der­stand the in­vest-in-your-lands model of labor, and so on. It's not re­ally some­thing for punks and an­ar­chists, even though there is su­per­fi­cial ap­peal.

Pre­sen­ter: There's a lot of sci­ence here!

Jack: Oh yes. We mon­i­tor every­thing we have proved pays, and more: soil bac­te­ria ge­net­ics, nu­tri­ent lev­els in the soil, ne­ma­tode pop­u­la­tions, you name it. We have such ex­cel­lent yields and pest con­trol be­cause we don't move around much - we get to know our land as sci­en­tists and artists and de­sign­ers - we share knowl­edge and mod­els.

Of course, not every­body con­tributes equally to this knowl­edge base - I have a neigh­bor who is a mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­ogy pro­fes­sor by (for­mer-) trade and, well, I use his num­bers a lot [grins]. But we all do what we can, and the re­sults are proof that our farm­ing tech­niques - "high mon­i­tor­ing bioin­ten­sive agri­cul­ture" or "Tech­ni­cal Per­ma­cul­ture" de­pend­ing on where you live and which school you fol­low - our farm­ing meth­ods work, and will con­tinue to work for at least a few hun­dred to a few tens of thou­sands of years.

And that's enough for us: leave it to our chil­dren to fig­ure out how to get their own lives to be even more in­te­grated morally, eth­i­cally and so­cially.

Pre­sen­ter: Some say that Un­plug­ging is a cult be­cause of your "Un­plug­ger Morals" doc­trines...

Jack: Act­ing as if the god in all life mat­tered is rad­i­cal pol­i­tics. But we have peo­ple from every faith and tra­di­tion liv­ing as Un­plug­gers, as well as those with no be­liefs but a deep moral con­vic­tion that this is the right thing to do. But as with Satya­graha - Gandhi's so­cial change ap­proach - this takes every­thing you have and more and you can't do it with­out a solid in­ter­nal frame­work, a deeply per­sonal com­mit­ment to this as Right Ac­tion in a Bud­dhist sense, as Dharma from a Hindu per­spec­tive, as The Life Di­vine if you are a Chris­t­ian. We have rad­i­cal Bene­dic­tine monks - on the edge of get­ting booted out of the Catholic Church - who have up­dated the lifestyle passed down from Bene­dict him­self to use Un­plug­ger Farm­ing and who be­came part of the Un­plug­ger Com­mu­nity as a re­sult. But we also have an­ar­chosyn­di­cal­ist athe­ists.

All it takes is a be­lief you can act on which helps you make per­sonal changes for global rea­sons. And a po­lit­i­cal faith isn't usu­ally enough to do that, but it can be. Re­li­gion has proven over time that it can move peo­ple in ways that noth­ing else can, and Un­plug­ging is the biggest change a so­ci­ety can make.

Liv­ing up to your val­ues is hard. Faith helps some peo­ple do it, so we tend to see more of those kinds of peo­ple mak­ing the switch. It's just a se­lec­tion bias.

Pre­sen­ter: What do you mean "a change that so­ci­ety can make?"

Jack: Un­plug­gers now con­sti­tute 5 per­cent of the United States pop­u­la­tion. At first, we were the very ide­o­log­i­cally mo­ti­vated, and there was a lot of in­ter­face with older com­mu­ni­tar­ian groups and prior gen­er­a­tions who had at­tempted to make this tran­si­tion.

But as we be­came more de­fined, and our thinkers elu­ci­dated our case more clearly - as our farmer-sci­en­tists began to re­ally get the yields pre­dicted in the­ory, on a per-square-foot basis... it be­came clear that we were talk­ing about a par­tial so­lu­tion to the prob­lems that have faced the human race from the be­gin­ning of time: how do I live my­self, and how does my fam­ily live.

And a so­ci­ety is just in­di­vid­u­als and fam­i­lies, and some­times fam­i­lies of fam­i­lies, all the way up to States and Gov­ern­ments and the In­ter­na­tional Agen­cies and so on. If you solve the prob­lem for a sin­gle fam­ily, and it's some­thing which can com­pete in the evo­lu­tion­ary mar­ket­place of ideas, then even­tu­ally you can solve the en­tire prob­lem.

You know why GDP has gone down 20 per­cent be­cause of Un­plug­ging? Un­plug­gers are en­tre­pre­neurs. We used to start busi­nesses be­cause we wanted to buy out at the top of the game, now we usu­ally buy a fairly lav­ish Pod, and some re­ally, re­ally good qual­ity land, un­plug by 30, and some of us ex­pect to spend the rest of our lives learn­ing, teach­ing and ex­plor­ing what it is to be alive. Farm­ing five or six hours a day seems like a lot of work, but you do it with friends, and you're doing sci­ence and re­search some of the time, and you eat what you make. The basic ac­tiv­i­ties of life are so much more sat­is­fy­ing that earn-and-spend-and-eat-carry-out when you ac­tu­ally re­spect them as basic human ac­tiv­i­ties, as links we share with every­thing that is alive.

Pre­sen­ter: Tell me about the En­dow­ment.

Jack: The En­dow­ment is how we help the poor to Un­plug, and it is eas­ily the most con­tro­ver­sial part of our pro­gram. We en­cour­age the de­vel­op­ing world to Un­plug as the ul­ti­mate form of Leapfrog­ging: skip hy­per­cap­i­tal­ism and an­ar­chocap­i­tal­ism and de­mo­c­ra­tic so­cial­ism en­tirely and jump di­rectly to Un­plug­ging. Many Un­plug­gers take their ex­cess cap­i­tal, keep in­vest­ing it in the sys­tem, and use the pro­ceeds to fund pri­vate Un­plug­ging pro­grams. Oth­ers sim­ply took their cap­i­tal and added it to funds man­aged by a Grameen-bank like in­sti­tu­tion called the Un­plug­ging Bank which lends peo­ple money to un­plug, and has them pay for their Pods by sell­ing ex­cess farm goods and teach­ing agri­cul­ture for us. The lever­age of these ap­proaches has yet to be ver­i­fied but - judg­ing by the po­lit­i­cal re­pres­sion of Un­plug­gers in China and India and some parts of Africa - judg­ing by that re­sis­tance, I think we are going to be suc­cess­ful.

As the Ma­hatma said: "First they ig­nore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Soft­ware used to be an in­dus­try, you know?

Pre­sen­ter: Thank you, Jack, for telling us about your life.