Cory at BoingBoing and Alex at WorldChanging sat down for a coffee together last week and started brainstorming about life after the apocalpyse. Cory says:
I noticed that while there’s a whole ton of stories — and people who emulate them — about heavily armed survivalists bravely holding off the twilight of civilization after the Big One, there are damned few stories about super-networked post-apocalyptic Peace Corps who respond to the Great Fall by figuring out how to put it all back together. I even came up with a name for it: the Outquisition; the opposite of the Inquisition — missionaries who come to your town to remind you of how awesome it can all be, leave behind a bunch of rad, life-improving systems and tools, and generally get on with the business of being happy, well-fed and peaceful.
Alex wrote up a great post about this and 24 hours later, some WorldChanging readers created Outquisition.org. I’m not sure what they’ll do there, but in my dreams, they’re off building a non-secret society of emergency-preparedness Nice People who think that the response to catastrophe isn’t lifeboat rules and militias, but humanitarian aid and kick-ass tools.
Alex elaborates:
What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.
Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good atadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.
Interestingly, all this has generated a torrent of debate on the comments section, with rural people cocking a number of eyebrows at the idea that urban folk will sally out to rescue them. One of the more gentle responses suggests that
The thought that a bunch of city folks could come out to the country and teach the farmers how to do their job is comical. Ideally it would be a two-way system with both sides contributing to the conversation. The farmers would be able to teach the city folk how to farm to grow their own food, while the city people would bring their particular skill set to the table.
On the other hand,
You know, maybe the city folk DO know more about some things than the farmer might. If the farmer has been dependent upon hybrid seed he must buy every year, because the seed produced by his crops is sterile, and the fertilizer he must buy is petroleum based and no longer affordable or even available. Some “City Person” showing up with non-hybid seed and plans for a DIY manure composter that produces burnable methane gas and, as a byproduct, high quality organic liquid fertilizer, well that “city Person” just might be that farmer’s personal saviour.
The whole comments section on the WorldChanging post is worth a look: a very lively and informative discussion.
