I've been wondering what tech levels would be SELF SUSTAINABLE. Like the amish lifestyle is a circular economy, everything they need they can make themselves, grow themselves, and compost themselves. Like mostly.

But can you have something like electric motors or wind power in the same way? Can you have electronics? Can you have eReader? Like if you had a town the size of 50.000 people.

Theoretically advances in technology could allow for things like biological computing. Like a variety of seeds to produce plants making all sorts of medicine, or single cell cultures then organize into simple electronics. Not sure how sci-fi that is. But in a way that would be a "safe point" for civilization.

Because even after a limited nuclear exchange which is is getting more and more likely each year we're not going to have any global supply chain left.

If someone is going to run with this idea, I very sincerely ask that you please do it in one of the locations marked on this map. Then my company will be able to operate a 1990s-technology cellular phone network in the proposed neo-Amish town, a network that will enable 1990s GSM cellphones to actually work! And I do mean it with full seriousness - the linked website is my actual company, with all attendant legal and contact info.

Out of the set of locations marked on the linked map, I strongly prefer the ones in Oregon. I and the rest of my founding team are based in California, and I am a trans woman - hence certain places are, quite sadly, simply unsafe for to me travel to, let alone the intricate tasks of building towers, installing equipment and then operating and maintaining it. There are no PCS spectrum vacancies in our home state of CA, but OR is close, has good spectrum available, and it is a lovely state with strong LGBTQ+ rights.

let's bring ICQ back.

So um is this just millennial retirement? Boomers are getting their senior communities we need our own communities

You can keep the IMs. I would like MP3s, though. A library could have a computer that can be booked for research purposes.

I'm debating over on-demand video and better TVs. Maybe a compromise would be the community decides its own broadcast schedule so it's not as instant but still allows some modern media.

I'm not. There were some awful parts of the 90s.

It'll never be the same anyway. Something that a lot of legacy gaming servers has taught me is that you can't replicate nostalgic memories.

But will it have LGBT Rights?

IRC and newsgroups, too. Self hosted websites and forums.

I hate to be the regressive, but yeah…this was better.

Can we keep the "no smoking inside commercial establishments" policy at least? Otherwise I'm down.

You’re shockingly close to the plot of The Matrix.

people who say this never actually, like, quit social media or anything that would bring them closer to this

I dream of a time in my life when I can sit around in my grandpa chair playing 80's and 90's video games on my 90inch PPMQ+LER/LED with macrovision and google-tone color rendering 3D/8D ultra-thin TV in a retro case to make it look like a giant version of those old floor model "piece of furniture in and of themselves" TVs like my grandpa had back in '84. Maybe my AI grandson can play along so I can relive the childlike wonder of playing through these games for the first time from the perspective of a kid AI.

This guy is doing it https://openpath.quest/2026/i-am-retiring-from-tech-to-live-offline

AI was the last straw. Have you heard of that island off India where the indiginous population kills any outsiders fool-hardy enough to land? They are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday, or at the very least should not want to see completely extinguished. A reminder. Never forget your roots. Here in Pennsylvania we have the Amish performing a similar function. Significantly less hostile, though still set apart, they bear witness to what was normal for all of us a couple short centuries ago: horse and buggy, wood stoves and lanterns. My intent is to be AI Amish, which means Internet Amish. Not 1780, but 1980. Neo-Amish. I'm fine driving a car and flipping a lightswitch, by which I mean that they don't make me into something I hate, which AI and doomscrolling do.

OK, but we demand IRC instead of AOL-IM.

Instead of AIM, MeshCore. Cheap, off-net, encrypted, solar-powered, simple.

Reminds of this bit from Freefall: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3200/fc03150.htm

Take me back to the time when I would finish before the bottom half of jenna jameson even manages to load

Blockbuster doesn't carry pornography.

Bend, Oregon

Guck that, move it to summer 2001 so we can at least use ICQ and constantly warn everyone about 9/11

honestly right now ain't so bad. we got microbreweries and shit.

This is how you accidentally start a Gen-X commune.

Honestly, the 90s was a shit time for many LGBTQ people and often PoCs as well. Can we have (at least) todays levels of wokeness? Oh and today levels of healthcare... and today levels of assistive technology for people needing assistance, oh and...

I think I have enough hardware laying around to serve as a dialup ISP for this. And the upstream bandwidth I already have is probably more than that of my dialup ISP 30 years ago.

ICQ, IRC, and Livejournal.

Not Amish, LoTeK!

The technology isnt the problem, though. Its how people are using it that is.

This is just the "80s were so much better... as ling as you werent gay" or "50s were so much better... as long as you werent black" but for the 90s.

The people making our lives arent going to stop just cause you slap a fresh coat of ~~denial~~ nostalgia over it.

sign me up

RCEs, RCEs everywhere

But I mean at least everything has a small memory footprint instead of using 4Gb to load a god damn web page.

Really, you have the opportunity to recreate the past and I’m stuck with AIM? I’ll stick to XMPP and IRC thanks.

I've heard people mocked for being "stuck in the 60s."

Me watching the original Matrix "That filthy guy willing to betray humanity just to be a little happy" Me living in the post covid/trump ruins the world/Jewish people doing a genocide... "Hook me up, you don't even have to make me rich, but that Joey Pants was on to something"

Black Mirror's San Junipero.

It's interesting how so many virtual realities tend to offer the 80s-90s as the best world to be in.

Lost me at allowing AOL. I was there as a teenager for the first AOL and looking back it was not a good thing.

Can I have my portable cd player back?

ICQ, please. Mine was 737916.

Skate parks, bmx(s), towering ice cream, starcraft on battlenet.

As long as we make it taste like pizza hut from the early 90s, cause they went down hard and their pizza is kind of ass, now.

Sounds like oomer behavior.

i'm still gonna run around with an Shenandoah beard, wide hat and wil clothes, and you can't stop me

I would probably choose the era of roughly 2012-2016.

Blockbuster went out of business for a reason. It was worse than Redbox and worse than Netflix's mail service. And eventually Netflix's streaming reached a magical peak where it was still affordable and had a great library. Almost everything was either Netflix or Hulu, and HBO waa only for really expensive high-budget stuff. Used to be Disney movies on Netflix.

Also... Idk how old this tweet is but it's weird to suddenly zee Nikki Limo pop up. I used to really enjoy her Tasty Tuesday show years ago.

Anything with a processor inside of it and connected to a high speed internet connection will enshittify. One wat is to limit CPU speed and internet, say use solar/wind powered mesh routers instead of fiber connections, so good enough to get info and simple communication, not enough for lots of pictures and video. That means you need a blockbuster for video.

and the economic crisis?

Count me in.