We depend on digital devices but we have no way to recreate them, without specialised machinery or advanced knowledge. This is an interesting blindspot and we need a way to address it. I call this process Digital Bushcraft.
Survivalism is using basic tools and your environment to ensure you don’t succumb to the elements. You somehow end up on an isolated island, or a mountain, or a forest, and you get to live. If you’re the kind of person who does this sort of thing for fun, you even get to thrive.
Let’s play a game. Let’s assume that some world-ending scenario has occurred. Global thermonuclear war, some sort of disease, you get transported to the Bronze age. The world of today gets known as The Great Before.
As a survivalist, you are one of the few who have managed to survive and thrive. Your basic needs are being met. You have a steady supply of food and water, you have formed a community of people, and you’re back to the Bronze Age.
In this new paradise of a simple and direct world, you yearn for complexity. You yearn to be awakened by five alarms set two minutes apart, rather than the break of dawn. You long for the days when you would crack a joke on Slack and get a bunch of 😂 reactions from those miles away from you, rather than the roaring laughter of the people close to you and around you. When the immediate problems get solved, you like to find new ones. You can’t stand to be at intellectual peace with yourself. You are, after all, a programmer. Or you wouldn’t be reading this.
One day during scavenging the ruins of the Great Before, you find a USB flash drive that contains the sort of information that would boost your civilisation. Or, it contains someone’s collection of cute animal pictures. You’re not exactly sure, but either sounds extremely valuable. The problem is, you don’t have a way of reading the files on the device, because whatever killed the civilisation that gave birth to you also killed all the laptops.
In the same way that you managed to build a shelter and a fire, and boil water and find your food, how would you go about building a simple computer device? How would you read the USB? Welcome to digital bushcraft.