Twitter Hobo's proposal for a new American nomadism

I love this stuff. Let's Make America Nomadic Again. Imagine a year-round roving survivalist burning man, in a new location every week, on BLM land or whatever, with babies playing in the dirt (like in Tacitus' Germania) and sheep grazing. Maybe invite only, or only a few of the locations publicly advertised. I'd show up for maybe months at a time. Can't commit more than that but this is the sort of crazy scheme that's worth trying.

America deserves to be populated by at least some honest to god nomadic tribes. It would do amazing things for America's soul.

This is probably somewhat illegal or at least gray-area contentious, so would be important to figure out how to do it as legally as possible, how to get slack by being as agreeable as possible, and how to negotiate with whatever bureaucrats might have a problem and powers to make a mess for it.

I think twitter hobo needs to just start doing it and posting locations to the worthy. And he needs to embrace the leadership principle: this is his idea so he's in charge. There is no "governance". If someone don't like it, they can fork the tribe.

Anyways, before I get way out over my skis here, let's discuss the general set of ideas and topics around voluntary homelessness, nomadism, van life, etc. Can twitter hobo do it?

>>1209

There are Americans who already do this. I saw a film about it. It was kind of depressing. I would want a less depressing version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadland

I wonder if the entries above and this online drifter's conception are an attempt to distance this idea from Instagram van life. I don't know if that is something worth distancing oneself from. I

For me, what came to mind first was Dead fans. Dead fans, like the Tuaraeg, or any nomadic people, have their own distinct musical tradition and religion, as well as distinct rules for conducting such a lifestyle. I imagine that everyone wants to go beyond that, or semi-retired fifth-wheel-pullers sleeping in Walmart parking lots.

>>1220
Well I'm going to van life my ass over to see mr Twitter hobo later this year, and we might even do it instagram style, so I guess we'll find out.

I think the deadheads are a good example for more than one reason. The travelling circus element seems like a thing that would take such a crowd beyond mere Walmart parking lot homelessness. This is why I suggested a roving burning man. It has been hypothesized that the first cities may have been part-time festival sites for nomadic groups. Maybe there's a similar game here.

But deadheading is still not quite at the point of material self sufficiency as it subsists in entertainment value. I think such a lifestyle would have to be materially productive in some way not just entertainment, and not just poverty. The productivity would have to be linked to the mobility, too. North America was once home to absolutely immense herds of bison which are necessarily rather mobile, so you could imagine a high-capital (literally) nomadic ranching as an ambitious extension of the classic of low-dollar goathair tent nomadism. That would be really something.

My nomad fantasy might be too restrictive. I would be just far enough up in Saskatchewan, somewhere around Meadow Lake, maybe deeper—Beauval？ the places you need to canoe or hike or fly into—so I could get the CBC just about anywhere on a shortwave bounce, travel the lakes as I pleased, mix in with the folks up there that are, it seems, still semi-nomadic (and the Metis have won court cases that attest to their nomadism, although it's mostly about a guarantee of trapping, fishing, and hunting rights outside of traditional territory), put in an occasional summer as a guide, if I needed to, maybe file enough reports to hold down a sinecure handed out by the provincial authorities, run a trap line in the winter, be close enough to canoe up to a bank to cash my social security and buy the necessities. This is a practical fantasy, I think, in a place that remote. I think it's productive, but in a sense it also means stepping out of history, or trying to hang on to something that is lost.

It seems like nomadism is premature. It should wait for the collapse. Then, it can be running a tribe across the crumbling highways of the Great Plains, making a living selling expired antibiotics, and camping on the outskirts of devastated Rust Belt towns, selecting the less scabrous addicts, buying the daughters of drifters as wives for my sons to wed in RV chapels in abandoned Walmart parking lots.

What is the solution for the present?

I think the most revealing thread this Adirondack guy (or however he goes now) posted was when he confessed that he felt viscerally uncomfortable anywhere but dilapidated, deindustrialized shitholes in the Northeast. The Southwest and Mountain West, which is going through massive amounts of energetic development to the point it's pricing out locals, are places he says don't have enough "character" (closed factories). What's central to this guys' schtick is the idea that Main Street is only composed of vape shops and adult DVD stores, and because it's all haunted by zombie-tweakers anyway all you should bother doing is earn $40 doing yardwork to afford a pesticide-laden plate of rice and beans, because gosh gee, that's all an honest buck like you can can do in this damn economy... He represents the demoralization-porn wing of the ailing homesteader movement.

>>1231

By the way, I say this as someone's who's currently living a transient, rural lifestyle as a young man. The depopulating heartlands of North America are a place to cut your teeth developing a wild will, so that you can return to the cities atop a white horse. I don't see the appeal in gypsy caravans that survive off skinning coons and complaining about the WEF on X, which is the lumberjack-provincialist mindset you see with Adirondack and Boilt Owl.

>>1231
>>1232
lmao. Good counterpoint, anon. Yeah you do have to distinguish between the nomad/wildness question and the weird declinist aesthetics of some of these guys. Interesting you lump him with Boilt Owl. The hobo seems more sincere, but I know what you mean. Adam "everything bad for your society is actually good" van Buskirk is somewhere in between.

Don't we have nomadic tribes already?

I had a friend in high school who played the tuba and smoked weed with his dad. Instead of going to college, he ran away to join the circus. He came back six months later and said it was boring: you put tents up, you take them down, you put them up again.

There's a guy on Youtube whose goal is to try every edible fruit. His day job is contortionist. He travels with entertainers and shoots fruit videos on the side.

Other nomadic occupations - traveling salesman, long-haul driver, flight attendant - don't travel in packs, but the pack is the hard part even for the sedentary.

>>1248
>the pack is the hard part even for the sedentary.
The pack is the hard part. I'm here in Utah where they have the pack absolutely sorted out. We were discussing last night what it would take for intelligent Americans currently lacking membership in some organized group to reliably survive the next 100 years. It's not hard for a far-seeing individual philosopher here and there to build a great family, company, etc, but there's only so much you can do and think your way out of as an individual, and getting economies of scale on the good life outside of the death spiralling mainstream seems weirdly inaccessible right now.

A lot of people speculate you need some kind of shared irrational faith commitment that sets you apart and forces individual adherents to associate with and help each other. Maybe, but you don't get one by wanting it. I'm partial to material and political explanations though: we had organized community that has now been destroyed by psyops and hostile politics. Rebuilding community is really hard when the prevailing politics are still organized around deconstruction of every institution of your community, but the competent normies haven't really begun to feel it yet.

The deal right now seems to be that the competent get access to a somewhat functional mainstream society as long as you give up your ability to talk about or organize for your actual interests, and accept some bullshit that is tolerable for now but basically going to wipe you out in the long run. Nothing in this is acutely terrible, the political weight behind defense of it is immense, and most of the people complaining about it are congenital losers, so we don't get serious normie-compatible responses.

>>1249
I wouldn't attribute it entirely to psyops and hostile politics. I think there are other factors.

Decoupling is one. We used to have fraternal societies that provided health insurance as one of many functions; now we have insurance companies. We've replaced a social fabric with an impersonal institution. The benefit of this is that an impersonal institution can't make provision of services conditional on popularity or conformity; the drawback is that an entire class of social institution is gone, replaced by something faceless and atomized that has a critical dependency on every facet of modern society.

Another is the bottom quintile. Do you govern for the benefit of the bottom quintile that can't be trusted with responsibility, and that will ruin things for others if they aren't given an external authority to submit to, at the cost of making life worse for the rest? Or do you govern for those who can govern themselves, and say to hell with the bottom quintile? If some people can handle their drink (and indeed benefit from it) and some can't, do you enforce prohibition or not? If you enforce prohibition but allow exit, those who can drink responsibly will exit; if you don't enforce prohibition, those who can't will either get burned or leave for a community that does.

There are similar matters of taste. Some people hate wearing suits; others hate seeing men not wearing suits. There are so many options now - so many *visible* options - that enforcing uniformity is untenable unless you want to drive away everyone who has any opinion about anything. Tacit acceptance of eccentricity isn't viable: people resent eccentrics as "getting away with something". Neither is hypocrisy, for two reasons: first, it's inevitable that a respected member of the community, who people would really prefer not to exile, will be outed as a violator of some custom or law, and questions will arise, and second, the next generation might miss the joke and take things seriously that they shouldn't.

Also, technological and social change are so rapid that traditional authorities can't keep up. In general, they come out against everything new; when they're wrong they get egg on their face, and when they're right people think it's by accident. Sometimes these attitudes hold their members back, and they'll sense this and stop being members. Many high-paying jobs essentially require stimulant abuse, for example, so anything that gets mad about Adderall will lose the ambitious. (What do you do when your community doesn't allow you to advance your interests?) In general, people of quality don't respect traditional institutions unless they become desperate or catch the helicopter parent bug, and new institutions are very difficult to raise, and opposed as competition by everything established - including the state, which would otherwise have to figure out what to do with it.

That's not to say there aren't hostile interests, of course. Netflix competes with sleep, so naturally it competes with church, and Cass Sunstein has published on the downsides to governments of their subjects having social lives. It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that Harvard doesn't want Americans to have friends. Even without Harvard, the current regime has the worst qualities of both a longhouse gerontocracy and a criminal wasteland: the state of the cities pushes people to the suburbs, where they don't bother going out because it's an hour by car to get anywhere.
(It has been argued that this was by design, and that white flight was encouraged to break up the white ethnic neighborhoods of Northeastern cities.) Besides, everyone's tired after work and just wants to go home and collapse in front of the TV... and the woman who organizes the meetups is moving in two months since her husband got a better job in California and it's not clear who'll replace her... and maybe you'd like to go to church, but it'd have to be something without the silly stuff...

It would be a hard problem even without the hostile regime.

>>1250
It's certainly a hard problem even without the hostile political environment, but a lot of the stuff you're listing is just downstream of the politics. Much of it is the entropic decoherence that happens after a people stops being able (either prevented or degenerated) to dynamically organize responses to their problems.

Others of those things are even more directly political. Ethnic cleansing of whites from many cities is obvious as you point out. Purges of "traditional" elites from elite institutions is a more subtle but directly political upstream cause of traditional institutions losing their charisma and ability to hold people. Mormonism unlike episcopalianism etc was never dependent on Americas elite institutions for its own elite so they are doing alright. Even with your insurance point, financialization of healthcare was part of the political revolution of "the '60s" that blew up traditional American society.

>the political revolution of "the '60s" that blew up traditional American society.

I'm wondering if we should put the point of decline further back in our investigation, since the Belle Époque between the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of World War I appears to be when the West was at its most optimistic and confident. There are many accounts of high-profile trans-Atlantic marriages, which is an indicator of elite coordination. To what extent did World War I already start to blow up traditional European/American society and how? Was it already blown up by industrialization? To what extent would looking at this period help us with the reverse engineering?

>>1252
trying to date decline to any singular cause or event is always a fool's errand, because decline is multicausal and self-reinforcing. World War 1 was absolutely a major and possibly fatal blow (among many) to what we now call "western civilization". But it's clear that the late 19th century was far from healthy in any of the societies concerned as well. All we can say is these events were the earthquakes that punctuated an inexorable tectonic drift.

I singled out the 1960s because it's one of the more directly proximate and causally linked shakeups to our immediate issues. It happened in the lives and with the participation of those still living, and it continues to dominate our political milieu. The same can't be said for WW1.

>>1251
Purges of elite institutions?

Mormonism has its own institutions and that matters, but it also has much more of a sense of itself as a distinct people (complete with exodus narrative) and much more distinctiveness. The other Christian groups are too much of a spectrum, I think; from what I've seen, there's a lot of church shopping and a lot of conversion from one denomination to another. But the brand problem is quite severe, and I think everything else would be surmountable if not for that. In my social circles, church is seen as something for the old and stupid (or at least the untrustworthy and terminally lanyardish) and Christianity is a by-word for talk-radio conservatism. (Could it have avoided talk radio? Does Mormonism? I don't know the answer to that, but I'd imagine it'd be better prepared to than most.)

The traditional view of traditional institutions that I'm familiar with, though, is that they're instruments for the moral instruction and governance of the masses. We still have those; they're called "authorities" and they talk about science. They're a little further out on a number of issues than the more traditional ones, but that's a competitive edge.

If the sovereign doesn't want people to have friends, maybe it's simply mistaken. Maybe people fall into all this nasty QAnon stuff because an alive and accessible scene in America is like an oasis in the desert. Maybe Cass Sunstein was wrong - or maybe he was right, but missed the crucial fact that Nazism was *what German elites wanted*, and German elites got their way due to an *absence* of schizoposters and malcontents. Maybe the American can-do spirit, the vitality of a nation of builders, came from the American civic society that's now in danger. Or maybe it's a health issue: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/03/new-surgeon-general-advisory-raises-alarm-about-devastating-impact-epidemic-loneliness-isolation-united-states.html

>trying to date decline to any singular cause or event is always a fool's errand, because decline is multicausal and self-reinforcing.

Yes, that's fair, it makes more sense to consider particular social technologies as Mr. Burja does in his essay on industrial society. In our case it's marketing. The traditional institutions that we used to have for governance have given way successively to institutions that are most favored by the social technology of marketing. This social technology is arguably still critical to maintaining American hegemony. America's soft power, in the form of the popular appeal of liberalism, has not waned despite threats to America's hard power. China is unable to present a compelling alternative to this, neither is any other challenger. Is that where we should look to? What would be the best way to understand marketing and to start repurposing it?

>>1254
>If the sovereign doesn't want people to have friends, maybe it's simply mistaken.
It is mistaken in the sense of being insane and evil, which is always a mistake. But it's unclear if the status quo could survive people having real friends, so maybe not so mistaken in that sense.

>Maybe the American can-do spirit, the vitality of a nation of builders, came from the American civic society that's now in danger.
Yes, but I think more like "the danger" than "in danger". Say what you will about national socialism (the one thing this system fears) it came from civic society, not encumbent elites.

>>1256
> Say what you will about national socialism (the one thing this system fears) it came from civic society, not encumbent elites.

There's something to this. Spengler advocated a version of this (one without anti-Semitism or race obsession) in Prussianism and Socialism, one of his most programmatic works.

>>1256
> It is mistaken in the sense of being insane and evil, which is always a mistake. But it's unclear if the status quo could survive people having real friends, so maybe not so mistaken in that sense.

Why not?

People go off to college or move to a city and then they *come back weird*... why is this? Civic society brings moral decay... they make friends at smoke pit, get added to Telegram group chat, snag invite to illegal rave in abandoned warehouse and meet hot transsexual Jew... in city where there is life you meet all sorts of people! But we do need to think of the children, you know, so maybe it's bad that people have friends after all.

Compare to civic society of conservative movement: bored housewives addicted to talk radio. It's the one thing there is to do. If Netflix competes with sleep, Fox News competes with friends.

Or take conversion narrative of far-right malcontent on Elon Musk's Twitter: at some point he never learns to shut up about politics and loses all his friends. Graham Linehan grafts Twitter to his nervous system, goes insane, his wife leaves him, he demands everyone working with him sign statement of faith and loses entire career. Is this a trade that someone with an active and fulfilling social life would make?

This is a narrative that could be developed and added to an existing cluster of narratives to the effect that the archons are mistaken and should change their minds.

> Say what you will about national socialism (the one thing this system fears) it came from civic society, not encumbent elites.

Were Papen and Hindenburg not incumbent elites? What about Neithardt?

>Were Papen and Hindenburg not incumbent elites? What about Neithardt?

Papen is an interesting case. Going by Stephan Malinowski's statistics, a little more than quarter of the old aristocracy joined the NSDAP before 1933, including one of Kaiser Wilhelm II's sons, August Wilhelm in 1930. This membership was more limited among Catholic nobles such as those in Bavaria, Rhineland and Westphalia, and Papen was from Westphalia and was apparently influential in German Catholic circles. Perhaps he also thought that he could enlist NSDAP help to restore the monarchy and bolster his own position? Even if he didn't believe in it ideologically it ended up making use of him.

Allowing former princes to register with the party using their abolished former titles and other accoutrements was useful both to be on good terms with the incumbent elites, at least initially, and to repurpose the prominence of the incumbent elites for the benefit of the rising elites.

>>1258
>> Say what you will about national socialism (the one thing this system fears) it came from civic society, not encumbent elites.

> Were Papen and Hindenburg not incumbent elites? What about Neithardt?

Papen and Hindenburg facilitated the rise of national socialism due to tactical moves in 1933; it did not come from them or their faction.