I'm filled with awe and respect when I look at this guy. He's brilliant and clearly dedicated to human wellbeing and liberation, and I can only aspire to even approach what he's accomplished so far.

But now comes the but.

I can't help feeling like he's focusing on the wrong scale, in a way that seriously impedes the likelihood of success. Let's be clear: the material basis he's living on is pretty shitty. He shits in a bucket? Freezes at night? That's the norm only in rural areas in developing countries, and his current focus isn't even on improving those things: other priorities trump it.

And that's directly because of the scale, which is too small. A group of a couple dozen people, even brilliant and hard-working people, simply cannot generate even the basic amenities of modern life, given contemporary knowledge and technology. But a town or smaller city? Problems that now seem insurmountable with his approach become routine.

I totally get that it seems awesome to re-invent the world from scratch, with a group of buddies and passionate volunteers. But it's ultimately escapist. It seems to me like open sourcing cheap manufacturing methods with a target economic scale of the metropolitan area would do a lot more to build a genuinely liberatory society. Sure, you end up more alienated from the material basis you live on than with his approach. But it's a much smaller transition--dare I say, a more agile one--than from global hyper-economies to hyper-local economies. And advances there would easily lend themselves to the hyper-local economies he desires.

Then again, I'm here bloviating, while he's out there doing stuff. Godspeed.