I was reading an article on BBC about Kelly Sutton of CultofLess.com and it got me to thinking about the potential for a new sub-culture in the US and rest of the world. Basically it is a movement (if you can call it that yet) of mainly 20-somethings relinquishing the vast majority of their posessions and living with as little as possible as long as they have their laptops and other digital goodies. Depending on friends and family to provide a place to sleep in some instances. This may yet be another symptom of steps toward what many call Technological Singularity in the sense that a new subset of people following this digital living and minimalism of possessions are becoming more popular. Now there are Hacker Spaces, imagine a day soon where there will be “Hacker Flop Houses” or “Hacker Hostels”. Even work could be transformed for this subset of people in terms of things already occurring. With the ability to telecommute or work on Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) that services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Crowd Flower, or others could allow people to live an almost digital hobo existence bedding down in hacker flop houses and moving on to another place whenever they choose. With no physical address these people could also become hired digital guns if they chose to follow a less reputable path. Using public Internet access to do their deeds and be gone to another town by the time anyone notices. Almost sounds like something from a William Gibson book but the groundwork for this sort of thing is already in place in many instances. Roving gangs of black hats working to do the deeds of the highest bidder. Sounds pretty scary to me. Although that is just an example of what might happen. Most people as in the original article I read are honest working people who are following a route less taken, which I can understand and support. It would also be a very effective way to save money if you lack the overhead of a place to live.
Update 09212010 – Found an interesting write up on what is now being referred to as Technomads on BoingBoing.
A less dystopian vision is Homesteading 2.0 = Technology + Resilient Communities + Agriculture. It should be possible with modern technology to live a Good Life with less effort than early homesteaders. We may not need to turn into roving bands of digital assassins
@todd: Yes agreed. Just happened that my mind was in a ‘Gibsonesque’ mood the day I wrote this. I foresee potential for a lot of interesting things in the future in terms of social change brought on by technology. Even anti-technology communities brought on by privacy and Orwellian concerns which I have read about in many dystopia books.
My guess would be that for every “hacker hobo” there would be a large number of digital slackers living a similar lifestyle (spending more on electronics and bandwidth than food, shelter and transportation) but working in non-skilled service industries.
If you’ve got hacking skillz it would be easy to slide down the slippery slope to a real job; without those skillz the easiest path would leave you marginally employed in food service indefinitely, or at least until you have a baby or a bike accident and need health insurance.