Chris Carter

One of the marks of the post-industrial world is the abstraction of basic human function. These abstractions are all around us, and serve to create the ease and efficiency of the modern world. It is the reason you can use the internet to order an Amazon package within minutes, and it arrive at your door within two days. The abstraction is the simple interface you interact with (your phone, or computer, etc.) combined with the massive infrastructure of supply chains, communication networks, financial contracts, international relations, and all the other innovations of modernity that stand behind it. An abstraction is a mask for complexity, which allows you to move tremendous resources at your beck and call, making things easy, cheap, and fast.

However, abstraction can lull us into the false sense that life is actually easier in the modern world. In reality, life is no easier than it ever has been, it’s just that the burden of life is now shared among many more people who are structured together in institutions and corporations and with various specialties and expertises. Modernity does not happen automatically; it requires that everyone participating in a modern abstraction does their job, and that there are enough knowledgeable and hardworking people to make it better when it stops working. All of these moving parts make abstractions very flexible, efficient, and cheap, but also fragile, like any complexity.

One of the theses of the kind of Luddism that I promote is that we consistently underestimate the risks of our modern technologies failing. This means we are constantly ignorantly overexposed to downside risk. COVID-19 was a peek into the consequences of this overexposure; global supply chain collapse, shortages, and overall incompetency of critical resources in a unique (but not too unique) set of circumstances.

How many people would be able to provide their own food if the shelves in the grocery store were empty? Gardening, much less farming is practically absent from the lives of the vast, vast majority of Americans. That’s abstraction.

How many people can even service their own basic day-to-day needs, such as flat tires, or dead batteries, or first aid needs, without calling someone else? It’s easy to not know what to do when you can always just pay someone else to get you out of a sticky situation. That’s abstraction.

How many people would be able to access critical communication with loved ones if they had no internet or cell service? Most homes used to have landline phones, which work even when the power is out, and many civilian vehicles were even equipped with CB radio. Now, internet and cellular are the norm for communication. That’s abstraction.

Abstraction in Communication

Communication is central to the nature of man. Man is gregarious; he cannot live well without the help of others. It is not good for man to be alone, after all. While modernity has increased our capacity to communicate more, and over longer distances, and even connect men better to their past (communication with our fathers, so to speak), it has done so through abstractions, which are inherently fragile. Most communication nowadays is virtual, via email, or text, or social media, or instant message. These forms of communication are extremely convenient and efficient, which is a huge blessing, but also a huge responsibility to maintain, as they rely on many layers of technology to work at all. A man seeking to build a communication network for his family or his business would do well to consider the risks of relying solely on these tools; he must resist the lull of the apparent ease of just downloading an app or making a gmail account to communicate with others. What if there’s a widespead internet, or cellular, or power outage? What if encrypted messaging apps like Signal become politically unfavorable? What if you find out certain communication methods have been hacked, or backdoored by a government authority, or otherwise compromise the operational security of your home or business? Communication requires backups and alternatives.

When considering the issue of resilience for any technology, it is helpful to place technologies along a gradient of whatever attribute you want to consider them according to. For example, I would rank the following technologies according to resilience:

1. In-Person Communication. You know, talking.
2. Line of Sight Radio. This includes Ham Radio, GMRS, FRS “Walkie Talkies”, Meshtastic, etc.
3. Cellular. This is SMS and MMS for text messaging, and also cellular phone calls and data usage.
4. Decentralized Internet. These are networks consist of many open source federated servers, e.g. XMPP, Matrix, etc.
5. Centralized Internet. These are network that rely on a single entity to support communication traffic, e.g. Signal, WhatsApp, social media, a website, etc.

There are other considerations here, such as privacy, cost, portability, etc. There are also other technologies that are just more difficult to get at; what about “snail mail” via the Postal Service? What about written textual transmission through time? What about HF radio, which can reach further than line of sight, but only if the conditions are right? Ultimately these will need to be considered according to your own use case, and that may make an interesting study to do someday to rigorously assess each of these techonologies in relation to others. But let’s stick with what we have so I can demonstrate a point. As we go from high ranking resilience (1) to low ranking resilience (5) technologies, the following statements are true, in general:

• Reach Increases. Participating in a complex network means you can reach more people. A simpler network has a smaller reach.
• Infrastructure Complexity Increases. A complex network requires more resources (servers, tools, materials, people, contracts, businesses, international relations, etc.) to operate. A simple network requires fewer.
• Fragility Increases. A complex network is more susceptible to critical infrastructure failure, CEO scandals, market dynamics, etc. A simple network has fewer moving parts and consolidates the majority of the infrastructure in the participants of the network themselves.
• Ease of Entry Increases. The power of abstraction and the reach of the network make it easy to join and participate on it.
• Suspicion Increases. Participants in a complex network fear the network may be spying on them, censoring them, farming their data, etc. Participants in a simple network have direct control of the data they share on the network.
• Naivity Increases. The ease of use and entry of a complex network lulls participants into assuming that the network will always be there. Users of a simple network are attuned to the limitations and risks of their infrastructure.

Notice, as well, which kinds of networks are more prevalent in human communication today: the low-ranking resiliency ones. We are simply drowning in network complexity, and largely blind to the risks of it.

A Balanced Approach

Is there a way to get the resilience of simple networks with the benefits of complex ones? Yes: you use both.

Local Communication

The point of any communications stack is to have options, and to use those options regularly. One of the options that almost no one can exercise currently is the option of local communication, which I will define as “within a couple miles of their current location”.

Walkie talkies are a great way to set up a local communications network with your family, your neighborhood, a hiking party, or a road trip convoy. My buddies and I have gotten ourselves out of a lot of sticky situations where there was no cell service by having some simple GMRS radios. FRS radios, the uniquitous “walkie talkies” that can be found at almost any store that sells electronics, are a good option if you need to stand up a small communication network quickly. However, many guys nowadays are switching to the option of GRMS radios for the same use cases. GMRS radios have full interoperability with FRS radios, but they allow you to use higher power, have optional use on repeaters, and are generally higher quality radios. To start using GMRS, all you have to do is fill out some forms and pay the FCC $35, and then buy some radios, of course. The license covers any immediate family member. For the average man or family, I think this is the best option.

If you want radio that can give you access to a wider area, you can study for your ham radio license. A “technician” ham license, the lowest level, will get you access to much more power and many more frequencies than a traditional FRS or GMRS radio. You can also access repeaters, which are local stationary radios that “repeat” whatever they hear on their uplink frequency, usually across a wide area. Ham is a bit more of an up-front investment than GMRS or FRS, but there are good returns for this investment. Ham is nearly ubiquitous as a service, and has played a key role in providing critical communications during natural disasters or for providing wilderness aid. I spoke to a repeater operator over ham radio one time while hiking, who informed me that the repeater’s intended use was for distress calls from lost or injured hikers; if you like getting into the mountains, ham could save your life. If you go beyond your “technician” license, you get access to the HF bands, which allow radio signals to bounce off the ionosphere and facilitate worldwide communication. Getting licensed to do this takes a fair bit more study and more investment in equipment, but the payoff is well worth it.

Nowadays, radio has more options than just voice communication over a handheld or mobile radio. Meshtastic is free and open source software that can be flashed to small, cheap radio boards that can form a “mesh network” with other Meshtastic radios. These allow for encrypted text message and position report communication over the network, and connect to a mobile device via bluetooth for a user interface. Since they are a mesh network, direct line of sight is not necessary for each node on the network to talk to every other node; messages can “hop” to whatever nodes they see, until they have filled the whole network. These devices are a great suppliment to a comms stack for a group already using traditional radios, as text and position messages can often travel further over the air than voice can, and with lower power. They don’t require any licensing to use, so there is a very low barrier to entry to start participating on the network.

Web Communication

One of the problems with many of the modern modes of communication over the web is that they are proprietary, meaning they are owned by someone else. Resilient comms, by contrast, are owned by you. If you depend on your online presence for income or to stay connected to your family, friends, business, etc., you should think about this. Sure, maybe you trust the people who own what you currently use, but what happens when you suddenly don’t? Maybe your web hosting provider, like SquareSpace or Wordpress, won’t shut you down if you commit wrongthink, but maybe they will. Things change. That’s just how it goes.

Now, I’m opposed to social media for many reasons, but if you really want an online presence that you have complete control over, the best way is to just learn how to build your own website. Rent a server from a trustworthy VPC provider, like Vultr, learn how to deploy a website there, and start writing. You’re a free man who owns your own online assets; no one can shut you up. Even if your cloud provider goes woke, or shuts you down, just find another one and redeploy your website.

You can go beyond this, though. landchad.net is full of a bunch of free tutorials on how to set up your own services on your own cloud server. If you have a little bit of linux knowledge, you can ususally set these kinds of things up in a few minutes. Or, hire your friendly neighborhood Linux nerd to set things up for you. This means instead of using and paying for services owned by people who farm your data and hate you, like Google Calendar and Facebook Messenger, you use your own versions of those services.

I currently rent a VM for about $5 a month that hosts a small family website, a CalDAV server for my family’s calendar and todo list manager, and an XMPP chat server. There are other services that will handle file sharing, video calling, or even your own VPN that are all free and take only a few minutes to set up on your own machine with just a little bit of Linux knowledge.

Signal and Instant Message

You can even spin up your own chat server for your family or business to use. The best options are XMPP and Matrix, though others may exist.

The beauty of these protocols is that they are distributed. Unlike chat networks such as Signal, or WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger, which rely on all chat traffic going through a centralized set of servers controlled by a single entity, distributed protocols distribute traffic amongst a network of decentralized servers maintained by users of the network themselves. In theory, anyone can rent a VPC, spin up an Ejabberd or Prosody server, create an account, and talk to the rest of the XMPP network with end-to-end encryption. No single entity can shut down or censor or monitor all network traffic.

The risk of centralization is higher than most consider. Signal is a vert popular privacy-focused chat network, but many people don’t know that it costs tens of millions of dollars annually to keep running, that it was initially funded with $50 million from Brian Acton, the founder of WhatsApp, and that it also recieves funding from the Open Technology Fund, which recieves funding directly from Congress. In other words, just like any other centralized chat service, Signal burns a lot of cash to stay afloat, and gets that cash from some people who may not have your best intentions in mind. Now, I think Signal is a great product, and seems to be a very secure and private one too. I use it on the daily. But from the perspective of resiliency of communication, it suffers from the same issues as other centralized networks. What happens if the Open Technology Fund pulls the plug? What if Signal decides to get bought out by Big Tech? Why are the Feds funding Signal anyway?

By contrast, XMPP and Matrix are not “software”. They are open standards that define protocols. This means there’s not just a single entity that controls how the chat behaves, and there’s no single software bug or infrastructure bug that could bring the whole network down. There’s only one Signal, but there are loads of XMPP and Matrix servers and clients available for anyone to download, install, and start moving network traffic. You could even write your own client and server software for them if you wanted to.

In addition to our other services, my family runs a simple XMPP chat server that we use in parallel with Signal. It’s a backup system, an option we can exercise when we want to. That’s the whole point of a communications stack; you have options.