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0 pointsTeMPOraL10y ago0 comments

> Elsewhere, especially in rural America, the prepper culture seems a lot stronger, perhaps owing to the echoes of the Cold War. It always shocked me that the movement is virtually non-existent in Europe (where I grew up); if you look at their history, they certainly have more to worry about.

I always felt the US prepper culture is primarily driven by the gun culture, as it mixes with American individualism / self-made man mythos. There you are, alone with maybe only family to protect, as the society around you burns down to the ground. You have your farm and your shotgun, now you're the boss. You know you'll overcome any challenge fate throws in your way, and if some pesky other humans want to dance, well, that's what the shotgun is for.

Europe is less individualistic. And without guns. People trust in institutions more. Which means, if the societal collapse hits us, we're fucked. But maybe it makes the society ever so slightly more resilient. And it also means that, sadly, you can't make zombie/alien invasion movies in Europe - the protagonist won't be stumbling upon assault rifles in every other abandoned house. Though I really wish someone tried to make a movie like that - I'd like to see how it could play out in a place with less cars and much less guns.

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hackercomplex10y ago· 1 in thread

I see where you're coming from, but you emphasize a widely held stereotype about the 'american prepper' which I think A. isn't true, and B. makes it seem almost fatalistic, which is the idea of "every family for himself".

I think in reality what you have in the rural US are communities that are ready to band together in hard times.

Perhaps a more clear way to think about the situation is in terms of distributed computing and graph theory. As many of you know, in theoretical computer science, the CAP theorem states that it is impossible for a distributed computer system to simultaneously provide all three of the following guarantees:

Consistency (all nodes see the same data at the same time)

Availability (a guarantee that every request receives a response about whether it succeeded or failed)

Partition tolerance (the system continues to operate despite arbitrary partitioning due to network failures)

I think that some individuals in the United States (the ones who live in large metros) prefer to optimize for Consistency and Availability by living in populous areas. There are more firefighters, paramedics, and power company linemen ready to step up quickly to restore services in the event of an emergency.

People who live in rural areas in the United States are optimizing for Partition tolerance, but that doesn't mean they expect to one day become completely independent nodes (that's merely a stereotype), instead they anticipate that eventually a few vertexes up the graph there may be some unexpected latency, or even a network partition.

The prepping culture can be thought of a distributed systems protocol which enables "self healing" characteristics so that a temporarily cut off part of the cluster can avoid downtime just by shedding a little consistency. (Guns help them reject corrupted messages from outside of their sub-graph during a partition, it's a form of security isolation)

One could argue that large metros also have this capability just that their RAFT leader election process takes longer (gangs shooting it out) whereas rural communities have an easier time with it because there's less chatter on the network. Prepper communities have more caching, and they store more shards on every node. ;)

In Europe they have more of a monolithic architecture from what I gather although they've enjoyed pretty decent uptime.

TeMPOraLOP10y ago

A nice deconstruction, thanks! I really like the analogy.

My perspective on US preppers is mostly based on the materials they publish - websites and a book I read - which often tend to paint very fatalistic scenarios (understandably so; most people don't apply to their lives everything from a book or article). And then, honestly, a lot of works of popular culture paint it this way.

I try to cut through my biases, but I think I failed. I don't want to say America is fatalistic per se, but - as far as I know from all the reading and watching I did over the years - the American mythos still revolves around self-made men and women, pioneers and colonists. It's different in Europe; there've been mostly stable settlements here for over a thousand years. Most of our history curriculum focuses on that. We're used to rules and borders changing, but not to having to bootstrap civilization.

That said, I think the increased focus on "partition tolerance" part in the US compared to Europe may be in big part a result of US having lots of areas that are very sparse. In Europe, especially the western part, there isn't enough space. The whole continent has twice the population of the US but the same land area. Most rural communities are still pretty close to towns and major cities.

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