Door Locks: The Most Fragile Complex Tech That We Still Actually Want?
How much modern technology do we really need, anyway?
Imagine society breaks down or you finally achieve the ultimate permaculture, homesteading lifestyle you’ve always dreamed about. You grow your own food. You trade with neighbours. You’re self-sufficient. What modern technology do you miss the most, or do you still really need? Is it door locks?
The Self Sufficiency List
Let’s walk through the list of needs and how you might meet them without using advanced electric- or fuel-dependent technology. In our ideal setup you do all of the following:
Food: You grow your own vegetable garden and tend your own herd or flocks for meat, milk, honey, and eggs. You barter and trade with neighbours.
Water: You live near good quality sources of water and capture + store rain.
Shelter: You built a resilient, sturdy house using local materials, traditional construction methods, and human-scaled techniques. It lasts a long time. You know how to repair it.
Defense: You grow large hedgerows of sheltering plants, tall trees, and thorny defenses to shape and protect your home. You have faithful guard dogs, angry geese, and other alert animals.
Heating: You have a wood stove, plenty of forest, and plant replacement trees.
Cooling: You have trees, shade, good site design, good house design, a cool roof, a swimming pond, and plenty of ways to keep cool without using power.
Clothing: You produce all of your own clothes from local wool, plants, or other materials.
Sanitation: You’ve implemented the Humanure Handbook and have everything dealt with properly. You compost everything you can. You don’t produce much commercial or plastic waste.
Herbal Medicine: You can identify and grow any natural plant or herb you need to handle a variety of ailments. Everyone in your family and community has good first aid training.
Labour and Tools: You use horses and draft animals to help with work. You either build your own hand tools or buy and trade for them from your local community. You can repair or replace your tools.
Knowledge: You own an extensive library of useful books for all ages, and/or have a community with a solid library.
If you’ve made it through this entire list and actually implemented everything: Phew! Amazing! You have crafted a low-tech, low-dependency lifestyle that is extremely resilient and anti-fragile. Congratulations! It shouldn’t matter if you are living in the year 1200, 2000, or (hopefully) 30,000 - your needs are met, you can survive and thrive, and can build both a family and a community through many situations.
What’s Missing?
So what items are lacking from this amazing utopia? The biggest gaps seem like:
Modern medicine: surgery, prescriptions
Emergency Response: Fire trucks, ambulance
Self defense: a firearm
Security: Locks for your doors
Communication: Radios + phones
Knowledge: A deep robust library full of books
Is it possible to solve these?
Problems Solved With Community
From the list above - medicine, surgery, childbirth, firefighting, and emergency response seem best solved by building a strong, cooperative community. Perhaps you don’t know how to perform surgery or deliver a baby, but someone in your community might. If your neighbours can gather and cooperate to fight a fire, prevent a flood, or rescue someone - all of these acts seem best tackled by skills, training, cooperation, and practice.
Sharing a library full of books is useful too.
Problems Solved With Technology
Creating complex items such as door locks and firearms seems best solved by learning the skills and becoming a smith. Being able to lock your door at night is a comfort. Sure - you might have a large number of children or live in a community that trusts each other and posts a rotating nightwatch. But you’re going to need to sleep at some point, and being able to lock your door is useful.
Likewise - you definitely want to maintain all of your tools so they work well and last as long as possible. But eventually your shovel or firearm might break, and you’ll need a spare part or replacement. You want to have access to a smith.
Problems Solved By Doing Without
While radios and phones may be useful modern conveniences - life is obviously quite possible without them. If you don’t have the technology or the means to create radios - you can always simply do without.
Conclusion: Meet A Blacksmith
Most of the items in the lists above seem like you can satisfy your needs without having to rely on a lot of complicated technology. To paraphrase Ben Falk - being resilient and regenerative usually means: something living and biological. But a few items - like putting locks on your doors and repairing your firearm - still need someone with the skill to build and repair them.
If you are not already a medic, midwife, firefighter, and blacksmith - it’s a good time to start making some friends.
References
Locks
Locks, technology, and doing without
Radios - Building a simple radio receiver