from Glen Meder
Picture the fourth day.
Not the first day of a blackout — the first day is almost fun. Candles, card games, everybody’s a little giddy. The fourth day is different. The fridge emptied out on day two. The water pressure is dropping. Somebody in the house has a cut that’s started to look angry around the edges, and the roads aren’t clear enough to get to an urgent care that may not be open anyway.
And you find yourself reaching for your phone to look something up.
That’s the moment I want to talk about. Because that reflex — that automatic reach — is the single biggest hole in most people’s preparedness.
We have become absolutely dependent on modern technology for every aspect of our lives.
Think about where your practical knowledge actually lives. How to treat that wound. How much bleach purifies how much water. How to keep the food you have left from spoiling without power. How to get a garden producing calories, not just salad.
It’s on YouTube/Rumble. It’s on a blog post. It’s in a browser bookmark.
Which means it’s on someone else’s computer, at the end of a fiber line, in a building, powered by the same grid that just went down.
It’s easy to be reliant on tech for simple, meaningless questions like “How many miles wide is Lake Michigan.” But we take this for granted. If this tech is not functioning, when we need it, it’s not a question of how big a great lake is. Instead, it’s a question on how to purify water, stop a cut from bleeding, or how to know if food is safe to eat.
I know this might sound far-fetched, but in 2021, Texas put millions of people in the dark and cold for the better part of a week. Hurricanes routinely take rural counties offline for ten days or more. This is definitely something that can happen, and I am not a fan of putting all of my eggs in a basket.
Instead, I want to show you something Marjory Wildcraft and The Grow Network just released.
They took their complete archive — 15 years of homesteading, herbal medicine, food production, food preservation, and preparedness work — and loaded all of it onto a single 1TB drive. Then Marjory opened her personal library and added that on top: military field manuals, the complete Foxfire series, permaculture texts, water purification, off-grid power, emergency comms, and medical and dental references written specifically for when there is no doctor and no dentist. Plus an archive of 38,000 repair guides, because in a long emergency the person who can fix things is the most valuable person in the county.
26,952 files. 921 gigabytes. In something that fits in a shirt pocket.
You plug it into a laptop and it opens. No account, no password, no app, no signal, no subscription. Pair it with a small solar setup and you have a functioning reference library in a world that temporarily doesn’t have one.
We recently interviewed her on this, you can check out our interview and learn more about the personal digital library here.
We’re far enough away in NZ from Nato’s prime targets for annihilation — Iran, Russia, China — not to be affected too much directly, but there’ll be very limited perhaps no more Internet. Buying a survival book in print form is a good idea. —Eds