There is a quiet competence that comes from this. You stop asking "Is the internet down?" and start asking "Is my links up?" You stop waiting for a technician and start checking the logs. This is a form of strength. To understand the system that carries your words is to be free from the mystery that keeps you dependent.

I am very interested in this project, as a noted fan of meshtastic, a similar but much less security-focused approach to meshnet communication over LoRa. I am specifically linking this page though (the "Zen of Reticulum" page) because I find it a fascinating peek into the anarcho-libertarian ethos at the heart of so much modern computing projects, even those that I think are generally good projects (like this one, to be clear).

The overwhelmingly centralized nature of the modern internet leaves it incredibly vulnerable to attack, from a million different vectors. One could theoretically cut all the wires carrying internet across the Atlantic and cause massive disruptions to the global internet. Not unfixable problems, to be sure, but massive disruptions nonetheless.

Various mesh projects have sprung up meant to combat this threat, or other similar threats caused by centralization. Federated tools, like Mastodon, are an attempt at this, as are even more trojan horse options like Bluesky. The threats that they are reacting to are real, to be sure -- but the solve being proposed is a greater reliance not on shared resources controlled by the public but increasingly privatized backbones of social communication.

This is, I think, an odd quirk of the modern technological landscape. The modern digital individual is constant predated upon by capitalist entities, so a rational response is to make oneself untraceable, untrackable, as much as reasonably possible.

Because your identity is portable, your connectivity can be fluid. You can be sitting at a desk connected to a fiber backbone one moment, and walking through a field connected only to a long-range LoRa mesh the next. To the rest of the network, nothing has changed. Your friends do not need to update your contact info. The messages they send do not bounce back. The network senses the shift in the medium and reroutes the flow of data automatically.

You are no longer a stationary node in a fixed grid. You are a wanderer in a fluid medium.

The goal sounds a lot like leaving the social fabric entirely, which relies on stability and fixed nodes. If I am a constant wanderer, I have no home. If I have no home, I have no neighbors. If I have no neighbors, I have no community.

I think anarchist solutions have a real purpose. I think this one is cool as hell and I will probably look into it as a fun option to have, for either serious or fun reasons. But I often glance twice when these ideologies are picked apart by their creators, because I think the takeaways are often driven by not a desire for community but a sense of fear.