Voluntary Simplicity, Involuntary Complexities, and the Pull of Remove: The Radical Ruralities of off-Grid Lifestyles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why do residents of Western world live off-the-grid? This paper provides answers to this question. The expression ‘off-the-grid’, refers to the living condition of a household or a community lying outside the electricity infrastructure, but often also denotes disconnection from other infrastructures such as municipal water conduits, natural gas pipelines, road networks, garbage and waste collection, food supply chains, and telecommunications. Drawing from and contributing to the literatures on rural geographies and voluntary simplicity we argue that while off-gridders embrace values typical of the voluntary simplicity philosophy, their biographical and geographical trajectories reveal that living off-grids is not a clear and free choice. The performance of the mundane complexities typical of the lifestyle renders off-grid living a uniquely radical, but also contradictory and even paradoxical, constellation of practices through which new marginal spatialities are constituted. Drawing from ethnographic fragments culled from a multisited ethnographic project unfolding across Canada we present a thickly descriptive look into the motives and lifestyles of off-gridders living in the Yukon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".