From Systems to Societies
In my previous post on techno‑crofting I began to write about systems: energy, food, materials, the flows that have to cross the boundary when you live at the edge. But systems aren’t the whole story. People have to want to live with them. This piece is about the culture and practices that make a techno‑croft a place to live well as part of a local and global community, not just a technical thought experiment. It is, as always, a work in progress and the essay will evolve over time as I continue to discuss with people and refine the ideas.
I’ve previously written about Living Well with Robots in a panel discussion hosted by Prof Shannon Vallor. Shannon directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute and is far better placed than me to comment on living well with technology, but before I dive into the technical underpinning and infrastructure that’s required for the techno-croft I think it’s worth exploring, briefly, the human-and-place centred approach that underpins techno-crofting.
Rooted in place, wired to the world
When I say “croft” I’m thinking of real places: a bay in the northwest Scottish highlands, a hill farm on a ragged grid, a windy island where the ferry doesn’t always sail.
The techno‑croft community that I’m envisaging isn’t a generic co‑housing or co-working scheme that you could plonk down anywhere. It takes its cues from a specific landscape and climate, then uses technology to make that place livable and prosperous without pretending it’s somewhere else. One term that describes this approach is neolocalism, a term coined by Wes Flack in 1997 in his paper, appropriately enough, on microbreweries. He describes neolocalism as an attempt “to reassert the ‘distinctively local’ in response to a landscape increasingly devoid of the unique.” Techno-crofting takes this concept and applied it to edge-based communities, where people live in beautiful surroundings where nature is abundant, infrastructure is scarce, and where people are unburdened by the busyness of life in a city or mega-city.
At the same time, these techno-crofting communities are not cut off. The residents are fully part of the global economy—writing code, running experiments, analysing data—primarily exporting bits instead of atoms. When I first got to Harvard I was enthralled by the FabLab revolution that Professor Neil Gershenfield was kicking off at Massachusetts’ technical college just down the road. The concept was facinating, that a lab in Boston, or in rural India, would be connected by common local infrastructure. Anything that could be made in one part of the world could be replicated in any other part of the world simply by emailing over the code and running the designs through the shared process on the same type of CNC mill or laser cutter. I’ll come back to this concept in a future essay when I move on to describing the workshops and infrastructure, but the concept is core to the techno-croft concept: people working locally to make what they need, but connected globally to a network of inventors and entrepreneurs. An emphasis on place, with global entanglement.
A secular, techno‑humanist creed
If there’s a ‘religion’ here, it’s a very secular one: a kind of techno‑humanism.
Technology is welcome, even celebrated, but only on certain terms: it has to make ordinary human lives better, in this particular place, and it has to remain legible and repairable.
Success is not measured in growth curves or purity points. It’s measured in quieter, more local things: are people healthy, curious, financially secure; is the land less battered this year than last; do the systems fail gracefully when the ferry doesn’t sail or the network goes down? When met with a global exogenous shock like the Covid-19 pandemic how do the systems and people work together to ensure resilience?
Rituals of weather, work, and maintenance
Every community has its rituals. In a techno‑croft they’re less about belief and more about weather, work, and maintenance. In my local community in West Linton in the Scottish Borders there’s a wonderful society called The Whipman Play it’s now in its 223rd year and it celebrates the local traditions of horsemanship and Common Riding. It sets the tempo for the year in our village, it is a celbration of people and place.
In my techno-croft thought experiment: people and robots harvest biomass from the sea to produce plastics and feedstocks and there will emerge something like the Whipman Play. There’s the first seaweed harvest of the year, when everyone helps drag glistening piles above the tide line. There’s the big autumn maintenance week when roofs, turbines and polytunnels are checked before the gales.
There are also system rituals: the evening when a new turbine spins up and the lights flicker over to local power; the slightly grim but oddly bonding ‘autopsy’ when a bioreactor fails and everyone gathers to take it apart and understand what happened.
These don’t have to be elaborate—just repeated, shared, and slightly story‑worthy.
In our global society people feel increasingly disconnected from local news and community. When wealthy incomers to a rural community can work completely online and have their “entertainment needs” served by Netflix, they can become isolated from place, from weather, from seasonality. Engineering offers solutions to homogenising life, providing 19 degree temperatures and perfect humidity 365 days a year, meeting protein needs via bioreactors, providing partners digitally… Process control for human life… But it’s unfullfilling and unsustainable. Humans need ritual, periodicity, uncertainty, human connection, shared creed, and connection to nature.
How it differs (without bashing anyone)
I recognise that the concept I’m presenting—a green community in the Highlands—could be lumped in with eco‑villages, communes, or some imagined ‘Amish of the Future’. That’s not what this is.
Places like Findhorn have done pioneering work on community and ecology in Scotland. The techno‑croft idea is aiming at something slightly different: less spiritual, more system‑engineering; less retreat, more full participation in the messy global economy whilst living-fully, locally.
I’m also explicitly describing this not as a sect or a cult. Governance is cooperative and boring on purpose. The books are open. People come and go. You don’t have to sign up to a cosmology, just to some very practical commitments about work, place and how we treat each other.
And unlike Amish communities, the point is not to withdraw from modernity or freeze technology at some chosen moment. The point is to be absolutely modern, but on terms that ordinary humans can live with in a hard place.
Crofting, without the feudal hangover
I still want to use the word ‘croft’, even though its history is tangled up with landlordism, clearance, and marginality.
What I’m trying to keep is the scale and the pattern: small units of land, a shared hub, a mix of subsistence and cash income, deep attention to a particular patch of ground.
What I want to discard is the feudal hangover: precarious tenure, distant lairds, the assumption that living on the edge means being poor and stuck.
A techno‑croft is crofting updated for a world where you can live on a sea loch or a hill farm and still work with colleagues in Boston or Bengaluru.
Quiet wealth and serious work
The goal isn’t to retreat into frugality, but to live well on honest terms with the place. The residents I have in mind are not trying to drop out of the global economy; they’re trying to change the terms on which they participate in it.
In practice, that looks like people with serious crafts and careers—farriers, fish-farmers, engineers, programmers, scientists, designers, analysts—living in small, well‑designed houses on a windy edge, doing demanding work (using fibre or satellite where required), and then walking out the door into a community and landscape that they actually care about.
“Wealth, here, is the ability to choose meaningful work, to have some slack in your life, and to reinvest both money and attention back into the systems and people around you. It’s okay to be comfortable. The constraint is not ‘no nice things’; it’s not pretending the resupply ship (ferry, lorry, drone) will always run and that the grid will always be fine.
A pattern for any edge
I’m writing this with Scotland and the Highlands in mind because that’s the landscape I know best, but the pattern isn’t uniquely Scottish.
Any place that sits at the edge of a big system—an island off a ferry route, a high plateau at the end of a brittle transmission line, a town in the path of climate chaos—could choose to become a techno‑croft. It’s kind of like the FabLab concept taken to the next level. I worked with some architect colleagues on the WikiHouse project many years ago, and there are certainly elements of that in here.
The details will vary, but the concept is the same: treat your place as a design constraint, use technology that ordinary people can understand and fix, and build a culture where being fully in the global economy and fully in your local community are not mutually exclusive.
If you wish to discuss any of this, or to engage on a project or a talk, you can reach me at a.a.stokes@ed.ac.uk.