The Crime of Not Needing You

The latest fashionable worry is that people who unplug from the grid are abandoning the rest of us. Read it from a cave in Andalucía and it starts to look like something else entirely.

An essay outline landed in front of me recently with a title that made me put the kettle down: “The Dark Side of Self-Reliance: How Micro-Off-Grid Living Fragments Society.” The argument, in short, is that the drift towards homesteading and self-sufficiency isn’t noble at all. We’re quietly withdrawing our social capital, apparently, and opting out of centralised power, food, and infrastructure is “ultimate self-interest disguised as sustainability”, leaving the civic systems weaker for everyone left behind.

I read this in a cave in rural Andalucía, which felt a bit like being handed a leaflet on the dangers of hitchhiking while standing on the hard shoulder with my thumb out. I share this place with a handful of friends. Our main electricity is what you might generously call aspirational, so the solar panels does the heavy lifting whenever the grid decides to have a lie-down, and when the reservoir supply wobbles, as it does, we fall back on the water we’ve learned to store for ourselves. We are not a purist. We are half on, half off, and entirely aware of how that sounds. But it does make us precisely the sort of people this essay is wagging its finger at, and once the initial bristle had passed, I found myself asking a more useful question than “how dare they?”

The question was this… who benefits from the idea that self-reliance is selfish? Because when you turn the premise on its head, and look not at the people unplugging but at the people uneasy about them, a rather different story falls out. It isn’t a story about a society fragmenting. It’s a story about systems that have grown very comfortable with captive customers, and about how quickly the language of civic duty gets wheeled out when a few of those customers start wandering towards the exit.

I spent a good chunk of my working life in the RAF Police and then in senior security management, and if that taught me anything, it’s that control rarely introduces itself as control. It arrives dressed as safety, as order, as responsibility, as “for everyone’s good”. So let’s read this argument the way I was trained to read a building: by asking who holds the keys, and who gets nervous when someone else cuts a copy.

The sleight of hand

Read the original premise again and watch the hands rather than the patter. Opting out of “centralised public systems (power, food supply, communal infrastructure)” is framed as a withdrawal from civic life. That only works if being a paying customer of those systems is the same thing as being a good citizen, and that’s a very large assumption to smuggle in under a sustainability heading.

In Britain, a good deal of what we still call public infrastructure stopped being public decades ago. British Gas was floated in 1986 (if you’re old enough, you’ll remember being told to tell Sid), the water authorities of England and Wales were sold in 1989, and the electricity industry followed in 1990. What people still talk about fondly as communal infrastructure is, in most cases, a collection of private companies with shareholders, dividend policies and, in the case of some water companies, debt piles that would make a Premier League chairman wince. The pipes are still under our feet, but the commons they once represented were sold off through share offers with cheerful television adverts.

So when someone accuses the off-gridder of withdrawing social capital, it’s worth translating. What’s actually being withdrawn is revenue. A household that makes its own power and catches its own water stops paying into a system that will, quite reasonably from its own point of view, record that as a loss. That isn’t civic betrayal. That’s a customer leaving a shop. You can’t desert a commons that’s already been sold, and it takes a particular kind of nerve to sell the commons and then lecture the people who stop renting it back.

Notice, too, how that dependency is priced. A British household pays a daily standing charge for its electricity and gas whether it boils a kettle or not, a fee that exists simply because you’re connected. That’s the pricing of a system that assumes you can’t leave. And when it starts to look as though you can, the conversation has a curious habit of drifting away from price and towards morality.

We’ve been here before

None of this is new, which is the genuinely interesting part. Across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Parliament passed enclosure act after enclosure act, fencing off the common fields, pastures and wastes of rural England. The official story was agricultural improvement, and there’s truth in that. But some of the men promoting it were refreshingly candid about another benefit.

In 1794, John Bishton wrote a report on the agriculture of Shropshire for the newly formed Board of Agriculture, and in it he complained that “the use of common lands operates on the mind as a sort of independence.” A cottager with a cow on the common, a few geese and his own firewood didn’t need to turn up for wage work every day of the year. Enclose the commons, Bishton argued, and he would. He wasn’t hiding it. He thought it was a selling point.

Read that again with a modern ear. Self-sufficiency wasn’t treated as a problem because it fragmented society. The village commons were, if anything, intensely social, governed by custom, shared rules and endless neighbourly argument about whose pig was where. It was a problem because it made people less available, less dependable as labour, and harder to squeeze. The fence wasn’t built to bring people together. It was built to make them need something.

The late anthropologist James C. Scott spent a career pulling at this thread. In Seeing Like a State he argued that modern states favour what they can see, count and tax, and that a great deal of what gets sold as improvement is really about making untidy human life “legible” to administrators: fixed surnames, land registries, standard weights and measures, numbered streets. In The Art of Not Being Governed he went further, describing the hill peoples of upland Southeast Asia who, over centuries, arranged their farming, their settlements and even their histories to stay out of reach of the lowland states. What looked from the valley like backwardness was, Scott argued, a deliberate strategy.

An off-grid household is, in Scott’s terms, a small patch of illegibility. There’s no meter to read, no bill to chase, no consumption data to model or sell. It isn’t necessarily hiding anything. It simply isn’t generating the trail that modern administration and modern markets both run on… and systems built on visibility tend to experience invisibility as a threat long before anyone can explain exactly why.

Two small stories

If you want to see the original essay’s argument in its natural habitat, you don’t have to imagine it. My adopted country has already road-tested it. In October 2015, Spain’s government brought in Real Decreto 900/2015 to regulate electricity self-consumption, and buried in it was what everyone quickly nicknamed the impuesto al sol, the sun tax. Households and businesses that generated their own solar power while staying connected to the grid faced a charge on the energy they produced and used themselves.

The official justification is the bit worth framing and hanging in the hallway. The charge was presented as a way to protect the sustainability of the electricity system, because people producing their own power should still contribute to the fixed costs of the network. In other words, almost exactly the argument in that essay outline: if you make your own, everyone else is left holding the bill. To be scrupulously fair, Spanish commentators have long pointed out that it wasn’t technically a tax, that smaller installations were largely spared, and that very little was ever actually collected. That’s rather the point, though. It didn’t need to raise money. It only needed to make people think twice, and in one of the sunniest countries in Europe, self-consumption stalled. It was finally repealed by Real Decreto-ley 15/2018 on 5 October 2018, the same year Europe agreed that citizens had a right to produce and consume their own renewable energy.

The second story comes from Cape Coral, Florida, and it’s stranger. In January 2013 a widow called Robin Speronis moved into a small duplex there and lived without city power or water. A little solar charger fed a battery for some lights and a laptop, propane handled cooking and light, and two 55-gallon barrels caught the rain from her gutters. In November 2013 a local television station ran a story about her lifestyle, and the very next day a code enforcement officer posted a notice on her door declaring the home unfit for human habitation.

When the case reached Special Magistrate Harold Eskin in February 2014, most of the city’s charges fell away, and he accepted that the codes allowed her to live without utility power. But he found her guilty of not being connected to an approved water supply, and gave her until the end of March to comply. The magistrate himself admitted that “reasonableness and code requirements don’t always go hand-in-hand.” Here’s the detail that matters: city officials conceded the code required her to be connected to the water system, not to actually use it. Connection, not consumption. That’s the tell.

In the interests of honesty, Speronis wasn’t the perfect poster child. She had been flushing her rainwater into the city sewer without paying for it, which earned her liens on the property and a capped sewer. Fair enough… that’s a real cost she was passing on to her neighbours, and it’s exactly the kind of thing the original essay would seize on. But notice what the system actually demanded. It didn’t ask her to pay for what she used. It insisted she plug into something she didn’t want and didn’t need, and pay for the privilege of being plugged in.

Nobody needs to meet in a room

This is where the argument could easily go off the rails, so let me be careful. It would be tempting to say that the people in power are frightened of losing control, and to picture a wood-panelled room somewhere with a map of rural Spain and little pins marking every unlicensed solar panel. I’ve written before about what I call the soup problem, the way genuine institutional harms get contaminated the moment they’re stirred into the same pot as conspiracy theories. Go down that road and every sensible reader stops listening, and frankly they’d be right to.

The good news is that you don’t need a villain. You only need incentives. Utility companies have fixed costs and shareholders, so every household that leaves is a small dent in a business model built on the assumption that nobody can. Treasuries like consumption they can measure and tax. The data economy likes behaviour it can see. Building codes and planning rules were mostly written for a world in which everyone was connected, so anyone who isn’t automatically looks like a problem in the paperwork. Every one of those actors behaves perfectly rationally on its own terms, and nobody has to coordinate anything. Put them together, though, and you get a system that reacts to people leaving rather than as an immune system reacts to a splinter.

That’s far more unsettling than a conspiracy, because you can’t expose it or vote it out. In my security years, the vulnerabilities that worried me most were never the ones someone had designed. They were the habits nobody questioned, the procedures that protected themselves simply because they existed, the fire door everyone propped open because that was how it had always been done. Systems defend their own shape. They don’t need to be told to.

Which brings me back to that essay outline. It doesn’t need to have been commissioned by anybody to be useful to somebody. It only needs to sound reasonable, to flatter its readers’ sense of civic virtue, and to arrive at a moment when energy bills are high, and trust in institutions is low. Useful ideas find their own sponsors. The moral framing does a job no utility company could ever do in its own name: it turns a commercial loss into a personal failing, and asks the person who has left to feel guilty about it.

The case against me

It would be cheap to stop there, so let me give the other side its best shot, because it has one. The strongest version of the original argument isn’t about selfishness at all. It’s about arithmetic. A power network or a water system has enormous fixed costs: the pipes, the cables, the substations, the people who mend them at three in the morning. If the households most able to leave do leave, those costs get spread across fewer customers, and the ones left behind tend to be poorer, older, renting, or living somewhere with no roof to put a panel on. Bills rise, more of those who can afford to leave do so, and round it goes. Economists call it a utility death spiral, and it isn’t a fantasy. It’s precisely the worry the Spanish government leaned on in 2015.

The second honest point is that exit is a privilege. Going off-grid usually needs land, capital, a roof you own and the time to learn how to keep it all running. Somebody in a rented flat on a prepayment meter can’t simply unplug as a matter of principle. And nobody truly opts out. However self-sufficient the cave feels on a good day, I still drive on roads somebody else paid for, and if the cave ever caught fire I’d be extremely glad of the bomberos. Even the history isn’t as tidy as I made it sound. Some economic historians argue that many English labourers had already lost their common rights well before enclosure arrived, so the fence may have finished a job rather than started it.

All of that is true, and none of it makes self-reliance the villain. If the fixed costs of the network are the problem, the answer is to fund the network fairly, through general taxation or tariffs that ask more of those who can pay, rather than chaining every household to it and calling the chain citizenship. If exit is a privilege, the answer is to widen it, not to shame the people who’ve managed it. Spain, interestingly, did exactly that. When it scrapped the sun tax in 2018, it also opened the door to shared self-consumption, so that neighbours and communities could generate power together. The fix wasn’t to stop people leaving. It was to let them leave together.

And it’s worth noticing who gets the lecture. The death spiral argument is a perfectly good case for public investment in shared infrastructure. Yet somehow it keeps being aimed at the individual with a few solar panels, and rarely at the companies that paid out handsome dividends for decades while the pipes aged underneath them.

Self-reliance is not solitude

The deepest flaw in the original essay isn’t its politics. It’s its picture of what off-grid life actually looks like. It assumes self-reliance means individualism, one stubborn household behind a fence with its own panels, its own well and its back turned to the world. That isn’t my experience, and I’d wager it isn’t most people’s.

At the start of every week, the people I live with sit down and work out who’s cooking on which days and where the supplies are coming from. The water has to be watched, the chickens fed, the panels kept clean, the backup supplies topped up before anyone needs them. When one of us is away, somebody else picks up the slack without being asked. Out here, the village is shrinking, as so many rural Spanish villages are, and the neighbours who remain matter more, not less. Living this way has made me more dependent on people, not less. It’s simply made me less dependent on companies.

That’s the quiet joke at the heart of the whole debate. The centralised model was supposed to be the communal one, but in practice it turned millions of us into separate account numbers who never need to speak to the people next door. Unplugging, even partially, tends to drag you straight back into the old business of relying on each other. If anything is fragmenting society, it isn’t the woman in Florida catching rain in a barrel. It’s the decades-long habit of selling off the things we used to hold in common, and then calling the people who notice selfish.

I don’t know how this ends. Perhaps the grid learns to share, and the energy networks of the next few decades look less like a toll road and more like a village commons. Perhaps the next crisis, a winter of blackouts or a summer of dry taps, makes the people with panels and water tanks look either wonderfully foresighted or quietly treacherous, depending on who’s telling the story. The original essay asks a good question: what do we owe each other? I just think it aimed that question at the wrong people.

Tonight the mains supply is flickering again, as it does, and the solar is quietly taking over without anyone asking its permission. Somewhere a system is recording a few kilowatt-hours it won’t be able to bill me for. I sit here with a cup of tea, trying to work out which of us is supposed to be the disloyal one, and I still haven’t settled on an answer.

Until Next Time