>The kids play minecraft with their friends while mom and dad stream netflix. Step into a modern off-grid house and you wouldn't see any differences.
Well, if part of being off-grid pressuposes the existance of a huge global and domestic grid to fund, manufacture, transport, and sell you things like internet service, routers, Netflix shows, computer games, televisions, laptops, all kinds of electric and digital appliances, solar cells, batteries, and so on, trucks, factories and cargo ships to transport them, mines extracting resources to make them, the associated with the above waste disposal, even cities and businesses built around all these to support the people making those and their families (plus your own work, paid in regular currency to afford the aforementioned), I'm not sure how "off-grid" it really is...
This "off grid" sure is not some Walden style affair. It just means "I buy and setup "renewable energy" units for my family's exclusive energy production and storage and have a self-owned shit disposal method, otherwise you couldn't tell mine from any other house in the area".
This is definitely not "off the grid", except for very narrow definitions of the grid.
Perhaps "somewhat eco friendly" would be a better designation, or "light on corporate resources" (with the exception of Internet and GP's longish list).
Off "the grid" is more than off the utility grid. It implies a rejection of the globalized supply chain, and a return to subsistence consumption. If you can't make it, you don't have it. This also includes non-existence in the financial system, and the minimization of data footprint.
It's just off the electric and waste disposal grid (and sometimes not even that).
Not "off the grid" in a fuller self-sufficient sustainable way.
And there are many people who do live in today's world "off the grid" in a fuller sense of the term - far more than the description of "off the grid" living here. People living in rural villages, island dwellings, and so on, in Europe, for example, can be far more off the grid than above (self-sustainable, that is, growing most of their own food, doing with less, hardly owning a TV or a smartphone, and so on), even if they still have a power line.
This includes not just old rural families and such, but also young people in a "back to the village" movement that's been going on.
I've come to believe that 'off grid' is about the establishment and maintenance of just enough infrastructure to allow the participant(s) to sustain the fantasy that they can replicate and maintain what they perceive as normative reality without reliance on any external factors. It is to maintain the notion that one can be independent of the broader society but still withdraw from that society any material advantages made available. In would seem to me a more benign outgrowth of basic human social patterns: specialized warrior-centered tribes who maintain themselves by raiding more agrarian tribes (particularly I think of the situation with the bandits in The Magnificent Seven as a more contemporary example.)
Well, if part of being off-grid pressuposes the existance of a huge global and domestic grid to fund, manufacture, transport, and sell you things like internet service, routers, Netflix shows, computer games, televisions, laptops, all kinds of electric and digital appliances, solar cells, batteries, and so on, trucks, factories and cargo ships to transport them, mines extracting resources to make them, the associated with the above waste disposal, even cities and businesses built around all these to support the people making those and their families (plus your own work, paid in regular currency to afford the aforementioned), I'm not sure how "off-grid" it really is...
This "off grid" sure is not some Walden style affair. It just means "I buy and setup "renewable energy" units for my family's exclusive energy production and storage and have a self-owned shit disposal method, otherwise you couldn't tell mine from any other house in the area".