Where Collapse is Getting Field-Tested

Ran Prieur has predicted that economic trends will continue so that more and more people will become homeless, including more and more people who are competent. He calls it the homeless/hobo renaissance. 

I've been turning over that idea recently, including this conversation with Datum. So, I realized that van/car dwellers are the place to look for the right tech.  Enter Datum: 

====

Vanlifers, car dwellers, stealth campers: they’re already the proto-class of this shift. Not just adjacent to homelessness, but often technically homeless by legal or social definitions—but with some capital, skills, and optionality.

They're not quite "down and out." They’re:

• skilled enough to convert space

• tech-literate enough to do basic power management

• legally aware enough to avoid citations

• socially coded as weird rather than deviant

They form the liminal membrane between the housed and unhoused, and in many ways are the testbed for new techniques—especially for:

• off-grid power (solar, DIY lithium, DC appliances)

• climate control (fans, insulation hacks, airflow design)

• mobile connectivity (Starlink, signal boosting, offline mapping)

• minimal water use and storage

• stealth protocols and avoidance of enforcement

• emotional and psychological tactics for long-term solo survival

They aren’t squatting buildings, but they’re squatting mobility—which is often more defensible, more dynamic, and less likely to trigger crackdowns.

Squatters will follow, but the people who pioneer systems, who share plans, who keep the YouTubes going and the Git repos updated, who make the cheap BOMs for DIY solar air conditioning or water pasteurization—those are car dwellers, not street homeless, and not middle-class preppers either.

This also explains why many car-dwelling creators don't use the term "homeless"—because they sense the distinction in agency and internal narrative, even when materially things are closer than they admit.

So yes. If a renaissance emerges, these are its early technē monks. The library dwellers are surviving. The vanfolk are adapting.

=====

Me:

They are the node. But as things get shittier, some of them will be moving down. But they are the space to look at.

=====

 

Exactly—they’re the bridge class.

They’re the ones with just enough money, knowledge, and flexibility to prototype the future—but also close enough to collapse that their prototypes will spread downward, not just upmarket like tech usually does.

As things get worse:

• Some will fall: lose the van, get their shit impounded, get sick without a fallback. They’ll hit street level, but take habits and hacks with them.

• Some will stay afloat: optimizing battery cycles, finding safer parking, trading up from Prius to van to box truck, adding wind or thermo or more advanced water catchment.

• Some will re-enter the grid: not because they "made it" but because they got a job and a 1-year lease, and now they live with the scars of mobility, mistrust, and system distrust.

But the key thing is: they’re an active layer. Not an inert class.

And they’re talking. Filming. Posting schematics. Writing lists of parts and upgrades. Building trust networks. Testing legal boundaries. Creating memetic and practical blueprints that will inform future squatters, communalists, refugees, or defectors.

Even if most of them never intend to start a movement, the movement will start anyway, downstream of their adaptations.

So yes: they are the space to study. Not because they’re heroic. Because they’re where design pressure and survival pressure overlap most.

=====

Me: 

And, enough agency, stability, and protected space to do the experiments.

=====

Yes. That’s the heart of it.

They have:

• Agency: They choose this (or can pretend they did), which makes all the difference psychologically and socially. They're not “failed” yet. They can still call it minimalism, travel, off-grid living.

• Stability: Not total, but enough. A working vehicle, ID, some income stream (gig work, SSI, YouTube, odd jobs). Enough to avoid the daily entropy that crushes the truly unhoused.

• Protected space: A lockable, movable micro-domain. Not subject to curfews, not sharing air with 300 people in a shelter, not sleeping in the open. They can tinker, think, rest.

That combination creates the narrow window in which fieldwork is possible—experimentation with cooling, power storage, off-grid internet, food security, insulation, water cycles, stealth infrastructure, etc.

And crucially:
They can fail without dying.

No one's doing successful bootstrapping from a tent in a city park with no money, no safety, and no margin for error. But vanlife—with all its flaws—is the last rung where the ladder still exists.

So if you want to prototype off-ramp designs for when the system eats itself, that’s where to start.