Twin Oaks itself survives by selling hammocks, cashew butter, and web design to the outside world. It's a way of carving out your own niche while leaving the balance unchanged. It free-rides on industrial society, while leaving most other social relations unchanged.
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When you visit the Twin Oaks website, one of the pages describes the prominent role of women in the day to day operations and management of the community.
There's an interesting quote that accidentally describes their profound dependence upon the larger world.
from...
<http://www.twinoaks.org/community/women/chicks-sticks.html >
Inge - Auto Manager
*I've worked on our vehicles for the full 9 years I've been here—I started on my first day! (I was a mechanic for 15 years before joining Twin Oaks.) The job is satisfying yet frustrating, and never boring—there's always new challenges and new technology. It's a good feeling to be able to do this work in a male-dominated field. Our local auto-parts store is respectful, and I like giving the message that women can do this work.*
...
Now that's nice but let's focus for a moment on the bit about using the *local auto parts store.* Behind that store (which may be part of a huge chain such as Pep Boys, Strauss, etc, etc) there's a vast and technologically intense infrastructure that engineers, manufactures and ships auto replacement and enhancement parts to retail outlets across the US -- indeed, the world. No vast technosphere, no replacement parts for machinery.
Just one example of many such linkages I'm sure.
Twin Oaks may be, more or less, *off the grid* (as those of us who wear a big white *G* for geek on our fashionably black t-shirts say) but without the grid it wouldn't be able to enjoy its 100 person strong intentional community.
This is surely true of other communities of this type.
I understand the appeal. Modernity, as it's currently structured, is dangerous and often frightening. I went through what you might call a 'Jerry Mander Summer' years ago. An odd interlude for a technophile like me but it was hot, I was working 70 hours a week and my tasty girlfriend had just skipped town with a dude who wore beads and claimed he was Lakota (he did have really nice hair).
I wasn't in my right mind.
There was Jerry writing about eliminating television and saving sacred spaces and returning to the small scale past. If only we could turn back the dial to the time long before lasers -- hell, even before large-scale organization (what would this be then, before China's Qin dynasty?) life would sort itself out nicely.
The Asimov dream of square jawed heroes manning atomic rockets to the stars hadn't worked out...yet...and like I said, it was hot, so I was a ready audience for this back to the um, something, message.
Thing is, after a while it hit me that all this talk of our technological system being one huge ball of evil -- unnatural, unnecessary, and discardable -- seemed more and more foolish the clearer my head got.
Consider satellites, just one of our relatively new toys. We can build and launch satellites into earth orbit. This suggests that building and launching satellites is one of those things people do after the necessary number of centuries of background work is done.
Now, I can deny this and claim that the pre-satellite launching era was better but to me this seems like denying a part of human character.
The trick now is not for us to step back to Arcadia (which really, is a step back to nothing) but forward, past the clumsy, wasteful and probably fatal form of modernity we're saddled with to the next bit which, if we manage to make it, will make us bigger than we are at the moment, not smaller.
.d.