PmWiki | LeftBeyond / DIYEthos

"DIY or die, phi. DIY or die."

In the youth underground, as often as possible, you make your own stuff, repurpose stuff made pre-Appearing, or recycle stuff that's no longer in common use; the general perception is that if you can't at least fix it, you don't own it. A few gamer geeks talk of "machine spirits", but the simple fact is that you never know if you'll be allowed to buy parts, or batteries, or tranny fluid, or what you have, so best to know how to do without in a pinch.

There's a couple reasons for this, but the biggest one is that sometimes electronics produced after the Appearing, with the newfound reliance on analog systems, work better for the Glorified than for the Naturals, and considerably worse for the nonbelievers. Narrative causality is suspected to be at play, especially since the problem is much less visible with low-performance digital devices but resurfaces with high-speed digital circuitry; a popular current theory is that this phenomenon is a deviation of imbued knowledge of farming and carpentry not being applied as intended.

A significant portion of Chaos/Independence tech is therefore a mishmash kitbash of pre-Appearing tech, homemade low-performance machines, and anything they can take apart and put back together. Operating systems range from "Windows 98/2000" to "odd kludge of various Linux distros" to "MS-DOS".

Some of the more technically minded haunts have a communal makerspace as their front shop, usually one that is also open to believers.