Outquisition.

Yesterday I came across something called the "Outquisition", which has a unique take on how to handle the collapse of Western civilisation that doesn't involve holing up with a three dozen cases of baked beans and a shotgun. So, what does it involve? Rebuilding the industrial base? Protecting the transportation and communications infrastructure? Industrial-scale power plants? Restoring harvests to pre-catastrophe levels? Maintaining government continuity?

Nope. Something a bit more along the lines of red-state city folk riding to the rescue of their rural and rust state brethren.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems -- and getting really good atadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.

This comes under the heading of Ideas That Need To Cook A Bit Longer. Leaving aside how useful microfinancing and knowledge management systems will be in the face of the apocalypse, it seems as if the authors of Outquisition have a less than realistic picture of who is going to need whose help if civilisation goes up the spout. I've lived in both city and country and I can state quite firmly that in a rebuilding society scenario I'd much rather be in the country as I am now. At the moment, all things being equal, I could ride out the Fall for a good two months before it became anything more than an inconvienience and if I had enough notice I could stretch that to indefinitely–especially if the locals made a pact with the farmers and the small industrial estates that relocated outside the city limits.

If anything, the last thing we'd expect from the city would be missionaries intent on redistributing the future. More likely it would be cold, starving hordes wanting to redistribute my larder. Ever been in the city when the basic services get knocked out by an earthquake or some other disaster? A couple of years ago a windstorm blasted through the vicinity of Chez Szondy and the worst that happened was that a lot of people had to go without store-bought bread for a fortnight while they fell back on generators and woodstoves to keep light and warmth while the roads were cleared and power lines repaired. A city, however, relies on a massive influx of goods on a daily basis just to feed itself. Stop deliveries for a day and the grocery shelves are empty. Stop them for a week and you have riots on your hands. Holistic programmes for kids don't do you much good in that situation. You need the Army and a brigade of engineers to make sure the would-be missionaries don't face the question of whether they starve to death before typhoid sets in.

"Comfy, green cities", my eye.