In [[Lifehouse]], Adam Greenfield coins the term "technologies of permanent recourse": > What is best of all, then, is to rely wherever possible on ways of doing and being that are robust to disruption because they are fundamentally simple and hardy. These are what I call "technologies of permanent recourse." They are tactics developed in and for hard times and circumstances, they broadly remain available to us even under significant stress. They aren't based on finicky, high-maintenance components, don't have lots of external dependencies, do not rely on a persistent availability of an extended supply chain, and can largely be built up and repaired from those resources we already have ready to hand. > > They favour, electromechanical means over electronic ones, mechanical means over those, and passive, organic ones wherever feasible, and can therefore tend to be labour-intensive, as opposed to capital-, equipment-, energy-, or computation-intensive. They can be turned to surprisingly sophisticated ends, including refrigerating food and filtering enough drinking water for a neighbourhood. Above all, they aren't owned by anybody: the methods underlying them are literally common knowledge.