“I wonder if choosing off-grid living implies an abandonment of our current world, instead of integrating with existing systems and trying to make them better,” she asks me. “The off-grid lifestyle seems to invite people to actively leave society with the assumption that since this is not working, there must be a better way out there .”

These organizations often position themselves as the future of communities, but they look a lot more like the past, a sort of romanticized feudalism.