Down-Grid Rooms

There’s been a lot of writing and discussion about the lo-fi, analog, disconnected lifestyle. I started writing about it 15 or so years ago with some of the earlier T.W. Lee stories.

While I am an old-school analog aficionado, I’m not in favor of total disconnection. The Internet has helped me immeasurably with research, and by making available certain materials such as old manuals. As a teenage hacker in the 1980s, I was at a loss to do things with my Timex Sinclair 1000, Commodore VIC-20, and Atari 8-bit machines (I owned an 800XL and 130XE) because the in-depth technical data was often too difficult to find via my available at the time sources. You might find a cool book or two at the mall’s Waldenbooks, or the local computer store if you were lucky enough to have one. Try to write a wardialer for your 1030 however, and unless you were lucky enough to find this article, you’d have been SOL. Likewise, it would have been nice to have a manual for the NM-20 I bought at the Mount Beacon hamfest in 1985. So while the Internet has its shithole places like Facebook and some other social media sites, it’s still way too useful to pull the plug on. The solution? A Down-Grid Room. I call it a down-grid room because the whole off-grid thing is a fantasy, and the Internet is empowering and liberating once you get passed the walled gardens and realize most social media presences are fake.

The Down-Grid Room has no Internetworking in it. It’s analog. It has books, radios, stuff for writing and crafting, maybe a CD and/or DVD player, possibly even a TV hooked up to an OTA (Over The Air) antenna system that’s pointed at the local PBS affiliate. There is a little shelf in the hallway next to the door where you put your smartphone before you go in. I suppose you could allow an extension for your landline in there, but the idea is to disconnect and work on meatspace stuff. You can even go all the way, and remove all outside world connectivity, but I like listening to NPR, the police scanner, and shortwave so that ain’t happening in this house. You get what you’re trying to do here, however, and how you arrange it is up to you. The Down-Grid Room allows for disconnected computing devices in case you have an old Texas Instruments TI-99/4A or similar old-school microcomputer you like messing with, want to do some work with Arduinos, or if you want to use a Raspberry Pi as an e-book reader. You could even set up a small LAN with an old Linksys WRT-54 or similar to do small-scale networking experiments or run remote sensors on your property, as long as it’s kept off the Net.

Why have a Down-Grid Room?

• A Down-Grid Room restores intentionality. The Internet is great for research, manuals, obscure schematics, and the kind of obtainium you prayed to find in a hamfest cardboard box. But it’s also designed to fracture your attention. A Down‑Grid Room flips polarity. You choose what enters the space, what tools are available, the pace and the depth. A Down-Grid Room is not anti‑Internet, instead it’s pro‑intention.

• A Down-Grid Room preserves the analog competencies that built the hacker ethic. The 1980s hacker experience wasn’t just about machines—it was about tinkering, fiddling, breaking, repairing, discovering; the thrill in finding a single article that unlocked a whole subsystem.

• A Down-Grid Room creates a cognitive “pressure differential.” When everything is connected, nothing feels special. When you step into a room where the Net isn’t ambient, your brain shifts modes. It’s the same mental shift you felt when you first typed POKE commands into a machine that didn’t care about you, didn’t track you, and didn’t try to sell you anything.

• A Down-Grid Room becomes a personal archive and workshop. You’re building a micro‑library/lab/studio. After a while it becomes a curated collection of obtainium, place where half‑finished projects can stay half‑finished, sanctuary for long‑form thinking, staging area for analog experiments, and continuity anchor for your creative identity.

• A Down-Grid Room rebalances your relationship with the Internet. It says “The Internet is a tool, not where I live.” You step out of the room and back into the connected world with more clarity, more purpose, and more discernment. You use the Net for what it’s good at: research, manuals, obscure documentation. You leave the rest outside.

• A Down-Grid Room is a resilience node. A fallback workspace during outages, a place where skills don’t depend on cloud services, a reminder that creativity doesn’t require connectivity, and a buffer against the fragility of always‑online systems.

• A Down‑Grid Room is a ritual space. You leave the phone on the shelf. You cross into a different mode of being. You enter a zone where time behaves differently. You become the operator, not the operated.