It started when I put up The Gupta Store (mostly Electronics and Outdoors plus a whole pile of goodies not on amazon which I simply indexed.) The Gupta Store was an idea I’d originally passed off as a gag, before Mark Charmer and Ben Vickers convinced me to think about it more seriously. I was on a bit of a wild hare tonight, having had an incredibly good day hanging out with Rick Falkvinge so I though… “I wonder how much of this gear is on Amazon?” – the answer is not all of it, but quite a bit. Most of the rest I put here at the main Gupta Store URL.

And then I got The Fear.

@leashless A tweet-length reason explaining “why this’ll be critical in a collapse scenario” for each product would be great.

— Jonathan Deamer (@JonathanDeamer) June 28, 2012

Because, the truth is that what you need for a “collapse scenario” is… well, there’s four things, really.

1> A month of food for everybody in your house, and more if you can manage it.

2> A bottle of chlorine bleach for purifying water (look up how online) and cleaning.

3> A three month or longer pre-order of any medications you and your family require.

4> A shit-ton of luck.

Because those first three get you through a short, short crisis – software errors fuck up the entire banking network, or there’s a run on the banks and the government turns it around. The multi-year prolonged Soviet-style collapse which many of us fear is a whole different ballgame. People talk farmland or owning a house and gardening in the back yard for food, and that’s all good advice, but not many people have that organized. And there’s The Fear.

This is really happening, at least in Greece. Spain, Italy may follow. America… is simmering; while all eyes are on Europe, the Dollar cracks quietly in the background as faith in the governance of the US fades. There are all kinds of places you can “go survivalist” but there’s no substitute for a simple truth: you’re going to miss that warm, comforting industrial supply chain if it wobbles, and right now it’s looking pretty shaky.

The Gupta Store was a bit of fun, a place to talk about design, about paying attention to breakthroughs in how things are made and how fundamental industrial technologies are changing. But it’s also a place to consider a different question: if society gets shaky, how much more than this are you going to need?

Dealing in Security is a method for thinking about what you actually need in real detail. It’s part of the Gupta State Failure Management Archive. Try the two talks in the archive which were done in Ireland.