I got acquainted to backshifting movement some ten or more years ago. It started with people choosing a rather more simple way of life, detaching from technology and going analogue. Sometimes, it would be just moving from cities to smaller places as villages or remote houses. Sometimes, it would be going for a minimalist home, giving away all unnecessary objects from your life. Later on, I started thinking about how unnecessary is the centralized way of life, mind and governance.
During that time, me and my family decided to start occasionally visiting my grandparents' house, located in a small Bulgarian village. Back then it was returning to my roots, a process of learning or reinventing things forgotten from childhood. It was good to spend time outdoors in the yard of my grandfather's house, working on the soil and with the soil, learning to cultivate land and seed. There was a well in the yard of the house and it brought to my mind the idea how a family, living in the very same house, could be self-sustainable and not dependent on the centralized water supply system. There are many other ways of getting water, for example, from not centralized source but on your own -- collecting rainfall water, storing and distributing among small community members. The same thing can be applied to all aspects of life so that we get detached from the central overlord and rely on our own efforts, local communities, families and friends.
This is backshifting - realizing that returning back is going forward, choosing smaller, means going bigger and understanding whole picture. Smaller societies, smaller organizations or smaller companies prove to be rather more peaceful, creative, self-sustainable as well as less aggressive and evil. The power of bigger unity corrupts and gives false feeling of impunity. The bad thing is that our society got built either naturally or synthetically, I don't know, over one center of power during time and history, developing all its relations by delegating to this overlord the right to decide for everyone within. The good thing is that decentralization is sneaking in from our past and history or better to say pre-history with societies and individuals helping each other survive in harsh environment; it is sneaking in now through such achievements as peer-to-peer information exchange, cryptography and blockchain. Technology is not bad, it is good, but in bad hands it is bad. If technology is very centralized it becomes evil. If it is decentralized, it belongs to everyone and it is good.
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