Having been in the “mesh” space for years, there’s a ton of this techno-primitivism fantasy floating around. The reality is that people want to access the internet and they want it to work well.
This article is a perfect example. This solar powered server which does not have 100% uptime for artistic reasons is probably sitting in someone’s kitchen next to a refrigerator which uses many times as much power and definitely has 100% uptime.
> refrigerator which uses many times as much power and definitely has 100% uptime.
Except that the making-cold mechanism of fridges have nowhere near a 100% duty-cycle. You probably wouldn't notice if it didn't even meet two "nines" of uptime.
In fact, that's how frost-free freezers work, by taking advantage that fact to run a heater(!) for some number of minutes several times a day. A defrost timer that does 10 minutes every 8 hours reduces compressor uptime to 98%.
