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"For the sciences, the way to change science's perception of things is to wait until all the old farts have died off."
- Larry Niven

Paid Avoidance Zone  
  An area where the inhabitants agree, for a government-paid fee, to live without sophisticated services.  

It's expensive to provide elaborate services (technical and social); so, what if you designated particular areas of the country and paid people to live there? The payment being less than it would cost to provide the infrastructure that we all expect as part of modern life.

...settlements created by refugees from Northern California after the Great Bay Quake. Literally millions of traumatized fugitives had straggled southward. For years they survived in tents and shanties, dependent on federal handouts .. afraid to enter a building with a solid roof for fear it would crash down and kill them.

...One of the best thing about a paid-avoidance area is that you can still get manual cooking.

From The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner.
Published by Harper and Row in 1975
Additional resources -

The left-handed benefit, of course, is that you don't have to deal with all of the "conveniences" of modern life, like leaving a data-trail everywhere you go.

Paid avoidance zones are listed as technovelgy because, far from having no technology, they are sometimes showcases for ecofast building and other techniques that make maximum use of minimum resources.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Shockwave Rider
  More Ideas and Technology by John Brunner
  Tech news articles related to The Shockwave Rider
  Tech news articles related to works by John Brunner

Paid Avoidance Zone-related news articles:
  - Information-Free Zones Future Vacation Spot

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