"No indoor plumbing" would make life functionally impossible in apartment buildings, condos, and suburbs - and at least in the US, a lot of people live in places like that.
I suppose you could take an elevator down multiple floors and then climb into your car to drive to the nearest outhouse any time you need to use the bathroom, but that seems unreasonable to me. So I think in practice "no indoor plumbing" means "a different structure of life", similar to the rural plot of land I spent part of my childhood on with well water, a septic system, and no official fire department or police department. (We had 56k dialup though!)
The point of this article feels like "we've made life without the internet really difficult", which is true, but we use indoor plumbing dozens or hundreds of times a day - washing our hands before handling food, washing our dishes, going to the bathroom, taking a shower, washing clothes, preparing food, having a drink. Its impact on hygiene and general quality of life is hard to overstate and any amount of time spent camping should drive this home I think. The author seems to have actually spent long periods of time without indoor plumbing though, so maybe they just love that lifestyle.
In comparison, sure, the modern person uses the internet a lot, but most of that time is spent doing inessential stuff like browsing social media or sending work emails. If the internet was gone you just wouldn't have those things and you'd go back to, IDK, the radio, newspapers, and typewriters.
Props to the author for keeping Robert's question alive.
Interesting. So basically an individual out in the sticks can genuinely get by with Internet but not plumbing, but urban life would be impossible at scale without plumbing, and without urban civilization at scale we probably wouldn’t be able to maintain the internet at scale?
Correct. At the risk of stating the obvious, indoor plumbing (and public sanitation in general) is not something required for you as an individual. It's something required for society as a whole to sustain value added activities that require dense urban areas without debilitating epidemics wiping out productivity (and any other measure of well-being) in those urban areas.
Always how it shows up too: someone says "I've been camping and it was fine".
That's not what a lack of indoor plumbing is like though. In fact going camping when indoor plumbing exists isn't even the same: when it's a few enthusiasts digging holes sparsely is very different to when the entire population is doing it.
The first city to really hit this wall was London in 1858. When the river level dropped, the sewage in the Thames remained, resulting in "the great stink". Construction of a proper sewage system began the following year in 1859. In 1865 it was complete enough to begin operation. It wasn't considered complete until a decade later, in 1875.
The role of sewage in spreading cholera was first hypothesized in 1849 by John Snowe. He'd put together a pretty convincing case by 1854, and the actual bacteria was discovered in the same year. But the proof that finally convinced the medical establishment didn't come about until 1883.
If this makes you suspect that the medical establishment had their collective heads up their collective asses, I'm not about to disagree.
Reasoning is hard, and the medical establishment didn't consist of biologists, any more than the computer-programming establishment consists of computer scientists. It still doesn't today.
The main reasoning challenge here is that doctors are slow to accept evidence that what they've always done is not what they should do.
See the prolonged acceptance of bloodletting, resistance to handwashing, and on and on to the slow adoption in the present day of evidence based medicine.
I guess that's plausible, and I have occasionally observed doctors behaving that way, but I don't have enough evidence to independently confirm that it's especially common among doctors.
Also, I've seen people do amazingly dumb things because of disbelieving their doctors, so maybe a certain amount of overconfidence would be protective?
There is a lot of research in psychology on this. ChatGPT will happily refer you to various books written over the decades on how the strong hierarchical structure of medicine makes it particularly prone to cognitive dissonance, with lots of concrete examples of doctors behaving that way.
I asked GPT-5 Mini and it said, in part, "some studies find clinicians update more when evidence is clear and actionable (better calibration), others show clinicians exhibit the same biases as laypeople (e.g., positivity bias, anchoring). Results depend on task design, sample, and how “evidence” is presented. (...) Experimental psychology and related fields show measurable differences in how some doctors update beliefs—many update appropriately to clear, high‑quality evidence and some update better than average—but there is no simple universal claim that all doctors are more willing than the average person to change their minds. The evidence supports a nuanced conclusion: clinicians can be more evidence‑responsive in domain‑relevant tasks, but updating varies widely and is strongly shaped by task framing, institutional context, performance level, and incentives."
But that's because GPT-5 Mini's responses are strongly shaped by task framing and context. You can get it to say just about anything as long as you stay away from taboo areas.
It did refer me to a lot of books, and the ones I looked up did in fact actually exist, but none of them seemed to be relevant.
Yeah, "would you, personally, forgo this" is a very different value proposition vs. "would you delete this from civilization".
A single person might choose the internet over plumbing because at worst they have to compost and use an outhouse, which is less inconvenient than being locked out of most web services.
But while giving up the internet globally sends you to the 1980s, giving up plumbing globally sends you to the 1780s. YouTube and Amazon ain't worth chamberpots, dessicated skyscrapers, and regular cholera outbreaks that would reduce most cities into dysfunctional public health disasters.
As in "lacks running water," meaning you have to dispose of a building's worth of piss and shit at street level multiple times per day. And if it's a residential building, that means no water for bathing, cooking, drinking, etc. (You could ship in thousands of gallon jugs per day, but that's a logistical nightmare.)
Like a world without elevators, urban life without plumbing very quickly becomes unsustainable in buildings above a certain size.
The piss and shit problem is real, but not nearly as bad as you're imagining; I've written a bit based on my extensive shit-related experience and shit-related human history in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908441.
Burning Man recommends 6 liters of water per day per person for bathing, cooking, drinking, etc.: https://burningman.org/event/preparation/playa-living/water/ But that can generally be cut in half when you're anywhere other than one of the world's driest deserts in the middle of summer. This means you need to bring in your own weight in water roughly once a month; if there's no elevator, and you can safely lift 25% of your own weight, you can lug it up the stairs once a week. If there's an elevator, you can probably bring the water up the elevator every month or two.
About a third of that water has to eventually go back down in the form of piss, which is not a major problem if you have sealable plastic bottles to store it in. There's always the risk of an unpleasant accident with that approach, of course, but that's rare.
So I don't think there's ever a building size where a lack of indoor plumbing makes urban life unsustainable. If you're strong enough to walk up and down the stairs every day, you're strong enough to carry water up the stairs once a week. If there's an elevator that you can ride carrying two children, you can also ride it carrying water, once a month. Throughout history, and today in poor rural areas, most people have always had to carry their water much farther than that.
One counterpoint I can think of: most forms of electronic payment require the Internet now. Credit card transactions, Venmo et al. You could transition back to cash but there would be enormous switching costs and short-term chaos, and I could imagine paper-based transactions are also way less efficient in terms of transaction fees and literal loss of the cash.
One of the bizarre ironies of the world is that mobile phone based payment systems achieved widespread adoption in third world countries before the USA! (That's largely because the USA had less need, there were plenty of established alternatives.)
That's one of the reasons why poor villages found mobile phones to be so essential.
It's also interesting to consider that most commercial data centres depend on plumbing for aircon or even direct water-cooling. Therefore depending how far you take this, it could result in an internet that exists, but with a limited set of services (as they can only be self hosted, or at least not at the huge scale we are accustomed to).
Depends on what you consider "plumbing" I suppose. People can live in dense housing carrying containers of water into their living space for cooking and cleaning, and using chamberpots for most elimination. It has some obvious downsides, but it works.
People have lived in multi-story buildings without indoor flush toilets for much longer than there have been elevators or cars. Indoor flush toilets only became widespread less than 200 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamber_pot
You might not be eager to carry the chamber pot down to the cesspool every day to empty it (or to walk underneath the windows where people were emptying theirs onto the street, which was the actual historical practice) but there are better alternatives; a properly designed composting toilet doesn't stink and can easily hold 10 kg or more of poop before you need to empty it. If you empty it into a compost pile instead of a cesspool, it can continue to not stink. Chemical toilets (in their simplest form, throwing a double handful of wood ash onto the poop when you're done) are another option, but perhaps ultimately a more expensive one.
Most of the things you describe (handwashing, dishwashing, bathing, washing food, preparing food, drinking water) can be handled adequately with water you carry in. Flush toilets are the only exception. That is what we all do at Burning Man, and it's what virtually everyone did (outside of small enclaves like Harappa and Rome) for 2 million years until 200 years ago, including people who lived in cities. The Zen proverb, "chop wood, carry water," mentions carrying water because that was an everyday task for basically everyone throughout recorded history (and before), including everyone who lived in cities.
Running water is certainly very helpful to hygiene, but most of the time it's just a cheaper and less stinky alternative to alcohol for that purpose.
I don't agree that the internet is "inessential stuff", except in the sense that flush toilets are "inessential stuff". Almost anything you want to buy or know is available on the internet immediately, and that knowledge is immensely valuable. Similarly, you can contact almost anyone you know immediately. Knowledge, commerce, and social connection are very far from being "inessential stuff", although certainly people waste lots of their irreplaceable time on social-media sites that provide the illusion of social connection without the reality.
I'm not sure I buy looking at the numbers of poor people without indoor plumbing but with internet access tells you about what they would actually prefer all things being equal. Internet access seems much cheaper to get and maintain access to than indoor plumbing, both in terms of monetary cost and also infrastructure.
Assuming you don't have indoor plumbing, you need to add more rooms onto your house (or take indoor space away). You also need to plumb both the water supply and the drainage system into your space, which if you're lucky you can already get under your house, and if not requires digging up the floor and foundation. And if you're doing this solo (a la a well and a septic system or similar) you need to acquire the necessary skills (electrical, plumbing, drainage management) and build it all out. I'm not a waste disposal expert, but I suspect the nature of indoor plumbing sending all waste water to the same location makes just running a big pipe to your existing outhouse (assuming you have enough downhill slope) not a good idea. A big hole that can handle the amount of human waste a few people produce is probably would not do great adding a bunch of additional waste water to it every day too.
By comparison, internet can be had with little more than a phone. In fact if you have a wireless phone at all, you probably have internet access, wether or not you intended to get it. And that applies to the homeless people the article mentions too. Let's ignore the fact that a person that is homeless by definition has no home in which to put indoor plumbing, there are also often programs, charities and NGOs providing cell phones and internet connectivity. Basic internet access could be had for $25 / month. I can't think of anything a homeless person could spend $25 on that would secure them indoor plumbing access for a month. Maybe a gym membership? Then again, your internet provider isn't likely to kick you out and call the cops, but a gym might if they catch on that you're just here to shower and use the toilets every day.
I cannot imagine people (or at least tech people) didn't have life altering experiences at the dot com bubble times. I was 9 when I logged onto my first bbs begin 80s and in coming years I started to believe that was far more important than plumbing. You could make friends, exchange software, plan meetups etc all without leaving my desk. When internet came, I definitely would've had that, if this was needed, if it meant crapping in the bushes.
Have to agree, Internet over Indoor Plumbing, since I spend the great majority of my time on the internet vs the toilet. That might be easier for me as I was toilet-trained in a household that used an outhouse containing the infamous "thunderbox".
For me personally, indoor plumbing wins hands down. If you took society at large, I'd suggest the answer is still indoor plumbing .. the amount of disease and excess deaths would overrule surveillance capitalism easily.
I wish I could understand the people who have internet without toilets: Is it something where it's just not a big deal to pee / poop outside where they live?
I could see, if I lived in an area where the weather was nice, and it wasn't a big deal to just walk over to a tree and water it, I might not care as much either.
Is it like camping where it's often easier to just duck behind a tree instead of walking to the bathroom?
Sewers and toilets are very, very expensive. Indoor plumbing malfunctions regularly destroy houses even when they are protected by well-enforced building codes, and porcelain toilets basically require industrial mass production. Internet access is much cheaper.
"No indoor plumbing" would make life functionally impossible in apartment buildings, condos, and suburbs - and at least in the US, a lot of people live in places like that.
I suppose you could take an elevator down multiple floors and then climb into your car to drive to the nearest outhouse any time you need to use the bathroom, but that seems unreasonable to me. So I think in practice "no indoor plumbing" means "a different structure of life", similar to the rural plot of land I spent part of my childhood on with well water, a septic system, and no official fire department or police department. (We had 56k dialup though!)
The point of this article feels like "we've made life without the internet really difficult", which is true, but we use indoor plumbing dozens or hundreds of times a day - washing our hands before handling food, washing our dishes, going to the bathroom, taking a shower, washing clothes, preparing food, having a drink. Its impact on hygiene and general quality of life is hard to overstate and any amount of time spent camping should drive this home I think. The author seems to have actually spent long periods of time without indoor plumbing though, so maybe they just love that lifestyle.
In comparison, sure, the modern person uses the internet a lot, but most of that time is spent doing inessential stuff like browsing social media or sending work emails. If the internet was gone you just wouldn't have those things and you'd go back to, IDK, the radio, newspapers, and typewriters.
Props to the author for keeping Robert's question alive.
Interesting. So basically an individual out in the sticks can genuinely get by with Internet but not plumbing, but urban life would be impossible at scale without plumbing, and without urban civilization at scale we probably wouldn’t be able to maintain the internet at scale?
Correct. At the risk of stating the obvious, indoor plumbing (and public sanitation in general) is not something required for you as an individual. It's something required for society as a whole to sustain value added activities that require dense urban areas without debilitating epidemics wiping out productivity (and any other measure of well-being) in those urban areas.
Always how it shows up too: someone says "I've been camping and it was fine".
That's not what a lack of indoor plumbing is like though. In fact going camping when indoor plumbing exists isn't even the same: when it's a few enthusiasts digging holes sparsely is very different to when the entire population is doing it.
Yes.
The first city to really hit this wall was London in 1858. When the river level dropped, the sewage in the Thames remained, resulting in "the great stink". Construction of a proper sewage system began the following year in 1859. In 1865 it was complete enough to begin operation. It wasn't considered complete until a decade later, in 1875.
The role of sewage in spreading cholera was first hypothesized in 1849 by John Snowe. He'd put together a pretty convincing case by 1854, and the actual bacteria was discovered in the same year. But the proof that finally convinced the medical establishment didn't come about until 1883.
If this makes you suspect that the medical establishment had their collective heads up their collective asses, I'm not about to disagree.
Reasoning is hard, and the medical establishment didn't consist of biologists, any more than the computer-programming establishment consists of computer scientists. It still doesn't today.
The main reasoning challenge here is that doctors are slow to accept evidence that what they've always done is not what they should do.
See the prolonged acceptance of bloodletting, resistance to handwashing, and on and on to the slow adoption in the present day of evidence based medicine.
If you don't know about the latter, see https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06-dont-medical-treatmen....
Not just doctors, but everyone. The epistemic humility to change your mind when confronted with evidence you were wrong is rare and fragile.
Yes everyone, but especially doctors.
The more authority that you believe yourself to have, the stronger the cognitive dissonance against admitting to your mistakes.
Doctors feel themselves to have a lot of authority.
I guess that's plausible, and I have occasionally observed doctors behaving that way, but I don't have enough evidence to independently confirm that it's especially common among doctors.
Also, I've seen people do amazingly dumb things because of disbelieving their doctors, so maybe a certain amount of overconfidence would be protective?
There is a lot of research in psychology on this. ChatGPT will happily refer you to various books written over the decades on how the strong hierarchical structure of medicine makes it particularly prone to cognitive dissonance, with lots of concrete examples of doctors behaving that way.
I asked GPT-5 Mini and it said, in part, "some studies find clinicians update more when evidence is clear and actionable (better calibration), others show clinicians exhibit the same biases as laypeople (e.g., positivity bias, anchoring). Results depend on task design, sample, and how “evidence” is presented. (...) Experimental psychology and related fields show measurable differences in how some doctors update beliefs—many update appropriately to clear, high‑quality evidence and some update better than average—but there is no simple universal claim that all doctors are more willing than the average person to change their minds. The evidence supports a nuanced conclusion: clinicians can be more evidence‑responsive in domain‑relevant tasks, but updating varies widely and is strongly shaped by task framing, institutional context, performance level, and incentives."
But that's because GPT-5 Mini's responses are strongly shaped by task framing and context. You can get it to say just about anything as long as you stay away from taboo areas.
It did refer me to a lot of books, and the ones I looked up did in fact actually exist, but none of them seemed to be relevant.
Yeah, "would you, personally, forgo this" is a very different value proposition vs. "would you delete this from civilization".
A single person might choose the internet over plumbing because at worst they have to compost and use an outhouse, which is less inconvenient than being locked out of most web services.
But while giving up the internet globally sends you to the 1980s, giving up plumbing globally sends you to the 1780s. YouTube and Amazon ain't worth chamberpots, dessicated skyscrapers, and regular cholera outbreaks that would reduce most cities into dysfunctional public health disasters.
Desiccated skyscrapers? I take it you prefer your skyscrapers to be moist?
As in "lacks running water," meaning you have to dispose of a building's worth of piss and shit at street level multiple times per day. And if it's a residential building, that means no water for bathing, cooking, drinking, etc. (You could ship in thousands of gallon jugs per day, but that's a logistical nightmare.)
Like a world without elevators, urban life without plumbing very quickly becomes unsustainable in buildings above a certain size.
The piss and shit problem is real, but not nearly as bad as you're imagining; I've written a bit based on my extensive shit-related experience and shit-related human history in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908441.
Burning Man recommends 6 liters of water per day per person for bathing, cooking, drinking, etc.: https://burningman.org/event/preparation/playa-living/water/ But that can generally be cut in half when you're anywhere other than one of the world's driest deserts in the middle of summer. This means you need to bring in your own weight in water roughly once a month; if there's no elevator, and you can safely lift 25% of your own weight, you can lug it up the stairs once a week. If there's an elevator, you can probably bring the water up the elevator every month or two.
About a third of that water has to eventually go back down in the form of piss, which is not a major problem if you have sealable plastic bottles to store it in. There's always the risk of an unpleasant accident with that approach, of course, but that's rare.
So I don't think there's ever a building size where a lack of indoor plumbing makes urban life unsustainable. If you're strong enough to walk up and down the stairs every day, you're strong enough to carry water up the stairs once a week. If there's an elevator that you can ride carrying two children, you can also ride it carrying water, once a month. Throughout history, and today in poor rural areas, most people have always had to carry their water much farther than that.
One counterpoint I can think of: most forms of electronic payment require the Internet now. Credit card transactions, Venmo et al. You could transition back to cash but there would be enormous switching costs and short-term chaos, and I could imagine paper-based transactions are also way less efficient in terms of transaction fees and literal loss of the cash.
> You could transition back to cash but there would be enormous switching costs
How much of a switch this would be depends a lot on the country: in quite some countries cash is the common method for payment:
> https://www.forex.se/en/travel/forex-index/cash-index/
> https://dailypassport.com/countries-that-still-rely-on-cash/
> https://www.travelex.com.au/travelex-hub/travel-inspiration/...
I think we're imagining a scenario where the internet never existed, not one in which it disappeared suddenly
Though, if we were going to discuss the "disappear suddenly" scenario, losing indoor plumbing seems even more horrifying...
One of the bizarre ironies of the world is that mobile phone based payment systems achieved widespread adoption in third world countries before the USA! (That's largely because the USA had less need, there were plenty of established alternatives.)
That's one of the reasons why poor villages found mobile phones to be so essential.
It's also interesting to consider that most commercial data centres depend on plumbing for aircon or even direct water-cooling. Therefore depending how far you take this, it could result in an internet that exists, but with a limited set of services (as they can only be self hosted, or at least not at the huge scale we are accustomed to).
Depends on what you consider "plumbing" I suppose. People can live in dense housing carrying containers of water into their living space for cooking and cleaning, and using chamberpots for most elimination. It has some obvious downsides, but it works.
People have lived in multi-story buildings without indoor flush toilets for much longer than there have been elevators or cars. Indoor flush toilets only became widespread less than 200 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamber_pot
You might not be eager to carry the chamber pot down to the cesspool every day to empty it (or to walk underneath the windows where people were emptying theirs onto the street, which was the actual historical practice) but there are better alternatives; a properly designed composting toilet doesn't stink and can easily hold 10 kg or more of poop before you need to empty it. If you empty it into a compost pile instead of a cesspool, it can continue to not stink. Chemical toilets (in their simplest form, throwing a double handful of wood ash onto the poop when you're done) are another option, but perhaps ultimately a more expensive one.
Most of the things you describe (handwashing, dishwashing, bathing, washing food, preparing food, drinking water) can be handled adequately with water you carry in. Flush toilets are the only exception. That is what we all do at Burning Man, and it's what virtually everyone did (outside of small enclaves like Harappa and Rome) for 2 million years until 200 years ago, including people who lived in cities. The Zen proverb, "chop wood, carry water," mentions carrying water because that was an everyday task for basically everyone throughout recorded history (and before), including everyone who lived in cities.
Running water is certainly very helpful to hygiene, but most of the time it's just a cheaper and less stinky alternative to alcohol for that purpose.
I don't agree that the internet is "inessential stuff", except in the sense that flush toilets are "inessential stuff". Almost anything you want to buy or know is available on the internet immediately, and that knowledge is immensely valuable. Similarly, you can contact almost anyone you know immediately. Knowledge, commerce, and social connection are very far from being "inessential stuff", although certainly people waste lots of their irreplaceable time on social-media sites that provide the illusion of social connection without the reality.
I'm not sure I buy looking at the numbers of poor people without indoor plumbing but with internet access tells you about what they would actually prefer all things being equal. Internet access seems much cheaper to get and maintain access to than indoor plumbing, both in terms of monetary cost and also infrastructure.
Assuming you don't have indoor plumbing, you need to add more rooms onto your house (or take indoor space away). You also need to plumb both the water supply and the drainage system into your space, which if you're lucky you can already get under your house, and if not requires digging up the floor and foundation. And if you're doing this solo (a la a well and a septic system or similar) you need to acquire the necessary skills (electrical, plumbing, drainage management) and build it all out. I'm not a waste disposal expert, but I suspect the nature of indoor plumbing sending all waste water to the same location makes just running a big pipe to your existing outhouse (assuming you have enough downhill slope) not a good idea. A big hole that can handle the amount of human waste a few people produce is probably would not do great adding a bunch of additional waste water to it every day too.
By comparison, internet can be had with little more than a phone. In fact if you have a wireless phone at all, you probably have internet access, wether or not you intended to get it. And that applies to the homeless people the article mentions too. Let's ignore the fact that a person that is homeless by definition has no home in which to put indoor plumbing, there are also often programs, charities and NGOs providing cell phones and internet connectivity. Basic internet access could be had for $25 / month. I can't think of anything a homeless person could spend $25 on that would secure them indoor plumbing access for a month. Maybe a gym membership? Then again, your internet provider isn't likely to kick you out and call the cops, but a gym might if they catch on that you're just here to shower and use the toilets every day.
I cannot imagine people (or at least tech people) didn't have life altering experiences at the dot com bubble times. I was 9 when I logged onto my first bbs begin 80s and in coming years I started to believe that was far more important than plumbing. You could make friends, exchange software, plan meetups etc all without leaving my desk. When internet came, I definitely would've had that, if this was needed, if it meant crapping in the bushes.
Have to agree, Internet over Indoor Plumbing, since I spend the great majority of my time on the internet vs the toilet. That might be easier for me as I was toilet-trained in a household that used an outhouse containing the infamous "thunderbox".
> I spend the great majority of my time on the internet vs the toilet.
¿Por qué no los dos?
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/man-sits-toilet-bowl-laptop-...
For me personally, indoor plumbing wins hands down. If you took society at large, I'd suggest the answer is still indoor plumbing .. the amount of disease and excess deaths would overrule surveillance capitalism easily.
I wish I could understand the people who have internet without toilets: Is it something where it's just not a big deal to pee / poop outside where they live?
I could see, if I lived in an area where the weather was nice, and it wasn't a big deal to just walk over to a tree and water it, I might not care as much either.
Is it like camping where it's often easier to just duck behind a tree instead of walking to the bathroom?
Sewers and toilets are very, very expensive. Indoor plumbing malfunctions regularly destroy houses even when they are protected by well-enforced building codes, and porcelain toilets basically require industrial mass production. Internet access is much cheaper.
I think it's very fitting to compare the internet to a toilet.