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2026 has been full of ups and downs for Star Wars fans, who were treated to the highest-rated project in franchise history with Maul — Shadow Lord . There was never a doubt for Disney and Lucasfilm that the show was going to be a smash hit, which was proven when it was renewed for Season 2 before a single episode hit the air. The first Star Wars movie since 2019, The Mandalorian and Grogu , unfortunately, didn’t find the same success as the first Disney+ show of the year. The film is expected to be the lowest-grossing Star Wars movie in franchise history by the end of its run, even lower than Solo: A Star Wars Story . However, the bad news for Star Wars fans dates back to 2025, when it was announced that Disney canceled The Hunt for Ben Solo movie starring Adam Driver and directed by Steven Soderbergh .

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Before the United States was a country, it was a rebellion: against kings, taxes, and the general idea that someone far away has the right to tell you what to do. In that very foundational sense, there’s nothing more American than opting out, and this map is your field guide to the U.S.’s most creative acts of noncompliance. From California’s Slab City to Amish Country in the Midwest, this is the other America. Not the majority version, but an equally American one. It exists not despite its residents having opted out of the mainstream, but because they have.

1. The Amish

Opting Out of Modernity

Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana

Seeking balance between God and the world. Nearly 50% of the residents of Holmes County, Ohio, are Amish, which means that large parts of the county look as if the 20th century never happened. Horse-drawn buggies clippety-clop past cornfields that have never seen a tractor. There is no Wi-Fi, no TV, no electricity. Bread is baked by hand. Barns are raised by hand, too.

The Amish, an Anabaptist sect that keeps God close by refusing the conveniences of modern life, constitute America’s largest-scale experiment in opting out of modern society — and judging by the numbers, it’s a successful one. In 1900, an estimated 5,000 Amish lived in the U.S. Thanks to high birth rates, an average of six children per woman, the population surpassed 400,000 in 2025. More than 60% reside in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, but Amish settlements have sprung up across 29 other states, including as far afield as New Mexico.

The Amish don’t just ignore progress; they negotiate with it.

The keys to the Amish community’s separation and, arguably, its success are the Ordnung and Gelassenheit . The Ordnung is an unwritten set of rules particular to each congregation. Some Amish, for instance, use tractors, but not rubber tires. Some allow telephones, but not in the house. Gelassenheit translates to “submission” — to the will of God as expressed in the Ordnung .

As these examples show, the Amish don’t just ignore progress; they negotiate with it. Each new technology is evaluated: Will it strengthen the community or weaken it? Will it make members more dependent on others or less? The ban on electricity, for example, is not so much about power as about the grid that would tie Amish households to the outside world. Many Amish have accepted solar panels as they can provide electricity without a grid connection.

The Amish are not unaware of the world beyond their communities. Many young adults purposely explore it during a period called Rumspringa (“jumping around”), but around 80% decide to commit to the Amish lifestyle afterward — enough to keep the community’s population doubling every 20 years or so.

2. National Radio Quiet Zone

Opting Out of Electromagnetic Radiation

Parts of Maryland, Virginia, & West Virginia

Where your phone goes to die. Your phone won’t get any signal in the central part of the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ), and that’s by design. Established in 1958 by the Federal Communications Commission, the NRQZ restricts electromagnetic emissions in a giant rectangle covering 13,000 square miles of Appalachia straddling Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland. Today, it is one of the few radio-quiet places in the world.

The NRQZ is home to the Green Bank Observatory (GBO) , the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. It’s designed to pick up signals so faint they carry less energy than a single snowflake touching the ground, and scientists use it to detect pulsars, map hydrogen clouds, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Also in the NRQZ: Sugar Grove, the location of a National Security Agency (NSA) communications station. Same principle, except these giant antennae are used to capture terrestrial intelligence.

Visitors often describe local life as slower, more social, and more in tune with nature.

For these über-sensitive ears to do their job, the rest of us need to be really quiet when it comes to electromagnetic radiation. Since it would be impossible to ban all modern electronics across such a large part of the country, the NRQZ has been divided into five concentric enforcement zones that grow progressively stricter the closer they are to the GBO and Sugar Grove Station. In Zone 5, the NRQZ’s outermost region, cellphone towers and other fixed transmitters are subject to stricter rules than elsewhere. By the time you reach Zones 1 and 2, which include the GBO and Sugar Grove Station themselves, all unauthorized radiation is strictly forbidden. That means no cellphones, fitness trackers, or even gasoline-powered vehicles (spark plugs generate miniature electromagnetic pulses).

Limited access to modern electromagnetic technology has obvious drawbacks, but there are benefits to living in the NRQZ as well: Visitors often describe local life as slower, more social, and more in tune with nature. People who believe they suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) are also drawn to the area. EHS is not recognized as a medical condition — its symptoms are believed to be psychosomatic manifestations of technoskepticism — but the NRQZ can offer EHS sufferers relief from headaches, fatigue, nausea, tingling skin, and other symptoms.

3. Sanctuary Cities

Opting Out of Immigration Enforcement

Hundreds of cities across the U.S.

Civic disobedience grounded in a religious exception. In ancient Greece, if you touched the altar of Athena, the goddess offered you asylum (Greek for “non-seizure”), meaning you were protected against immediate violence or arrest. With Christianity, churches and abbeys took over this role. In medieval London, the writ of the king did not apply to Whitefriars, a former monastery that had retained its “liberty,” making it a notoriously unruly haven for debtors, prostitutes, and criminals. It was nicknamed “Alsatia,” after the then-lawless region on the border of Germany and France.

America’s sanctuary cities — places where local authorities limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement — also trace their lineage to religious spaces, specifically the churches that offered asylum to refugees from Central America’s civil wars in the early 1980s. The idea then crossed over from religious to civic authorities. In 1985, San Francisco passed a “City of Refuge” resolution that prohibited the use of city funds and resources to assist federal immigration authorities.

Sanctuary cities exercise one form of governmental power to limit another.

While “sanctuary city” lacks an official definition, more than 1,000 jurisdictions across the U.S. have some form of sanctuary policy. The Department of Justice’s list of sanctuary jurisdictions includes 12 states (plus the District of Columbia), four counties, and 18 cities, including Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and, of course, San Francisco.

The constitutional argument for refusing to offer city-level support for federal efforts to enforce immigration laws, including the deployment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is actually rather elegant. It cites the 10th Amendment, which reserves powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government for the states and the people. It also builds on the anti-commandeering doctrine, confirmed by the Supreme Court in Printz v. United States (1997), which prevents the federal government from conscripting local law enforcement into federal programs. In this reading, sanctuary cities are not rebels; they’re constitutionalists sticking to the letter of the law.

Unsurprisingly, that’s not how the Federales see it. The Trump administration threatened to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities and has conducted large-scale ICE operations in sanctuary jurisdictions, most notably Minneapolis in 2025 and 2026. By opting out of federal demands on immigration enforcement, sanctuary cities are exercising one form of governmental power to limit another form of governmental power. It’s the federalist tradition weaponized against the federal government: ironic, paradoxical, and as American as apple pie.

4. Slab City

Opting Out of Government Regulation

Imperial County, California

Welcome to utopia (but bring your own water). Slab City has been called “the last free place in America.” If true, then freedom is not for the faint of heart. Located in the Sonoran Desert, the unincorporated community technically belongs to California, but the state is an absentee landlord. Any government presence is fleeting, and regulations are not enforced. Slab City has no utilities, no zoning ordinances, and, depending on whom you ask, no past and no future — just an eternal, Sun-baked present.

The community takes its name from the concrete slabs left behind when the Marines abandoned Camp Dunlap in 1956. The base fell into California’s lap, but after it failed to find a new purpose for the site, a procession of social misfits marched into the administrative vacuum — the marginal, the bankrupt, the retired, the addicted, the artistic, and the free.

Slab City’s population ebbs and flows with the seasons. In the winter, when the heat is bearable, up to 4,000 people call it home. In the summer, when temperatures regularly exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit, the population dwindles to a few hundred hardcore residents.

Slab City is a great American experiment: part refuge, part art project, part survival challenge.

Today, it is a semi-anarchic, off-the-grid community where locals can find freedom — most notably from the costs of traditional housing. In a country where many people spend more than 30% of their income on housing, Slab City offers a place to live without paying for the privilege. The land and air are free, though the water will cost you.

Even with all the restrictions that their particular brand of freedom imposes, “Slabbers,” as they are called, have built a vibrant community. There is a library. There are churches. Notable landmarks include Salvation Mountain, a monument to Christian folk art that has been called both a national treasure and a health hazard (the paint contains lead), and East Jesus, an evolving art installation consisting of found objects, recycled technology, and philosophical graffiti.

Despite the government’s absence, Slab City is a genuine community. Despite the absence of laws, it is not an amoral place. Paradoxically, it embraces both mutual aid and a live-and-let-live ethos. Slab City is a great American experiment: part refuge, part art project, part survival challenge. It shows true freedom is still available if you’re prepared to suffer a few hardships — and bring your own water.

5. Sudbury Valley School

Opting Out of Traditional Education

Framingham, Massachusetts

The school without a curriculum, classes, or grades. In 1968, French students tore up the streets of Paris to throw cobblestones at the police. That same year, another educational revolution — not as headline-grabbing, but arguably more durable — took place in Framingham, Massachusetts: the opening of the Sudbury Valley School.

The school is radically different from most educational institutions. It has no curriculum, no compulsory classes, and no grades. Teachers are hired on an annually renewable basis by the School Meeting, a democratic assembly in which every staff member and student — ages four through 19 — has a vote. A recipe for chaos and disaster? Hardly. All these years later, not only is the school still going, but the Sudbury Model has inspired more than 40 other schools in Europe, Israel, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere in the U.S.

At a Sudbury school, students do anything they want and nothing they don’t.

The Sudbury Model is based on a radical reading of developmental psychology and democratic theory: Children are natural learners, so give them the freedom and resources to pursue their curiosity. The idea is that they will enjoy learning and, essentially, educate themselves. This stands in contrast to traditional schooling, which, from the Sudbury perspective, is compliance training rather than education.

So, what does a Sudbury education look like? The short answer: Students do anything they want and nothing they don’t. They can play video games, bake cakes, build things, talk, read, or do calculus. Staff supports them in their pursuits. The bet is that “just playing” will nurture an inspired curiosity that is more self-sustaining than compulsory learning.

The Sudbury Model is designed to produce graduates who are highly adaptable to change — a trait the schools argue is essential for the 21st-century economy. So, does it work?

Sudbury schools contend that their graduates generally integrate well into traditional higher education and diverse professional fields, and graduates often report that their self-directed background helped them be adaptable and confident in their post-education careers.

Since Sudbury Model schools tend to lack traditional accreditation, complications can arise with some college applications. Nevertheless, the Sudbury Valley School persists year after year in welcoming children who, by traditional metrics, are doing absolutely nothing, but seem, by every other measure, to be doing entirely fine.

6. ERCOT

Opting Out of the Power Grid

Texas

Why texas powerlines don’t cross state lines. In most of the U.S., electricity flows across state lines. But not Texas. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the power supply for roughly 90% of the state. The system is so deliberately isolated from its neighbors that it has only a handful of connections to the Eastern Interconnection and the Western Interconnection, the two massive grids that power the rest of the continental U.S.

So, is ERCOT a modern expression of Texans’ smoldering secessionist tendencies? Perhaps, but the more proximate explanation is that Texas utility companies want to avoid oversight by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the most straightforward way to do that is to keep power lines from crossing state lines. That allows Texan power company executives — resourceful, independent, and, one imagines, wearing 10-gallon hats — to decide among themselves how to regulate (or not regulate) energy infrastructure.

The system that protects Texas from federal regulation also makes it an energy island.

For decades, this looked like a win for Texas. The Lone Star State had a deregulated energy market, low electricity prices, and a grid powered largely by the state’s own oil and gas, with its burgeoning wind farms increasingly in the mix. (Texas produces more wind power than any other state.)

But when things go wrong in Texas, they go wrong on a Texan scale. In February 2021, Storm Uri brought a prolonged cold spell to the state. Temperatures fell to record lows, freezing gas wells and unwinterized wind turbines. Millions of households lost power, and hundreds of people died. The grid was on the brink of total failure. ERCOT’s own post-mortem analysis found it came within five minutes of a catastrophic statewide blackout that could have lasted for months.

After the crisis, several high-profile politicians found fault with the wind turbines (some of which had kept operating), while praising the gas infrastructure (which had failed substantially). Seven of 12 ERCOT board members resigned , but the fundamental issue — the state’s grid independence — was not addressed. The system that protects Texas from federal regulation continues to prevent it from importing relief when necessary. The state is an energy island. Whether the cost of that isolation is being mitigated by the weatherization regulation passed after the previous crisis will become apparent during the next one.

7. Trust Industry

Opting Out of Taxation

South Dakota

Recreating Switzerland in a prairie state. South Dakota. Known for the Black Hills, brutal winters, and … its finance industry? In certain circles, it is. While the state is home to fewer than a million people, it is the legal domicile of around $800 billion (and, by some accounts, up to $1 trillion) in assets held in trusts. How did the Mount Rushmore State end up being the Switzerland of the prairies?

The story starts in 1981, with Citibank desperate to escape New York’s usury laws, which capped the interest rate it could charge on credit cards. Seeing an opportunity, South Dakota abolished its usury ceiling and convinced Citibank to move its credit card operations to Sioux Falls. The move brought jobs and growth. Having discovered the power of regulatory vacuums, the state legislature kept going.

South Dakota has broken no federal laws — it has merely benefited from the holes between them.

In 1983, South Dakota abolished its rule against perpetuities, the ancient legal doctrine preventing families from locking wealth in a trust forever. South Dakota became home to an abundance of “dynasty trusts,” as they came to be known. These trusts shelter assets from taxes not just for one generation, but for all future generations.

Over time, ancillary financial services sprang up in Sioux Falls and Pierre, the twin hubs of South Dakota’s trust industry: asset protection trusts, shielding wealth from creditors; directed trusts, separating investment from administration; quiet trusts, requiring no notice to beneficiaries; and more. As a result, many of the wealthiest families in the U.S. and beyond (South Dakota’s trusts are available for foreign citizens) have parked their fortunes in the state, where they are guarded by structures so complex that even Smaug couldn’t sniff them out.

South Dakota’s fiscal opt-out offers such strong asset protection to out-of-state and foreign individuals and entities that it can shield them from exposure to their local jurisdiction’s taxes and regulations. No doubt many of the fortunes parked in its trusts are the result of honest hard work, but investigative journalists have pointed out that some of the money comes from convicted fraudsters, relatives of autocrats, and other less-than-salubrious clients. South Dakota has broken no federal laws, though — it has merely benefited from the holes between them.

8. Mackinac Island

Opting Out of Automobiles

Mackinac Island, Michigan

The horse-powered tourist destination. In the narrow straits between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, just east of the bridge connecting Michigan’s two peninsulas, sits Mackinac Island, a picturesque and peculiar tourist destination that smells of fudge and horse manure. The former is due to tourists. The latter goes back to the city leaders’ decision to ban the automobile in 1898. The interdiction remains in effect to this day, so the main source of horsepower on Mackinac Island is actual horses.

The U.S. is arguably the most car-oriented country on Earth. Its cities, economy, and culture are built around the personal vehicle and the freedom it promises. Mackinac Island is one of just a handful of places — including half a dozen smaller islands on the eastern seaboard and an isolated village deep within the Grand Canyon — that have opted out of America’s car culture.

America can sustain two opposing realities simultaneously — especially if both can be monetized.

In truth, it never opted in . The ban, passed because a visiting motor vehicle spooked the local horses, was in place 15 years before the first Ford Model T rolled off an assembly line. In the century-plus since, Mackinac Island has adapted its pre-automotive ways to modern times. The island’s 500 permanent residents and the tourists who invade it every summer travel by foot, bike, and horse-drawn carriage. Cargo is transported by dray, a two-wheeled horse-drawn cart. Most of the emergency services get around on horseback, although they do have a few motorized vehicles, including an ambulance.

In peak season, the island’s transportation needs are met by around 500 horses, and collectively, they produce a lot of horse manure — somewhere between three and four tons daily — which is hauled by barge to the mainland. In the summer, Mackinac Island also produces around 10,000 pounds of fudge every day. The local specialty is sold all along Main Street, hence the unique blend of aromas on the island — it’s part stable, part candy shop, and wholly a relic of the 19th century.

Mackinac Island is the conceptual antipode to Detroit, the Motor City, further south in the same state. But the American system can sustain two opposing realities simultaneously — especially if both can be monetized. With its pleasing Victorian-era architecture, unique horse-drawn transportation, and copious amounts of delicious fudge, the island without cars has been a highly lucrative tourist destination for more than a century. Today, even the smell of its horse manure, once ubiquitous, can be thought of as quaint and charming.

9. Quartzsite

Opting Out of Fixed Homes

Quartzsite, Arizona

A temporary capital for America’s nomads. It sounds like a contradiction. By definition, nomads don’t have a fixed abode, and by extension, they can’t have a capital city. The town of Quartzsite, Arizona, defies that logic by being two different places in two different seasons. In the summer, it’s a sleepy village with a permanent population of about 2,500 and declining. But in the winter, thousands of itinerant Americans in RVs, vans, converted school buses, trailer-pulled homes, and other live-in vehicles that defy categorization flock to the speck in the Sonoran Desert.

How many arrive is hard to say, because Americans of the “I live where I park” persuasion don’t like being counted. Estimates range from 150,000 to 250,000 — the latter figure would make Quartzsite one of the 10 largest cities in Arizona.

Quartzsite has been a winter gathering place for America’s nomads since the 1960s, when people discovered that the Southwest desert is the cheapest part of the country to wait out the cold season. The early Quartzsite scene was dominated by conventional retirees, who traded the freezing temperatures of a Michigan winter for the Arizona sunshine.

Motivations for life on the road balance between social rebellion and outright poverty.

That started changing in the 2010s, and in the post-pandemic years, members of the van-life movement have flocked to Quartzsite. Driven by a mix of Instagram aesthetics and economic necessity, the movement consists mainly of millennials and Gen Zers who have done the math on rent and concluded that living on the road in a converted cargo van is more achievable and satisfying than struggling to get by in traditional society.

The Oscar-winning movie Nomadland (2020) captures Quartzsite on the cusp of change, with motivations for life on the road balancing between social rebellion and outright poverty. Van life may offer an adventurous alternative to mortgages and landlords, but life on the road has its own considerable drawbacks. Opting out of residential stability also means saying goodbye to the kind of civic participation that requires a fixed address. Registering to vote becomes more difficult, as does accessing government services and establishing the local ties that most social support systems assume. America’s nomads gain freedom and mobility; they lose roots and services.

Quartzsite is a good example of the difficulty of navigating those trade-offs. The small town’s infrastructure is hardly adequate for its seasonal invasion — water supply is a persistent problem. Nevertheless, people reliably converge on the town every winter. If housing costs continue to rise, the number of nomads in America — currently estimated at up to 3 million people, or 1% of the total population — could grow further, with Quartzsite’s seasonal population rising along with it.

10. The New Camaldoli Hermitage

Opting Out of the Digital World

Big Sur, California

Taking the silent treatment to the next level. In Big Sur, on a ridge high above the Pacific Ocean, sits the New Camaldoli Hermitage. There, a community of Benedictine monks bakes fruitcake, sells honey, prays, and practices silence — and you can join them.

The monks run a small retreat house for secular visitors who want to embrace silence and disconnect from modern life in the broadest possible sense — giving up everything that came after, say, the Council of Trent (1545–63). Trying to disconnect so completely at home is likely hard for many people to imagine, let alone attempt, which is perhaps why the retreat is consistently booked months out. There is no internet at New Camaldoli and no phone service. What guests do get are a small cell with a narrow bed, three meals a day, and beautiful ocean views — plus whatever they take away from a few days without verbal communication and digital connectivity.

Retreats like New Camaldoli are a form of hygiene for the mind.

The impact is significant enough that silent retreats are now a growing trend in the U.S. tourism industry. There are retreats of a Christian persuasion, like the one run by the Benedictines in Big Sur, but there are also Zen monasteries offering a Buddhist take on switching off for a few days, and secular resorts that offer a digital detox without a religious angle. The rising popularity of these retreats mirrors the rise of the attention economy, with its addictive-by-design apps and social media platforms. You could say that retreats like New Camaldoli are not a luxury, but a necessity — a form of hygiene for the mind.

The retreats offer more than just an opportunity for introspection, though. They give visitors a reprieve from the performance of digital life. Consciously or not, most of us constantly curate and present versions of ourselves online, and in turn, we are ambiently aware of everyone’s opinions about everything at all times. A week of silence and prayer, with monks who always live this way, can expand one’s perspective, showing alternative ways to relate to time and to others.

Perhaps opting out Benedictine-style will go mainstream as a way to defragment our attention spans and recalibrate our senses of self. If that’s the case, the monks of Big Sur are going to need a much bigger guesthouse.

This article Mapped: America’s 10 most creative acts of noncompliance is featured on Big Think .

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Here's an embarrassing thing to admit on the internet: when I was a teenage subscriber to Nintendo Power magazine, I picked the Donkey Kong 64 soundtrack as my "sign-up gift" because I wanted to be able to listen to the DK Rap on CD . Why I was obsessed with the song I can't say 25 years later, but Donkey Kong 64 is a memorable mess of a game—sprawling, ambitious, funny, inventive, and often infuriating, with a predilection for collectibles so infamous that the developers made fun of themselves for it a few years later.

The point is, Donkey Kong 64 is a game that inspires strong feelings in those who've played it. So it seems fitting that members of the DK64 randomizer community, who've dedicated years to picking it apart and putting it back together, would start developing an unofficial PC port with a specific rallying cry:

"Fuck AI vibe coding bullshit."

DK64 Recompiled, announced in a YouTube video in late June, is actually the second project with that exact name, and that's no coincidence. It's the latest example of an increasingly common point of friction in the game emulation and hacking scene, as experienced programmers butt heads with those eager to use new AI tools to spin up new ports of old games in record time. In some cases, ports written with AI tools like Claude are ostracized or ignored. But in the case of Donkey Kong 64, the game's biggest fans weren't about to cede ground.

"The DK64 randomizer dev team is owning this shit now," contributor 2dos wrote in the N64 Recomp Discord server, shortly after the video's debut. "We have decided to take on and own this development due to the poor development direction of another recompilation project of DK64 happening concurrently that is heavily leaning on AI vibe code, and thus is resulting in a poor quality project that will make it progressively harder to manage as time goes on. Our DK64 recompilation project is backed by folks who have worked on and tinkered with the backend of the DK64 code for well over a decade, and do not rely on vibe coding to make code changes."

Static recompilation is a technique that, in short, translates all of a game's code from one system's language to another; unlike emulation, it's not simulating the original hardware holistically. The most prominent hobby project using this technique so far is N64 Recomp, announced just over two years ago , which is a recompilation tool specifically geared towards Nintendo 64 games. Since its debut we've seen modders use it to create PC ports of Banjo-Kazooie , Star Fox 64, Mario Kart 64, and more, while similar projects have sprung up for other consoles like the Xbox 360.

Legally, the freshly written code is clean because these recompiled ports don't contain any of the assets from the original games—players have to provide a ROM file themselves. The porting process has become an ethical, rather than legal, battleground in the last few months, as "vibe coded" projects have begun cropping up practically every day.

One developer has used Claude's AI coding to spin up recompilation tools for the NES, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, Super Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, and Virtual Boy, each with a handful of games at least bootable so far. Another's got GitHub repositories for everything from the PS3 to the ZX Spectrum. Others have used the Xbox 360 recompilation framework ReXGlue to pump out ports at a seemingly astonishing rate—but once you get past the YouTube videos hyping them up, the reality isn't quite so impressive.

"Vibe coding a recomp has started to become significantly more prominent and not in a good way," says Ballaam, a contributor to the DK64 randomizer and now DK64 Recompiled alongside 2dos. "I think GoldenEye was released somewhat recently with being heavily vibe coded and, as a result of that (and probably either dev inexperience or overconfidence in the AI output), it leads to some very critical bugs which make the recomp borderline unplayable. The main N64 recomp server has gone as far as to not promote any recomp which uses AI for a significant portion of it."

(Image credit: Rare, Banjo Kazooie Recompiled) That GoldenEye project has also drawn criticism from those who know the game inside and out. The paradox of current tools making it easier than ever to start projects means anyone can vibe code their way to a partially working port, but shaping it into an accurate, crash-free, feature-rich version of a game is a different story.

2dos warns that a big risk with relying on AI is technical debt—a codebase becoming harder to understand and modify as it grows, with maintenance becoming "a nightmare" if you don't put in the work to thoroughly document it. The knock-on effect is that other humans are less likely to want (or even be able) to contribute. If a developer doesn't thoroughly understand the code the AI writes, that will also require them to spend more tokens to fix bugs. Those costs can add up fast, and the AI's "fixes" won't necessarily be good, either.

In the case of the AI-based Donkey Kong 64 recompilation, 2dos discovered that the agentic coding had modified RT64 , "the base module that makes the N64 graphics render."

"That would lead to significant management and compatibility issues down the line, and cause other unexpected side effects that are currently visible in preview videos in the other recomp," he says.

Vibes: Questionable

Using AI is attractive because it skips past the slow, manual process of figuring out exactly what every function in a game is doing, which can often take years. Many of the polished recompilation ports available currently are for games that have previously been decompiled , creating fresh, human-readable source code. It's an enormous undertaking even for old games, but understanding what the source code is doing helps enormously when troubleshooting.

Decompilation also makes modding much more viable, which is one of the most attractive features for modern ports of retro games. (DK64: Recompiled's debut trailer touts support for a tag anywhere mod that will let players swap between Kongs on the fly, addressing one of the most common complaints about the game's backtrack-heavy design.)

Developer SrBananaMan64 recently released a PC port of Harvest Moon 64 alongside a range of mods to speed up messages, zoom out the camera, and so on. A completed decompilation by another developer helped make that a reality.

"They're using a powerful tool without putting in the work to actually learn what it does"

ReXGlue developer

"Recompilation doesn’t actually need a 100% decomp to work, just enough for the symbols to be mapped out to produce a viable .elf file that N64Recomp uses," SrBananaMan64 says. "But this game seemed like it needed the proper enhancements to spruce [it] up… The quality of the game is lacking so it needs the widescreen and high frame rates to compensate for that in my opinion."

He shares the DK team's view that developers "should never let AI take the wheel," even if it can occasionally be an "amazing tool" for specific uses. "Minuscule tasks such as searching through a decomp for a certain function you would like to patch or mod," for example.

Lines for acceptable AI usage are now being drawn across the open source development scene. The maintainers of the Godot engine are now rejecting "substantial pieces" of AI-generated code . A nascent recompilation project for the GameCube & Wii declares "No AI code is used," and that it's a "human hand-made project by a group of passionate developers, who want the best for the Retro Gaming community." So does a solo project tackling recompilation for the PS1 .

An in-progress recompilation of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night via RecompOne (Image credit: RecompOne, Konami) A port for Sonic Advance also has a "strict no AI policy," championing the endeavor's underlying purpose: "We want humans to use this project to practice their skills. Reverse engineering, documenting, understanding, being part of the process."

Tom, the developer behind ReXGlue, sees the low-effort ports as a "people problem," not an issue with the tool itself. "The real issue is people who don't bother to understand what they're posting," he says. "They're using a powerful tool without putting in the work to actually learn what it does, and then wondering why their project falls apart, performs poorly, or has nothing genuinely new to bring to the table. It's like riding a motorcycle before you can even ride a bike."

One common defense for vibe coding ports boil down to "this is just my hobby project, so ignore it if you don't like it." One counter-argument to that point is ethical. Even setting aside the broader environmental impact and stolen training data of generative AI models, there's an argument that even a fan-made port should endeavor to do justice to the original work—to honor the game's original creators by representing it as accuracy as possible. Another is that a vibe coded port that's likely to have those long-term maintenance issues 2dos warned about could pull interest away from a human-coded project that's more likely to be perfected in the long run. The existence of a half-assed project could even turn another developer away from putting months or years of their work into a game at all.

"That’s a big risk," SrBananaMan64 says. For example the Smash Bros. Battleship project which was completely AI generated will take away from the release of mine." (He's currently working on his own recompilation of the N64 fighter).

Another common defense from those simply eager to play a game they love—that anything is better than nothing—also doesn't necessarily hold up beyond the initial burst of excitement.

(Image credit: Nintendo, DK64: Recompiled) "I think there is some sentiment from those who haven't experienced a vibe coded recomp that 'who cares if its vibe coded as long as it works," says Ballaam, "when they don't fully realize that for the most part, they really really don't.

"LLMs nowadays have lowered the skill floor of producing a functioning piece of code that those who are technologically curious but don't have the patience or passion to fully learn a language can feel like they're coding. They scale up their projects but don't scale up their learning to accommodate their desires because they rely too much on the AI crutch."

Perhaps someday, as agentic coding continues to advance, vibe coded ports really will be sufficient. Perhaps a small portion of this initial wave of vibe coders will even pick up enough interest in the process to learn to do the programming themselves. Or maybe the rising costs of AI models will dissuade casual hobbyists from burning tokens on projects that are hard to see through to completion.

For now we're in the thick of it, and we're sure to see more competing projects like Donkey Kong 64 Recompiled before we come out the other side.

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Shielding astronauts from the killer radiation they face is a central challenge facing any designer of a deep-space crewed mission. Even relatively low levels of exposure for long periods of time can lead to everything from central nervous system damage to cancer. But current solutions, such as passive water shells or active superconducting magnets, have their own limitations. To get around those, a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Valerio Parisi and a team of researchers from Italy and Germany, looks at the feasibility of using a permanent magnet (and its associated permanent magnetic field) to potentially block some of that deadly radiation without the costs of competing technologies.

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“I would prefer not to.”

Those words, printed in white capital letters on a black T-shirt, are worn by a man surrounded by crates full of books in Zuccotti Park, downtown Manhattan. It is late October 2011, and the man doesn’t know it yet, but in three weeks’ time, the books in his crates will be seized by the NYPD and destroyed.

The slogan on the man’s T-shirt comes from Herman Melville’s 1853 short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The words are spoken by Bartleby, a lawyer’s copyist, who has become, in the words of The New Republic , the “patron saint of civil disobedience.”

In Melville’s fable, Bartleby works diligently for a New York lawyer until one day, for no discernible reason, he stops and instead responds to his employer’s every request with the phrase: “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby remains at his desk, and the lawyer’s every attempt to get him to work proves unsuccessful. Eventually, the lawyer tells Bartleby to pack up and leave the office. “I would prefer not to,” is the reply.

We never learn why Bartleby behaves as he does or, in fact, anything about his past. Melville deliberately avoids clues, and this is perhaps why the story continues to resonate so widely, from The Economist , which has a “Bartleby” column about the mundanity of working life, to the Australian children’s cartoon Bluey , which features a poker-faced “Bartlebee” doll in a Christmas episode. The mystery of Bartleby is unsettling: He’s a blank page. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued that his very choice of words — “I would prefer not to” — creates an ambiguous “zone of indetermination” that dissolves normal linguistic binaries and seems to threaten the social conventions on which we rely.

Literature is full of characters who opt out of prevailing worldviews. The interesting question is how far we, as readers, condone their opting out.

The man wearing the Bartleby T-shirt is Zach, one of the librarians who created the People’s Library at the heart of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest. The protest was a response to the global financial crisis of 2008 and a perceived lack of culpability or contrition amongst banks and corporations. Under the banner “We are the 99%,” protesters staged a 59-day sit-in at Zuccotti Park, highlighting inequality and championing social justice.

At the center of the occupation was the People’s Library, which grew out of donations until it numbered more than 5,000 books. The library adopted Melville’s story — the subtitle of which is “A Story of Wall-Street” — staging readings and printing T-shirts. I’m looking at a photograph of Zach from an old People’s Library blog post , which explains:

“Bartleby” is an imperfect analogy for Occupy Wall Street, but it nevertheless resonates because it is about how a refusal can open up new ways of seeing. Bartleby’s refusal — and his occupation of the Chancery office — punctures the “doctrine of assumptions” that naturalized the power relations governing the employer’s world.

Bartleby’s occupation of a Wall Street office in the story has a direct connection to Occupy Wall Street, but the mystery of his behavior makes him a fickle figurehead. Literature is full of other characters who opt out of prevailing worldviews for more tangible reasons. The interesting question is how far we, as readers, condone their “opting out.”

If we find the status quo dystopian, then opting out is clearly the morally commendable choice. When Winston Smith writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” over and over again in his secret diary, we cheer because we know those words represent the first steps of a journey that will place him in opposition to the hideous, authoritarian, joyless world of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). We thrill when the fireman Guy Montag pockets an illicit book in Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and when Offred meets Ofglen in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), we yearn for her to join the Mayday resistance and oppose the Republic of Gilead.

The case is also clear when the prevailing worldview is rife with prejudice or bigotry. The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin, for example, dramatizes Edna Pontellier’s gradual rejection of 19th-century marital and maternal expectations in favor of a life marked by artistic and romantic freedom. The same is true of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston, in which Janie Crawford overcomes similar frustrations and the added impediment of racial prejudice.

But the moral status of opting out becomes less obvious in the apparently bucolic genre of “back to nature” stories, in which a character swaps a conventional lifestyle for a simpler way of living. In Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees (1957), the young Cosimo climbs a tree in the baronial garden after arguing with his father about eating snail soup. Cosimo swears he will never come down for the rest of his life and stays true to his promise. He lives in the garden’s trees and the local woods, idling, reading, and pursuing amorous adventures until he is an old man. Similarly, in Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground (1980), Abra, driven to desperation, abandons her loving husband and children to live alone on a smallholding in rural Ontario, growing vegetables and forgetting about her family.

Behind both of these stories lies Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), the textbook for this mode of opting out: Its ethos extols this kind of experimental self-dependence, environmental awareness, and spiritual discovery. Indeed, if The New Republic hadn’t already canonized Bartleby, Thoreau would have a decent claim to being the “patron saint of civil disobedience.” After all, the first product of his sojourn at Walden Pond was the 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” in which he argues that the “only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

As readers, we can empathize with the reasons for opting out while simultaneously regretting the circumstances that make it an attractive option.

Much as I admire Thoreau, I detect something naggingly selfish in Walden , as I do at the end of Voltaire’s Candide (1759), when Candide gives up engaging with the world and settles down to tend his cottage garden instead. We understand, of course, that trauma and the frustrations of modern life can motivate a retreat to nature, but abstaining from society still feels, on some level, like capitulation. Voltaire would argue that that is his point: It’s impossible to remain optimistic and engaged in the face of the world’s misery.

My point is that, as readers, we can empathize with the reasons for opting out while simultaneously regretting the circumstances that make it an attractive option.

And of course, there are examples of opting out that lead to obviously negative results. Characters such as Ilya Ilyich Oblomov in Ivan Goncharov’s eponymous novel (1859) or Jean des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (1884) have opted out of society through an apathetic, aristocratic sense of ennui. Both have become so self-involved that they can barely leave their rooms or even their beds. At one point, des Esseintes encrusts the shell of his pet tortoise with exotic jewels until it is crushed to death under its own weight. Goncharov and Huysmans treat their characters with affectionate humor, but they are hardly role models for fulfilling life choices.

Even more destructive are characters such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who retreats to his subterranean lodgings to stew in frustration and write his diatribe against society, or Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham, who stops all the clocks in her mansion and sits in her crumbling bridal dress amidst a rotting wedding breakfast while plotting the downfall of the male sex. Perhaps the most disturbing example of all is Meursault in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), who steps so far out of the range of normal human emotions that he feels nothing at his mother’s funeral or when he shoots a man dead on an Algerian beach. At the end of the novel, convicted of murder, Meursault embraces the “tender indifference of the world.”

Bartleby’s motivations are opaque. He can be read as a valiant opponent of capitalism, but he may equally be a victim of depression.

Literature demonstrates that the moral legitimacy of opting out depends on the circumstances in which one finds oneself, and moreover, that people can be skillful at spinning narratives to legitimize their behavior. We need to tune our analytical abilities and reach our own conclusions as to how far opting out is a valid option.

The same is true of politics. We need to use our skills as readers when we consume news feeds. We need to listen to politicians as if they were unreliable narrators; we need to look for ulterior meanings and notice rhetorical techniques. When President Trump withdraws the U.S. from the World Health Organization or Bernie Sanders criticizes the North American Free Trade Agreement, our duty is to analyze their narratives and decide whether their positions are legitimate.

This is why Zach was wearing a Bartleby T-shirt in 2011. But, again, Bartleby’s motivations are opaque. Of all the literary examples we’ve discussed, his decision to opt out can be interpreted most diversely: He can be read as a valiant opponent of capitalism, but he may equally be a victim of depression, or he may be displaying a catastrophically harmful and selfish protectionism.

In the story, Bartleby is eventually dragged to “the Tombs” — the Hall of Justice — where he starves quietly to death because he prefers not to eat. On November 15, 2011, Zuccotti Park was cleared. The protesters were evicted, and the 5,554 books in the People’s Library were seized by the NYPD, loaded into garbage trucks, and destroyed.

Fifteen years later, we can speculate as to whether politicians and corporations are any more engaged with society. Are they seeking to improve the world? Are they looking out for the 99%? Or perhaps, like Bartleby, they would prefer not to.

This article “I would prefer not to”: The mystery behind literature’s most famous act of refusal is featured on Big Think .

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The goal of the TechRadar Choice Awards has always been to celebrate the most-loved tech releases by enabling the real-world users of the products to combine their experience with our editors' expertise to choose our winners.

It’s time to take this idea further: in 2026, we’re running two sets of awards back to back: meet the TechRadar Readers’ Choice Awards, and the TechRadar Product of the Year Awards. Combined, these are the TechRadar Awards 2026 .

They both have the same core categories, covering all the products we love to test and explore on TechRadar, ranging from TVs to tablets, drones to DACs, coffee machines to console accessories.

However, the winners of the TechRadar Readers’ Choice Awards will be chosen 100% by public vote, while the winners of the TechRadar Product of the Year Awards will be chosen 100% by our editors and reviewers.

The shortlists of products that readers will vote on in the TechRadar Readers’ Choice Awards will be chosen by the TechRadar team, selected from the most popular and highest-rated products released during the eligibility period (meaning they must be released between 1st September 2025 and 31st September 2026 in most cases).

• Read the full eligibility criteria for the TechRadar Awards 2026

To give the brands and products you represent (or that you just love) the best chance to appear in the shortlists, you can nominate them for these awards, starting 7 July 2026. Whether you work with the product you're nominating, or are just a fan, give it your support!

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The winners will be announced in October — make sure your favorite products are in with a chance by nominating them!