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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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