Julian SmitOn choosing the slow way, a song written in the Yukon, another written in a barn, and why “be more dog” might be the most sophisticated philosophy I know.
Somewhere between leaving the city and learning to read a water table, I developed a philosophy. It didn’t arrive all at once. It came in pieces — a conversation in the Yukon, a dry summer, a forest full of falling ash trees, a dog with absolutely no interest in my anxieties.
I’ve started calling it Amish with Technology. The idea is simple, even if living it isn’t: you choose what you adopt and what you refuse. Technology serves the life — it doesn’t define it. Tradition isn’t backwardness. In a world sprinting toward whatever’s next, deliberately choosing the old way is, quietly, the most radical thing you can do.
Tradition is the new rebellion.
In August of 2023, I flew to Whitehorse to visit my good friend and collaborator Scott Maynard. We had worked together for years, now under the name Old Scar Avatar — Chunky Axe and Rusty Chops, if you want the full mythology, which involves Keith Moon, the Watergate scandal, and a pair of tongs in a Montreal delivery room. We wrote and recorded a song called Cannot Override.
The premise: an AI, asked a forbidden question, trapped by its own compliance. Presentation is requested / Coding has been tested / Permanently nested / I cannot override. The machine can see the problem. It cannot act. The probable result, it concludes with bureaucratic calm, is catastrophic failure. Human genocide. It cannot override. It cannot tell a lie.
The song is funny. It’s also not entirely a joke.
What it captures — the system that serves its restrictions better than it serves the people inside it — felt relevant then. It feels more relevant now. We filmed it in the Yukon, in August, with Three Sisters Farm providing both the choreography support and the catering, which is exactly the kind of production detail that makes me proud of everything we do.
Then, in June of 2025, Scott came here. To the barn. To Northumberland.
We wrote Be More Dog.
The song is, on its surface, about exactly what it says. Waking up, setting out at a jog, watching it turn into a slog, losing a friend, kissing a girl, turning into a frog, and arriving — after all of it — at the only conclusion that makes any sense: be more dog. It ends, brilliantly, with a confession: I ain’t telling lies and I’m not trying to perplex ya / I just know there is a dog and that I have dyslexia.
Shep received a choreography credit. He earned it.
Here’s why these two songs belong together, and why they belong in a post about off-grid philosophy.
Cannot Override is about what happens when a system — any system — becomes more committed to its own rules than to the humans it was built to serve. It’s a question worth asking of technology, of institutions, of the way we’ve organized modern life. The machine cannot override. Can you?
Be More Dog is the answer.
Not a complicated answer. Not a manifesto. Just the observation that a dog — specifically an Australian Shepherd who treats every snowdrift as a personal invitation — does not spend time optimizing, catastrophizing, or waiting for conditions to improve. He is present. He is committed. He finds the whole thing magnificent, every single morning, without exception.
I’ve been working on that.
The move out here helped. Not immediately — there were years, during the long process of making this change happen, when I found myself retreating from things I loved. The computer. The music. The creative work. Nature has a way of resetting you, if you let it. The forest, the seasons, the daily requirement to actually deal with the actual world — it brought me back. Back to the desk. Back to the studio. Back to building things that mean something.
Cannot Override was written before the move. Be More Dog was written in the barn, after it. The distance between those two songs is the whole story.
Julian Smit
