Solarpunk

Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.

Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.

People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.

Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.

Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.

Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions---things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis---while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.

One of my goals for my postcard series is to show a rebuilding society that prioritizes reducing waste and externalities, and examining what weird technologies might appeal to them because of those goals/limitations. So I've been wanting to do a scene of a caustic soda locomotive ever since I first heard about them.

Soda locomotives were a type of fireless steam locomotive that barely made it out of the prototype phase, where the boiler is surrounded by a tank of ‘caustic soda’ (usually one of several possible chemicals), which generates heat when mixed with water. The heat produces steam in the boiler, which is used to drive the pistons, but instead of being released, its condensed and added to the soda to create more heat. This goes on until the soda gets too dilute to produce more heat, but it can be 'recharged' by drying it out again.

These never really took off because it took more coal to dry the soda at the station than to just run a conventional steam locomotive, and electric trains quickly came into their own and filled the niche of quiet, low-pollution trains for inside cities and tunnels.

But I feel like these could pair well with solar steam generators (another late-1800’s design) stationed along the tracks, to create analogue, solar-powered trains. These could run on existing unpowered tracks, without requiring any new electrical infrastructure, just the isolated drying stations.

The train crew would just exchange wet soda for dry and start again (looks like that took about 45 minutes). The cool thing is that this arrangement could be asyncronous - the station can dry out the caustic soda, then store it for when the train shows up. The train can run on cloudy days or at night, as long as they get enough sunny days to dry out big batches of soda at the stops along the way. And the solar concentrators can be huge and optimized for their location because they don’t have to move.

The focus of these postcards isn’t on technological utopias so much as on societies that are reexamining how to do things as they rebuild, anachronistically combining all kinds of tech. So trains and solar concentrators built with 1800’s technology seem like an easier starting place.

The concentrators require fairly simple materials (mirrors or polished metal) and math to make (plus some simple mechanical timing or basic motors/electronics to get them to follow the sun without a human turning a crank).

Most of the descriptions I've seen of drying the caustic soda mention pumping superheated steam through the dilute mix from another (coal) boiler, so it seems like you could use almost any design from the earliest solar steam generators to something like these modern ones depending on the society’s manufacturing capabilities. The solar concentrator/boiler I referenced for the art is a design from 1901.

(The most common modern design for solar steam generation I've seen is that sort of mirrored-trough-and-vaccum-lined-tube system. I mostly went with the big round reflector because I was worried the trough design wouldn't read as distinct from photovoltaic panels in this art style.)

The trains could run with minimal pollution using these simple technologies, and even if their range is lower, or they're not as fast, that might be a trade off this society would accept.

Ideally they would use existing tracks and passenger or freight cars, and only need new infrastructure around whatever station fueled them up on their route (or at a destination). I think this applies to the compressed air locomotives just as well as the caustic soda ones.

(If you don’t like the idea of caustic soda locomotives, but you still want this idea to work, another option with a shorter range is compressed air locomotives. Instead of drying the soda, the station would be using a solar steam engine or windmill or water wheel to run an air compressor, steadily filling a tank which would be used to top up locomotives on their route. This would still allow for isolated infrastructure to power a train along unpowered rails. IRL these mostly saw use in mines.)

The locomotive in the scene is based on a real-life fireless locomotive. They’re similar, but filled with super-hot steam by external sources. They seemed like a good reference for what a caustic soda locomotive might have looked like had the concept reached a more polished, production format. But they don’t really fit my goal for tolerating intermittency as they’d need the heat source to be going when they stopped for a refill.

Curious to hear people’s ideas on how education would look in such a world.

For me, I’d like to see it moved away from testing and results based learning.

A stronger focus on physical engagement with things, e.g. learning biology by going out and cataloging wildlife and learning what’s in a local ecosystem before coming together and researching findings and looking for new questions to ask.

Less sitting around at desks being fed information and a greater focus on individual agency in exploring topics of interest.

Not to say there isn’t a time and a place for “high level” stuff where you need to deep dive into books and listen to lectures, but there needs to be a greater balance in methodology.

This is a projection in Oakland. You can find the original art here.

The way-back machine found a March 2023 Reddit post by Aaron Bushnell where he said, “I’ve realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imagining a better world than I am. I follow YouTubers like Andrewism that fill my head with concrete images of free, post-scarcity communities, and it makes me so much more prepared to reject things about the current world, because I’ve imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now.”

If you care to see the full quote, you can check @tinythunders on Twitter or Andrewism’s YouTube Channel, the community tab.

This conversation and the reactions it caused made me think of a few tips to explicitly veer away from AI-aided dystopias in your fictional universe.

Avoid a monolithic centralized statist super-AI

I guess ChatGPT is the model people use, the idea that there is a supercomputer managing all aspects of a community. And people are understandably wary of a single point of control that could too easily lead to totalitarianism

Instead, have a multitude of transparent local agents managing different systems. Each with a different algorithm and "personality".

Talk about open source

The most used AI models today are open source. We have a media that is biased towards thinking that things that do not generate commercial transactions are not important yet I am willing to bet that more tokens are generated by all the free models in the world than by OpenAI and its commercial competitors.

AIs are not to be produced by opaque companies from their ivory towers. They are the result of researchers and engineers who have a passion for designing smart system and --a fact that is too often obscured by the sad state of our society where you often have to join a company to make a living-- they do it with a genuine concern for humanity's well being and a desire that this work is used for the greater good.

It is among AI engineers that you will find the most paranoids about AI safety and safeguards. In a solarpunk future, this is a public debate and a political subject that is an important part of the policy discussion: We make models together, with incentives that are collectively agreed upon.

AIs are personal

You don't need a supercomputer to run an AI. LLMs today run on relatively modest gaming devices, even on raspberry pi! (though slowly at the moment). Energy-efficient chips are currently being designed to make the barrier of entry even lower.

It is a very safe bet to say that in the future, every person will have their own intelligent agent managing their local devices. Or even one agent per device and an orchestrator on their smartphone. And it is important that they are in complete control of these.

AIs should enhance humans control over their own devices, not make them surrender it.

AIs as enablers of democracy

You not only use your pocket AI to control your dishwasher, it is also your personal lawyer and representative. No human has the bandwidth to go through all the current policy debates happening in a typical country or even local community. But a well designed agent that spends time discussing with you will know your preferences and make sure to represent them.

It can engage in discussions with other agents to find compromises, to propose or oppose initiative.

As everyone's opinion is now included in every decision about road planning, public transportation, construction schedules and urban development, the general landscape will organically grow friendlier for everybody.

Hi all, I'm working on a Solarpunk world building project and I want to know your thoughts on one of the main features of my world. To preface all this and provide some context, my world is an alternate-history with a divergence point sometime in the 2020s. The divergence was caused by a vocal and technically-skilled group of Green-Anarchists that labelled themselves as "Dawn".

Dawn did a whole host of things to ween people off of Capitalism and into my Solarpunk world, I've gone into immense detail on this but I doubt it's relevancy to my question so I'll omit all those details, but there was a tipping-point in which Capitalism crumbled and gave into Dawn's Anarcho-Solar world.

To make sure the world stayed Solarpunk and to give people stress-free lifestyles, they developed 1 AI and 1 AGI. The AGI manages all Dawn technology, such as Dawn power generation, carbon-capture, a global hyper-loop etc and the AI makes sure no one tampers with the AGI (For those unaware, AGI is Artificial General Intelligence, so for example Skynet is an AGI since it can think and do many things, but ChatGPT is an AI because it can only do text).

Most people in my world wont ever have to think about the AI and AGI, it is taught in my education system to make people aware in case of catastrophe but it mostly manages itself and is monitored by the longest-serving Dawn members.

I simply want to know if machines like this can exist in Solarpunk with it remaining Solarpunk, and if people like the idea or not. If you want to know more about my world building then feel free to ask! Thanks for your time in advance :)

P.S. I should mention that AI and AGI are mirrored across 8 different instances and for the most part work independently of each other, meeting only when strictly necessary. This is to give even more defense against tampering and error.

Edit 1: Changed title from Overlord to Background, Overlord implies oppression which the system doesn't do.

In short, US residents need to shut it down before Genocide Joe escalates us to World War III.

Open Source principles applied to biotech is a way we can today fight against the capture of oligarchical seed companies of the very foods we all need to live. Check out here to see what organizations in your area are part of the Global Coalition of Open Source Seed Initiatives (GOSSI).

I projected this and so much more on (formerly) Twitter HQ in San Francisco. You can see then are sign that used to show the company name.

I found these paragraphs inspiring enough to share. Just living is praxis when you live mindfully.

Source: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/brian-a-dominick-animal-liberation-and-social-revolution

For a long while, I'd been picturing a society that handled reuse the way I do IRL - if you have a thing, you make it last as long as possible, fix it if you can, and when it's finally worn out you find another use for it (even if just as component parts). I'd imagined the transfer of usable items would be handled informally, through community networks or something similar to Everything is Free/Buy Nothing groups IRL.

But conversations awhile back got me imagining a bigger, community/societal-level focus on reuse. Perhaps a society where most people's first source for some household items or appliances or furniture would be some kind of community stockpile. I imagine warehouses where items are sorted and tested, fixed, and perhaps broken down to components for other repairs. Where they're catalogued and posted to some kind of library- or eBay-like website. I imagine community drop off and collection points, where someone who's downsizing might bring extra appliances, and young folks just starting out might pick their first furniture. I picture a separate refuse stream for things that are still good or could be fixed, emphasizing that there's a difference between something you don't need anymore, and something nobody needs (actual garbage). I could even see work crews combing through long-abandoned houses, hauling out items to put back into circulation, before disassembling the building, Habitat For Humanity -style, to use the lumber and counters and cabinets etc elsewhere.

I don't think this would be the only source of stuff, probably not even the primary one. If you want fancy furniture I figure you'd go to a local workshop and see what they've got, or commission something from an open-source design. But I could see this system of reuse taking the place of something like Walmart or IKEA. Sort of your default for cheap stuff (I'm weak on economic theory; I'd love a society where it's all free, but I don't know enough to describe that with confidence. Hopefully it'd at least be a government org, or a worker run nonprofit type thing where all profits go to the workers and continuing operation?). I like the idea of a society with an institutional focus on reuse rather than extraction and disposal.

Normally I don't start off with a whole chunk of world building like that, but I'm planning some photobash scenes around these ideas, and I'd love to work out some of the questions and discussions about logistics before I've made the things and done something wrong.

The first question I had was around collection of these items. I'd been imagining some kind of vehicle operating a bit like a garbage truck, making rounds through various neighborhoods collecting the things people don't want, but less frequently and with a slower pace because they have to be more careful with the stuff they pick up and have to make more trips back to the depot. I'd love to do a streetcar or something other than a generic box truck, but I think a truck makes the most sense. Streetcars were occasionally used to deliver the mail, but I've found no examples of them even being used as garbage trucks, which might be able to maintain a pace that wouldn't disrupt everything else on the line. Depending on the level of service offered, they could need a lot of flexibility - do they pick up just from community drop off points, or from the curb outside people's homes, or do they assist with moving things out of homes for those who are elderly or disabled? Maybe different levels of service for different circumstances?

I hope people would do their best to re-home items directly using the future equivalent of EIF or Buy Nothing, but it'd be nice if there was an option besides the landfill for items that don't generate interest in their immediate community, or where the person just wants it gone with the convenience of throwing it out. I feel like this could help with that.

Then there's the question of how do you get bulky items home in a society where almost no one drives? IKEA and Walmart design a lot of their products to fit, flat-packed, into your sedan or hatchback. And they offer delivery. This society would be handling a lot of already built items and have a lower reliance on personal cars. Maybe most street cars would let you lug a dresser onboard if they're not crowded? I've certainly done similar with the local trains, though the guy at the turnstile wasn't paying attention and probably would have stopped us. Maybe you'd use a cargo bike and trailer? Maybe you just have to hire a delivery service for big things? Is it abelist if the small storefront-style drop-off/pickup sites first answer is to hand you a push cart with your bulky item and send you down the street with it?

Do you have any thoughts on the idea of reuse at this scale?

Nov 3 2023 marks the furthest Halley's comet will be from Earth before making the turn-around trip back.

Hi, I'm currently at an eco-village, and had a discussion about washing dishes per hand vs using a dishwasher. I was not completely sure, but have read somewhere, that a dishwasher is more efficient (in terms of energy and water usage). I just fact-checked that and indeed, when not being super careful by handwashing (no running water, using very little detergent, rather cold water etc.), a dishwasher is more efficient.

I think it would be super useful to have a dense wiki for stuff like this for everyday life, because it's so easy to think that something different is more efficient. Because at first thought it doesn't sound immediately intuitive.

Does anybody know if there's something like this? And if not, it probably makes sense to start a wiki like that.

Hi, I've been working on a few photobashes lately, of different scenes in a fictional solarpunk future. I recently started a scene of a solarpunk village. I’ve been thinking a lot about rural places lately, since that’s where I’m from, and how they might change with some of the societal crumbles and contractions I feel like are impending. In my grandparents’ time, the region where I grew up was lots of small villages, usually bunched up around water and local industry, with farms spread out beyond that. With cars, people have spread out in these sprawling bedroom communities that are becoming ever more dense with people. Gas and groceries are 40 minutes away by car (more if you're looking for a box store), and I feel like most people I knew drove an hour each way for work.

I wanted to do a scene sort of showing how things might change in rural areas if cars became impractical (due to shortages etc) and how things could be rebuilt better.

I've realized that this is a bit bigger in scope than most of the things I've depicted before. I'm trying to show most of a community in one shot here (albeit at a distance). And there's so much we could do differently, I don't really want to miss any ideas/opportunities.

I know I want to include the following:

• A dense village surrounded by farms and forest, an abandoned mcmansion or large house far enough out to be impractical
• High speed rail access to the village
• Solar panels
• Waterwheels
• Farms
• Algae farming
• Maybe a bit of an inside-out appearance where they've cleared farmland around the town but planted lots of trees between the buildings for cooling?

But when it comes to stuff like the layout and other societal-structure stuff, I don't really have any specifics in mind, which is why I feel like I should look for input from others rather than just drag along my own assumptions. As always I plan to emphasize reuse, so I can grab some existing bits and pieces of towns, but this'll be in the US where even the small towns aren't (in my experience) clumped this densely, so we have some flexibility with what the current residents have changed.

Here's the really rough version I currently have, so you can get an idea as to the general layout I'm planning for. The big green blank space and the surrounding woods etc is where the village and fields will go.

Sorry if I'm asking around too much, I posted to /c/farming yesterday for ideas for the fields (which I'm also happy to get) but I feel like a solarpunk society should be very consensus-driven, so it makes sense for depictions of it to be as well. I'll be doing smaller, simpler scenes for a bit after this one and should be more self-sufficient.

Not my OC but what I've believed for years: there's no conflict between reducing your own environmental impact and holding corporations responsible. We hold corps responsible for the environment by creating a societal ethos of environmental responsibility that forces corporations to serve the people's needs or go bankrupt or be outlawed. And anyone who feels that kind of ethos will reduce their own environmental impact because it's the right thing to do.

Thoughts?