The Solarpunk Stack, Part 1

An Architecture for Designing Futures

OK I wasn’t sure if I could justify finishing this post on the same pretext of “doing what I’m good at” for Palestine as my last post because while it covers most of the things I usually want to point out we could actually be doing instead of “firebombing a Wal-Mart” or posting about it and then not firebombing a Wal-Mart, these methods are focused on achieving our own independence from the systems structuring our problems here, and don’t bring much weight to bear either across oceans or under full-blown military existential threat. Then I remembered the reason I started thinking about that was the almost unnoticeable week-long “Global Strike” (now months ago) that was articulated essentially as a less clearly defined Buy Nothing Day, a tactic I’m seeing invoked around more and more disparate issues. It’s weird to see, after the early 2010s left radicalized itself off the failure of the “raising awareness” and “let’s do this, internet” models of activism from Occupy to Kony 2012, Gen Z embracing it with stan-conditioned enthusiasm - but then, what millennials opted for as more pragmatic and realistic (edgy electoralism, in the form of both Bernie and Trump) wasn’t either. What’s remarkable is that while Buy Nothing Day was conceived of as a limited prefiguration (and Occupy tried and failed to jump from this prefiguration to permanent revolution with no planning or scaling in between) of a world where nobody would buy anything (outside of maybe some Graeberian socially and temporally delimited market settings), the new consumer strikes, occupying an ambiguous position between culture war boycott, general strike, school walkout and social distancing, depend for effect on the assumption that you will be consuming (indeed, in some settings like the horizontal art/media economy, ethically/politically obligated to consume) the rest of the time anyway, and has little causal relation in either direction to its target besides as refusal to participate in a complicit capitalism as a whole. Solarpunk has a negative association with this kind of sentimental anti-consumerism and “community project” lifestylism (and the grifts that spring up to take advantage of them), but I always understood solarpunk to be about rebuilding every technological and social relation to nature from the ground up. And I mean from the ground up in a sense distinct from high modernism’s top down, the sense in which “techno-solutions” are generally stymied in climate discourse. Solarpunk, drawing not only on anarchist speculation (whether or not it has to be anarchist) but the original cyberpunk with its emphasis on amateur and underground technocultures, proposes that “technological” forms of intervention need not necessarily be hierarchical or founded on the domination of nature. Nor does one “techno-solution” allow the rest of industrial capitalism to chug along unaffected; interventions must be made at every level of the stack.

It is this sense of interventions at every level that I think the solarpunk imaginary contains some of the only practicable approaches to our current problems - political and ecological, even though little of this potential has been recognized partly because of the predominance of aesthetic readings of the concept. I’m using the Stack in Benjamin Bratton’s sense of an architecture of divided sovereignty between different technical and political structures with different scales and boundaries. But I’m also using it in Ziz’s sense of a closed loop of energy required to do anything, particularly anything not already built into the one you’re in. If you’re looking for a fully general “solution to” the monocult/monoculture deadlock described in my last post, btw, I highly encourage you to read that post first. I’m sure you’ve heard stories about Ziz, but the infohazards can all be disarmed by one simple fact: neither Ziz nor any of her followers have built a “closed loop” themselves. They’ve substituted a conceptual and ideological stack for the material one even though one of the core insights in The Matrix Is A System could be a restatement of Marx, a better crystallization of base/superstructure than many Marxists grasp - “Institutions that become a source of food generate the same almost-absolute political pressure to continue themselves.” Or for that matter Fela Kuti - “water, him no get enemy”.

None of these suggestions are meant to be exhaustive - everything in this post feels embarrassingly provisional even though I’ve been promising it for months and every section took forever to write; I think Marx also had this problem. He wanted to solve it with a centralized party; I’m not categorically opposed to it, but even Marxist-Leninists will admit there aren’t exactly many worthy of loyalty right now, so for the moment I’m just gonna crowdsource it, a possibility Marx couldn’t really imagine but I can’t believe he wouldn’t jump on if he could. If you catch a gap in one of them that I haven’t bracketed or addressed, and I’m sure there will be many, instead of rushing to discredit me in favour of your preferred non-ideology, try and think of something that might fill it. After all, whether you go for state socialism, rigorous anarchism, left communism, electoral incrementalism or based MAGA communism, you’re going to need to solve most of these problems anyway, and having infrastructure before the world burns and your ideology rises from the ashes won’t hurt. As an epistemic/cognitive companion for thinking about the practical dimensions of the stack I suggest Yudkowsky’s Inadequate Equilibria. Alternatively, my only hope is whenever you next feel stuck doomscrolling or arguing about how the other wretched poster needs to Change Their Life before you, you look back at this and look for something you think you either could do or, not knowing how to do, would rather spend five minutes figuring out than another five minutes doomscrolling. If you feel your life lacks some sort of narrative, consider this its inciting question. I’m trying to do this too but in the words of a Tumblr user “im not fucking barbie i cannot have 100000000000000000000000 careers”. The only chance for any of these to work out, let alone all of them in conjunction with each other is scale and numbers - but I think they have more to offer at comparatively more achievable (and flexible) scale and numbers than everyone converting to your preferred ideology or morality, or overwhelming the state by electoral or military force.

POWER

This is the domain from which solarpunk derives its most recognizable iconography. Solar panels are already consumer affordable at a scale allowing individuals to either render themselves substantially independent from or give back to the grid, and the lack of widespread adoption should be a worrying sign for the public will to adopt any of these substantially more complex interventions. But then, solar panels in consumer form still have limited applications if you don’t own a house or land, which the most environmentally conscious age groups increasingly don’t. Power interventions are thus tightly coupled to housing interventions, and via the grid, coupled at one of the most inconvenient points of dependence on the state. Commercial solar panel production, of course, is not designed to be implemented in guerrilla form; but a few fairly simple hacks could be developed and widely disseminated to challenge this hegemony. Several companies are already selling solar windows, an implementation that lends itself to apartments and workplaces. As promotional materials in outlets as solemn and sussy as the World Economic Forum underline, “the US is estimated to have between five and seven billion square metres of glass surface” - and I’m not even writing from there. But contrary to Great Reset fantasies, there’s no way all that glass surface is getting replaced under the World Economic Forum’s ruleset. Indeed, suburban middle class individuals and families are barely even winning in this paradigm structured around them - Cory Doctorow has a good write-up on how capitalization has rendered commercial solar financially unsustainable for much of the market it’s supposed to benefit. This is where we need to start thinking in radically new forms of localism - anyone who shares a building with anyone else, for living or work, should consider themselves to belong to a natural organizing constituency with a mandate to pressure their owners to retrofit their property by any number of means, from petitions to rent strikes or picket lines (developing, or building on depending on local conditions, a base for organization around other causes, from ventilation to rent). Installing solar windows and other panels (I can imagine making use of the balconies of many apartments) at the level of individual units, of course, could cut out the middleman of slow, gruelling and economically uphill activism. There are quite a few tricks for doing this yourself, without even buying a solar array, although most of them are fairly limited in terms of power output, enough to sustain one or two appliances. At that point you might as well also try things like wheel-based generators. All of these might at least be worth a few afternoons of hobbyist-level activity for marginally cutting your power bill if nothing else. And if you get good at them, you don’t have to artificially limit your “private sphere” offer installation to other people you live near, it might even be a decent gig.

FOOD
This is one area where there’s already a good deal of well-trodden praxis, though imo most of it falls into the nostalgia trap with which solarpunk has been associated. Nobody is replacing their main food supply with community gardens, let alone a modern population’s - the #1 design concern here should be scaling. Although if you know where to look there have been strides in this direction, like Montreal’s LUFA, which makes up a major part of one of my friends’ groceries. The question of course is if everyone did this, would it be able to scale to meet demand while staying true to its vision, or would it hit a physical limit of available space, etc. Urban and “vertical” farming, the go-to symbols of solarpunk’s urban and technical optimism over merely local and subsistence farming, have been dogged with concerns about scaling, which should be decoupled between strictly physical concerns and concerns about profitability, the latter potentially solvable outside a profit model. A lot of these questions will only be resolved in practice, but to a large extent, this fits in my head alongside housing as a question about space. Due to the competitive nature of North American farming, startling amounts of arable land are lying unused around basically midsize hub or outlying suburb. You may not easily be able to legally buy that land, but it’s way too late to worry about that now.

The food forest as opposed to field (though this obviously works better for some crops and ecosystems) model, promoted by big-name solarpunks like Saint Andrewism, represents a significant step towards density and labour efficiency, as could other adaptations from gatherer as opposed to agriculturist lifestyles. Acorns, for instance, were a staple that sustained pre-contact cities. Even before growing any new food forests, how much could you get out of what already drops in your city every year? What about other edible fruits and nuts currently being wasted as decorative?

I think as much as the recognizable work of building there’s a considerable work of modelling to be done here - locally, in every specific area, as well as building generalizable abstract models - if we want to extrapolate what needs to be built and how to avoid it falling into the trap of feel-good lifestyle projects. How many food-bearing trees are in your city already? Where are they? How much usable land or rooftop space is in, on or outside your city? (How much would rooftop farming in particular have to trade off with other uses of urban surface like solar panels?) If you’re stuck twiddling your thumbs in an academic field like geography, this might be a place to radicalize your skillset. App, website and protocol design will also be necessary to help streamline crowdsourcing much of this information. Some of this already exists and just isn’t well-known outside of tiny lifestyle foraging communities - there’s a global crowdsourced map at FallingFruit.org and if you are reading this I want you to either put a tree you know on there, or go on a walk until you find one. But this doesn’t all have to be painstakingly done by humans mapping their local neighbourhoods - someone could automate a lot of this kind of surveying with drones and AI.

At the end of the day, however, our settlements aren’t designed to be agriculturally self-sustaining and probably won’t be even at max existing capacity. For purely spatial reasons, the indoor and vertical farming options are an appealing solution - they would also allow you to bypass the ascetic-conservative demand, debated over and over in the fruitless iterations of “banana discourse”, to only eat food native to your bioregion. Much of what follows for HOUSING will also apply to this; this will probably also require a shift to hydroponics, which will require significant cooperation with WATER and POWER levels of the stack. Projects using existing resources and space, however, could be a first step to free up (in the sense of labour-time and finances dedicated to securing food within the existing stack) and accumulate (in the sense of funding or other models of cooperation pools) resources to pool towards these larger, higher-fixed capital projects.

SHELTER
The housing crisis is a world-historic opportunity for people to change how they look at space. At this point the everyday perception of space is probably more reified and fetishized by property-relations than commodities - if a space isn’t designated for us by someone trying to profit from its use, or a state graciously granting us free range on some of its preserves, we don’t even perceive it. The YIMBY/NIMBY war into which most of the energy of generational housing anger is being channeled is an absurd race to the bottom because both sides take this for granted; the YIMBYs see the artificial scarcity so literally as real scarcity they propose wasting money, materials and carbon to build more while the NIMBYs can only see it like a state and expect the base/superstructure stack to flow backwards with activists telling the government telling property owners what to do. We lack the creativity of slum dwellers throughout history - or feel entitled not to use it - even as our living conditions degrade to the level of expensive slums anyway.

Full-on squatting is of course one of the riskiest forms of praxis I could propose here (and would pose challenges, though might also force solutions, integrating with other levels of the stack). But if not that we should at least be thinking about how to demand and secure access to unused space (including for other parts of the stack like FOOD and MANUFACTURE) outside the top-down policy level (which would likely let the state set conditions on use). One reason leftists seem more helpless on housing than labour politics right now is there is land-users don’t really have an equivalent of the leverage of a strike, unless you’re already paying rent and just negotiating it down, but limited forms of unauthorized use and obstruction could be exactly such a bargaining chip - this was implicit in the original logic of “occupations”. There are also probably efficiencies to be found in scaling the use of crowdfunding to buy up low value properties and developing them as co-operatives. Where these properties are inadequately supported by current infrastructure (POWER, WATER etc.) this can be taken as an opportunity to integrate our own.

But if we need to build more anyway - and for the same reasons as with FOOD, we probably do - we shouldn’t let real estate developers do that for us. In the early 20th century, the foundations of the suburbs were built from the ground up, by the people living in them, with mail-order homes. This still exists, not even exclusive to the “tiny house” movement which attracts so much suspicion as a Great Reset enforced decline in living standards - for my part, if I was building my own house I’d probably make it pretty small just to save myself effort, but you can go ahead and build yourself Groverhaus if you want, I’m specifically trying not to make aesthetic gestures here. The point is, building a house somewhere the cops aren’t likely to bother to tear it down (and if they do you can just build it back, that’s what they did in Kowloon Walled City).

COMPLEX MATERIALS
This is one that I spent a lot of time researching last year when I was doing an “everyday life project” for my last course requirement (on Thoreau & the Politics of Everyday Life) where I traced as much as I could of the supply chain of every material in every product I bought. A bunch of the creative results of that are here - as with most of my speculative fiction, I slide around the scale of plausibility a fair bit because I don’t know enough of the science to really aim for “hard” cred, but a bunch of the core ideas are things that seemed practicable. And this is an area that doesn’t get talked about much because it seems aggressively intractable. The vast majority of things you’ll see on an ingredients list or a clothing label - or more indispensably, a medicine bottle - with a long string of Latin syllables, as well as the materials of the packaging, are derived from long sequences of chemical reactions that trace back in the first instance to compounds produced by the carbon-intensive process of hydrocarbon steam cracking. A lot of petrochemical processes are also infamously polluting in other ways. And tbc, while non-biodegradable plastics reduction is a distinct front just in waste terms, I’m not sure the drive to replace everything with “natural” materials isn’t going to strain those very natural systems we’re simultaneously trying to preserve and use more for other things once you start scaling past symbolic moves like banning plastic straws. (Feel free to point me to research on this!) A population of 8 billion humans at a standard of living we would find tolerable is not a natural phenomenon; it would be ecologically irresponsible to expect to support it entirely by “natural” means, rather than building its own systems to the same standards of renewability and reciprocity as nature.

As part of the project, whenever I found a supply chain I looked into alternatives and a lot of the time there were interesting ones either in the theoretical or low-hanging fruit stage of development, in two main areas: organic production methods (i.e. using specialized, including genetically modified bacteria, fungi or algae). This one interests me in particular because of its potential for decentralization and decapitalization - theoretically you could grow these in cultures in your garage as a side hustle, like weed or crypto mining or shrimp. When I say “hustle” I mean in the most general possible sense of a human drive to “truck and trade”, not necessarily capitalist commodity-exchange: mutual aid networks could coordinate supply requests across networks of hobbyists with elements in the MANUFACTURING and LOGISTICS layers of the stack. You’re probably going to need this layer anyway to do much with these unless the production is squeaky-clean; it’d be a sheer wasted opportunity to immediately collapse the relation you build into a commercial one. As AI safety buffs know, there are already places you can order custom chemicals with minimal questions. DIY CRISPR kits are cheaper than 3D printers. The DIY hormone infrastructure almost certainly has lessons for other areas here. The other big intervention area was recycling - a lot of chemical waste includes compounds that can be used in other processes. Brine used in food salts is pumped back into the sea for no reason by desalination plants. Cleanup operations - legal or otherwise - could be folded in with industrial scavenging.

This is also an area where there could be like, 200x more research than there currently seems to be as a first step. Patrick T. Brown’s dishonest Nature stunt may have impressed the Leigh Phillips contingent of increasingly reactionary ecomodernists but discredited his critique of the distribution of climate research, which is a shame because this is a great example of where it’s true: imperial “Science” is wasting time proving “climate change is real and bad” over and over in hopes that internalizing this sufficiently will make everyone roll over their entire productive infrastructure while much of it is still waiting on science to actually demonstrate scalable replacements. But you don’t need to lower yourself to a weird manipulative pressure campaign on the editorial board of Nature to start this: not only is no one actually stopping anyone qualified from doing this research, but recent events in superconductivity have suggested, although again I can’t claim any expertise, that a fair amount of materials science experimentation can be done at home! I don’t mean to simply retreat historically to the idyll of the Romantic gentleman scientist, although I’m sure a lot of tpot could and it’d be a more dignified use of your shape rotating prowess than developing AI for marketers and weapons manufacturers or writing a million Substacks. There’s a whole realm of possible citizen-science partnership arrangements this opens up: specialists who understand the relevant processes but can’t secure funding for a high-end lab could outsource tests to amateurs, crowdfunded labs could hire specialists. On a previous aside this also seems like an area where AI could speed things up substantially - the same kinds of brute-force algorithmic search on chemical combinations already producing more hyped-up medical results might help us discover cleaner materials and chemical processes.

MANUFACTURE
My first solarpunk story, which might still be my best but I haven’t managed to publish anywhere (about 50% of people who read it get it and 50% don’t), imagined a society ritually structured around a primary means of production every full adult owns individually, having learned and built themselves as a coming of age: a 3D printer. Of course, people have been promising this kind of revolution since the dawn of 3D printing and we need to soberly examine the reasons they’re still being used primarily to make tabletop gaming figures. They still don’t make much that doesn’t fit in a desktop-to-closet-sized box (the latter are really expensive). A lot of our most industrial manufacturing-intensive products use combinations of materials that can’t be 3D-printed easily, like metal and wood (see ELECTRONICS in particular). But I dunno, look around your house and identify everything that could still be made to these criteria: tableware. Bottles and containers. Toys. A sustainable society might consider it as perverse not to make some of these yourself as never cooking your own meals. At the beginning of COVID I bit the bullet and ordered one online because everyone was anticipating the need to publicly source ventilators, visors and other medical equipment. It didn’t arrive in the rush of COVID orders and this didn’t end up being a major element of the pandemic anyway; I haven’t since had the stimmy bucks or a comparable excuse, but I still mean to. But also important - especially at some of the other levels, including ELECTRONICS and even COMPLEX MATERIALS - is that the heavier-duty 3D printers, the kind an average reader of this post can’t afford on their own or fit in their apartment, can do a lot more. Local productive and distributive organizations - an entire organizational category which has barely begun to be thought - as soon as they have a viable funding structure should endeavour to bring at least one such printer to their representative unit.

At larger scales, between the Trumpian phantasm of “bringing the jobs back” to depressed Global North exurbs and the best case scenario of a top down Green New Deal, I can imagine organizing co-operatives funded by their members and communities buying infrastructure, negotiating agreements with local and municipal governments that won’t be high bidders for the existing “green jobs” for infrastructure like solar panels, EV chargers etc. Attempts to democratize, decentralize or socialize heavier industry have been a stumbling block of revolutions with much better starting conditions - see Mao’s infamous campaign of backyard pig iron smelting. Chuang’s Sorghum and Steel series, in fact, makes a convincing case that many of the failures of the Chinese revolution (whose lasting impact has mostly consisted in shifting the manufacturing centre of the global market), from the hukou system to the survival of a class base for Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, stem from its being essentially hostage to the engineers and administrators, some left over from the Japanese occupation, who knew how to make the factories actually work. With more heavily automated processes and in many ways an even more deskilled workforce, this will be an even more pressing problem. Existing manufacturing unions are, unfortunately, among the most risk-averse and least likely to use their leverage to direct manufacturing priorities and policy (and even the more radical rising unions in service work should at this point be thinking beyond negotiating within the wage-relation and striking for supply chain and infrastructure overhauls), but if anyone trying to push them in more radical directions wants to pick up the De Leonist strategy, the loyalties of the technical layer might well decide the outcome.

The general presumption about solarpunk manufacture of course is that it would be primarily artisanal, and while on one hand this is part of the conflation between solarpunk, degrowth and traditional green nostalgia I critique in the Miyazaki post, there’s an interesting intervention to think about here relative to another contemporary trend the left is struggling to respond to, the intensifying fascization of small business. I often push back on the emerging left contrarian view that small businesses are inherently worse, both on the level of politics and labour relations, than megacorporations, and get pushback in turn from people who’ve compared bad experiences working in both that I can’t really respond to - and the thing is while I’m extremely skeptical of the vulgar accelerationist vision of a world where everyone is totally materially dependent on a Wal-Mart/Amazon/Blackrock/Starbucks confusopoly that spontaneously unionizes into a workers’ soviet, I don’t have any particular stake in the concept of “small business” itself so much as the transhistorical phenomenon of artisanal creativity and productivity that has been enclosed into “small business” under this particular mode of production. The problem is I can see exactly how the formation of “small business” fascizes the artisanal impulse: you’re forced to put in all the extra effort and sacrifice of resisting the natural tendency of capital, especially in the wake of destabilizing events like COVID, but in the name of your right to extract profits from your products and employees, which encourages more-than-instrumental rationalizations of that right, now identified with your right to artisanal production in the first place. The same phenomenon is only marginally more benign in the self-employed artisanal economies of “content creators” and artists. The alternative, then, would be to drain the runoff of “small business” into non-capitalized artisanal economies.

Readers with a left background are probably asking at this point, doesn’t this all sound a bit like communization? Yeah, I mean I also wrote a whole book riffing on Tiqqun, and the more standard “solarpunk” political economy text is Le Bread Book. But the reason I’m organizing this in a “stack” is to try and decouple the concrete premises of communization from the rhetorical fetish of immediacy, particularly as seen in Dauvé’s anticosmic obsession with “breaking all separations” (including, infamously, the sexual separation between adults and children; sorry I bring this up in every post because it’s everywhere), which pre-emptively inserts a kind of capitalist realism where every form of organization is capitalist (or state-socialist). I don’t propose praxis at the site of daily life instead of the state out of opposition to organization or structure (or even coercion - I agree with William Gillis in terms of the utopian horizon but not necessarily every tradeoff getting there), but because the structures that can and must be implemented at these sites are necessary to implement structures at other sites.

LOGISTICS
Someone I know was working on this then jumped to a larger project which IMO still won’t have much of a chance to either be implemented or implemented equitably if nobody does this, so somebody please fucking do this: we have all the platform infrastructure needed for decentralized labour organization on levels never before seen in history. People are talking about doing this with DAOs, which is fine but is just a slightly more decentralized kludge of existing market organization. I am not just talking about DAOs. I am talking about systems where any user gets to design a task, decide roles and resources it will need (not necessarily reduced to a medium of exchange or labour-power: you can create a database for use-values!), recruit for roles across the platform, define rewards for them, sign up to receive resources from any other project through any exchange-arrangement including for free, enforce agreements through the terms & conditions of the platform and automated auditing systems (this doesn’t have to be blockchain although blockchain makes it easier, AI probably also makes it easier), and measure flows of resources in and out of any given project. You can have a general job board where anyone with any skill who wants to use it for some non-capitalist project can browse openings in their area (again some kind of local networks would be relevant here for anything physical) using their skill and pitch in for corresponding reductions. Projects could plug into each other at any level of a supply chain, from MANUFACTURE to POWER to COMPLEX MATERIALS. FOOD and SHELTER arrangements could even be made through the platform. There could be an opt-in generalized points system for exchange across the platform as a whole, plus shared points or token arrangements at any scale between. (Yes a lot of this DAOs do well already, my major reason for insisting on this not just being DAOs is it shouldn’t have to be limited to people with a crypto wallet. There is at the moment a fairly low cap on the proportion of people interested enough in a crypto ecosystem that mostly promotes itself on commodities trading LARP to sign up for a wallet, and while there is at least as much of a cap on people who would use this, there’s significant non-overlap between the two demographics. Ideally it shouldn’t require sign-in through any mainstream financial institution either.) Yes a lot of this is unclear because I haven’t tried to design it yet, again this is a set of problems to solve, but it’s insane that nobody else is starting on them.

Another big part of making this possible, of course, will be transport. A thing I discovered recently because I’ve been trying (failing) to focus on Palestine - I would rather focus on these long term problems than any “current thing”, if nothing else because it lends itself more to my time-independent, creative style of problem-solving, but it might be worth treating “ongoing genocide that the entire international order is openly unwilling to prevent” as a test run for the coordination mechanisms we’ll need on an even broader scale here - is that delivery drones are weirdly gatekept. You can’t just buy them, even if you have the money - you can’t even see the prices without submitting a query, which presumably involves explaining that you’re a Legitimate Business or Non-profit intending to use them for approved purposes unlike, say, crowdfunding a fleet to station at a dock in Sinai and fly crowdfunded supplies over Palestine bypassing the international aid/permission regime entirely. (TBC: I have not ruled out all possible ways of doing this. If you see any exploitable modifications feel free to contact me or take them yourself.) Consumer drones being pretty much exclusively quadcopters for photography hobbyists is a market distortion, and I’m really curious now at what level these permission structures get decided, and also whether there’s ways around them on the black market yet, although that in itself selects for hierarchies funneling resources to individuals capable of large secure payouts. These are the real structures of your world: the distinctions between theoretical and actual possibilities. On the other hand, you’re still allowed to use rideshares for people - they still just assume you won’t use the same organizational platforms for supplies. Assume this, too, is a historical window and you have to act before it’s closed. You’d want to eventually set up your own secure platform for independent “fleets” while building a “customer" base or fulfilling specific requests through the platform proposed above through existing apps.

St. Andrewism’s well-known Library Economy proposal (implicitly endorsed by Aaron Bushnell!) belongs here, and I’ll just link to his video on it directly, adding that at least in my city there is already a version of it, and I don’t live in a particularly big city so there might very well be one in yours already. In which case the problems to be solved are publicizing it enough that people can find it easily as their local equivalent capitalist enterprise (as an aspiring non-capitalist enterprise, it shouldn’t be entirely reliant on people it pays for this), contributing resources of your own and offering your time and resources to scale it. Or you could start your own thing if you don’t trust its management for whatever reason but it’s at this point - and at no point before - that your efforts verge into arrogance and presumption. If you can’t achieve something yourself, that is your problem, not a problem with the task. If it’s your problem, entreat someone more capable to do it - you have forfeited the right to dignity. I am posting this now because I failed something I was attempting myself, and I’m not even giving up that one thing, because there is no one else to do it yet. Oh I am the hypocrite. Oh I have nothing and I’m alone. Oh I am the storyteller. Oh I have nothing but I believe me.

tbc. in ELECTRONICS, INTERNET, PUBLIC SPACE, HEALTH and SELF DEFENSE