Honestly I love the direction you are going with this. I agree with you about the abundance especially if the people in this world have culturally shifted so that most things do get shared. And I do think that in a real life transition we would definitely see a lot of people scavenging and recycling stuff and relying on each other for daily needs.

I also think it would be cool to see how much of nature we can use to enhance existing technology or maybe even create a whole new tech tree that is run with mutual relationships with different organisms. Like there was a group of scientist that found bacteria that produce concrete when exposed to water and another group that is working on a chemical computers. What if we reinforce buildings by planting trees that grew around them, worked with some animals to build stuff that benefits both them and us at the same time, or used organic computing (maybe using slime molds) to do complex, long term, calculations without the need for electricity and it being much less fragile.

The thing is that for what I’m describing it wouldn’t be something that we fully realize in our generation but I do think it would lead to a society that could sustain itself indefinitely if we chose to live below the regeneration rate for the material or organisms we chose.

Edit: I was thinking about this only because I watched some stuff by Ronald wright and it has stuck quite a bit. specifically this if you are interested: https://youtu.be/S1ypWcqnojM (tried invidious but didn’t work)

Edit2: Also there are a few things I disagree with like his views on population control and his belief on the reliance of governments for change but his analysis is spot on.

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I think a lot of the planning for their scenes comes from the solarpunk prompts podcast these days.

I remember seeing a post on here about that podcast and added it to the list of podcasts I’m listening to.

They’ve been doing a bunch of cool solarpunk art for a bit, and they’ve started releasing it CC-BY

Huh I didn’t know that. I’ll make sure to keep out an eye for their work. Btw was looking through your website and I like how thought out your photobashes are.

Also as an aside since it seems you put a lot of thought into this kind of stuff do you have any thoughts on how much of a solarpunk future can run on only renewable material? I see a lot of art that focuses on solar panels and stuff but I’ve recently been thinking that it might not be possible to have too many of those long term because repairing them probably would require a complex supply chain and extraction process that we probably would have to move away from as society gets transformed.

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I like the art a lot already. Can’t wait to see more.

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This is pretty cool thx. I like how they include both the researcher and their seminal works. It also helped me find another researcher that was into low tech other than Philippe Bihouix. I wonder why most researchers that are into that are French?

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I don’t think it was included because there were no new comments made after august 1.

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Something that I find interesting is how close the central clusters of beehaw.org, slrpnk.net, and lemmy.blahaj.zone are together. If you only highlight those instances then you see how close their communities tend to be.

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Just because someone has more skills, experience or information doesn’t mean that person has or should have authority over others. There are even situations where having more of those things can become a hindrance because it biases the person to doing things a certain way when someone from an outside perspective could handle the situation in a different, possibly better way.

It still should be on the individual to decide whether they want to defer to the experts depending on the situation. The reason why people can come to collective decisions and rely on other people’s knowledge is because they have shared purpose and trust each other to be working to similar goals. That is what makes people’s choices voluntary.

I don’t believe we should uphold hierarchies in any form instead we should help teach people to reason through when to trust other people’s judgements which doesn’t rely on defaulting to an authority.

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To be honest I am still having a bit of trouble understanding what a firm and a pure market is but either way I think the problem that occurs when you scale these interactions to larger communities are informational problems. You start to run into problems relating to Dunbar’s number and how many meaningful relationships you can maintain. That is where elinor ostrom’s method would need to be improved.

However I don’t believe currency would actually help resolve it because it is too detached and doesn’t provide enough information to actually build meaningful relationships between communities and people therefore would still have to deal with the tendency for people to dehumanize/exploit processes that can be turned into numbers.

An alternative that I think was shown (but I’m not sure because I haven’t read the second book) was something from the Monk and Robot series which is a nice solarpunk book that I recently got into. There were instances when a traveling tea monk (therapist with tea) went to a few different communities and “bought” a lot of herbs for their teas and “sold” their services as a tea monk by tapping their phones (which they called something like a box computer or whatever) together.

The thing is that it was never explicitly stated that it that they were exchanging money so I interpreted it as it just being an activity log between the people that are doing the exchange so that if you were doing business with them again you would have a pseudo-memory of your relationship so you can make the decision of whether or not it is worth interacting with them or not.

I liked that solution because it actually is tackling the root of the problem (not being able to build trust with limited memory) and doesn’t have the exploitative nature of regular currency being roped in at all.

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Ok maybe it I understood the article incorrectly then. I thought it was trying to setup an economic system within a community with a lot of strong ties already. In that situation I believe this system would be a detriment.

When dealing with inter-community ties I still believe that the system would need to be clarified a bit more to show how the currency wouldn’t be unequally distributed. Even with non-transferable vouchers if the system of distributing them is a meritocracy then it would still lead to some community having an imbalance of power over others. But fundamentally I agree with the article that there is a problem with weak ties between communities and would need different solutions than would work inside of a community.

Edit: grammar

Edit2: Just realized you were the one that described it being able to be used between communities not the article. Brain is slow today.

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Also sorry for coming off a bit antagonistic. Didn’t get much sleep.

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I think part of the reason why she doesn’t give specific solutions is because in her research she found that the solutions that the community used was dependent on the kinds of people in that community which made the solutions to diverse to just boil down to one thing.

Instead she came up with general principles that you could see show up consistently in all the solutions that were studied.

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Ok, the core of my disagreement is that they are creating a system that needs money (or some form of currency) to function even though we already have techniques to solve those problems on the scale that they are describing them without it.

And ancaps are usually more individualist but some do believe in common property. To me what makes this anarcho-capitalist is that they are making the use of the space still dependent on capital and is impersonal which makes the system exploitative since the person that has the most funds gets to decide on how a space is used.

Edit: grammar

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No offense but this sounds more like anarcho-capitalism than anything else ( specifically because of the collecting fees in perpetuity part of residual rights and the idea that you might need an AI to set tax rates in a community. )

But other than that I don’t trust a website that has a board member that is the founder of ethereum and is supported by the Rockefeller foundation to be a good guide to a society beyond capitalism.

Source: https://www.radicalxchange.org/about/

Edit: Also I’ve realized that I haven’t really given an alternative so this is something more concrete

https://neilhacker.com/2021/03/25/governing-the-commons/

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I think the fediverse already experienced what happens when those problems arise during the canvas event and yet it was still eventually resolved peacefully.

There was limited space on the board and certain structures couldn’t be created somewhere else because it was in relation to something that was in that specific part of the board (the pony blast was a big attraction and the rainbow traveled through a lot of things.) So if you want to see what happens look at one of those time lapses very closely.

Edit: And what was even more interesting about that event is a lot of the negotiation happened without any direct communication where as in this hypothetical community you would be able to talk to those people.

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This should be pinned or put in the sidebar at least. Its a good intro to anarchist ideas.

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I think that’s just everything in the description being jumbled up as one. Posting from invidious does that for some reason.

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Huh I didn’t know. Yeah send those links if you have them. What was the general gist of what she has done?

Edit: Also do you have any thoughts on the video though. I still think the content is informative.

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One of the side effects that I think might happen is that we could have local internet be more important than it was before since they would have to build the mesh networks within a community and with various standards which I think would be a good thing in the long run.

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Idk, I was just thinking flowers or fruit growing from the walls or maybe even furniture/utilities being a part of the building itself in such a way that depending on how you use them the shape changes over time I haven’t really thought that far ahead.

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In a solarpunk future I’d hope we’d have the technology to have buildings that grow according to how they are used. That would be awesome.

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