Category Archives: Jobs

Solarpunk Phones Part 2: Decentralize

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[This is Part 2 of a series about solarpunk phones. Here’s a link to Part 1: Repair and Part 3: Design.]

Humans have an amazing capacity for cognitive dissonance. Even though we may know something is bad for us or has significant negative consequences, we’ll still trudge ahead, even if the benefit to an action is small. As Steven Szpajda from This Week in Law is fond of saying, people will give up large amounts of privacy and security for a very small perceived benefit.

Solarpunk Druid had a recent post to this effect, “It’s the events stupid: Why FB is the hardest media to quit” discussing the titular quandary. As we have with fossil fuels, we’ve become reliant on systems whose existence is at cross-purposes with our own.

For this second part of my exploration of what a solarpunk communication device might look like, I want you to consider your relationship with your carrier and web service providers — Verizon, Facebook, etc.

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Most of us have become comfortable, complacent even, with the idea that the companies that control our communications know everything about our habits. What might be surprising though, is that the information they collect isn’t just available to other multi-national megacorporations, but that private citizens can easily get access to the location of customers of at least AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile in the US.

Solarpunk, as a subgenre of speculative fiction is all about “what-if,” so what if we weren’t beholding to megacorps for our communications? What if we decentralized our cellphone and internet access? With the increasing presence of AI subservient to known bad actors, it’s time we start examining how to wean ourselves off of the corporations that feed our information addictions. While taking a break from technology can be beneficial for our mental well-being, I don’t think it’s practical to completely give it up either.

Solarpunk is also about making the “what-if” into a concrete reality, so what technologies exist to help us break free and decentralize our digital lives?

NetworkTopology-Mesh by Foobaz

Mesh Networks

Mesh networking, which we’ve mentioned before, allows various parts of a network to communicate without a single central node, like a cellphone tower, controlling all of the traffic. If everyone in a given geographic area had a smartphone that worked on a mesh network, they wouldn’t need a carrier to contact their friends in that area. This has been touted as a potentially life-saving measure for natural disasters, and is also a powerful tool for people protesting authoritarian regimes. Mesh networks are still in the early stages of development, but they point toward a possibile future of decentralized communication where the users themselves are the network, not some centralized authority that could leave users in the dark either intentionally or because of a cyber attack. Some current implementations include the mesh network going up in Detroit, the Serval Project, GoTenna, and the Althea Mesh.

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Leaving for greener social pastures

Between the shuttering of GeoCities a decade ago and recent major changes to Tumblr and Flikr, denizens of the internet have witnessed great swaths of the web be deleted at the whim of a single entity. At the same time, data breaches like Equifax and direct manipulation of users by Facebook and their partners has made it more clear than ever that you’re the product for these companies.

The Open Source Community has been experimenting with alternative social networks for some time, and with the W3C ActivityPub standard, we’re seeing the emergence of an interconnected, social media Fediverse. What’s really cool about the Fediverse is that people on different platforms can follow each other without having to sign up for a different network. If the current behemoths had started this way, then you could follow your friend on Twitter from your Facebook account without having a Twitter account yourself. Since these platforms are Open Source, anyone can start their own instance, so there are communities built up around common interests (like solarpunk) but you can still hang out online with your friends from a different instance. There are a number of different platforms modeled off existing networks like FB and Twitter, but I’m sure we’ll see new concepts emerge as well. There are even some beta plugins to allow WordPress websites to be federated with ActivityPub, so maybe you’ll see Solarpunk Station in the Fediverse soon!

The Fediverse isn’t the only decentralized social networking solution out there either. Other clients like Scuttlebutt and Steemit have also cropped up in recent years. Scuttlebutt has a large solarpunk contingent already as seen in the partial graph of the network below, while Steemit skews heavily toward the cryptocurrency crowd as it is itself based on the blockchain. Scuttlebutt has some really cool features like being designed around intermittent connections. There’s a lot more information and a fun intro video on their website.

Partial graph of the #scuttlebutt social network, so far. A visualization by vtduncanhttps://t.co/vuqt11YdOR pic.twitter.com/drvdiSZusI

— André Staltz (@andrestaltz) February 6, 2018

Have you tried any of these new social media sites or built a mesh network? Let us know how it went below!

Why we can do better

Designing money for a solarpunk society

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Money is a social construct, but it is a very useful means of exchange between parties without the need of troublesome conversion rates like how many chickens a smartphone costs. One of the best things about social constructs is that they are mutable. Despite the fact that the government would like you to believe that the money they issue is the only way to exchange goods and services, the rise of cryptocurrencies has shown that the true power of money rests with the people. In fact, trust of the public is the #1 reason government-issued currencies work at all. While a government can debase it’s money through overprinting and other abuses, the fact is that money doesn’t work unless everyone believes in its value.

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Hypothetical cryptocurrency

Let’s say I’m in charge of a small municipality. While I think people should be able to earn more money if they make awesome contributions to society through some sort of market, I don’t think they should do that at the expense of people dying in the streets or because they can’t pay for medicine. How do I design my money to have the appropriate incentives to make sure everyone is taken care of?

One option is Universal Basic Income (UBI), so let’s bake that in from the beginning. We’ll need to generate the money for the UBI somehow, and the land value tax or the Fair Tax are the top two candidates for simple and fair taxation. Since I also want to disincentive sprawl, we’ll go with the land value tax in this example. In short, the land value tax charges someone a tax based on the amount of land they own. I’ve seen this likened to a rent paid to The People if one assumes all land belongs to the citizens of a given region and that private use is a lease of that land from the true owners.

When someone pays their land tax it goes in a big piggy bank along with all the other landholders. Then, every month each citizen gets a UBI check deposited into their personal account to pay bills, get food, and buy whatever other things they need.

Globle

I’m not affiliated with Globle, but they have an interesting approach to the incentives issue of the current corporate capitalism system we have. Their approach combines UBI, venture capital, and Kickstarter into a sort of corporations by the people model. As a holder of Globle cryptocurrency, people can vote on what companies and/or products they want to see in the market. Then, based on how those companies perform, part of the company’s profits go to the investors and part goes back into a UBI fund for everyone. It’s hard to say how it will play out, but I do think it’s a novel approach to funding UBI that would also help companies and people work together better since their well-beings are more intrinsically intertwined.

What sort of incentives do you think would bring us closer to a solarpunk society? Let us know in the comments below.

Seizing the means of production – What does 3D printing mean for solarpunk?

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Solarpunk Station is the proud owner of a new 3D printer! I am hoping to use it to produce useful objects as well as provide insights on how distributed manufacturing relates to solarpunk. This should be the first of many articles related to additive manufacturing.

TL;DR: 3D printers have a lot of promise to disrupt manufacturing of household goods, but don’t get one yet if you’re not ready to tinker.

Most consumer 3D printers are basically a hot glue gun that uses plastic filament instead of glue sticks. A nozzle is suspended above a platform and computer-generated files are fed to the machine where it deposits plastic layer by layer to form a 3D object. There are other types of 3D printers that use UV light and/or lasers to form objects layer by layer from vats of goo or powder, but the basic idea is the same.

The main advantage of 3D printing is how it changes people’s mindset in relation to goods. If you spend some time on Thingiverse or Youmagine you’ll see people openly sharing things they’ve designed with each other. There are also some marketplaces like Cults3D that include a section for designs for sale, but the bulk of current design work is open. We’re moving from distributed, open software development like Linux and Firefox to distributed and open development of physical items.

Pineapple-inspired bowl (orange) with green leaves surrounding the edge. Only five of the 10 leaves are finished.

The orange part of the bowl took 30 hours to print. The leaves each took about an hour, so there’s ~35 hours of print time here. Total time was over 40 hours once all 10 leaves were finished.

Remixes take the open nature of 3D printable designs to the next level. People can adapt a previous design to a different device, or take a part and make it better, stronger, or faster to print. Since so many files are open source you’re free to adapt an item to your needs. I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought that something I’d purchased was pretty cool except for one issue that I repeatedly turned over in my head. Without an easy way to make a replacement part, I was stuck with it. Now with a 3D printer, I can download a design, change anything I don’t like and upload my remix for others to find. While watching a part print can feel excruciatingly slow at times (the pineapple bowl took almost two days at 130% size), making something and being able to iterate on the design is still much faster than with most other methods.

These remixes extend to things you already own too. While I can’t print a replacement saucepan yet, I can repair or improve a lot of objects around the house. There’s a great subreddit for functional prints with lots of cool ideas, and Thingiverse has a pretty big section for replacement parts. DeskGrown is a new company that sells parts that can’t be printed for their designs and gives away the printable files for free. They have a clock and a set of headphones so far. I think we’ll see more of this hybrid model popping up since desktop 3D printers are limited to plastics at the moment.

While to some extent, 3D printing is over-hyped, I think it will be one of the critically enabling technologies for a solarpunk world. Not everything can be 3D printed, but a lot of everyday objects can be, meaning you can ship 1 kg of filament to your house and make several things for the same amount of packaging, cost, and environmental waste you would have for one item before.

The two main drawbacks of 3D printing are the learning curve and generation of plastic waste. As a beginner, I have had several failed prints. I believe the number of failed prints will go down considerably as I get more experience with the printer, but 3D printing is still not a zero waste manufacturing process. I am keeping failed prints and other scraps in a bag in hopes that I will be able to reprocess it into fresh filament in the future.

Failed cat ball toy print looks more like spaghetti...

This doesn’t look like a cat ball…

The plastic I have been printing is PLA (polylactic acid) which is a bioplastic made from various plant-based sources. It is biodegradable and can be recycled in a closed loop back to virgin material standards, making it one of the few Cradle-to-Cradle plastics available. Many other materials are available for 3D printers including ABS (often used in car parts), PET (soda/water bottle plastic), wax for metal casting molds, and TPU (flexible/rubbery plastic). With such a wide variety of materials available, it’s difficult to determine the exact environmental cost of 3D printing. If PLA were able to sate everyone’s needs, then we wouldn’t have the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but every material has it’s strengths and weaknesses, so that isn’t the case. On a bright note, PLA is one of the easier plastics to print with, so it has one of the highest adoption rates in the community.

We’re a long way away from the ease of use of the replicator in Star Trek. Using a 3D printer requires a lot of fine tuning and trial-and-error. I imagine the off-the-shelf solutions are better than kits, but 3D printers are still a large time investment. We’ll probably get to the point where you can buy one that just works, but as of now, a 3D printer requires a lot of time to get really good results.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to build your own computers or work on bicycles and really know what’s going on with the machines you’re using then I definitely recommend getting a kit. Otherwise, you’re probably better off finding someone locally with a printer on Make XYZ, Hubs, or getting a design printed straight from Thingiverse or Shapeways. In fact, you may want to reach out to local 3D printer folk even if you do want to get a printer yourself. Most people who are 3D printing are glad to share their opinions on different models as well as tips and tricks to get better results. There may even be a Meetup in your area.

3D printers will play a role in distributed manufacturing along with CNCs, laser cutters, and other machine tools. We’re a long way away from asking Alexa to make “Tea, Earl Grey, hot,” but we may get there eventually. The space has moved very quickly over the last ten years, and I expect the next ten will be equally exciting.

Do you have a 3D printer or know someone who does? Are there any solarpunk ideas that are particularly well suited to 3D printing you’d like to see us explore? Sound off below!

The Rules: Capitalism, UBI, and the Blockchain

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The Rules Blog recently posted an excellent piece about the relationship between extractive capitalism, universal basic income (UBI), and blockchain technologies. Climate change, pollution, and exploitation of the workforce are largely a function of the incentives baked into the current version of centralized currency and capitalism that we have today. Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies offer a beacon of hope that by wresting control of money away from centralized governments and big banks we can remake the economy in a way that serves the people instead of the current system where people serve the economy.

While governments dicker about the merits of UBI and small-scale experiments are starting in some jurisdictions, the blockchain community is already developing some cryptocurrencies with UBI built in. The people writing at the Rules Blog have connections to one of the solutions, Circles, but many others exist such as Manna* and UBU. A short list can be found in this Reddit post.

As I mentioned before, the best chance for UBI in the United States is the FairTax. I think that circumventing the ponderous bureaucracy of government will probably result in a more expedient and fair system than anything we would get from Washington. The other advantage of blockchain-based systems is that they will be truly international and not locked down by the draconian laws of any one given government.

What do you think? Is blockchain over-hyped? Is it the next big thing? Sound off below, and thanks for visiting!

*Affiliate link – I may receive extra Manna if you sign up for the Manna UBI project through this link

Urban Ore – What the future of Zero Waste looks like

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The Institute for Local Self Reliance podcast recently chatted with the founders of Urban Ore in Berkley about how they divert waste from the landfill and are able to make a living from the old adage: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

While a lot of what Urban Ore sells is architectural salvage, they also have clothing, books, sporting goods, and many other items. Urban Ore mostly gets their salvage from the municipal waste stream in Berkley, so it’s an interesting case study in better ways to manage garbage in an urban environment. It makes a true Zero Waste future not seem so crazy after all for us solarpunks.

Urban Ore also has a really interesting employment compensation structure where everyone, including the owners, gets an hourly wage. The base wage depends on the job employee does, but they make more on top of that based on sales pro-rated to how much they were working that week. No specific commissions are given, just a profit sharing bonus tabulated each week. I think this is a good company to look at for ways to plan equitable compensation for solarpunk jobs.

For other interesting podcasts, check out the Resources page.

Have you heard of any other groups or companies doing similar work? Sound off in the comments!

Re-purposing malls as solarpunk co-housing

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One of the best ideas for solarpunk co-housing I’ve seen is Bluelightning42’s post about re-purposing malls on Tumblr. While there has been the mixed use redevelopment of the Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island, and NewLab, an incubator+housing in Brooklyn, I’ve seen little else done in regards to this concept.

Bellevue Square Mall courtesy of Debs (ò‿ó)♪

Business Insider ran a story last year as part of it’s “Death of Suburbia” series talking about the roughly 25% of shopping malls in the US at risk of closing. I think the main issue is that most malls aren’t in particularly easy to access areas, but with a large enough community, I think you could get a public transit stop (if there isn’t one already) and car-sharing to provide off-site transportation. If you want to see the really cool architecture in some of these malls, Seph Lawless has been getting amazing photos of abandoned malls.

Rezoning the mall (where needed) as mixed-use would allow some small stores on-site for groceries and other small items. I know that I would love to be able to just walk down the hall to grab some Swedish fish out of a bulk bin in the middle of the night (I’m so healthy). You could leave the food court going too with shared communal kitchens and restaurants run by the people living there.

Garden courtesy of cuprikorn

Most of the parking lots could be reclaimed as greenspace, leaving a small area for car-sharing vehicles and the bus stop. A community garden could spring up where there was once only asphalt. Depending on the bike infrastructure in your city, you might also be able to build spur trails from the mall to other interesting parts of town.

Most malls have some natural lighting, so why not make some of the skylights stained glass to keep up the solarpunk vibe? With the huge roofing area of a mall, you could generate power for residents by adding solar panels and small wind turbines. There might be enough area that you would qualify as a small-scale renewable power plant. I would want to update the HVAC system to heat/cool with a geothermal heat pump to maximize the efficiency of the building along with the other requisite insulation and lighting efficiency upgrades.

Stained glass in Kaohsiung City courtesy of MiNe

So, do you have any ideas about how a repurposed mall could be a great place to live? Are there any concerns that you have regarding the idea? Sound of in the comments and let us know!

Photos are from Flikr users under a Creative Commons License

Prettyy!! Want! {Nature/ 1 of 3} by Debs (ò‿ó)♪
MiNe-KissX_103-0082RG by MiNe
Garden by Cuprikorn (this picture is under a different license: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Solarpunk, taxation, and universal basic income

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Universal Basic Income (UBI) is one of the big ideas I’ve seen floating around the solarpunk community. To learn more, I read some of the more scintillating chapters of Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, and apparently there haven’t been any studies big enough to see what the true impact of a basic income would be on society. The authors suggested that a good starting place would be a baby step toward UBI where everyone got a small stipend.

The Adam Smith Institute recently published a paper on the market case for UBI and outlined the reasons why people should be supporting a move toward UBI. One of the main reasons is mounting concerns over technological unemployment with the rapid rise of automation and AI-driven production. For instance, truck and taxi operators are expected to be displaced by autonomous vehicles in coming years. Many other jobs will be at risk as well as computer systems get better at taking over tasks once performed by humans.

One proposal that I’ve been following that was mentioned in the book was the Fair Tax (HR 25) which eliminates the Federal Income Tax and replaces it with a Federal Sales tax. Where this gets interesting is that as a function of switching to a Federal Sales Tax, everyone in the country is given a “prebate” to account for income disparity at the lower end. This could be considered a sort of light UBI as everyone in the country will get the same “prebate” regardless of their income.

Another bonus of the Fair Tax is that it is only implemented once on an item. Used items are not taxed meaning that we can incentivize conserving resources while giving us a nationwide test of how to implement a full-scale UBI.

Perhaps the best part is that the Fair Tax eliminates the IRS and the current loophole-ridden Federal Income Tax system. I think we all know that the current system has more than its fair share of problems. Every time a new tax “reform” bill is brought up in Congress, we see how much of a losing game the income tax system is.

The Fair Tax is not perfect, but it seems like a workable solution with widespread existing support in the US Congress. More information is available about the Fair Tax at http://fairtax.org/faq.

Sound off in the comments if you think UBI is the way of the future or if you have any thoughts on the Fair Tax. Thanks for stopping by!

Some of the text for this article is recycled from my Tumblr post on the subject: https://solarpunk-gnome.tumblr.com/post/163921938517/taxation-and-solarpunk-a-few-thoughts

Image is “Taxes” by 401kcalculator.org via a Creative Commons license.

A human-powered modular tool station

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Solarpunk is about being friendly to the environment, so I’ve been thinking a lot about areas where human power could be used instead of electricity. I drew up this (very) quick sketch of a modular table that could accept a wide range of tools. It’s based on the old treadle sewing machines, but I think it could also use more conventional bike parts and be pedal powered. I’m not sure what the advantages are of treadle vs pedal, so if anyone knows why the old sewing machines used that system instead I’d be very curious to know!

Sketch of a human-powered base for various tools. Loosely based on treadle-powered sewing machine tables.

A rough idea of a human-powered (treadle or pedal) modular system

Treadle sewing machine. The sewing machine folds out from the center of the table when needed.

Caleb Spears from Portal Bikes said that Portal was using a modified cottered bottom bracket spindle to drive the attachments for their system. I think using a similar setup would be beneficial when building the table since tools could then be interchangeable between both systems. Caleb mentioned that the Portal Bikes usually have one person pedaling and one person operating the tools. Having a PTO hookup on either the inside or outside of the table to allow one-person operation of smaller tools and two-person operation of larger mechanisms would be ideal.

Picture of a cottered bottom bracket spindle with a notch cut in the end. The notch allows for the attachment of various tools.

This is the spindle picture I was sent by Caleb at Portal Bikes

I think my next steps will be to make a mock-up of the system in LEGO to see if there are any obvious flaws with the idea. If you can find an old treadle base for a reasonable price, I think it would be a great starting point for a full-sized prototype.

Treadle base with no top

Be sure to sound off in the comments if you’ve ever used a treadle sewing machine or any other kind of human-powered tools! Thanks for stopping by!

Photo credits:

Jim Hammer: “Singer Sewing Machine” (CC-BY-SA 2.0 license)
Caleb Spear: Picture of Portal Bikes PTO Spindle
gettheshot75: “Treadle Sewing base” (CC-BY-SA 2.0 license)

Solarpunk jobs webinar (updated)