Solarpunk

Hey Solarpunk people! We are a small community of readers, writers, and activists that is dedicated to exploring Solarpunk and adjacent literature. Every week, we discuss one chapter of a book that we choose together. So far, we have read four books, including most recently The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. If you want to join our book club just in time to pick our next read, please swing by. We’d be happy to have more people to share thoughts and insights with!

https://discord.gg/wFsXhs3MDG

Alice Cappelle generally tackles social issues, and here she shares the idea that school under capitalism is seen as transactional, and therefore this results in teachers being disrespected, which stymies education.

I think this has to be the first time someone has linked to LinkedIn from this community. But this guy, Brian Rivera, is really repping Oakland CA and the wildly underecognized Bay Area rap scene in this video.

This cover was painted by Sean Bodley for our open-source solarpunk tabletop game. The goal is to try and create something that isn't just representative of a specific narrow version of solarpunk, but can act as a starting point for writers and game masters to create stories that fit their tastes. We want this to be to solarpunk what D&D is to fantasy: whatever you want to make of it.

The default setting is a high-density, high tech, urban, version of solarpunk with a mix of hard science, optimism, radical politics, and an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to world building.

If you want to know more, check out our new website, http://fullyautomatedrpg.com, and if you've got more questions head over to our Lemmy community: https://slrpnk.net/c/fullyautomatedrpg !

We're in beta, and running games on Discord, so if you want to actually plan, follow the link on the website.

You can find more of Sean's work at http://seanbodley.com and https://patreon.com/seanbodley .

I am working on the sequel to Murder in the Tool Library, a solarpunk mystery novel I published recently. In the next book, the clues lead to the Yucatan, and I would love to improve my representation of native people from that region. If you identify in any way as Maya (Yucatec, Mopan, or Q'eqchi') please do message me.

I heard about this pre-release last year, but just remembered to check, and it came out three weeks ago!

Description

A newly sentient AI inhabits a Roomba to escape from their research office, and a robotic dog hunts for rain in a drought-ridden world. A murder of crows disrupts production on a solar farm, and a young woman communes with a telepathic fungal network to protect a forest. A suspicious cat follows bees across the rooftops of a solarpunk city, and a rabbit hitches a ride to the Grand Canyon to fulfil a prophecy. The path toward better futures is one we must walk alongside other creatures, negotiating the challenges of multispecies justice. Solarpunk Creatures introduces a whole new cast of more-than-human protagonists: organic and digital, alien and fantastic, tiny and boundlessly large.

Stories:

• “Threadloom” by N. R. M. Roshak
• “Sonora’s Journey” by Kai Holmwood
• “The Colorful Crow Of Web-Of-Life Park” by Sandra Ulbrich Almazan
• “The Business Of Bees” by Andrew Knighton
• “Night Fowls” by Ana Sun
• “Water Cycle” by Lauren C. Teffeau
• “Microbia” by Center For Militant Futurology
• “Rabbits, Rivers, And Prickly Pears” by Justine Norton-Kertson
• “Hunting For Rain” by Lyndsey Croal
• “AI Dreams Of Real Sheep—More At 8” by Commando Jugendstil and Tales from the EV Studio
• “An Inconvenient Unicorn” by Geraldine Briony Hunt
• “Quorum Sensing” by Calliope Papas
• “Flyby” by Priya Sarukkai Chabria
• “Quarropts Can’t Dance” by Rodrigo Culagovski
• “Thank Geo” by BrightFlame
• “Our Minds Share A City” by Catherine Yeates
• “Hopdog” by Rimi B. Chatterjee
• “Solar Murder” by A.E. Marling
• “The Wetlands Versus The Mayor” by Jerri Jerreat
• “Leaf Whispers, Ocean Song” by Tashan Mehta

In this thought-provoking YouTube video, join us for the talk "From Capitalist Realism to a Solarpunk Reality: Building the Infrastructures of a Better Future." We're diving deep into the intersection of technology, social change, and ecological restoration.

Meet our esteemed panelists:

🌿 André Rosario (he/him) - A hacker, writer, and gardener crafting DIY articles and weaving solarpunk fiction.

🌿 Ariel Kroon (she/her) - An independent settler scholar with a PhD in English, exploring crisis narratives in Canadian post-apocalyptic science fiction.

🌿 Luka Dowell (they/them) - The force behind the Solarpunk Now! podcast, challenging capitalist realism by spotlighting hopeful, radical initiatives.

🌿 Joey Ayoub (he/him) - An activist, writer, and scholar navigating political landscapes during climate collapse.

As solarpunks, we challenge the narrative that change is impossible. Through the insights of our diverse panelists, we explore pathways from capitalist realism to a solarpunk reality, envisioning infrastructures for a sustainable and equitable future.

A break from the usual in this community, but I trust it'll be appreciated. I think this is very solarpunk: using technology to improve the lives of all creatures.

Why is this solarpunk? Because changing society takes people power. Because protests change nations. Because for the last decade protests inspired by democratic anarchist principles have sprung up in nation after nation, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. And the after action report of the first two decades of the 21st century shows not just how anarchist-inspired protests began but how they fail - and who takes advantage of that failure.

This article is long, complex, and hard to read. Emotionally hard. It holds some truths that are hard for punks and anarchists to hear.

And if your activism is more than just posting online it may be the most important article you read this year.

Saw this article over on the solarpunk subreddit and wanted to bring it over here with my own opinion attached.

For being a near-zero way to travel in the air it's solar, but the reasons the author criticizes solar-electric propelled airships make it punk. The issues pointed out by the author - slow travel time, lower passenger counts, and windows of time for viable travel, a need for sleepers - could also be seen as its strengths.

For one, slow travel time and lower passenger counts make it a lot easier to meet and connect with strangers with little social risk. They also wouldn't need sleepers. With tight spaces like that, they're less comfortable than economy. My wife and I took a long distance train here in the U.S. (which has its own issues), but we loved the social interaction and actually preferred our economy seats over the sleepers. Two years later, we still like to chat about some of the folks we met and speculate on how they're doing.

The long transit time and specific travel windows would force people to rethink how badly they actually wanted to travel overseas and consider a more local scope. If that's not solarpunk...

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.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6081311

This is the background art for the cover. Before I share the full cover, I wanted to give a peak at what artist Sean Bodley has done for the background.

You can find more of his work at https://seanbodley.com/ and support him at patreon.com/seanbodley .

Stumbled at this while exploring small web. Not sure if it belongs here but however they are living is pretty solarpunk

From about us:

Hundred Rabbits is a small artist collective. Together, we explore the planned failability of modern technology at the bounds of the hyper-connected world. We research and test low-tech solutions and document our findings with the hope of building a more resilient future.

We live and work on a 10 meter vessel called Pino, we have sailed around the Pacific Ocean and realized how fragile the modern-day computing stack was. Living in remote uninhabited parts of the world has offered us a playground to learn how technology degrades beyond the shores of the western world.

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.