Notices by alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts (alxd@writing.exchange), page 2

@elmyra let me say we have a whole #podcast doing exactly this - @SolarpunkPrompts , https://podcast.tomasino.org/ or "Solarpunk Prompts" on any podcast platform!

#imagineBetter

There's a reason why paper ballots are considered safer than electronic elections: they can be audited, counted by people without extremely specialized skills. You can train someone to count votes in a few days instead of a few years of intense P2P cybersecurity courses, software and hardware expertise.

What Blockchain and DAOs offer you is offloading the responsibility for your processes to a third party, making you forget that you're giving them enough power to become absolute rulers.

And for every. single. argument. for Blockchains, DAOs, Web3, there is another open source tool that does the same thing, but better, less energy-intensely, with more fine-tuning for your own needs.

You can dive into IPFS, DAT, Scuttlebutt, Git and GitTorrent, dozens and dozens protocols which can solve your problems.

But none of them come in a sleek, well-marketed package of "solving all of your problems" only a scammer can offer you.

In the recently resurfaced debate about #solarpunk (or lunarpunk) aspects of #web3 and #blockchain I'm intrigued by one aspect:

Why do we accept being given a solution without outlining the problem in the first place?

Why don't we listen to #DAO pitches instead of asking ourselves how we want to run our communities, how do we want to make decisions, vote, discuss things?

Just stating the problem first would make it very clear that there are multiple technical solutions, not just the Web3.

Every time I encountered someone pitching a DAO or a Blockchain to an organization, they specifically bundled several things together to make them indistinguishable - the culture with the technology, the way a community is organized with the tools they use. With that, there fewer footholds for any kind of question, insight into what is really happening.

This is what I mean by saying that the technology is transparent and it's not always a good thing, because it makes us unable to discuss it.

In my definition of #technology in #solarpunk I do call it the "crystallized community", as a sum of all the decisions, tradition, culture, because the tools arise from the needs and the conscious choice, not the other way around.

Blockchain and DAOs are an anti-thesis of Solarpunk not just because of their carbon footprint, but because they bundle everything together and make choices for you, pretending there was never a choice in how your community could operate.

Moreover, Blockchains, with their tokens, enforce _financialization_ of your communities, where the way ledger is implemented does not correspond with any kind of gift economy, with communalism, but with the harshest capitalist market traditions. Whoever has the [money/tokens/votes], rules.

We spent thousands of years working on different law systems, putting transparency, equality before the law at their core, and Blockchain wants to replace them with a web3 engineer being a priest/judge.

@rysiek @ward capitalism corrupts language like this.

To the point of some languages (not only Polish) missing "sustainability", only having "a balanced growth". Because you cannot not grow.

@Collar there are a lot of podcasts, like @solarpunkpresents , @solarpunkcast and my own @SolarpunkPrompts ;)

Andrewism has a great YouTube channel!

My own essay https://alxd.org/solarpunk-lenses-and-foundations.html can be a good intro!

#climate protests aren't enough in getting the attention of the general public, because without a vision of an alternative, sustainable future people quickly move on.

#solarpunk 's function is to create imaginable tomorrows to which the climate protests can point to - and which are able to sustain people's attention.

It's not about painting a perfect utopia, but a path where our actions matter, to fight the defeatism.

#climateChange #climateProtests #activism #literature

Once again I'm pinged in the #mastodon dev thread about grouping notifications of the same type, which started back 6 years ago: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1483 .

There were several attempts at implementing it, all shot down by maintainers.

@Gargron , do you still stand by your comment from https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/11446#issuecomment-516297592 ?

Is there space for discussing and implementing notification grouping in this app?

#mastodonDev #notifications #ui #ux #UXDesign #fediverse #floss #software #softwareDev

"If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history."

"The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber & Wengrow

#solarpunk #narratives

All in all it's a really good book supporting that "it has not always been this way", that we are not doomed to go towards a global dictatorship dystopia, but that in history we had multiple examples of people dismantling hierarchies and choosing to live in flatter, more democratic and/or anarchist communities. It's just that what we define as "history" today is not really interested in such "dark ages" with no clear leaders or kings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

It's also a great example of why #solarpunk stories - and maybe also social games, like #ttrpg s and #LARP s are needed, to help us imagine different ways of structuring our societies and communities, to playfully explore them intellectually and emotionally. Only this will give us the distance and perspective to see what is really wrong with the systems we are in, but also - a little of the healthy respite without escapism.

We are exploring those realms for a reason.

@polezaivsani this is about a little more than just "art" - "The Dawn of Everything" describes a lot of communities living among the "playful" rituals, which would very intentionally flip the power dynamics around then every so often. So it wasn't only an act of imagination [which could be easier to us], but a lived experience of treating power and hierarchies much more playfully, ephemerally.

A few days ago an old question surfaced on the #solarpunk reddit:

"What makes the Solarpunk movement #punk ?"

Since I wrote a few essays trying to respond to this question, let me answer it in a series of toots:

Okay, but where is the -punk- in all that? It was supposed to be SolarPUNK, not a sunny everyone-get-along-now! Where’s throwing molotov cocktails at hypercorps, where are the mohawks and being the underdogs? What’s punk in starting a garden?

Finally deactivated my Twitter account - for the same reason as Facebook, before that. I could see it becoming more and more toxic and manipulative. I will miss the more commercial creatives sharing their work, but I don't want to help Elon boost his numbers.

From now on, I'm only on Mastodon.

@polezaivsani @bsmall2 that's exactly why I wouldn't write such a story [of the guy in Alaska].

I've been thinking about the problem with #solarpunk and #cyberpunk for some years now and I arrived at one important conclusion:

We don't need any more warnings.

They don't work.

We need prototypes of a way forward. They can be absurd, they can be a little naive, but we need to get a lot of them out to try imagining what to do instead of just getting paralyzed by the doomerism around.

I find https://www.okdoomer.io/youre-not-going-to-make-it/ to be a nice little essay for all those people who think they can just leave the society during a #climateApocalypse and live #offGrid nicely.

It states again and again: you're not going to make it on your own.

We either build resilience together, as a #solarpunk society and communities, or we won't make it.

Let's not romanticize off-grid, homesteading and bunkers.

One more good line:

"The best kind of prepping is emotional."

Not exactly #solarpunk , but it's interesting to see the modernity and the future of the #globalSouth in Rest Of (the) World's #photography contest: https://restofworld.org/2023/winners-2023-photography-contest/

If you haven't heard about the magazine, it has a big pro-big-tech bias, but does a really great job introducing people to the context of how differently #technology is used outside of the North!

Take it with a grain of salt, but feel free to explore the world you haven't seen before!