In essence, I believe a post-scarcity civilisation can be built right now by taking certain actions. Mainly: get as many people as possible as far away from conventional systems as possible, starting with ourselves. We build parallel systems with the high level of knowledge available. Not just smelly hippie solutions, but attractive solutions in every area: local food production, local energy, cheap housing, beautiful aesthetics etc. We design environments to meet human needs.
Phase 1 is to make an initial investment to create a baseline of supporting off-grid systems in our daily lives. Phase 2 is to reduce our economic participation to a minimum. We successively cut our dependencies on companies and the state.
By moving matter in spacetime into efficient arrangements, we can build a parallel society. It will fill the void of the hollow systems of the status-quo and attract more people. We will suffocate contemporary power structures by depriving them of the fuel they need: our participation.
Centring this around direct, practical techniques makes the bridge visible to the mainstream compared to centring it around core theory. For instance, rejection of hierarchy is hard to explain to people, hard for them to understand and thus unlikely to be implemented in their everyday lives. This holds true even if rejection of hierarchy would be imperative. Core values can follow stupidly simple, theoretically easily criticised but practically robust techniques.
The techniques here are designed to be implementable yet radical and difficult to absorb by conventional systems when applied as I suggest.
Most people have radical tendencies in that they want to be with their families instead of work, help each other to no direct benefit, take issue with overconsumption or something else. Instead of getting people on board with theory, we should make practice accessible.
This will be the only page on the website which covers the vision. Everything else are tangible instructions of how to move matter in spacetime into sustainable arrangements (see, for example, the list of tangible techniques).
This page is mainly to help you decide if you agree with the vision and wish to stay, or disagree with the vision and wish to leave.
One reason for the practical focus is that everybody else are doing theory. No one does practice (or at least shares it in a digestible, implementable way). Most everything else covering solarpunk/post-scarcity online—from social media to YouTube to blogs—is cheap talk to build internet persona. There’s a distinct lack of tangible steps for transformative action in people’s everyday lives.
I challenge my fellow radical progressives out there to actually act radically progressive. I’m not saying that sharing whatever quote on whichever social platform is without purpose. However because everybody else are already doing that, and because that is the easy part, and because it’s ultimately the hands-on stuff that will get us to the solarpunk world, I implore you to read up on the practical techniques and seriously consider implementing some of them in your life.
The vision we pursue is this:
Beautiful aesthetics always gets missed in practical application. They are the most important to me personally so I will start with them.
We have lost our sense of aesthetics over the last century of active removal of soulful architecture and landscapes. This has culminated in generations with an underdeveloped sense of aesthetics, which is probably why everyone gets this wrong.
Good aesthetics are almost exclusively handmade or deeply indistinguishable from handmade.
Good aesthetics are almost never conflicting with nature, even in the rare cases when they are distinctly contrasting with nature.
Good aesthetics radiants a sense of soulfulness and sincerity which draws people in.
Thus, we terrace landscapes with stone and log, build natural pools and geodesic dome greenhouses.
Until humanity has re-learnt the value of soulful aesthetics, we discourage large-scale building projects. No politician, engineer or architect today is qualified to alter matter at scale.
Aesthetics are more important than you think, because done right and different from convention, they’re a powerful and flashy tool for pulling people on the fence over to your side. Never settle for industry made just because it’s cheaper or easier to get your hands on. Instead, buy half the amount of the handmade stuff and take twice as long to build your landscape.
Over time I will cover many details and examples in regards to aesthetics.
We don’t care if the end result will be 90% centralised energy, 90% decentralised or something in between. But because virtually all energy systems today are centralised, and because individuals cannot build state-scale power plants in their backyards, everything energy-related here will cover small, local energy systems.
Centralised energy systems also use up huge spaces all at once, prevents elegant design, negatively affects ecosystems, impairs the potential for innovation, alienates the people from honing skills to affect their own energy production, requires high-level security, demands unreasonable infrastructure and constitutes a vulnerability in a war scenario/terrorist attack/natural disaster.
That is not to say that they cannot be used in the far future when humanity has laid the groundwork for a civilised world, but today they are at the bottom of the list for meaningfully discussing energy.
This means that we flip contemporary debate on its head: all common energy systems are not worth our attention. This includes nuclear, hydro, geothermal plants and even wind- and solar farms.
Instead, we focus on alternative energy as the core. A few examples include local solar power, passive solar home design, Jean Pain systems, rocket mass water heaters+ovens+stoves+willow-planted greywater ditches, geothermal earth air tubes, thermoelectric generators (TEGs), stirling engine generators, home-scale biogas digesters+converted portable generators, earth ships, insulation curtains, downgrading to low-tech where suitable, heating people not places, repurposing, degrowth etc.
The majority of what we do today does more harm than good: transportation, electricity generation and usage, work etc. Most jobs are bullshit jobs where employees would contribute more to the world by simply not working.
We aim to reduce our energy consumption by more than half for certain, and well over 90% if current company and state energy consumption is accounted for.
This is achieved through both lifestyle changes and shifts in technology. Contrary to popular belief, it’s very easy to reduce electricity consumption while maintaining or even improving quality of life. Just like your quality of life is not tied to how much stuff you own (often the opposite is true), it is not tied to how much electricity you use (down to a reasonable level).
When we talk about quality of life, we mean all 24 hours of the day. Thus if you commute to work for instance, that severely reduces your quality of life. If you’re at home tending to a fire for 30m active time during winter days, that’s a vastly increased quality of life compared to being at work getting the money to pay an overblown electricity bill for the same heat.
The average electricity consumption for a household in the USA is 29 000 watt-hours per day. This is sickeningly large. Running a laptop for 12h incurs about 600 watt-hours. We have an electricity addiction in the west.
Temperature changes (space heating, space cooling, water heating, cooking etc.) solved without electricity cuts 80% electricity right out. The default should be to build standardised rocket mass heaters into houses for this purpose.
There’s not a forced shift for everybody to use earth cellars, composting toilets or anything else, but the options are presented in a more balanced way. A combination of high-tech and low-tech solutions are available and people get to choose where to gravitate.
We shift the time we spend such that more food is grown locally and community is built. A shared geodesic dome greenhouse at the centre goes a long way. I have built one of these from scratch in my backyard and can provide detailed instructions.
Earth cellars can be used to store food in an optimal climate with no electricity. Tomatoes are canned, citrus stored on the tree itself, dried beans stored in jars, certain root vegetables stored in the ground etc.
Crop systems focused on perennials requires little maintenance for good yields. Throw into this cold-hardy self-seeders like miner’s lettuce and you have a resilient and efficient system.
Public debate is full of assumptions about people and their behaviours which really aren’t true.
For instance, there’s no physical law which says that human beings must conceptualise themselves as separate entities in spacetime. Essentially you are a collection of matter capable of asserting control over itself for a split second in infinity. This means that the matter which constitutes your hands has no fundamentally different “main character” quality as opposed to the matter that constitutes the hands of another person, or the matter in a treetrunk or a spacerock. As far as the universe is concerned, you are all the same stardust. You will all be returned to the source in the end.
This is the truth that should be taught to everyone.
For a functional education system, we demand a Manhattan Project—that is a project which gets the resources it needs until its goal is fulfilled irrespective of cost. The goal for education would be to establish environments to maximise curiosity, optimise for the needs of human beings and nourish benevolent neural connections.
This would make people form very different thought patterns and actually use their brains instead of being used by their brains as is the case today. The latter is useful for short-term working machines, predictability and control. The former is a true realisation of human potential, and would serve as the signal flare for the birth of the civilised world.
I began by saying that we will “get as many people as possible as far away from conventional systems as possible, starting with ourselves”. There is nuance to this, of course. Consider—as an example—debt-based, centralised money (current monetary systems):
In practice, most of us cannot stop using money right this second. The solution is to adapt unconventional thought-patterns and behaviours which cause less and less circulation. This can even mean spending money today in ways which makes you and/or others spend less tomorrow.
If you need help with where to start in your mind: start by focusing on what’s most intuitive to you in terms of moving away from convention. Double-down on that.
Try actions which works in your life situation. Read the practical examples here and use those that feel right to you.
As you become more comfortable, expand to all areas of life and use more of the transition tactics.
Keep humble in doing this, as convention will surely have taken root in the thought-patterns/ego in your own brain. Think more in terms of leaving something meaningless in order to realign with something meaningful, rather than fighting a war against the establishment or something.
It’s ultimately more effective to step away from the dumpster fire than it is to throw fuel at it in hopes that it will be destroyed.
Enough words. The list of practical techniques can be found here.