Sunshine and Seedlings: A Newsletter by HydroponicTrash

Sunshine and Seedlings is Leaving Substack!

I’m taking this blog off of Substack and moving to a self-hosted Ghost blog…

Read more

2 months ago · 18 likes · 3 comments · HydroponicTrash

If you are interested in reading this article, head over to:

https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar/cyberdecks-going-analog-and-convivial-technology/

My new blog gives me more control over my content and allows people to support my work in new ways.

I’m taking this blog off of Substack and moving to a self-hosted Ghost blog!

Things should look and work pretty much the same over there, and if you are subscribed, your subscription will carry over to the new server.

Now, I’m over at https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar!

Check out the new blog!

How to make sure you get new updates

If you are a current subscriber, you are already subscribed to the new blog. Emails will come from: posts@hydroponictrash.solar

All emails from my blog will come from posts@hydroponictrash.solar. If you don’t do anything, they might land in Promotions, Updates, or even Spam, depending on your email provider.

The easiest way is to add that email to your contacts/safe sender’s list. Or if it ends up in spam, mark it as not spam (idk what email provider you are using, but it should be easy).

Why I’m leaving Substack

There are a couple of reasons I’m switching over, and it’s been something looming in the back of my mind for a while. So, I finally put in the work (it was kind of a pain) and made the switch to my own self-hosted server.

1. I want to own my work and control my data. I don’t want to be beholden to a corporation to make sure my writing is out there in the world.

2. A big reason is that Substack doesn’t moderate anything. Which means I have to share a platform that routinely allows neo-nazis, conspiracy theorists, and other right-wing chuds to spew hatred and misinformation. For more info, check out

   https://leavesubstack.com/.

3. Because of the relative toxicity of Substack, I have heard from many people that they won’t share or even read my work because it’s on Substack. Which is a huge bummer. I originally started this as a passion project just to get shit out of my head, and now it’s bloomed into something pretty big (thanks to all of you who support me). I don’t want to be associated with a site that is connected with white supremacists, and I don’t want people to pass over what I write because of where the information sits.

What’s different about the new blog?

• I’ve overhauled all of my posts. I have a terrible tendency as a writer to not edit my shit after writing it. So I updated all my posts, corrected spelling and grammar, and fixed some broken TikTok links.

• I can control paid subscriptions more, with new tiers. I made it way cheaper to support the blog monthly or yearly.

• You can now send one-time donations!

  • If you want to buy me a coffee, help fund a project, or just want to throw some cash my way as thanks, now you don’t have to subscribe monthly!

• The blog can now be followed on the Fediverse, thanks to Ghost’s integration with ActivityPub!

Paid Subscribers

If you are a paid subscriber (thank you again for supporting me), you will still stay subscribed. Your paid subscription isn’t handled by Substack (Stripe handles that).

Feel free to keep it, or cancel your current subscription and resubscribe. Totally up to you though.

The blog has since moved to: https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

My last post was written right after the 2024 election. As we all saw the storm approaching on the horizon, we all had an idea of how bad things could get - how bad things might get - how bad things would get - with no true idea of how bad things would be in reality.

Suspended in limbo, watching the inevitable come towards us, bracing, preparing, reeling, crying out in terror, ignoring the problem altogether, and some of us giving up when the wake started to hit the metaphorical shore. And now, we have seen the storm come, and in many ways, things are worse than we imagined. In other ways, they are exactly as they said they would be, line-by-line enactments from Project 2025.

I do not doubt that, like me, you have also been watching things happen, with each hour passing bringing a new horror. I don’t think I need to explain what is happening; you already know. I doubt you need another person telling you about the horrors happening at this moment and the bleak future we are looking towards.

But as with the natural world, life moves towards death, just as every system, empire, economy, and tyrant decays. Eventually, they rot. Where there is death, there is life; natural systems rely on death, rot, and decomposition to move energy towards life. Where there is despair, there is hope because, like life, hope uses the energy from death and despair to make something new.

It’s within this rot, this destruction, this collapse, where the metaphorical fungi will flourish. It’s in the decay that the energy of the rotting system will be used to grow something new.

Mycelium, decay, and energy entropy

Mushrooms are actually how some types of fungi reproduce; they spread spores that replicate the underlying mycelium - which is the network formed by the fungi and can be thought of as the “body” of the fungi. This network is an interconnected one, and there are multiple types of fungi that play different roles in the ecosystem.

Parasitic fungi require a living host to survive, stealing food from the host; saprophytic fungi live by breaking down dead organic matter and recycling nutrients; mycorrhizal fungi form a symbiotic relationship between the mycelium and the roots of host plants. [1] mayneconservancy.ca

All three types play a pivitol role in the ecosystem, from latching on to existing organisms to use them as fuel, breaking down the decay of the world and sharing nutrients to the network at large, and forming relationships to other organisms like plants, in a mutual beneficial relationship, not only sharing minerals and resources, but also acting as a living network that connects ecosystems.

Biomimicry - Parasitic fungi

The social and economic systems that have brought us to our current moment are dying. What we are seeing are the last screams of anger, the last breaths of the empire, finally lashing out at itself after years of inflicting pain outside of it. The pain inflicted in the global south, to the economically targeted, to the marginalized, and to the environment outside of imperial power is now turning back in. The invading armies are occupying the cities within, the results of centuries of global destabilization across the world, are now coming back to the United States.

And so, like parasitic fungi, we need to latch on to our host (the crumbling and ever more fascistic systems of the American Empire and global capitalism) and take it down by leaching away the resources necessary for it to survive.

By decommodifying our lives, we take the capital which fuels this system out of it. Whether it be human capital (our labor), or financial capital, we need to tank consumer spending (which makes up the majority of the US economy) by building our own resource networks.

Taken from my last article:

The mechanisms of power that capitalism uses for control, are central to our everyday lives. We work for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic necessities. The feudal lords control the land, decide who can do what with it, control the flow of commodities and labor, and in turn control who gets access to the basics of life.

We need to take back control of what it means to live by collectivizing, decommodifying, and changing every system we interact with in our lives. Building mass political movements is easier when we address core parts of our lives and use our social and political frameworks to influence them. Building a mass political movement is easier when people don’t have to worry about their food, if they can afford their water bill, if they can afford to keep the lights on, etc. All of this is the carrot being dangled in front of the proverbial horse. You are promised a great life if you create profit for someone else. Take the carrot away, and take it back.

Saprophytic fungi, Permacomputing, and Composting the Current to Feed the New

saprophytic fungi live by breaking down dead organic matter and recycling nutrients

There is a lot I could say about this, so I will only use one example of what I mean by breaking down the “dead” matter and recycling the nutrients.

More so, this is more about taking what we currently have, what is considered to be “trash,” and turning it into something useful.

Permacomputing

The connection between technology, ecological and social destruction, capitalism, and exploitation is strong. And these connections are getting stronger with the rise of AI and the data centers and material extraction that’s required to run this technology. Year over year, more computers are discarded for no good reason other than that they have been replaced with an upgrade, or in some cases, purposefully bricked to drive profit (For example, Google essentially bricking old Chromebooks by not allowing older models to update ChromeOS).

We can use this “waste” to curb planned obsolescence, fuck over the corporations doing it, while also using these wasted computers to create some amazing things. The idea of permacomputing borrows from ideas from permaculture, so you can see the carryover of the ideas.

I will let you read the details for yourself at:

https://permacomputing.net/

But here is a snippet from the permacomputing wiki.

Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology inspired by permaculture.
There are huge environmental and societal issues in today's computing, and permacomputing specifically wants to challenge them in the same way as permaculture has challenged industrial agriculture. With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism.

We take the waste of the system and use it to make new things.

Your average laptop is not only a way to access websites. It can be a portable digital library, a community file server with helpful resources that don’t require the use of a data center or cloud infrastructure, it can be a media resource for educational purposes, a communal server for running workshops, or even for an autonomous communications network. A laptop from 2012 can be turned into one if not all of these things.

Even using Chromebooks as an example, they can be used to do some amazing things.

Biomimicry - Mycorrhizal fungi

Mycorrhizal fungi form a symbiotic relationship between the mycelium and the roots of host plants.

Our own resistance needs to form networks that spread, that share resources and information together. Not just within the fungal network, but to other plants and to other networks, so that means that our resistance shouldn’t stay in insulated groups, cliques, or subcultures, but spread out to our communities, our bioregions, and to the world at large.

Ideas are like spores; they spread the mycelium network by spreading, falling into places that you might not think are fertile (sometimes dangerous places), but are made to thrive and break things down. In breaking down the system, it will feed us and fuel us to grow. One spore creates a new network of resource sharing, a connected network of unity, to create more spores and spread even further.

Our networks need to be symbiotic both to each other, but also to the environment as a whole. With these mycelium-like networks cultivating a symbiotic relationship not only between humans, but the earth as well.

The only step after the system dies, is for the mycelium to come in - decompose the rot - share the resources - and allow something new to bloom.

Fractals of a Greater Pattern

I tend to write too much, trying to explain myself too much. But sometimes a picture says it all.

The blog has since moved to:

https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

We are staring down the proverbial barrel after the US election. Holding that weapon -is the amorphous threat of fascism. Regardless of who won the presidential race, the empire would still continue. Our votes as radicals only being used to select our opponent, and to select the grounds to keep doing the work, to keep resisting, and to keep working towards liberation. However, now that we have come out of this election, we are faced with Donald Trump, the policies of Project 2025, and the real risk that we slide into a christo-fascist authoritarian regime.

No matter who is in political power, they will not dismantle the weapons of domination, violence, hierarchy, and oppression. They will not cede any ground, or loosen their grip on power and money. And so we have to stay resolute to continue our fight for a better future. The goals we have set are still there, but now the opponents are different. More organized, filled with hatred. And yet, we also have a hatred kindling in ourselves. Of the social and political systems that destroy humanity, that kill innocent people, that dim the lives that otherwise could be so bright, that control us, manipulate us, hate us, and kill us. Save that hatred in your hearts. Direct those feelings away from depression and redirect them towards righteous anger to change the very system. That anger turns into energy to resist. Not for the short term, but the long term. The despair we feel is what they want us to feel. The far-right wants us to be scared, want us to stay silent.

We won’t be silent. We won’t stop fighting for collective liberation. We won’t be subsumed into the mechanisms of power that threaten the existence of life, of nature, and humanity.

None of us have a definite plan on what exactly to do.

The Plan is to Create A Viable Alternative, and Fight

While no one has a definite blueprint for the future, and while many of us have ideas of possibilities on the horizon. We really don’t know what will work and what won’t work. Which is why we need to experiment and adapt. We need to not only look to the future but also to the past. We need to learn from our ancestral fights, battles, and losses. We need to understand how we got here, the methods and techniques our ancestors used, and adapt those techniques to our current circumstances. As the climate changes and collapses, we need to adapt not only our beliefs but our social and economic systems as well. These social and economic systems are deeply intertwined with the problems we are seeing and the problems we will face in the future.

Fascism is an easy answer to complex questions. It is a system that ignores nuance. One that exploits the minds of people into believing in a fake hierarchy, believing in a “strong man”, believing in simple answers to complex problems. Why do the work of understanding white privilege and the impact it’s had on generations of people when they can think they are above everyone else because they are white? Why learn the complex interplay that economics and immigration play together, the nuances of everyday life, and the immigrants that are at the center of American society and economics? When the easy answer that fascists give is to deport them all? It’s a quelling of intellectualism. A subservience to hierarchy and to others who will sweep away all of the problems, if they let them deport, jail, or kill groups of people. The mechanisms of fascism in the US are entwined with white supremacy, Christianity, and capitalism. All of these combine to create social and political systems of hierarchical value, of strict gender and social roles, of an “us” and a “them”, a group of the blessed, and a group of the damned.

The first wave of fascism in the 1930’s across Europe, is directly mirrored now. However, as before mainly economic issues were central to the swing towards fascist beliefs. Now, we have seen a transformation in our current day. While those on the right wing say they voted for Trump for the “economy” - it’s the cultural war that they have bought into. The constant chaos of this modern world has left an open gap for fascists to come in, giving young men a reason to embrace hierarchy, religion, and racism. The cultural war against BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people has raged on, we have become their scapegoats. The same propaganda is reused from the 1930s and changed (in the case of groups like Q Anon). The same tactics used by fascists in the past is rearing it’s head again, had has been for a long time.

We can see the parallels of the past to the present. We can see the connections of what happened, to what is happening now. We have to learn from previous battles with fascism, and most importantly, adapt their techniques of resistance to the modern day, and to the modern versions of fascism.

It’s not enough to look to the past, but we have to look toward the future. And think of the world we want to see, and make it a reality. A total dismantling of the current system may lead to collapse, but as we have seen in the past, capitalism, hierarchy, homophobia, racism, and sexism will still hold on unless the new systems are so impervious to their influence that they can’t latch on again.

I will list some personal ideas of what a viable future toward liberation might look like, given our current circumstances and environment.

They can burn humanity and the planet, but like a phoenix, we will rise.

There have been countless videos and text posts online after the election, wondering what to do. Most people are resolute in falling into nihilism and resolving themselves to just let things happen.

Others are using their anger to fuel real, meaningful, action. Fascists will not wait around for us to fight back to carry out their sick plans. And we as leftists can’t sit back and let them continue any further. We have to fight back in whatever ways we can. Fight to survive while also thriving. Fight the collapse while also building our alternatives, while building a better future.

Wildfires may destroy the landscape, but in nature, this destruction can make the seeds that live by fire start to grow. We are seeds. We have been deposited by our ancestors over generations of struggle, the fires of fascism have arrived, threatening to burn everything away. And no matter what we will bloom.

In our fight, we will be planting the seeds for the radically different system we envision. In our actions of resistance, we also need to water the grounds for persistence.

Resistance to Persistence

The mechanisms of power that capitalism uses for control, are central to our everyday lives. We work for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic necessities. The feudal lords control the land, decide who can do what with it, control the flow of commodities and labor, and in turn control who gets access to the basics of life. As quoted from my article on building encrypted communication networks:

We need to take back control of what it means to live by collectivizing, decommodifying, and changing every system we interact with in our lives. Building mass political movements is easier when we address core parts of our lives and use our social and political frameworks to influence them. Building a mass political movement is easier when people don’t have to worry about their food, if they can afford their water bill, if they can afford to keep the lights on, etc. All of this is the carrot being dangled in front of the proverbial horse. You are promised a great life if you create profit for someone else. Take the carrot away, and take it back.

What I mean is that decommodifying access to resources takes the power away from corporations and states to control us. Being ungovernable means building autonomy, taking back the commons, and making sure all people have access to what they need.

I would suggest reading that full section in the link above so you can see my thought process on how creating autonomous infrastructure can aid in building mass movements and mass change.

Our resistance to the rise of fascism will be the seeds for our persistence in the future.

So far we don’t know how Trump’s plans will play out in the end, and this is speculation about the near future. But some of the policies already being talked about can give us hints at what they plan to do. And give us hints on planning what we need to do.

Rising Inflation and Food Costs | Building Food Autonomy

With the looming threat of insanely high tariffs on imports from specific countries, we can expect inflation to get worse. Corporations will take the suffering of middle-class people, and ring as much profit as they can from it. It will become harder for the average person to survive. With the flood of inflation, we need to actively build food autonomy across all regions. The grocery store might be too expensive, but we can make strides to get people to grow their food, and supplement their diets with things they grow. We can radically change our urban and suburban environments to be more conducive to survival, and replace lawns with gardens and small farms, while revitalizing the communities around us.

Gutting the Department of Education | Creating Free Schools

The Department of Education is under threat, cutting access to things like access to college, school accountability, and school funding/subsidies for low-income and rural areas. We could see schools close down, and for some children, free school meals are the only food they have access to.

Right-wing religious thought will also destroy legitimate topics of education such as an accurate portrayal of history, not teaching core scientific ideas like evolution, and teaching abstinence instead of sexual education.

Education as a whole will be under threat. And an uneducated populace is exactly what fascists want.

So we will need to look to the past and look towards the present day and the future. The Black Panther Party had many survival programs, one of the most influential and impactful was the free breakfast program.

We could work to create free schools, that focus on providing an education to people to supplement schooling that is taken over by religious and right-wing ideology, or in the worst cases, provide education to people if public schools entirely fail. With the technological tools we have on hand. It’s possible to create an entire library of banned books, solid peer-reviewed and factual text books, and history books that can be run on a single computer. (See the article below)

Changes to HUD | Expropriating Land, Ecovillages, and Dual Power

There are talks of getting rid of discrimination protections for marginalized communities when it comes to getting access to housing. To resist these inequities, we have to build our own equitable systems outside of their power dynamics. We need to make free and collective housing. This can be done while strengthening our resilience to climate collapse.

Mass Deportations | Mass Revolutionary Resistance

The fascists that are coming into power want to deport millions of people from the US. This is the combination of all the forces that we have stood up against, the rising militarization of police forces, the growing power of ICE, the cop cities being built, and the private prison systems, all coalesce into this plan.

We have to do whatever we can to stop deportations. Direct action will be necessary. It’s not enough to protest, we have to stand between the families that will be ripped apart and the police/ICE. Safehouses can be established to hide those at risk of deportation. We have to do whatever we can to sabotage the raids, the transportation of innocent people, and do whatever we can to sabotage the concentration camps that will “detain” people.

We need to protect those who need to be protected.

The power in us joining together, protecting families from deportation, and protecting people from fascist violence will snowball to create an even larger movement of resistance.

Dual power to build mass movements

Rising Inflation | The Return to Convivial and Low-Tech Methods

The poor and middle class will be locked out of acquiring basic needs through the use of economic warfare through the use of tariffs. We will see the price of consumer goods, some that are necessary to living, skyrocket in price. Further ensuring that poor and working-class people cannot afford to live. Locking them into additional debt, and with the end goal of producing a class of people dispossessed from the land, their homes, and ending up houseless. With the criminalization of houselessness being enacted and further planned, combined with the 13th Amendment, will create large groups of people at risk of being arrested and converted from serfs to slave labor. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. The massive inflation will be used as a tool to lock poor and working-class people into losing their livelihoods and possibly being arrested for not having housing.

We can turn to convivial and low tech solutions to meet the needs of all people. Using and reusing resources that already exist or are easy to manufacture at a local level, we can give people the tools to live their lives, while cutting down on their need for capital to survive.

While basic services like electricity may skyrocket in price, we can help each other generate our own electricity, divesting from the system and producing autonomy.

We can focus on low-tech solutions to daily life. Using natural materials combined with the waste of the capitalist system, we can reusing existing technology that normally would end up in e-waste facilities or landfills, using the ‘trash’ of capitalism to create libraries, mobile schools, media servers, localized social media platforms, washing machines, power generation. The list is long.

Check out https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/low-tech-solutions/ for more ideas on this.

The Fight Hasn’t Changed, The Goals are Still the Same, We Will Resist and Win.

Short of writing an entire book, I wanted to link some things together to point out that the fight hasn’t changed. We are in a fight against capitalism, exploitation, violence, domination - and against the fascist ideology and regime that wants to do harm. Our resistance can be just that, temporary resistance. Or our resistance can be the seeds for a better future. The battles and methods we will need to use to fight fascism will be the building grounds for larger change. The fight to survive this evil and to survive on a dying planet will be the building grounds for us building an equitable system, and helping to regenerate the earth.

Our resistance is interconnected, and we need to treat it as a seed for the future.

The blog has since moved to:

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

This is for educational purposes only. I am not responsible for misuse of this information as this article is a confluence of publicly available information with personal anecdotes. If you use this information to do anything illegal or malicious, that is on you - and your responsibility.

This will be a guide on how to use LoRa (Long Range) radio hardware to create mesh networks that can transmit text messages miles away with no cellular signal/LTE, no WiFi, and no infrastructure. These nodes can be powered directly off portable solar panels with USB chargers, or used with portable battery banks. This can create a resilient mesh network of devices that can send text messages without the need for wider infrastructure in emergencies such as natural disasters, during protests, or in areas of military or state occupation. Messages can be encrypted and can be sent to broadcast channels or directly to other devices/users like a DM or a traditional text message. This can all be done with cheap hardware with LoRa capabilities, a power source, and some basic computer skills (No CLI or special coding). Depending on the environment even the cheapest LoRa hardware can broadcast up to three miles in urban/suburban areas or up to ten miles in rural areas/direct line of sight. That’s node-to-node distance, with multiple nodes in a local network you can extend the range even further. Because mesh nodes automatically join the network and act like a relay, the more nodes, the more theoretical distance you can cover and the more people who can have access and communicate. With antenna upgrades, proper placement, and some basic skills you can create a DIY autonomous communication system that works even when everything else doesn’t.

I will offer two examples of some hardware, one is a small device that connects to a phone via Bluetooth and uses the Meshtastic app on a phone to act as a client. The other device is more standalone and is basically a Blackberry clone with a LoRa chip in it. Great to have an all-in-one device to hand to someone that just works with LoRa and doesn’t require a phone (less power requirements with fewer devices). There are some benefits and downsides to these options but I wanted to illustrate the possibilities on what you can use.

This article is broken up into sections to make it easier to digest.

1. Things will start with the technical “how” section and will explain how to do this hands-on - with steps to go from bare unflashed hardware to sending messages, adding encryption, boosting signals, and ways to actually use the hardware.

2. The “why” / “use cases” section goes into detail about the reasoning behind making autonomous communication systems (and by extension) the reasons why we would want to build autonomous infrastructure. I also go into detail about situations/use cases where systems like this could be used along with some security tips. This is optional but it explains some social, political, and historical reasons why this topic is important.

3. The “next steps” section will connect autonomous communications with autonomous infrastructure as a whole. This will explain the snowball effect of going from small projects - to building community-wide mutual aid networks - to what I see as a possible path to revolutionary action.

   ---

Table of Contents

“The How?”:

How to build off-grid, solar-powered, encrypted, and resilient mesh LoRa networks

• Background/Overview

• Hardware

• What is LoRa?/How does the system work?

• How far can we transmit LoRa data?

• Mesh networks, nodes, and repeaters

• Getting LoRa Hardware

• Specific LoRa hardware examples

• 3D Printing Cases

• Hardware recommendations

• Flashing Meshtastic (With step-by-step instructions and examples)

• Using the Meshtastic App to send messages

• Encrypting Messages

• Powering your device with direct solar, portable battery banks, and other options

• Boosting signals with antennas and amplifiers

“The Why?”:

Use Cases

• Climate/Natural Disaster Emergencies

• Protests & Civil Unrest

• Conflicts/War zones

“The Next Steps”:

• Revolutionary action to build autonomous infrastructure - autonomous infrastructure to help with revolutionary action

How to build off-grid, solar-powered, encrypted, and resilient mesh LoRa networks

Background/Overview

This LoRa network system isn’t too complex and your average person can get a Meshtastic node flashed, powered, and running without a crazy amount of technical skills. Some basic criteria will be covered in more detail but these are the building blocks of what you need to get things going.

1. A device with LoRa capabilities.

2. A computer with internet access to flash the device. Or the firmware downloaded to load without internet access.

3. A way to connect to the device like a phone (optional if you get a standalone LoRa device).

4. A way to power the LoRa board.

5. A place to broadcast.

These are the basic Lego bricks. Just like Legos, you can build off of these basic blocks and reconfigure things.

Hardware

To create this mesh network we are going to use LoRa combined with Meshtastic software to create nodes within a network that work together to transmit text messages long distances without wider infrastructure. The specific hardware I used and some recommendations are featured later in this article in more detail.

What is LoRa?/How does the system work?

LoRa stands for Long Range, which is a special protocol that uses a specific radio frequency to transmit and receive data over long distances. LoRa requires special hardware that can send and receive LoRa signals, most phones don’t have LoRa hardware so we are going to use standalone LoRa devices to connect to a phone or a standalone LoRa device with a built-in keyboard to send data long distances.

How far can we transmit LoRa data?

That depends.

LoRa works great with line of sight, meaning two nodes are basically in front of each other with the least amount of obstructions in between them. Not everyone lives in a giant field with no trees and buildings in-between but you can still get a line of sight by getting high. Not like that, get to higher elevations to clear obstacles. You can get (nearly) a direct line of sight by putting nodes high up on buildings, structures, or natural formations like hills and mountains to broadcast over any obstacles.
In a city that means getting nodes as high as possible so the radio signals travel farther without hitting obstructions. Or by going up the mountain to broadcast in a valley.

You don’t need a direct line of sight but clearing obstacles will help the signal to travel farther. I was able to broadcast a signal in a suburban area a half mile away through trees and about 20 houses to the next node. Sometimes you won’t have the opportunity to bounce directly to another node, but by adding additional nodes or repeaters in the middle of your destination you can still send data through obstacles while also making it easier to connect to a far away node that may have a line of sight with another node even farther away. This brings up the topic of mesh networking, nodes, and signal bouncing.

By nodes I mean any device running Meshtastic. This can be another person’s Meshtastic client that can send and receive messages or it might be a standalone Meshtastic device that is made into a router or a repeater to just help send messages. Your device will be set up as a client. A client in a Meshtastic node can send and receive messages, but will also forward messages to other devices.

You can get creative with how you get around obstacles. You might be able to get another node or make a repeater LoRa device that connects through a neighborhood to a spot that can hit a tall office building, or tie a device to a rope and pull it up a tall tree. If you need momentary connections you could strap a node or repeater to a drone and clear all the homes and trees to get a good connection enough to send a message.

Mesh networks, nodes, and repeaters

The power in this comes from the ability to create a mesh network with clients that can send and receive messages or even standalone repeaters that use super cheap LoRa boards that will basically act like a relay and pass info on to the next node.

Mesh network basics

A traditional network is client-server based, so you have a sender, a receiver, and the infrastructure to move that info around. One major flaw is that if the communication structure or the infrastructure is broken, the message can’t be delivered. Take the internet as an example, if you use the encrypted messaging app Signal to send a message to another person there has to be a way for that message to get to the other person. What if the internet is down in the area of the person you are sending the message to? They just don’t get it.

However, a mesh network is more reliable because each node/device in the network can help move the message, and the reliance on centralized infrastructure to handle messages and transport that data is spread out. This message can be sent shorter distances through obstacles or longer distances using a direct line of sight to bounce the message across each device in the network.

Think of a mesh network like a relay run, each device on the network will pass the relay (the message) to the next available node until the message is hopefully delivered. In this example start with Bobby in the lower left corner.

You can see that even if parts of the network are broken; as long as other nodes/connections are available a message can still be delivered. Though Ace couldn’t forward the message from Bobby because of a signal drop due to obstacles, the message was relayed through the mesh to Jack in the end. Even though a snowstorm stopped Cara from forwarding directly to Jack, Amina was able to pass the message to Ace - who then passed it to Jack.

That example used a direct message to illustrate how messages can pass using Meshtastic, but the core of Meshtastic is to be able to send broadcast messages to all reachable devices. Great for messages that impact more than one person.

Why not use HAM radio?

While HAM radio (amateur radio) is the standard for long-range off-grid communications, in the US you can’t encrypt data over radio transmissions (unless you are a cop, federal agent, or have a specific license). You also need to be licensed to broadcast on most frequencies outside of specific ranges that are commonly used for emergencies and consumer goods like off-the-shelf walkie-talkies. Your average person isn’t going to want to drop hundreds of dollars on a fancy long range radio setup they can’t really use, need technical knowledge of how to handle it, and in general isn’t very user-friendly. Hand your average person a Baofeng radio and they will more than likely have no clue what to do. Hand them a device and tell them to use an app on their phone or on a computer that connects over Bluetooth that looks like a normal chat client and they will be able to operate things pretty easily.

Getting LoRa Hardware

You really just need LoRa-compatible hardware to start using it. LoRa is still a pretty new protocol compared to things like WiFi and Bluetooth so not every device will have it built in. But LoRa devices usually come with Bluetooth at the bare minimum to pair to a phone.
I opted to start with two different LoRa devices.

1. An all-in-one device that has a keyboard built-in and can act as a standalone Meshtastic client.

2. A small device that can be paired with a phone and is cheaper but still useful.

What you choose will be up to you. LoRa devices can range from $16 USD - $200 USD depending on the broadcast strength, the out-of-the-box easy use (most don’t come with a case), and the size of the screen.

Meshtastic has pretty wide support for ESP32 boards (most LoRa devices have an ESP32 chip in them) the following screenshot shows the supported ESP32 boards as of January 2024.

Some of these devices need a LoRa attachment or module but the easiest ones are the “T-series” made by LilyGo.

Considerations

Most LoRa devices won’t come with a case, some really good ones do come with cases and are ready to use out of the box like the LilyGo T-Echo which might be the best value for most people. However, ready to roll out of the box devices tend to sell out quickly.

You don’t need a case, and if you have a 3D printer you can churn out hundreds of these cases for a few bucks. Don’t let that stop you if you don’t have a 3D printer. You can just throw most of these devices into a shoebox or a plastic container. Will it look good? More than likely not. Will it work and keep it protected if you are installing a LoRa device like a repeater outdoors? Yes. I will go over 3D printing cases a bit later.

There are some other devices out there like the GoTenna mesh, but those are $200 for only two dongles. So no thanks. For the same price, you can get seven LilyGo TTGO T3 devices.

In terms of sourcing, Aliexpress or going to the manufacturer will be the best move in terms of cost. But shipping times might be long because they ship from China. You can buy these devices at a slight markup on sites like Amazon and other sites. Just look around for the best price compared to the shipping time!

Helium and SoftRF devices

You don’t want devices meant for Helium or SoftRF, those are different things with different uses. Most devices you will come across while searching “LoRa Meshtastic” online will say they are compatible. If you see any mention of Helium or SoftRF, feel free and skip it and opt for something more compatible. They will work, but it’s complicated to go into getting them running for what we are talking about here. If the site just says “LoRa” and “915Mhz” you should be good.

For the standalone LoRa device: LilyGo T-Deck $50

I went with a LilyGo T-Deck, which is a Blackberry clone with a scroll ball, and a full keyboard, along with the LoRa capabilities. If you are just starting and don’t feel comfortable with electronics, this might look a little intense. I would recommend getting some extra parts to make it better, as the antenna that it came with is fine, but isn’t your standard SMA (screw-on type) antenna.
If you buy them from Lilygo, you will want the 915Mhz model.

(Optional) I recommend getting an IPX IPEX-1 U.FL to SMA Female Pigtail adapter, that will fit on the board’s antenna slot and allow you to use a proper external antenna.

And also recommend getting a set of larger LoRa antennas tuned for 915MHz. You can get any antenna tuned for 915MHz, it doesn’t have to say LoRa, but for ease you can just search “LoRa” antenna.

(Optional) If you want it to have a standalone battery pack you can get any 3.7 volt battery with a JST connector. This will let you have an upgraded pack with a rechargeable battery, long-distance antennas with the ability to switch to even larger ones on the fly, and make it easy to carry.

Alternatively, you can scrap these from other electronics, they are found in pretty much every small electronic device and a trip to a thrift store or a dumpster dive might yield a bunch of these for free.

Because I have a metric fuck ton of rechargeable battery banks, I didn’t get a battery. The T-Deck will run off a USB-C cable and can run on pretty much any USB power source. A portable battery bank will also be able to charge other devices and can sometimes have an attached solar panel to change it in the sun. So an internal battery isn’t really necessary unless you want to have a truly all-in-one device. I like the option to carry one power bank to power multiple things. But you do you.

Advantages

• Can work as a completely standalone LoRa messenger. No phone is required. Just runs Meshtastic and you can type out messages.

• It can broadcast messages pretty far, it’s a larger board and the antenna can be upgraded giving it better range.

• 3D printed cases can make it look like a polished device and it’s rugged enough to take into the field.

• By default has acknowledge turned on, meaning it will play a ringtone when you get a message, which is nice to have and works like a phone.

Disadvantages

• Only sends LoRa messages, can’t really do anything else but that’s the point of a standalone device.

• It requires some upgrades and extra parts to really get rolling with it. It has a ton of extra bells and whistles but an antenna swap is needed.

• Kinda annoying to use without a case. I 3D printed a case for mine, but without a case it’s kinda a pain to move around and type. Though you can make a case out of anything (recycled bottles, cardboard, whatever).

Super portable and cheap LoRa device to connect to a phone: LilyGo T3 ($23) or T-Beam($30)

For testing, I also went with a LilyGo T3 that costs about $20 USD. It’s super small and runs off USB. It has a proper SMA antenna port to swap antennas at any time. It also has a screen that will read off messages. Super cheap, super small, and perfect for LoRa applications.

If you buy one from Lilygo select the SX1276 915Mhz model. 915Mhz will work with Meshtastic.

The T-Beam is similar but it’s slightly more expensive. But it can run without external power using a 18650 rechargeable battery and has slightly better transmit strength. This is a solid contender if you want a middle ground between the T3 and the T-Deck, of having the portability but also the power of a somewhat standalone device. Again, I opt to use external power banks or direct solar power, so I went with the T3 to start.

Also recommend getting the antenna mentioned in the T-Deck section that is tuned for LoRa at 915MHz. Those antennas will work best and maximize range and lower jitter, but other external antennas might work alright. It depends, most external antennas that will fit the SMA connector are meant for WiFi (2.4GZ + 5GZ) and are tuned for higher frequencies, while it might work, it’s not as good as a tuned antenna and may cause transmission issues.

You need a phone to use the T3, it pairs with Bluetooth so you can use the Meshtastic app on your phone to control and send messages. You really just need any device capable of downloading the Meshtastic mobile app from the appropriate app store. You can also control it over a Python CLI in Windows and Linux for all you nerds, but the mobile apps are way easier to use.

Once you have Meshtastic flashed to the device and the app or control CLI downloaded, you are ready to pair and send messages.

Advantages

• Smaller in scale and is super portable.

• Can be powered using any USB power source.

• Has a screen to view messages.

• Connects via Bluetooth to your phone so it feels like a normal texting experience.

Disadvantages

• No cases are available, you have to 3D print or make one.

• Requires a phone to use properly (unless you use a command line to work it), meaning older phones that can’t access app stores (ahem Apple) will not work as clients. Not everyone has a phone and it’s just a downside that you need another device to control it.

3D Printing Cases

T-Deck On Google Drive:

• Recommend printing the parts at 100% infill. 40% infill made the snaps too brittle and I had to CA glue the frame to get it to stick.

• Feels really nice and has extra space for a battery. You need the SMA cord mentioned above to reach the case top, but it works pretty well.

• I updated the link to the design here. It was deleted after originally posting this! But I still had the files on my printer’s SD card.

LilyGo TTGO T3 Case on Thingiverse:

• Recommend printing at 100% infill.

• The case fits well but there is some slack if you don’t add a battery. I filled the space with a piece of paper and it fits correctly.

• Has a nice clip part to attach to a bag.

Not everyone has a 3D printer or has access to a 3D printer (though I recommend getting one, they are really useful) there are some other options for getting a nice-looking case.

• Buy a print at an online 3D printing shop. Can get expensive, send them the STL file and the info you need and they will print and ship it to you. If you are doing cases for more than 4 devices, just get your own 3D printer. With a single roll of filament, you could print like 50 -100 cases for $20.

• Check out your local library. If you live in a metropolitan city/suburb, check if any libraries offer 3D printing services. Usually will be free with a library card. You might be able to go to another city or county and pay a few bucks to use their 3D printers.

• Check to see if you have a local makerspace near you. Makerspaces will have 3D printers, you might have to take a training class but it’s also good to learn and usually it’s really cheap to do one off prints or if you get a membership you have access to a ton of other tools.

• If you are a college student or work for a school, check to see if you have access to a 3D printing lab. If you go or work at a college (or sometimes high schools) you may be able to use a 3D printer there.

• Ask in local 3D printer meetups or local 3D printing groups. People in the 3D printing community love to help others, and if you just ask to learn and want to make some prints, someone might say yes and let you shadow them to learn, or will just print it out for you.

Recommended hardware: LilyGo T3 ($23) , T-Beam($30), or T-Echo ($54)

The T-Deck is pretty cool but only if you want to save energy or just want an all-in-one device. The T-Echo comes with a case but again, requires a phone. It’s cool to have a built-in keyboard but the LilyGo T3, T-Echo and T-Beam are cheaper and more convenient. The downside to the T3 and T-Beam is that they require a phone to actually use so it’s another thing to charge. Not a big deal, but something to be aware of.

There are other boards you can use, but I haven’t personally tested or used them. But here is a list of various boards that might also be worth considering.

The Heltec also comes with a case, so that is nice:

https://heltec.org/project/wifi-lora-32-v3/

Other devices are available from indie developers and builders, keep in mind these are mostly custom builds but they will use specific board types so figure out what it’s built with so you know what to select when flashing.

https://www.tindie.com/products/neilhao/meshtastic-mesh-device-nano-g1-explorer/

M5 stack with a LoRa attachment:
https://shop.m5stack.com/products/esp32-basic-core-lot-development-kit-v2-7

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/lora-module-868mhz

I might pick up an M5 Stack core because you can swap out the modules and it’s super cool. You can change your Meshtastic node to an air quality monitor and they have a bunch of extra sensor add-ons.

Flashing your new hardware with Meshtastic

Next, you will want to get the Meshtastic firmware on your device. These instructions will change depending on the exact device/model you have but in general, you need to hold a specific button down while plugging your device into a computer. Then use Chrome or Edge to go to Meshtastic’s web flasher site. Select your board and version, press a button, and boom. You now have a working Meshtastic node. I will go into more detail but that’s pretty much it to get it running. I’m not covering CLI installations or specialty edge cases, if you want to use the CLI - you are technical enough to read the docs and figure it out. I want to make an advanced article to go over how you could download the software to flash devices with no internet but that will come later.

OK now for the details!

LilyGo T-Deck Meshtastic Flashing

1. You will need a computer to do the initial setup and an internet connection. Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge is required to use the web flasher, Firefox doesn’t allow connections to the proper ports we need.

2. Set the power switch to the “off” position.

3. Plug in your T-Deck into the computer.

4. Hold down the trackball for around 3-5 seconds while switching the device on.

5. The screen will be black and not go to the default firmware. The LEDs will flash and will tell you that it’s ready for flashing.

6. Go to https://flasher.meshtastic.org/ and select “T-Deck” under the device dropdown.

7. Select the latest firmware in the “Stable” category.

8. Click flash and select the proper COM number. Typically this should only have one option but it should say “USB JTAG”.

9. Wait for the flasher to finish and the T-Deck should boot to Meshtastic.

If you learn better with videos, here is a good one that goes over those steps.

Initial config of Meshtastic

Next, you will change the name of your device which is basically what other nodes will see on the network, along with your location settings to properly set the time.

1. Turn your device off.

2. Go to https://client.meshtastic.org/

3. Turn the device on.

4. Click “new connection”, go to the serial tab, and click on “New Device”.

5. Select your T-Deck (The COM port name may have changed).

6. Once connected go to config » radio config »LoRa» And set your region.

7. Press the save icon in the top right corner. This will cause your device to reboot and you will have to refresh the page.

8. Do steps 3-5 again to connect the T-Deck, no need to add a new device just select your existing one.

9. Edit the device name by clicking the edit button in the top left.

   

10. Set a “Long Name” and a “Short” name, this is how other nodes will identify you.

11. Once you hit save the device will reboot again and you will need to follow steps 3-5.

12. You now have a running Meshtastic node with a custom name and can Broadcast messages!

Skipped to the initial config in the video below.

Using the T-Deck to send messages

The T-Deck is super simple to use. Start typing your message out and it will appear on the screen. By default messages will go to the broadcast channel, sending messages to any nodes that can be contacted.

If you have another node nearby and want to DM them, while you are typing a message use the trackball to move over to their name. My other device is listed as the recipient at the top.

You can also reconfigure things using the mobile app, setting that up is a little later in this guide.

LilyGo TTGO T3 (Also works for T-Beam) Meshtastic Flashing

1. You will need a computer to do the initial setup and an internet connection. Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge is required to use the web flasher, Firefox doesn’t allow connections to the proper ports we need.

2. Set the power switch to the “off” position.

3. Plug in your T3/T-Beam into the computer.

4. Hold down the RST button while turning it on, keep holding for at least 3 seconds.

   

5. The screen will be black and not go to the default firmware. The LEDs will flash and will tell you that it’s ready for flashing.

6. Go to https://flasher.meshtastic.org/ and select “T3” under the device dropdown.

7. Select the latest firmware in the “Stable” category.

8. Click flash and select the proper COM number. Typically this should only have one option but it should say “USB JTAG”.

9. Wait for the flasher to finish and the T3 should boot to Meshtastic.

Configuring Meshtastic for the T3/T-Beam

Next, you will change the name of your device which is basically what other nodes will see on the network, along with your location settings to properly set the time.

1. Turn your device off.

2. Go to https://client.meshtastic.org/

3. Turn the device on.

4. Click “new connection”, go to the serial tab, and click on “New Device”.

5. Select your device (The COM port name may have changed).

6. Once connected go to config » radio config »LoRa» And set your region.

7. Press the save icon in the top right corner. This will cause your device to reboot and you will have to refresh the page.

8. Do steps 3-5 again to connect the device, no need to add a new device just select your existing one.

9. Edit the device name by clicking the edit button in the top left.

   

10. Set a “Long Name” and a “Short” name, this is how other nodes will identify you.

11. Once you hit save the device will reboot again and you will need to follow steps 3-5.

12. You now have a running Meshtastic node with a custom name and can Broadcast messages!

13. Download the Meshtastic mobile app.

14. Go to the “Bluetooth” tab and connect to your new Meshtastic node. This will subscribe the device to the mesh network.

    

    ---

Sending messages using the mobile app

You can broadcast messages to other Meshtastic devices that are either in range - or are reachable through the local mesh by going to the “Messages” page and clicking “Channels”

To send direct messages to someone specific, click “Direct Messages” and select your recipient. After you establish contact, you can save their name and message them directly just like a normal chat/text message.

Meshtastic works on a broadcast-based system, which is how messages can be sent through the mesh. Though you might send a direct message to another node, really what is happening is a message is being broadcasted and a flag is added that says “Any client other than the recipient, ignore this message”. Meshtastic will filter out direct messages so they route to the correct recipient.

Keep in mind that these messages aren’t encrypted yet!
We will set up encryption in a bit. An interesting thing is that channel 0 (the default broadcast channel) is actually encrypted already - but it uses a default encryption key that every new Meshtastic device automatically has after the initial installation.

If you want to set up an encrypted channel you need to create a new channel, set an encryption code, and share that with your recipient.

Encrypting Messages

To send encrypted messages you need to create a new channel, this will generate a new encryption key that can be shared with other members of your group through a QR code if they are using a control device like a phone or a laptop - or by manually setting the encryption key string. This makes it easy to share encryption keys with other people, once their LoRa device has a matching key - your communications are fully encrypted. Meaning no one can read the contents of your messages without having that key. This is the standard if you’re messaging about anything sensitive.

Create a channel

With your device connected go to “Settings” » “Channels”» and click ”Add Channel”.

Next, you will need to:

• Name your channel

• Set the Key Size. I recommend keeping this at the highest (default) bit size of 256 bits.

• Keep the “Channel Role” as secondary.

• Leave “Uplink” and “Downlink” disabled.

A new channel will be available in the “messages” tab. Now you need to share your key with your friends/affinity group. You can give them the key if they have something like a T-Deck that requires a computer to change the config. If your friends/affinity group have LoRa devices that can sync to their phones, you can show them a QR code that they can scan and get the encryption key.
To do that go to “Settings” » “Share Channels QR Code”

Now your friend can scan the QR code and get the encryption key. Then you can send encrypted messages to each other.
Some valid security concerns can come up. That will be included later in the Security Concerns section.

Repeaters, routers, and extending mesh networks

To make a mesh network stronger, you need to add more nodes. Each node doesn’t need to be a client - aka able to send and receive messages. Some nodes can be made into repeaters that will just forward messages. Repeater nodes act like network extenders, all they do is take messages and pass them on. They are great for just relaying messages to another point that might have better range, or just relaying to extend the reach of the mesh network. The more repeaters or clients on the mesh, the larger distance is covered combined with line of sight distance.
Setting a device to “Router and Client” mode lets the device act as a repeater for the mesh while also being able to be configured over Bluetooth. This means you can set up the node and add encrypted channels (if you set the Bluetooth settings to a specific passcode).

Get the cheapest LoRa device you can find, Heltec makes the cheapest LoRa board and it has a screen and Bluetooth so you can set it up just like a T3 or T-Beam (using the right firmware).

Set it up using the steps above (select the right board though) and connect to it via Blueooth using your Meshtastic app.

Then go to “Settings” » “Device” » “Device Role” » and select “Repeater” or “Router & Client”

Repeater mode is good and will save energy by filtering out data, but it will only repeat broadcast messages and won’t repeat encrypted communications.

Router & Client mode is best because it still acts as a repeater while also letting you set encrypted channels if you are in Bluetooth range to reconfigure things.

Powering your LoRa devices / Mesh networks

All of these devices run on USB power so it gives you plenty of options to power these devices. Power consumption will depend on how many messages are being sent, the screen size, and the amount of storage available if a battery is being used.

You can run these nodes off a bunch of power sources as long as they have USB power:

• Directly off portable solar panels.

• Power from portable battery banks.

• Power from portable battery banks with built-in solar chargers (very useful)

• Power directly from solar charge controllers (depends on the model)

• A computer USB port.

• A phone’s USB port.

• A 12 volt to USB adapter to power devices off car batteries and deep cycle batteries (very useful)

• A USB wall charger for a phone or any device.

Anywhere you can find a USB port with power, you can power a node.

Direct from portable solar panels

You can run devices directly off the power of the sun, I have a portable solar panel that has two USB outputs on the back from Harbor Freight. I would only get that if it’s on sale, I got mine for $20. Any portable solar charger will work. A cheap 10 Watt foldable panel can power a LoRa device and charge a phone (if it has two USB charger ports).

The obvious downside is when there isn’t any sun, or if something blocks out the panel like a cloud, power might get cut. The upside is there are no batteries and with something like a T-Deck you could just carry these two things and be able to message people.

Power from portable battery banks

I use battery banks every day to charge my phone and devices on the go. Keep in mind that if you wanted battery storage for a small portable solar panel, this is a great way to go. Charge the bank with the power of the sun, or charge it on grid electricity at home, or in your car. Most battery banks have an insane amount of power storage and can run a node for multiple days depending on how big you go.

Power from portable battery banks with built-in solar chargers

Get the best of both worlds with a battery bank that can recharge itself using a built-in solar panel. These things are pretty durable, I hike with one on my backpack to charge in the sun and use it at night. It also has a nice flashlight and two USB ports. You can get any solar charger like this for pretty cheap and the battery life is alright.

The absolute GOAT for emergencies and camping is the LuminAid lantern.

Has a solar panel and MicroUSB charger, USB power out, it has a battery bank to charge and power devices, and it opens into a lantern that can give off a crazy amount of light. It also floats and is water resistant. Also not that huge, it’s similar in width to the solar battery bank and folds flat.

Power directly from solar charge controllers

Even the cheapest solar charge controllers for larger PV solar have USB output power. I go over how to make a DIY off-grid solar setup in the article below.

A 12 volt to USB adapter to power devices off car batteries and deep cycle batteries

In really bad emergencies it would be handy to have a 12 Volt switch panel. You can attach these to any 12 Volt battery usually: car batteries, boats, golf carts, and really anything large that uses a battery more than likely has a 12 Volt battery.
Attach the red to red (Positive to Positive) and black to black (Negative to Negative) and you can charge and power devices directly off a car battery.

It even has a volt meter to measure how low the battery is and two USB power slots with a switch.

Boosting/Amplifying Signals

As I recommended earlier, getting bigger, better, and tuned antennas will help with messaging. There is a balance of distance, line of sight, transmission strength, and antennas that determine how far a signal can travel and make it to the next node.

Antennas

You can use any external antenna and things might work, but for optimal transmission and receiving, get an antenna that is tuned for LoRa at 915mhz. The antenna I mentioned earlier is great because it’s portable and really boosts the range.

You can go even bigger, I picked up a $32 aluminum LoRa antenna that can connect directly to a LoRa device. It’s meant for long-range communications and is small enough to fit into a backpack to move it around. It comes with mounting brackets to attach it to a pole so you could always attach it to an existing antenna array on a building’s roof or even to a tree.

Amplifiers

A $30 LoRa amplifier can boost the transmission and receiving strength depending on the voltage given to the amp. You could get a 800mA transmission boost by wiring it to a standard USB cable for power. Higher boosts like 1000mA (5 Volts input) and 1500mA (6 Volts input) can be gained but these require voltages outside of USB power and will require a voltage regulator if you are using 12 Volt batteries. You can run this at higher voltage off solar power stations if you have an inverter and a sacrificial 5 or 6 Volt AC power plug. You can find these everywhere, they look like those random power bricks everyone has lying around. You could find some at thrift stores or even dumpster diving in places. Most will list the output power on the back of the plug.

Some amplifiers can work on multiple frequencies too, so it has multiple purposes for all the electronics/RF weirdos and hackers.

Signal Bouncing

You can also bounce radio signals (LoRa included) off other objects to throw the waves farther or make them more directional. Yagi antennas are standard but you can do weird shit like bouncing waves off parabolic dishes like satellite dishes. I did that with some Ubiquiti long-range WiFi dishes and bounced the rays off a parabolic solar oven to get a non-line-of-sight connection. Plus if the sun is out you can cook food with it, perfect for when you don’t have power/gas for an oven.

@hydroponictrashReplying to @hydroponictrash it worked!!! 2,000 feet / 1/4 of a mile of indirect connection.

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OpenSourceLowTech also did something similar by making a large parabolic antenna with chicken wire.

Use Cases

There are a couple of scenarios and situations where something like this might be useful. There are other options, and I want to stress that your strategy should be tailored to your environment. By other options I mean diversify your communications plan. Radio is fine but not everyone has access to HAM radio or is licensed or has the knowledge to understand how to use these systems. You also can’t encrypt communications so in situations where operational security (OPSEC) is important, you need other methods.

I see some use cases across major topics, each one has some subcategories or special circumstances. This isn’t exhaustive but a place to start.

1. Climate/ Natural Disaster Emergencies

2. Protests and Civil Unrest

3. Conflict/War Zones

Climate/ Natural Disaster Emergencies

As the climate crisis intensifies and governments and corporations essentially leave us to die to profit and maintain control and power, we will see increasing numbers of natural disasters triggered by the collapsing climate.

This isn’t a doomsday prepper fantasy, but a real issue that billions of people will feel the impacts of. Having the unfortunate circumstances of living in Texas, I lost power in the winter storm of 2021. 246 people died as a result of the storm, and that is a low estimate. Thousands of people had pipes burst and their entire homes and apartments were ruined. During this nearly state-wide blackout, communications infrastructure started to fail, almost everyone lost internet access due to power loss. Though most people had access to LTE/Cell phone service, some providers were knocked offline when cell towers lost power. With no reliable internet and cellular coverage, many people were stranded without access to clean water as the water sanitation plants in areas shut down due to the lack of power.

I’m using this as a personal example. Infrastructure is impacted during every natural disaster. Power, water, sanitation, communications, transportation, everything is impacted by climate collapse.

It was during this time that I saw mutual aid groups in Dallas start to distribute food, water, and information even before the National Guard rolled in. Driving through icy roads to help people who had a phone that had enough of a charge and service to contact someone to get help.

Now imagine if there was a diversified mesh of not just communications infrastructure but power infrastructure as well. People could communicate over radio with people who had access. A LoRa messaging mesh could bounce signals across the metroplex, making it easier for localized groups to communicate and coordinate disaster recovery and mutual aid efforts. Each localized group or person who was tapped into the network would have a way to power devices, and more importantly, power their neighbor’s devices. Using generators or off-grid solar systems to run heaters and create warming stations. I talk about creating DIY microgrids to not only power local servers and communication stations, but also to help charge their communities devices, run heaters, run medical equipment, all with cheap off-the-shelf parts.

Protests and Civil Unrest

We are seeing fascism grow across the world. Increasing social instability caused by the failures of capitalism combined with the ongoing climate collapse. We are dealing with record income inequality as those who own the means of production constantly exploit the working class: the people who actually do the work to keep things running. Militarized police forces murder unarmed BIPOC citizens and clamp down on those who speak out against these injustices. Imperial powers bomb civilians, or help fund these genocides - using the militarized police force at home to quell protests against genocidal, mindless violence. We are living in extraordinary, dangerous, and often - bleak times.

And yet there are people who not only speak up - but directly act to change this world and the systems of unjust hierarchy, domination, and violence. To protest these injustices of the world, to build social and political movements for a better future, to oppose the destruction of the environment, and to stand against genocide and war, makes you a target. It makes you a threat to the establishment of power, capital, domination, and violence.

Those of you who have protested know the insane lengths police and the state apparatus will go to, using methods that are banned by the Geneva Convention during warfare like using tear gas. Using LRADs and other technology to “disperse” crowds, aka attack civilians. Their tactics don’t stop there, surveillance is at the tip of the spear.

Police departments and federal agencies have access to devices to track who has been to a protest, and to identify, track, or charge people with crimes. There is a reason why you hear people say “Don’t bring your phone to a protest”. That’s because each phone has an IMSI number or a unique identifier attached to it. This number can be used to track your movement via cell phone towers. Police, states, and militaries have Stingrays, small devices that can simulate a cell phone tower, making every phone in an area connect to it. Not only would this disclose your IMSI identifier, but all unencrypted traffic could be viewed with a “Dirt Box”. This includes SMS text messages - which are not encrypted.

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/31/protests-surveillance-stingrays-dirtboxes-phone-tracking/

Even if you are using encrypted messaging apps like Signal, you can still be identified and tracked based on your IMSI number, or targeted for more surveillance.
You can opt to not bring a phone and instead stick to radio communications. But radio can’t be encrypted, meaning anyone who is scanning common frequencies could listen in on your conversation.

A mesh LoRa network used by affinity groups/protest groups can let everyone send encrypted messaging without a traceable cell phone. This is a situation where the T-Deck shines because you can get your encrypted channels set ahead of a demonstration and show up with just the T-Deck and no phone and still be able to send encrypted messages to the group.

Security Concerns

While Meshtastic is encrypted, there are possibilities for the encryption keys to be leaked (if a device is captured or the key is guessed or brute forced). If you are doing something very sensitive, assume that you are being watched.

Practice good security culture, if you have something to say that you absolutely don’t want other people hearing, set up a meeting and talk in person.

If you really want to keep these communications secure, encryption keys should be manually rolled over frequently, and in person.

Everything with security involves risk. If your risk profile calls for absolute secrecy, physically meet. But if you are willing to accept some risk with your communications, then the following tips can help. Keep in mind they won’t be the absolute - most secure way to do things. But you will be minimizing your risk while maximizing operability.

I’ve seen a couple of comments here and there about the fact that if a device gets taken, or falls into the wrong hands, they can read encrypted messages. The same thing is true of any encrypted device like a phone however, there is a concern with someone getting a hold of the LoRa device itself and seeing the messages being sent on the LoRa device’s screen. Even with encrypted messages, a device like a T3, T-Deck, or T-Beam will show the received message on the device’s screen.

If this is a concern (like at protests or in conflict zones) be sure that sensitive communications are brief and only sent when needed. For good Operational Security (OPSEC), it’s recommended to have an agreed-upon safe code that each person knows that is sent before something very sensitive is shared. Make sure this is something only trusted members know.

It could be a code word or an agreed-upon password or phrase.

“Hey Jane, got something sensitive to share.”

“Chestnut-Eagle-Button. What’s up?”

“Thanks, we dropped off extra water by the large tree in the park.”

Then clear the chat history.
Before a protest, clear the chat history.
Don’t use your real names, use screen names or code names, if a real name is sent, clear the chat history.
If a person doesn’t respond with the proper passcode/password/passphrase assume they are compromised and roll the encryption key on the channel by going to “Settings” » “Channels”» Select the proper channel » Press the key generator button.

Then request all other verified members switch encryption keys, either in person or by sending them a message (if other services are online).

In a pinch, you could send the encryption key in a DM, but keep in mind that anyone who is monitoring LoRa frequencies may be able to view that key being sent in transit. It’s a risk, but in order for that risk to become an issue the threat actor has to:

1. Know LoRa is being used.

2. Have the hardware to even pick up LoRa signals.

3. Have the technical experience to eavesdrop on LoRa signals and decode them.

Your average police department more than likely doesn’t have LoRa equipment, nor is trained to intercept LoRa signals. However, militaries and federal agencies have the funds and resources to have LoRa equipment and the money to train agents on how to intercept signals.

I don’t recommend sending encryption keys over unencrypted channels. Honestly never do it unless it’s a situation where someone is in danger.

If chats are routinely cleared of sensitive and identifiable information, and a verification code or passphrase is used: even if someone has their device captured, nothing can lead back to the other members.

Specifically for protests, if you are in danger of having a LoRa device captured - do not factory reset the device. I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice, but if you factory reset the board before being detained and and are charged with a crime - they may use the fact that you wiped the device against you. Have good data practices and you won’t need to worry about devices falling into the wrong hands.

I want to reitterate. I’m not resonsible for what people do with this information. If you do illegal shit - that is entirely on you. Nor am I saying you should do anything illegal. This is publicly available information.

LoRa devices do have identifiers based on their long and shortcodes. These should also be changed after every demonstration. There are ways to track down a LoRa signal, because Meshtastic will send connection strength data when a message is sent, which can be used to pinpoint who nearby is running Meshtastic.
It’s recommended that if you want full security to remove the default channel in Meshtastic and only stick to your own encrypted channels. This means that a threat actor can’t message your device with broadcast messages to see the signal strength if the default channel is removed. Meshtastic also stops range requests by default, so unless you turn that on, it will be hard to track you down unless they have LoRa equipment to figure out the location of any LoRa signal. Again that is an edge case, and even if they were able to see you were sending LoRa data, they would have no idea what you are sending.

Civil Unrest / Growing Fascist Militias

Leftists not only have to contend with the police, the federal government, and intelligence agencies, but increasingly right-wing militias are also becoming a technical problem.

For example, community defense organizations like The Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club routinely show up to defend/counter-protest fascists and religious right-wing militias who harass events like drag shows and LGBTQIA+ spaces.
At large protests, there is a phenomenon that happens when too many people with cell phones are in proximity in one area, where service drops and you can’t get a signal. This can impact communications and require a radio backup. But again, radio communications can’t be encrypted, and not only can police listen in - but fascist militia members themselves can listen as well. If you know anything about right-wing preppers and fascists, it’s that they are very interested in radio communications. Watch any firearm or right-leaning prepping channel and you will see them using radios, not just to communicate but to intercept transmissions from LGBTQIA+ defenders, people protesting for Black lives, people protesting the genocide happening to the Palestinians, anyone they oppose. With the goal of identifying people and targeting them for harassment.

At the moment it’s harassment, snitching to the police, or doxxing leftists that’s the main concern. However, if you watch right-wing and fascist groups and look at their internal messages - they want to kill people. That is the end goal of fascist ideology, and it’s reflected in their internal messaging to each other. Many fascist group chats have been infiltrated in the past- and in a fascist’s ideal world they wouldn’t just snitch to the police, they would shoot on-site. And they say it plain as day in their chats.

https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/patriot-front-meetings-spell-out-racist-networks-plans-hateful-operations/

As right-wing religious extremism and fascism grow in the US and across the globe. We will see increases in domestic terrorism, hate crimes against racial and religious minorities and the LGBTQIA+ community, a rise in antisemitic attacks, and direct attacks on infrastructure.

https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/the-far-right-fascination-with-the-electric-grid/

In the event of large-scale civil unrest caused by right-wing religious and fascist attacks, it would be good to have resilient and secure infrastructure to combat this.

Attacking critical infrastructure also overlaps with the realm of conflicts, wars, and occupations.

Conflicts/War Zones

In every modern conflict/war/occupation, the first targets of attack tend to be people and critical infrastructure.

Power, water, food supplies, sanitation, transportation, communication, education, and health care are targeted first - to cripple the ability for an insurgency or rebellion to form, to demoralize the people being targeted and killed, and to act as a method of control. This control comes after the destruction of critical infrastructure. The power is out, no one can communicate the horrors on the ground, hospitals are bombed or inoperable, schools are destroyed or shut down, sewage isn’t treated, and transportation networks are destroyed. The occupying force then comes in to “rebuild” the country and “make it better” by replacing the infrastructure that once existed with their own. The occupying force bombs civilians and civilian infrastructure then says “Wow you all lack basic services, let us be the heroes and get the lights back on" combined with counterinsurgency tactics to smear any opposing forces.

We are seeing that in action with the ongoing conflict and genocide targeting Palestinian people, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the situation happening in the Congo, and with the civil war in Sudan. What are the first things destroyed? Critical infrastructure. They say this is to halt military action, but how does bombing hospitals full of civilians impact military operations? They don’t - it’s pure genocidal violence.

A media blackout is also part of warfare. The worst situation is for an occupying force to lose their grasp on media coming out of the invaded areas. On-the-ground videos from Palestine show the reality of the conflict, they show the brutality and the death. With critical infrastructure gone, there aren’t easy ways for people to get information out of the conflict zone. You can’t call or text your friends to tell them where the nearest safe area is, or where important supplies like clean water and food are. Sure footage gets out, but that is reliant on the footage and information making it out of the battlefield.

Being able to communicate can be a life-or-death situation, and distributed, autonomous infrastructure can help in these situations to relay important information to civilians and help keep people alive. This isn’t just about communications, but water, power, food, and all of the critical infrastructure.

Following some of the security tips listed in the protest and civil unrest section, civilians in conflict zones can set up solar-powered, encrypted communication networks that don’t rely on destroyed or intermitted infrastructure.

Getting information across extremely long ranges will be difficult unless a mesh network is established enough in an area. But in conflict zones where even food is hard to come by, expecting a mass mesh network system to work would be short-sighted. Instead, small groups can maintain communications and disperse information to other civilians about the location of food, water, or safe areas.

Data runners or information runners could maintain communication nodes in different areas, transmitting data when they can and hopefully picking up another node within range. This can work along aid and transport routes between cities/villages.

Next Steps: Revolutionary action to build autonomous infrastructure - autonomous infrastructure to help with revolutionary action

Our social and political systems directly influence society, the ecosystem, and the infrastructures that make life happen. Social and political systems based on maximizing profit at the expense of all else will create systems and infrastructure that maximize profit and operate at a minimum expense. What’s been created is a system designed to extract everything from the ecosystem, to drive profit, and the infrastructures to make that system run (power, water, sanitation, communications, transportation, education, and healthcare) are done at the bare minimum to lower expenses. This means that workers are paid pennies for their labor, it means that economic growth and corporate profit are made by extracting as many resources as possible from the ecosystem. Even we as human beings are treated as a resource to be extracted for profit. Our power generation systems use the cheapest and most destructive fuel - fossil fuels - to maximize profits at the expense of all life on this planet. Our water systems have been poisoned by profitable and destructive agricultural processes, and the available clean water must be purchased with wages that are extracted from the short time of your life. Our communications systems work the way they do, to maximize profit. Our transportation networks are built the way they are to maximize profit. Our education systems are the way they are to maximize profit and churn out obedient workers. Our healthcare is designed to maximize profit and leave those without the means to pay to die.

Things can be different.

But technological change and changing the frameworks without social and political change will bring us back to the same place. Just with more solar panels. We have to change both social and political systems - and infrastructure systems to truly create a better and liveable future. But these infrastructure changes can also influence social and political change, by changing how we do things and by changing why we do things to influence change. It’s a circular process.

We need to take back control of what it means to live by collectivizing, decommodifying, and changing every system we interact with in our lives. Building mass political movements is easier when we address core parts of our lives and use our social and political frameworks to influence them. Building a mass political movement is easier when people don’t have to worry about their food, if they can afford their water bill, if they can afford to keep the lights on, etc. All of this is the carrot being dangled in front of the proverbial horse. You are promised a great life if you create profit for someone else. Take the carrot away, and take it back.

What I mean is that decommodifying access to resources takes the power away from corporations and states to control us. Being ungovernable means building autonomy, taking back the commons, and making sure all people have access to what they need. This can start small and snowball into larger things. Housing autonomy might look like squatters taking control of empty real estate to give free housing to anyone who wants it. It might look like land expropriations from corporations to build low-cost, low environmentally impactful housing out of natural materials like earthships. It might look like retrofitting and modifying urban and suburban areas to regenerate the local ecosystem rather than destroy it.

That type of change would bleed over into food systems, by creating permaculture and regenerative systems where there once was just turf grass or empty lots. With more people housed and with access to fresh food around them, it makes it easier to address food insecurity. We fight off the landlords and the police, we turn every patch of empty grass back into small native ecosystems. We slowly take money away from the profit-driven and destructive agricultural systems by growing food wherever we can. That change has an impact on our water systems, as more life is introduced into the soil with regenerative practices, the soil absorbs more water and keeps water in. Adding more plant life allows water to be slowed down and allows it to refill ground aquifers and water tables. More people see the direct impacts that housing and food systems have on their lives and understand their connection with nature at a wider scale.

This feeds into ecological protests, direct action, and acts of rebellion when it comes to stopping new fossil fuel developments, and shutting down existing ones. We instead turn to autonomous infrastructure that is made on a human scale instead of industrial-sized, centralized, and inefficient power production and transmission techniques. These areas where housing was expropriated, built, and retrofitted have their own electrical generation through community microgrids. Democratically maintained and owned by all people, not a corporation. To build encrypted communications systems we have to think about how to power them. There is a synchronicity between these things. By creating autonomous power generation it makes communities more resilient to climate change, and it makes it harder for states, corporations, police, and military forces to control people. These autonomous systems feed off each other and allow for other actions to grow and spread.

You get the point. A revolution isn’t just about social and political change - but change in all parts. By taking steps to make autonomous infrastructure, you make it easier for political action to take place. Because the mechanisms of control are taken away. On the flip side, we can’t just run infrastructure in the same hierarchical and gatekept ways we always have and expect a different result. We have to rethink how these things are run to be collective, equitable, and democratic.
Infrastructure change alone won’t change things. But doing direct action, building collective political power, taking action to make things happen - is easier when we take control of our food, water, shelter, educational systems, healthcare, communications, transportation - all of it.

Seizing the means of production and collectively living as equals means seizing the means of everything that lets us live, thrive, and be happy. We have to seize the means of control over the biosphere away from those who want to destroy it for profit and learn to live alongside the ecosystem rather than destroy it. We need to learn from fungi. Create nodes that reproduce more revolutionary action, spread the mycelium network out, share resources with not only each other but also nurture the environment around us, take the decay, and turn it into new life.

The blog has since moved to:

https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

Shits fucked. That’s easy enough to say right now. We’re living through collapse across many domains; economic, social, and environmental (To name a few). And that’s why we have to make the alternative a reality. Instead of a world built on exploitation, domination, and extraction, we can make the future into a world built on cooperation, equity, along with eco-system and social-system regeneration. There’s a diversity of tactics and ways to go about things, but I wanted to bring up some ideas that might fit within that broader world of ideas and might be steps we can take to decouple ourselves from the capitalist system while also building the alternative systems needed to live better lives.

Free housing collectives, Dual Power, ecovillages, and climate refugees

What is Dual power?

A situation where there are two powers – a democratic one developed by poor and working-class people (defined by direct democracy), and the other one capitalist (defined by domination) – coexisting and competing for legitimacy during a transition away from Capitalism.

-Black Socialists in America

What that means is building the world we want to see in the future, right now. Taking the steps to make things happen that will get us closer to the collective goal. And things don’t have to be monumental to create broader change. Dual power is a good compass to look at the future, and see that we can build the alternative within the current systems.

One way to get closer to liberation is to take away the proverbial carrot that is being dangled in front of us by capitalists and the systems and groups they use to maintain control. What do we all work for anyways? Food, water, shelter, transportation, the ability to live happy and healthy lives. At the moment all of that is gatekept by wealth and money. You need to make enough money, sell enough of your labor (or exploit others for profit), to make sure that you can survive. And millions of people aren’t surviving because of how this system works.

So to decouple ourselves from these exploitative systems, we can use the framework of dual power to gain food, water, and housing autonomy ourselves.

One way might involve banding together and creating a community land trust, a commonly held property pool, possibly funded by a community credit union. Basically pooling funds together to purchase the land needed to build these projects. You start to see the interesting contradictions because on one hand, we are wanting to decouple from the capitalist system, but on the other, we are forced to use capital to buy things like land and supplies. This is a very temporary step.

We collectively make decisions within a CLT to say for instance buy land. Thinking of the future of climate change it might be a good idea to buy land within areas that will see lessened impacts in the future. Another option is buying existing buildings and areas like apartment buildings and vacant lots to use for these experiments. This land should also be given back to the indigenous people of the area, so not only can we experiment with new ways of organizing society but also ensure that indigenous people get their stolen land back while we work alongside each other to restore an ecosystem destroyed by the powers who stole it.

Next will be building housing autonomy, building affordable housing, but not just affordable, but sustainable housing as well. There are ways to build homes that capture and reuse rainwater, use passive heating and cooling, and are extremely cost-effective to build because they use natural materials. Or to retrofit existing homes to be more reliable and more sustainable. The goal is to start making homes and giving them to the community members for free. You help someone else build their home, and they help build yours. A circular system of shared responsibilities and relationships.

With free housing comes building food and water autonomy, that means growing our own food on small scale micro farms, all the way up to collectively run, larger scale farms that supply many communities. Capturing rainwater, slowing water to replenish water tables to use wells, these tactics will help us get access to free clean water.

We get one step closer to not participating in the capitalist system at all.

@hydroponictrashShout out to @anser.methus for the OG video. Talking about a really cool plan for digital nomadic villages that can very quickly turn into amazing models for nomadic eco villages. #solarpunk

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Let’s say there are multiple communities, they can be federated and connected with each other. Communities might use time banking systems (denton.timebanks.org is a great example of this) where communities can request and offer goods and services without the need for monetary exchange.

Free and collective housing, while facing a changing climate

So far we have participated in a community land trust, bought land to build new sustainable homes or retrofitted existing areas and are giving housing away for free thanks to the collective labor of everyone in the community. There is a good reason to create communities like this, especially in areas and regions that might not get the worst that climate change has to offer. The idea is to create bastions of a better future that can quickly scale and meet the needs of climate refugees. As the climate changes there will be a large influx of people away from coastal areas, and the extremely hot areas, into more temperate ones. We would do better to prepare, to create these societies of autonomy, so everyone can have access to the things they need. The alternative to that, is to follow the current path of white supremacist capitalism. Climate refugees will be met with resistance. Especially if they can’t afford to move and live in different areas. Building a world without capital, without monetary need, is a matter of life and death really. We can choose to take the money and be met with fascism, or we can separate from it, collectivize, and work together.

Federated Ecovillages, Ecocommunities, and Bioregions

We are building more experimental communities like this, and retrofitting existing areas to follow the same ideas. Moving away from profit-driven commercial agriculture and creating widescale bioregion specific farming practices, informed by indigenous people who know the land, the plants, and the environment. But it’s not just small scale personal garden plots, though they are very important, but community-level agriculture, based in sensible practices like we find in agroforestry, indigenous practice, and permaculture. Rural areas aren’t just agricultural sacrificial zones for cities like they are now, the rural and urban blend, and have to live in coexistence. In cities we can’t expect our food to only come from rural and largely exploited workers, the work would be spread out, balanced between urban gardens, community gardens and farms, larger scale regional permaculture farms, into even larger and distributed ways of growing food.

These communities can come together in a federation, like how we can see in the Zapatista movement in Mexico, or in ideas found in Democratic Confederalism like in Rojava, Syria. There is a balance of collective power, along with community autonomy but with a common agreement that we are here to live, help to regenerate the ecosystem, and we are here to work together along with the earth.

While building resilient, cooperative communities, we can also build the resilient, cooperative infrastructures needed to live. We can create community micro grids comprised of a wide range of energy sources based on local conditions. We can use things like biogas digestors to create fuel without exacting fossil fuels. Active solar can be used to power homes, and even more importantly passive solar can be used to heat our homes and communities. This is scratching the surface and needs it’s own chapter entirely. But you see where this is going. This includes things like community networks, and regional communication networks using something like a mesh network, or radio. These infrastructures free us from the capitalist and exploitative systems, food, water, shelter, communication, and transportation all get decommodified only due to us building the alternative and changing our social relations and how we interact with each other.

The idea is that communities can form and share resources, creating their own networks of power, sanitation, and communication. When one community who is better adapted to produce something like corn, needs access to computers, another community who has access to old machines can step up and meet those needs without monetary exchange. Only the exchange knowing that we are living happier and better lives by sharing resources.
Community defense can also be part of the resource sharing, creating a federation of communities who look out for each other and protect each other and the land from extractive capitalists, their police henchmen, fascists, and those who wish harm on others. Collectively we can form community defense groups not just to stop the violence but defend against climate disasters and create emergency plans during natural events like floods, tornadoes, fires, etc, to defend the land and the people who inhabit it.

These interconnected communities can build networks of information to make things easier to share. Community and regional databases can be created to act as a virtual stockroom and warehouse, keeping track of the resources that are at hand. When people request things from the network such as specific food, clothing, tools, the collective database can be queried to see who in the federation might have extra stock, and move things where they need to go. Ultimately this is about connecting these communities within a federation, to share not only resources but information and knowledge.

A modern Cybersyn

In 1971 in Chile, Salvador Allende and the people of Chile wanted to create a distribution system to help run the economy. This economy would be based on the needs of working people, run, owned, and operated by the people, in a democratic and fair way. Using ideas from cybernetics, the average person participated within the system, being a check on how things ran by giving their opinions. These opinions would influence how and why materials, goods, and resources were moved. It was a system to somewhat automate what we are talking about here, how do you manage an economy across many people that doesnt’t directly need money to work? How do the workers that own the means of production balance the fair distribution of things without a central or democratic wing determining things for people, instead how does that balance with collective and individual autonomy? This was an experiment to see how socialism could innovate, change from the other routes other socialist countries were taking at the time, towards centralized (sometimes totalitarian) power, while giving the power back to the working class and citizens while also maintaining a fair distribution of power, goods, and services? All with very basic and almost obsolete even for the 70’s , teletype machines?
Well it started to work, and for a short time the Cybersocialist project was working. What ended it? Well ask yourself what group always appears to fuck things up especially when it comes to radical change? The CIA, and fascist forces within Chile at the time. The CIA backed the Pinochet regime, a fascist who eventually created a military dictatorship within Chile, killing an imprisoning any members of the previous socialist government, and killing the potential of this way of thinking of economic and social relations. Watch this video for more information.

After watching that, you can see the possibilities of a new form of Cybersyn. Imagine what that network would look like with modern computers and technology. That can all be done. We don’t need any bullshit like blockchain tech either, it all can run on open-source, freely available software, using old hardware destined for the scrapyard.

We can create community wide databases to get a baseline idea of what resources are out there, and how much a community normally produces. This info gets shared on community and regional networks that combine with other community databases. All of this can be run with off the shelf computers, chained together through mesh networks or data can even be streamed long distance over radio. These databases can also show what is available in community tool libraries, what is needed in other places.
A timebanking model can keep track of requests, who needs what, and alert people on where to move resources most efficiently. Instead of centralized groups who make decisions in a top down fashion, this would be button up. Maybe community economists would be elected from each community to help maintain the system.

When climate refugees need homes, food, water, those baselines can be examined and scaled to see how many homes need to be built, how much extra food needs to be grown, what the environmental impacts are, and their mitigations. Then we can organize things to have homes for people when they need it. Show them that this alternative society isn’t like the old one, people won’t want to go back to working for a wage. They would own their work and the means to do that work, they would see the productive power of their labor to help themselves the community, and the ecosystem at the same time. They can have a voice that matters in a consensus-based and democratic system. They can find out that people don’t have to fight to live, but cooperate.

Things can change.

It isn’t people moving to farms, it’s creating a mass movement

People moving out to the country to create individual ecovillages isn’t the answer. What we are talking about here is treating ecovillages, ecocommunities, and ecocities everywhere. These changes require mass movements to change the social, economic, and political conditions everywhere. Dual power is a method to get the dominos started, to tip things in the right direction where you are. That means if you live within a city, creating these conditions locally by occupying vacant land, homes, and spaces that can be used instead of sitting vacant only for profit. Creating the conditions within a city with direct action, tactical urbanism to do things like create bike lanes, do traffic calming, cut curbs and create ramps and infrastructure for the disabled, taking over abandoned lots and turning them into permaculture gardens. Creating housing cooperatives and buying back land from speculators to create affordable housing by economic force. Or by creating tenant unions to strike back at greedy landlords. In a suburban setting, you can get rid of your lawn and replace it with native wildflowers and native plants. Create permaculture and agroforestry gardens even in a subdivision. Do whatever you can to decarbonize your home, insulate it better to withstand heat, use passive solar to heat water instead of fossil fuel powered gas water heaters.

I can’t list everything here without writing a book but you get the idea, there are actions that need to be taken and can be taken even in a dense urban area to get things closer to the end goal.

Dual power to build mass movements

So while we can take smaller steps with a diversity of tactics, the goal is to show the alternative growing everywhere, to change the social outlook of what is possible by actually carrying out these programs and actions. Building a mass movement is easier when you can meet peoples needs, and show them that an alternative system can work. Building a mass movement is easier when you can feed people for free with fresh and locally sourced food, when you can house people for free in safe housing and ecologically minded housing, when you can ensure everyone has access to clean drinking water.

All of this is made easier by buying the autonomous infrastructure that creates the baseline for mass movements to build. No one wants to listen to a political speech. Give them free food, water, and shelter, don’t just tell people what’s possible - show people what’s possible.

Things won’t be sunshine and rainbows

All of these ideas as a direct threat to capitalist order and the system that is used to maintain control. By creating autonomous infrastructure we are decoupling from the systems of power that force us to take part in capitalism. I offered examples earlier like the Zapatistas, Rojava, Chile and the Cybersyn idea, and MST. Along with previous experiments like the CNT-FAI during the Spanish civil war and the early Soviet workers unions.

But keep in mind that the systems that be will not allow alternative to really thrive. You can see first hand that Chile’s alternative was so dangerous to the hegemony of US power in Latin America, that they had to do a military coup to stop it from happening. The Zapatistas started as an armed rebellion group. Rojava exists while in the Syrian civil war. MST has to battle the Brazilian state in both social and sometimes armed rebellion. In all of these cases we have to be realistic in seeing the backlash from capitalists and imperialist systems.

If we want these experiments to live on, we have to take power away from the existing system. They can’t starve a population that’s already being fed. They can’t evict a population that is already living in their own autonomous homes. So their last resort will be violence. Do I personally know what to do in that situation? No. But we can look at previous and current movements to see what might work. Ultimately creating global ecovillages means building mass movements that take power away from the current system enough to cripple it from attacking. It means not only creating federations of production, but also of defense, across the board, from every city, from every small town, from every region.

Change can and will happen

What I wanted to show was starting from where we’re at now, and how we might get to a better place. Not by individualistic action, but by collective action. Starting small, starting with diverse tactics from a broad range of ideas, and building that into something bigger. It’s not just about creating one ecovillage. But creating a federated, interconnected, cooperative, and regenerative global ecovillage by rebelling against the system, cooperating, and taking power back for all people. City by city, small town to large town, region to region, all of them eventually connecting. Why? Because we are meeting each others needs and the needs of the ecosystem.

On a personal note, this is my general goal and mission in life. To make something like this happen. If you want to call it ecosocialism, ecoanarchism, solarpunk, whatever, you get the general idea. Pretty soon my wife and I are thinking of making a life change and getting land to experiment on, and bringing in other people interested in doing the same. I don’t want to just talk about these things, I want to do them. And if you are on the fence about things, dreaming of a better future - take whatever steps you can to make them happen, look around, and see if there are others. We can work together to build a better future.

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If you’ve followed me for a while you know that I tend to focus on actionable things during climate collapse. What can we do now to take steps towards a better future? Not far flung fictional machines, or high tech techno fixes, but what can your average person - or more importantly, what can we do collectively to build the alternative while also smashing the current system?

Hemp and algae are just part of a larger ecosystem of plants that can have a huge impact on the way we live, the things we make, and how we impact the ecosystem in a rapidly changing world and ecosystem. From what I’ve seen so far they can be staples when it comes to creating a sustainable community. I’m coming at this from the assumption that these changes can be done on an individual level, but not an individualistic one. One person doing this won’t solve things. But if we act collectively, combine ideas, work together as a community to harvest all of it, grow it all, process the materials - on a larger scale, we can really see things change.

Uses and possibilities, it all sounds like science fiction but it’s reality!

Hemp has been considered a miracle plant for thousands of years and has been cultivated globally for just as long. Here is a list of the various things you can make with hemp:

Algae also has a wide amount of uses including as food when edible varieties are grown. The main thing I want to focus on is Alginate, which is a core ingredient in making bioplastics, biofilms, bioleathers, and biodegradable plastic-like substances.

One issue with bioplastics is that they can become brittle, and sometimes can’t withstand certain forces as well as other materials. But fiber reinforced bioplastics/films/materials are way stronger, and the fiber can come from the parts of the hemp harvest like the stalks - that aren’t often used - to help reinforce these goods.

So a community could grow hemp, create a myriad of products with it, and even use it to help create biodegradable and locally producible biomaterials for packaging or plastic replacements.

Things like hydrogels and biofilms can be made that can directly replace plastics, and they eventually break down in the ecosystem unline traditional plastics. The idea of making a plant based hydrogel is also interesting because things like Atmospheric Water Generators(AWGs) can use a type of hydrogel to help pull drinking water from the air in areas that don’t have access to clean water.

Circular systems, stopping waste, and regenerating the ecosystem

Looking at the uses of both hemp and algae, we can start to think about how we can fundamentally change our ways and methods of manufacturing away from a hypercapitalist, profit-driven, and petrochemical obsessed system to a free and open, collectivist, global and local, biomaterial system that doesn’t destroy the ecological foundations of our lives.

We can start to imagine closing the waste system loops. Things aren’t made with petroleum based plastics, then shipped across the world on ships fueled by fossil fuels, to be sold only to the people who can buy them, to be packaged with plastic that will never degrade, only for the product to end up in a landfill because it can’t be repaired because a corporation wants to increase it’s sales. This model is pure insanity.

To close the wast system loop, we can look towards nature as a teacher, to understand that all life systems follow the waste recycling loop. Seeds are planted, they grow and transform and transport nutrients, they interact with the mycelial web and share resources with other plants, they suck up CO2 and help filter contaminants, they eventually die, they rot and decay back into the soil ecosystem to feed the microbes and other insects and life that make up the soil web, only to act as the base to grow more life. That is how we should look at everything we do. If we decide to do things in this world, it can’t be permanent. It has to eventually breakdown and return back into a natural form that won’t impact the ecosystem, and ideally, it should actually help the ecosystem. That doesn’t mean that we can’t have permanent structures, say for instance a terracing system that can stay intact for thousands of years, but that system will actually help the environment long after we are out of the picture, because it’s a beneficial system. We should make our only impacts to the ecosystem a positive one.

So how do we look at these materials and start to close the waste loop system? Well with this we can grow hemp and algae literally anywhere, because they both are easy to grow and fast growers. Meaning the things we make aren’t locked into a global economic and trade system. To make clothes we don’t need to ship raw materials from South America to China, to be made into fabric that is shipped to Vietnam to be made into a garment that is shipped and sold in Germany. We can produce the things we need right in our own local communities. This is less efficient in the capitalist mindframe, because ideally, we would have an economy of scale. But this means that the economy of scale comes with a trade-off of ecological destruction. And so we can move the idea from a global system, to a regional one. This cuts down on the need for specific ways of manufacturing that tend to harm the environment.

Hemp is also an excellent plant for bioremediation and would be a great companion to mycoremediation, because of hemps ability to pull heavy metals and chemical contaminants from soil. This should be paired with soil tests to make sure the areas where the hemp is grown can be used for things that humans consume. But even if hemp has absorbed contaminants, we can still use it for industrial uses that removes those contaminants and locks them into things that are less likely to breakdown into the environment.

Circular energy production

Following the life cycles of natural systems, we can use the decomposition phase of natural materials to generate alternative forms of energy that decouple ourselves from both the capitalist system and the fossil fuel systems that use extremely detrimental resources to extract natural gas specifically with fracking.

This means that we can produce our own combustible fuel by fermenting the spent harvests of hemp and by using algae specifically grown for this purpose. We could also use edible algaes, or edible algae that my have been contaminated and isn’t suitable for human consumption as our feedstock for biogas digesters.

We can use this as an alternative fuel source when other renewables are out of service or can’t produce enough to meet demand. I’ve made my own DIY off grid solar panel system and have seen first hand what can happen if you have a long term storm system that blocks out sunlight, or enough to where your demand will exceed how much your panels can produce. There was a large storm system that stayed for close to a week and by day three, my solar system could only run small USB powered devices. If we are talking about a future where renewables are the mainstay of electrical generation, or if we were in an emergency and needed power say to power medical equipment our options would be limited. This can be a way to supplement things not only on a home basis but as a larger scale and on a municipal level to generate power. We might not need to burn the gas in a stove, but burning the gas to drive generators or to power turbines in emergency situations can help in tricky situations.

A problem with methane is that it’s an incredibly bad gas, and pollutes more than CO2 when it comes to climate change. This gas is created by decaying matter, but also as a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry. A huge producer of methane is the global meat industry, because cow dung creates massive amounts of methane gas.
However, there are ways to cut down on the gas being emitted. These biodigesters can also take in animal dung, and help trap that gas to instead be used and burned.

A note for this: burning methane still creates carbon dioxide, and will still contribute to climate change though at a much smaller rate compared to coal fired power plants. It also needs to be taken into account, the net cost of carbon and pollution for various industries. If we moved to a biogas combustible fuel source, that would cut the need for fracking and other methods of extracting natural gas. It could replace coal, which requires massive mining operations that cause tremendous ecological damage. This would also cut the emissions related to transporting and producing fuels because they would originate closer to the source of use. So there is a trade-off involved in talking about this. Same thing with wood based heating, outside of using dead or diseased timber, the timber industry cuts down a tremendous amount of trees for fuel and for goods, we can stop that by instead using biogas as a fuel source for heating.

Hempcrete, Earthships, Suburban Retrofits, and Living During Climate Collapse

Another part related to hemp is the creation of hempcrete, which is an interesting building material that is made with hemp, lime, and small amounts of portland cement. The hemp parts used for this are considered industrial waste, and so this can be a method of creating building materials that cut down on portland cement production (which is a huge producer of CO2) while also reusing parts of the hemp plant that is thought of as useless.

Hempcrete is interesting because of the PH of the bricks themselves, insects hate it because of the PH, and mold doesn’t grow well on it for the same reasons. And so it’s a great candidate where other natural building materials might not cut it.

Hemp also can be made into insulation, so not only can you build a structure using hempcrete, but you can also insulate it as well with hemp. So we can see the circular system of using these natural materials as a basis for building natural homes.

Going with the same thread of thinking, we can also change how we build homes if we don’t focus on profit as the main motivator. Which means we can create strong, insulated homes for everyone that requires less electricity and resource usage, and can be made of natural and recycled materials. In comes the ideas of Earthships.

An Earthship is built to be passive, oftentimes the air conditioning comes from a pipe system buried under a large mound behind the structure, that naturally cools the air entering the pipe, so this cuts down on the need for electrical-based air cooling. Same thing with heat in the winter, these are designed to absorb heat and store it in the structure itself. The greenhouses also help to create heat and regulate the temperature overall. These homes also recycle all of the water, including the sewage that can be used to fertilize and water plants outdoors, but in this case we can also use biodigestors to ferment the waste and turn it into usable biogas. These homes can be models for living as the climate changes and more volatile weather patterns happen compared to traditional homes, Earthships are much more resilient to the elements.

This can also be a method towards building universal housing for all, creating self sustaining homes where people can grow their own food, capture rainwater, reuse water, create their own energy, all for very little compared to a traditional home.

This carries over into rethinking how we approach the suburbs, urban life, and urban planning, and this too ties into hemp production as a great insulator and building material into revamping the suburbs from ecological deserts into ecological havens by changing our ideas of what life could look like.

Building a Better Future

As someone who writes solarpunk fiction, this all seems like the plot to something fictional but this is a reality. When I think of a anarchist, communist, social ecological, ecosocialist future, approaching things in this way comes to mind. Noticing that we aren’t separate from the natural systems, and to learn from nature instead of destroy it. To get rid of profit and money as a main driver of life, and towards actually helping humanity and the ecology. We can make sure that all people have access to good food, clean water, community, shelter, everything they need to live happy lives, all for free - save the hard work to make it all happen. This can all be done not just on a small scale, but on a larger scale as well.

On a municipal level this can go from direct action groups and ecovillages making things to city wide and regional solutions. We can collectively build alternative housing on degraed land, to restore the natural ecosystem and give people a home. We can create housing that requires far less resources and that can be run nearly entirely passively. We can retrofit the buildings we have with natural materials that serve in a wider system of reuse.

This is all a small sliver of what can be done, and I hope this acts as a seed to sprout your own action, ideas, and movements.

A better future is possible.

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I often post about projects that use high-tech gadgets, equipment, and methods but I at the same time remain fiercely critical of them. Their methods of production are unsustainable, destructive, and require massive amounts of exploitation. This is all for a reason: profit.

What if we looked at technology from a different view, and fundamentally changed our relations to tech and computers at large? What if instead of doing what is cheaper to maximize profit, we focused on making and remaking things that had the smallest amount of ecological impact with the largest positive social benefit?

I use high-tech things because I have them, and find them, I recycle and upcycle them, revive them, and remix them. While also not seeking out high-tech solutions where they don’t belong, or going out to buy something to solve a nonexistent issue.

The world is full of one-sized-fits-all “solutions” pushed down on people who know what the problem is and how to address it and don’t need tyrants to force them to do things in a certain way. That’s the way of colonization - “I think I know better than you savages, so just follow what I have to say”. Nah, fuck that.

Just like the people who do the work know the most about how the work gets done, the people who are in specific circumstances know the solutions that will work for them.

Technology alone will not save us

There’s a pervasive idea that comes in tech spaces that the issues of our time are purely technological without ever understanding that our social and political systems directly impact how and why technology is made. The foundations of technology are determined by the social conditions that surround it. If the technology for global communication is surrounded by socioeconomic systems that value profit over everything else, continuous economic growth (when I say this I mean abstract economics like GDP which don’t measure anything really of value to humans and the ecology), and values closed source/intellectual gatekeeping - you get tech sectors that look like the one we live in now. On the flip side to that, that same technology can exist in a radically equitable world that values more than profit, values the open sharing of free information using that same global communications network - you start to see the difference. The world around us shapes our systems, and the mechanisms of those systems (the technologies we use to make daily life happen) are impacted by these systems.

The ecomodernist take is that we can tech our way out of climate collapse. That we can innovate our way out of social and economic destruction. That all we need is a magical new climate capture system (possibly funded by the corporations direct responsible for the climate crisis) to save the day and reverse it all. All we need is a new digital currency to fund monocropped tree farms that plant invasive non-native trees in disaster-prone environments while wasting energy and computing power that just off sets the carbon emissions. It’s the idea that we can have infinite and exponential economic growth forever, keeping the capitalist machine running along - just as long as it’s powered by solar panels and off shore wind (Not that I’m against it). It’s green in the sense of using renewable energy to keep doing unsustainable shit. It’s “green” but there isn’t a second thought put into why we use specific materials in renewable energy production. It’s the idea that we wait for some genius to invent our way out of the end.

Appropriate technology, permacomputing, and a post-growth future

The key thing is that we have to radically rethink how we design, manufacture, use, maintain, repair, and reuse technology - and where and why we use it to be determined by local cultural and ecological needs. We need to look at the reality of a petrochemical centered manufacturing world, and ask “What are some other ways that we can produce things, with as little impact to the environment as possible?”. Instead of mining new aluminum for solar panels, can we find ways to extract the metals from other sources, reuse or recycle the already existing materials in the world? Right now it isn’t done because it isn’t profitable. But in a world where profits don’t mean shit, impact to us and the ecosystem does, we can actually do things that are worthwhile. What if we can take plastic trash, and rework it to replace metals that require extractive processes?

Or create the things we need out of biological materials, bioplastics that actually breakdown in the environment and don’t stick around for hundreds of years, make clothes from plants and die them with other plants.

Appropriate technology harnesses technology from across the spectrum, from passive to low tech, to DIY steps to high tech worlds, it’s an idea that things don’t have to be cut and dry - silicon valley designed - petrochemical dependent, and can incorporate both ancient and modern techniques. It might come in the form of reviving ancient farming techniques such as the waru waru, an ancient planting technique that takes advantage of flooding rains by trapping water and creating natural rainwater harvesting channels. Some places might upcycle old computers destined for the landfill and put them to use running climate models and taking weather data to share to an open collective of DIY climate scientists. That is a core essence of permacomputing.

Instead of creating waste, we learn from one of the best teachers, mother earth - that everything is reused endlessly. Our systems can change to match the natural flow of creation and decay that doesn’t destroy our planet or ourselves. It’s a way of interacting with how we live our lives at a fundamental level.

Let me be clear, this can’t be done just by consuming differently on an individual level. What we are talking about is a revolution of the masses, to overthrow the systems of domination and exploitation, to give power back to the people and to the planet. To fundamentally change our economics, our manufacturing, our technology our waste cycles, our social systems to adapt to a wildly changing world.

If you liked this article, this is just the spark of a larger work that I want to do, that focuses on the practical aspects of how to make this stuff happen. I want to create a series of zines, a podcast, and possibly long-form videos to talk about these topics, and how they intersect together at length. Stay tuned!

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This was an exercise in Design Fiction inspired by the The 2023 Work Kit of Design Fiction by the Near Future Laboratory. This was created in collaboration with my amazing wife Lauren where we drew cards from the deck and came up with ideas of what this near future object might be. What we came up with was a VR headset made by a mega-corporation where users could have virtual protests and pay a subscription fee to send their issues directly to corporate lobbyists. On the flip side of that protest piece, I wanted to make a zine protesting the VR headset itself made by an autonomous collective that hack the VR headsets and uses them for training for when they deal with riot police at actual protests and demonstrations.

I wanted to be sure to make that balance of realism. What a company might release that’s in reality some really sinister shit, and the eventual pushback from people who see a glimmer of hope in the cracks.

Background

We drew four cards, an archetype (instruction manual), an object (A VR headset), an attribute (mesmerizing), and an action (protest).

How do these things combine together to create an instruction manual for a VR headset that is mesmerizing and connected to protests?

We landed on a fictional company creating a VR headset directed towards protesters, made by a mega-corporation called Hapticore that wants to get people to protest online, instead of in reality.

Following the trend of pay-to-play microtransactions and cryptocurrency grifting, you can subscribe to a premium membership that will add your virtual protest slogans to an NFT and directly send it to Hapticore corporate lobbyists who will argue for your protest in front of government representatives.

The Hapticore Protest & Resistance headset is specially made to mimic protest conditions, with haptic feedback to really feel like you’re in the action (It literally feels like you are being hit with rubber bullets, tear-gassed, maced, etc) so people stop actually protesting, and they start protesting in the safe confines at home. While also still feeling like they accomplished their goal.

Following their typical polished corporate look I created a fictional quickstart guide that you might find in the headsets packaging.

The Pushback: Autonomous Collectives hack the headsets to train for real protests

At the bottom of the “Be Heard By Protesting!” section of the quickstart guide I included “states” where the NFT feature was banned. I wanted to think about what the US might look like in the near future with most of the west being liberated and connected together by a federation of communes, groups, revolutionaries, and radicals who created the Rocky Mountain Autonomous Federation. I could imagine an autonomous Oregon coast, where the rest of east Oregon got invaded by Idaho which was now a Christian Nationalist nation. This is following some real-world current news out of that area and I wanted to illustrate that. Puerto Rico becomes a state in the US (being Puerto Rican myself this would be like Idaho taking over Oregon and I am someone who wants Puerto Rican liberation). And West Nebraska is added as a temporary buffer zone between the Rocky Mountain Autonomous Federation, the now fascistic federal government, and the neo nazi/Christian Nationalist “Holy State of Justice” which comprised of Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah.

Seeing Hapticore and their CEOs connection to state and local police department training, the Rocky Mountain Autonomous Federation created a hacked firmware version that could allow a user to boot their headsets into an admin mode and gain access to more features. They took control of an old website the company ignored when they fired most of their IT staff, and because Hapticore runs all of their tech on a write-only blockchain they can’t stop the federation from creating their own servers to allow free transactions on the headsets.

I created a zine made by the federation that explains how to hack the headsets and use them to train activists, journalists, community defense members, and anyone in the federation and globally, to train against AI riot police before actually protesting.

Click here if you want to see the zine as a magazine view / in an easy to read format

Zine Images are below:

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The thing about futures is that it’s hard to feel yourself in them. Especially when these futures are radically different from our current realities. It’s hard to conceptualize what revolutionary change might feel like, when everything in our here and now is so different. But it’s for sure needed, not just to convey ideas but to put yourself into them. It’s hard to defeat capitalist realism - the idea that there are no alternatives to capitalism, but we can chip away at these ideas by imagining - and more importantly acting on these imagined futures - to make the alternative possible.

Let’s think about how we might feel in a degrowth/postgrowth future, and what we might discover or even rediscover about ourselves, the planet, and each other.

In this article, I want to lay out how I think the concepts of Buen Vivir and Hygge can give us insight into what a degrowth future might actually feel like. But not just explore what it might feel like, but look like, and act like as well. I see the solarpunk aesthetic as a good way of showcasing the good life - along with the solid social and political change within the idea of Buen Vivir and how Social Ecology intersects with those ideas to make that change happen.

Buen Vivir, Hygge, solarpunk, social ecology, and degrowth are all deeply connected within eachother. From their core values, methods, tactics and aesthetics, we can see how they compliment and build off eachother. Buen Vivir/Sumak Kawsay & Hygge can describe how building community with the people around you, exemplifiying the comfort of life of being able to relax by a fire. Or enjoying a meal with fresh food from a garden with your friends and neighbors. How it feels to be connected to others and the ecosystem around you, to feel connected to each other and the earth. How it feels to be included in something, to have your voice mean something not just in your local community but your region, and even farther. A life of simple pleasures, of living without the rush of capitalst accumulation, the slow life, the fast life, the life you want to choose. Solarpunk can show and tell the stories of a good life, give people visions of what is possible despite climate collapse. Tell stories of triumph, and show whats possible. Social ecology as the political framework along side the existing political framework of Buen Vivir to show how we make it happen. How we dismantle oppressive systems of violence, domination, and exploitation by creating equitable social arrangements. How we can end those same practices in our relationship with the ecosystem around us, and how we can relearn what technology means - not just low or high tech, but appropriate tech. Degrowth can point the way to a postcapitalist system, by decoupling our ideas of growth from made up economic metrics like GDP and make sure the growth we focus on is growing human and ecological well being. All of this is interconnected.

Let’s present some major points that intersect all of these different topics, then break them down into details so we can understand each piece a little better.

Buen Vivir, Hygge, solarpunk, social ecology, and degrowth have these major commonalities between them:

• Interconnectedness (between people and between the ecology)

• Collective and community well-being and action

• Cultural diversity

• Decolonization, Land Back, and Indigenous Rights

• Ecological Sustainability and the rights of nature

• Food and water sovereignty and sustainable agriculture

• Local autonomy and decentralized participatory/direct democracy & decision making

• Reciprocity and Mutual Aid

• The balance of technology with ecology

Terminology / Quick Explanations:

Before getting started it might be helpful to define some of these ideas in case you aren’t familiar.

Buen Vivir: The idea of Buen Vivir is an alternative to this development-centered approach. Buen Vivir is based on the belief that true well-being (“the good life”) is only possible as part of a community. The good of the community is placed above that of the individual, not in a way to negate individual freedom, but to center the community over selfishness, self-service, and resource hoarding. Furthermore, this is community in an expanded sense; it includes Nature, plants, animals, and the Earth. Nature itself must be cared for and respected as a valuable part of the community. The land cannot be owned; it should be honored and protected.

Hygge: Hard to pronounce, hygge ("hooga") is difficult to explain, too. In brief, hygge is about taking time away from the daily rush to be together with people you care about - or even by yourself - to relax and enjoy life's quieter pleasures. Hygge is often about informal time together with family or close friends. Typically, the setting is at home or another quiet location, or perhaps a picnic during the summer months. It usually involves sharing a meal and wine or beer, or hot chocolate and a bowl of candy if children are included. There is no agenda. You celebrate the small joys of life, or maybe discuss deeper topics. It is an opportunity to unwind and take things slow. 

Social Ecology: Social ecology is the study of how individuals interact with and respond to the environment around them, and how these interactions affect society and the environment as a whole. Consider traditional ecological studies, in which students examine how multiple factors must interact within nature to create the world’s ecosystems. Social ecology takes the same approach by examining society holistically. Studying how individuals, collectives and institutions interact with and depend on one another, social ecologists look at the bigger picture of our “system”—allowing for a more effective approach to solving society’s collective problems. The concept of social ecology was introduced by an environmental activist named Murray Bookchin. He was an ecologist and believed there was a better approach to the study. In his paper “What is Social Ecology?”, he argues environmentalists are too focused on studying the individual symptoms of a problem rather than addressing the problem itself—the belief that humans can and should control nature. Social Ecology also posits that technology can be positive if our social relations involving technology are positive. It points out that technology, social relations, economic relations and ecological relations are all interconnected.

Solarpunk: Solarpunk is a literary and artistic movement that envisions and works toward actualizing a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community. The "solar" represents solar energy as a renewable energy source and an optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism, while the "punk" refers to the countercultural, post-capitalist, and decolonial enthusiasm for creating such a future.

As a science fiction literary subgenre and art movement, solarpunk works address how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability, human impact on the environment, and addressing climate change and pollution.

Degrowth: Degrowth broadly means shrinking rather than growing economies, so we use less of the world’s energy and resources and put wellbeing ahead of profit.

The idea is that by pursuing degrowth policies, economies can help themselves, their citizens, and the planet by becoming more sustainable. This is done by decoupling our ideas of infinite economic growth based on made up measures like GDP, and instead focus on actual human and ecological benefit. Degrowth is an idea that critiques the global capitalist system which pursues growth at all costs, causing human exploitation and environmental destruction. The degrowth movement of activists and researchers advocates for societies that prioritize social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption. This requires radical redistribution, reduction in the material size of the global economy, and a shift in common values towards care, solidarity and autonomy. Degrowth means transforming societies to ensure environmental justice and a good life for all within planetary boundaries.

Buen Vivir, Sumak Kawsay and the good life: A Framework of Latin American Resistance, Joy, and Connection

Buen Vivir originates from the socialist indigenous communities of Latin America and has spread across South and Central America as a cultural reflection of various indigenous groups. Specifically, the idea comes from Sumak Kawsay which is the Quechua term for what roughly can be translated into Spansh as Buen Vivir and into English as “good living”. The term has been used in Peru, Bolivia, Chile (Mapuche), Paraguay (Guarani), Ecuador (Achuar), and Panama (Guna) - with multiple cultures sharing the same general idea with changes depending on the languages spoken.

These ideas can be traced back to the Tsotsil and Tseltal indigenous groups and their influence on Neozapatismo and the eventual creation of the Zapatistas.

At its core Buen Vivir is about well being, the things that make a good life possible. It’s about the interconnectedness of all people and beings to their environment, and a recognition of how interconnected we are to the ecosystem. Our lives depend on the well being of the ecosystem and the ecosystem is directly influenced by our actions. By killing the ecosystem, we are killing ourselves. Living the good life isn’t about consuming goods, hoarding money, or economic growth at the expense of the ecosystem, it’s about actually living a life of dignity. Being able to eat fresh and nutritious food, being able to drink clean water, being able to be a part of the collective whole of your local community, being able to enjoy all of the parts of life not because you can afford it, or some despot says you can, but because you are a human being.

The good life is also about resistance, and resisting ecological and social destruction. Resisting the calls for capital to subsume everything for a profit and fighting for a life of dignity. This quote from “Buen Vivir As an Alternative to Sustainable Development” by Natasha Chassagne points this out firsthand.

You can’t have a good life without being able to live, and the ability for indigenous people and of all people in Latin/South America to live well will come down to their ability to choose how to live their lives, and have control over land stewardship without capital forces coming in to extract the land for profits. You can’t have a good life without equality - where everyone in the community has equal access to healthy food, clean water, and quality homes. These imbalances affect communities at their core and you see this with the egalitarian - or better put communal - ways of living. If all of us aren’t thriving, none of us are, including the ecosystem. And so Buen Vivir is both a social & ecological understanding that also ties into the political.

Political Aspects of Buen Vivir, Social Ecology, Degrowth, and the Political Struggle for Equality

Following this thread you can see how the social and political background of Buen Vivir intersects with ideas in Social Ecology and Degrowth. From ideas in social ecology, our social arrangements will impact our ecological impact. If we base our lives on hierarchy and extraction of labor and resources, that will be reflected in how we interact with the ecosystem as well. To stop the harm, we have to address the underlying issues within our social and political lives. That means getting rid of violence, domination, extraction, and patriarchy within our social and political lives. We can’t have Buen Vivir without addressing these core issues, and fighting that looks like decolonial, anti-authoritarian, radically equitable, feminist, and eco-centered political action. This means an intersectional movement of various fights that combine into one. Not just social battles, but economic ones as well because the economic factors will influence the social and political and vice-versa. That is where degrowth comes into play and the interactions between how we measure progress, and economic activity. By decoupling endless economic growth, by moving away from purely economic measurements that ignore all social and ecological factors like GDP, we can actually measure the impacts things have on us. Imagine if instead of tracking GDP, quarterly profits, and stock prices, we measured if certain actions would benefit people, or hurt the environment. It’s simple. It’s direct. It’s concrete. We can’t do things for the sake of profit while sacrificing people and the earth.

And so the core commonalities between the social and economic struggles at the core of Buen Vivir are about building autonomous, communal, and equal societies. This is also part of Social Ecology and Degrowth as they address both the social and political realms and the methods and ways towards a post-capitalist - post-economic growth future.

Buen Vivir & Hygge: The good life means being together and really living.

Part of Buen Vivir would be the feeling of community, safety, and joy. There is something special about being able to live life without economic or social blockers, being able to live without institutions saying you can’t because you can’t afford it or because you look a certain way, or are a certain demographic background. Living life because we can and should live to the best possible definitions. Hygge is an interesting term that compliments Buen Vivir, and is more so a good describer of how the good life might really feel.

Hygge is about being content with lives pleasures, taking joy in the little things, and spending time to relax with family - either biological, adopted, or queer family, strangers, comrades, anyone. The idea connects back with Buen Vivir’s sense of living the good life, of a holistic understanding that to live a good life, there are social, economic and emotional aspects about our lives that need to have a balance. And to reach that balance for everyone, there is a certain baseline that all people need to live happy and healthy lives.

Solarpunk as an aesthetic to show the good life

We can see how solarpunk intersects with all of the topics we talked about before, because some of the core principles intersect with Social Ecology, Degrowth, Buen Vivir, and Hygge. We can think of solarpunk as the way of imagining what this future might look like both aesthetically and physically. Speculation can help us to use these principals to imagine their outcomes. At the moment, we are in the global struggle against capitalism, hierarchy, and domination. But it’s interesting to read a story about how people made it through, and built a better future around some of the topics and ideas here. It makes it easier to walk in someone else’s shoes so to speak and imagine yourself say in a democratic confederalist assembly of your community, voicing your opinion on a community action to help preserve endangered wildlife in your area. Or speculating what a degrowth future might look like where we lower our energy demand by creating free and open housing that is passive, and heats and cools itself, and how you might interact in an upcycled and revamped suburb with sprawling public transport that runs off low resource intensive passive solar. These things can be worked out, speculated, and shown as both a fiction, but also a path forward to imagine what the world could look like.

Show the future of change, feel the future of change, and make the future happen with direct action to create that change

What I’m talking about here is to look at these various ideas and frameworks as interconnected, and see how they interconnect with other things. How can we not only do revolutionary action, but show it, imagine it, feel it, and then fight for it. Have the imagination to imagine a better future, have the understanding of what life really could feel like, and then have the concrete social and political education and frameworks to make that all happen.

Let’s work to make the good life possible for all.

The blog has since moved to:

https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

Chromebooks are a ubiquitous staple mostly in educational spaces. They are small, cheap, and efficient laptops usually given out to students to do their work. Made by Google, the entire OS mainly acts as a web browser to access Google’s cloud resources (Google docs, sheets, etc).

What happens to the thousands of Chromebooks in schools after a few years pass? They end up in an end-of-life (EOL) state, unable to receive updates from Google. Laptops from 2018 are thrown away, scrapped, or auctioned off because they no longer will work. Is it because the hardware is broken or obsolete? No. It’s because Google wants to increase sales, and so after a few years they intentionally strand thousands of machines.

The history of the Chromebook is a history of planned obsolescence, a perfect example of how computing operates within capitalism - to maximize profit at the expense of all else. These complex machines are meant to be thrown away, tossed aside, and scraped. The rare earth minerals, the labor involved typically in the global south being carried out by an exploited labor force, the resources used to transport these materials, and the fossil fuels used in their mining, transport, development, and manufacturing. All of these resources and work are discarded. These computers could become free computers for low-income families or people who just need a new computer to do work in our ever-evolving digital world. But instead, they go to waste.

This article is broken up into two parts. The first is an actual tutorial on how to make a Chromebook boot to an up to date Linux install.

The other part of this article will go into the reasonings behind this, and talk more about planned obsolecnece, computers, capitalism, permacomputing, and post-scarcity anti-capitalist futures.

Click here to skip to that section.

Considerations, Limitations, and Constraints

This tutorial will be specifically for installing Ubuntu onto an external drive, and being able to tinker with a Chromebook to allow it to boot to that drive while maintaining the original ChromeOS. There are many factors and reasons why I went this route, and some considerations to keep in mind.
While this project is for a specific purpose, keep in mind that you don’t have to go this route. Do whatever you want, modify things to how you want them to be.

So why did I choose to boot to an external drive while keeping the original ChromeOS?

• These machines are going to be used to help build an autonomous wireless community network. This network will be not only for normal times, but also for emergencies. With that being said, not everyone will be familiar with or able to operate a Linux install, let alone be a server admin. So I want to maintain the ability for a nontechnical person to pick one of these up and just use it as a client. Keeping the ChromeOS on there allows for someone to just quickly use the machine. This allows them to be more versatile.

• The onboard memory is small, the models I got my hands on have 16GB of onboard eMMC storage. That is basically nothing. You could overwrite the ChromeOS with something like Ubuntu or Linux Mint, but then you have to do some annoying disk partitioning to separate the home directory, and either way you will need an external disk to use these as a server anyways. So it’s easier to just install it all on a USB drive or external hard drive.

• “But why not use other regular (non Chromebook) laptops?” You should try and reuse any and all computers you can. I’m not saying that Chromebooks should replace using an old laptop. Other laptops are actually easier to use because they have actual BIOS installed, and you can usually just replace the internal hard drive. What I’m saying here is not to overlook Chromebooks for their potential to do the same thing. They require slightly more work but it’s better than then ending up in a landfill. This is not to say that Chromebooks are better in any way either. This is a tutorial to help people save EOL Chromebooks, not to discount you on reusing an old Thinkpad.

• Using an external drive to boot and use as your main drive means that you can take the USB/drive out and use it on really any computer. So it gives you more versatility. In an emergency situation, imagine if you had one of these Chromebooks and the screen gets damaged. Well, just take your drive and plug it into any other computer, and boot to it. This gives you more options when it comes to use, especially because the storage on a Chromebook is soldered-on, you don’t have an easy way to remove data from the soldered-on drive.

• Raspberry Pi’s are expensive and overrated. The original platform I was using to make these networks was a Raspberry Pi, but if you haven’t looked at the prices of them after Covid, they are crazy expensive. There are plenty of nerds with a ton of them gathering dust from old projects. But to expect other people to have one already or even source one is ridiculous. Most of the clones are also expensive. You can get a used Chromebook (or an entire pallet of them) for less than $30. Chromebooks are also more powerful and have a screen, keyboard, and battery for even less than a barebones Raspberry Pi. There is a place for them if you need access to GPIO pins. One upside to a Pi is power consumption, but again, that depends on how you are powering them. Since Chromebooks are pretty efficient, they are good on battery life. The same way you would more than likely charge a battery bank is how you would recharge a Chromebook.

Overall, we want to create a resilient system here. Making things modular, portable and able to adapt to situations. If you install everything on a machine with a soldered-on drive, it will be hard to get information off that drive compared to installing it to an external source. With this you can both have a drive that can work on any computer, but also have a Chromebook that can double as a server when someone is there to manage it, but also can default back to just an internet client that anyone can pick up and use.

Upsides & Nuances & Downsides

There are a couple of points I want to illustrate so you can know if you can know things ahead of time. There are some positives and negatives and some weird small stuff but it’s easy and small enough to make reviving Chromebooks possible.

Upsides:

• Making a bootable Linux USB/drive means you can plug that drive into any other computer and start rockin’. In an emergency situation this mean that you can quickly switch to other machines if needed and keep things running.

• This is way cheaper than a Raspberry Pi if you are not needing GPIO pins. To make an actual portable Raspberry Pi requires so much that is already built into the Chromebook.

Nuances / small things:

Chromebooks are built to run ChromeOS, and with that comes some small annoying things about dual booting. When the computer is first started you will always need to wait 30 seconds after a stupid splash page, or press Ctl+D to boot to ChromeOS or Ctl+L to boot to an external drive.

Downsides:

• There are some steps you have to take to get the Chromebook to even boot to a USB. This might mean opening up the laptop and removing a screw. The alternative though is worse - these devices ending up in e-waste landfills or being scrapped with chemical and polluting processes.

Tutorial on enabling dev mode, enabling USB booting, and getting Linux running on a Chromebook

• First, you will need a Chromebook (I will go over sourcing later on)

• A USB drive to flash the Ubuntu installer (or any linux flavor)

• A USB drive to install the OS on or an external drive.

• Might need a screwdriver depending on your model.

This tutorial is based on another tutorial by Fascinating Captain, but I ran into some issues and nuances that aren’t mentioned in his original article. There are also multiple other paths to take depending on your Chromebook model, and the models I have fall into that.

TLDR Instructions

• Enter developer mode by turning off the machine, then holding the ESC + Refresh buttons while pressing the power button.

• Press Ctl+D and then Enter.

• Login or enter a guest session.

• Open Chrome and then Ctrl + Alt + T to open a terminal.

• Then type shell to open a bash shell.

• cd /usr/local

• sudo curl -LO mrchromebox.tech/firmware-util.sh && sudo bash firmware-util.sh

• See if “Install/Update RW_LEGACY Firmware” is blue. If not and [WP] is on every line, you can’t use software to remove the write protection and need to remove the WP screw.

• (If needed) remove the WP screw.

• Rerun the original script, if “Install/Update RW_LEGACY Firmware” is not blue skip to running: bash <(curl https://johnlewis.ie/flash_cb_fw.sh)

• Either way, the firmware will be installed.

• Reboot then enter a terminal with Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl+Alt+F2 (the back button) then enter this command in the terminal: sudo crossystem dev_boot_usb=1 dev_boot_legacy=1

• Some models may require this command to be run instead, it will tell you. Run: sudo crossystem dev_boot_usb=1 dev_boot_altfw=1

• Create bootable Linux installer USB.

• Reboot the machine and when at the “OS Verification is OFF” page press Ctl+L with the boot USB in then press ESC to list the drives and boot to it.

• Install Linux to another external USB or external drive.

• Reboot and press Ctl+L to boot to the external drive or Ctl+D to boot to Chrome OS

1. Enable Developer Mode

Entering developer mode will erase everything on the Chromebook. More than likely it’s already empty, but if you have been using it already backup your data off the machine because it will be wiped.

• With your Chromebook turned off hold down the ESC and Refresh While keeping them held down, press the power button once. You may need to hold the power button for a couple of seconds depending on your model.

• The next screen will look scary and say “Chrome OS is missing or damaged.” that isn’t true. Press Ctrl+D to bypass this screen.

• Turn off OS verification on the next page by pressing “Enter”

• The Chromebook will reboot after that.

• On the OS verification is OFF screen press Ctrl+D to bypass this message.

• You will see a timer counting down in the top right hand corner of the screen. It may also boot to a black screen that spins and says “Preparing the system for development mode”. Just wait until this finishes. The Chromebook will reboot and you’ll see the screen with the red exclamation mark.

• Developer mode is now enabled! To boot into ChromeOS, press Ctrl+D. Don’t press enter because that will enable OS verification which you don’t want.

After that, it will take you to a Chromebook page, press “Get Started” and connect to a Wifi network.

Optional: Set up Chromebook with Google account

After accepting Googles BS terms and conditions, there will be an option to setup the Chromebook with an account. You can do this if you want, but keep in mind if you are using an old Chromebook you more than likely won’t be covered by security patches so keep that in mind.

Entering Guest Mode without a Google account

Guest mode can be found at the bottom of that screen when you are first setting up the Chromebook. You can activate everything through a guest session, just be aware that your history won’t be saved.

Modifying Chromebook BIOS with new Firmware

Next we will open a shell to get the firmware installed.

Open a terminal by logging into a guest session (or your own user if you picked that) and opening chrome.

Then press Ctrl + Alt + T this will bring up a terminal window that will show:

crosh> 

Type in the command ‘shell’ and hit enter and it will open an actual bash shell so you can modify files.

crosh> shell
chronos@localhost / $

Chromebooks don’t have a traditional BIOS

Chromebooks don’t use BIOS to boot to external drives but uses firmware to determine what boots. What we are doing is installing our own firmware on top of the default boot firmware to make something like a BIOS.

For those whose eyes glazed over: the fake BIOS will allow us to boot to an external drive like a regular computer.

Installing the firmware will depend on your Chromebook. There are two ways to modify the settings to flash our own bios.

I would first try MrChromebox’s firmware script as it will print out a good amount of information. It will tell you if you can disable Firmware Write Protect through software or if you need to open up the computer to remove a screw. (It’s super easy and simple don’t worry).

So first we will run the nice script, figure out if we can override Firmware Wipe protect through software, or if we have to open the computer up.

Navigate to this page:

https://mrchromebox.tech/#fwscript

And it will include the commands to use.

Change directories to /usr/local because by default ChromeOS won’t let you save new data to a home directory. And then pull down the firmware installer.

cd /usr/local

sudo curl -LO mrchromebox.tech/firmware-util.sh && sudo bash firmware-util.sh

That will run the script and show you what options are available.

We are looking for “Install/Update RW_LEGACY Firmware”. If yours is blue you can rewrite it without needing to pull the read/write screw from the computer.
Mine would now allow me to do any of the above, and each line had [WP] meaning I could not rewrite the firmware without removing the WP screw. This is very common. If your script “Install/Update RW_LEGACY Firmware” is blue, skip this next section.

Physically removing the Read/Write Screw (Depends on your model)

This sounds pretty crazy but it’s really easy to do. More than likely you are doing this to an old Chromebook that is already EOL. You just need a screwdriver and the ability to read to get this done.

If your script from before said [WP] in red next to everything then you need to remove the WP screw. Get a screw driver and take the screws off.

VERY IMPORTANT! Before opening the computer, turn the power off. Completely off. Safety first!

You are looking for an area on the motherboard labeled “WP Screw” or “Write Protect Screw”

Unscrew that and now you can write custom firmware to your board!

Screw your backplate back in, reboot, and press Control + D to boot into the ChromeOS. Go back to /usr/local and rerun the script either by using the same command as before, but since you already downloaded it you can just type in:

sudo ./firmware-util.sh

Flashing the new boot firmware

If your machine had “Install/Update RW_LEGACY Firmware” in blue from the script, or if you physically removed your WP screw and reran the script, then press enter and it will install a custom boot loader.

That is the easy way, your model might give you problems like mine did. I removed the WP screw, reran the script and then the option for “Install/Update RW_LEGACY Firmware” was still greyed out. There is another option that will work, but now that you know that write protection is turned off, running the alternative should work.

Flashing firmware if mrchromebox’s script was greyed out (Skip if it was blue and ran)

My specific Chromebook the Dell Chromebook 11 3180 didn’t like mrchromebox’s script and yours might not either. John Lewis made another slightly older script that will work on other models that the mrchromebox script doesn't run on.

Open a new terminal window with Ctrl+Alt+T and do the following (One per each line):

shell 
(This will bring up a bash shell)
cd /usr/local
bash <(curl https://johnlewis.ie/flash_cb_fw.sh)

This will run the installer. Based on your model there will be various options to choose from.

If you run this script and you don’t see the option “Modify my Chromebooks RW_Legacy slot” you more than likely can’t flash this boot loader. This depends on a ton of things and there isn’t an easy way to give you an exact list of which ones will work 100%.

Choose the option “Modify my Chromebooks RW_Legacy slot”

Type in the number that is on that list.

The terminal will flash and present you with a screen where you have to type in a prompt that is generated. This will be different between Chromebooks but for my case this is what I had to type:

If this bricks my kefka, on my head be it!

Some scary text will come up, if it says success then you are good to go.

Enable USB Boot

If your firmware flash was successful you will be able to reboot into ChromeOS no problem! Now we have to enable USB booting. Load into ChromeOS by pressing Ctl+D.

• If you logged into a google account you will be taken to the Chrome login screen. Press Ctrl+Alt+F2 and login using the password chronos

• If you are using a guest session just go Ctrl+Alt+T then type shell to open a terminal and get a bash shell.

When at the terminal type in:

sudo crossystem dev_boot_usb=1 dev_boot_legacy=1

If you do that and get an error about using dev_boot_altfw run this instead:

sudo crossystem dev_boot_usb=1 dev_boot_altfw=1

After that when you reboot and get to the startup screen press Ctl+L and it should bring you to a screen that looks like a traditional BIOS!

Install Linux to an external drive

Now you just need your new OS flashed onto a flash drive so you can install Linux onto either another USB drive or an external hard drive. Either way is the same.

Create a bootable Linux installer

Etcher is the best software to do this, other bootable USB creators like Rufus might cause problems and not let you boot correctly. Etcher is also incredibly easy to use and installs on everything.

Here is the etcher website!
https://www.balena.io/etcher

If you need a walkthrough of using Etcher, follow this tutorial. It’s pretty simple.

You basically need to download the latest Ubuntu (or any linux flavor) ISO to your machine, load that into etcher, put in your USB drive and press go.

I opted to use Ubuntu Desktop because it makes it easy to turn these into portable servers without fussing with other Linux flavors repositories.

When you are on the linux desktop download page, scroll down and select the acutal latest version. The LTS version is old but still covered with patches but you might as well install the latest and greatest.

Boot to an external drive to install Linux

Plug in your newly created installation USB and power on the Chromebook. Once you get to the page that says “OS Verification is OFF” press Ctl+L to boot to our custom BIOS like firmware.

Press esc to list the available drives to boot to, choose your USB Linux installer.

Run through the installation, make sure you plug in the drive you want to use where you will be installing Ubuntu/Linux.

Go through the installer like normal, you can pick “Install Ubuntu” or try, either way you want to run the installer. Make sure to select the option “Install third-party software for graphics and Wifi hardware and additional media formats”

Then it will bring another screen to decide where your Ubuntu install will go. Be sure to pick the other external USB or external drive where Ubuntu will be installed. If you want to do fancy partitioning go ahead, but choose “Erase disk and install Ubuntu”. This will obviously erase the disk so use something empty, or backup the data.

Finishing the install

There you have it! After the installation finishes you should be able to reboot, then press Ctl+L to boot to USB, then esc to list your drives, select your drive and you are ready to roll.

Some Chromebooks don’t initialize the SD card slot until after boot, meaning you cant boot directly from an SD card but can still use the SD card when Ubuntu loads.

You can also remap the keys to make them feel like a normal computer, as the special keys may not match what they were used for on the Chromebook.

There is a handy script that might fix all of this for you but, with my install everything worked out of the box without any fuss (besides the special keys)

Sourcing Chromebooks

School districts and cities often time will auction Chromebooks off at super low prices. Sometimes you can grab entire pallets, thousands of these computers for less than $50. Look for local auction websites, in my area in Dallas I use LSOAuctions as an example.

Facebook marketplace is another place to look. I hate Facebook as well and refuse to actually use it I know. Most people reading this are anti Facebook or weird Linux nerds but here is a bit of advice: most people are using Facebook marketplace to sell cheap shit. Whether you like it or not, you can find some good deals on old computers on there.

You can also just call school districts and see if you can get in touch with someone in their IT department. Try and get ahold of someone who works on a helpdesk or who handle computer provisioning. There are people whose entire job is to take care of the computer stock. I’ve seen some concerning replies across social media from sysadmins at school districts who just literally threw away the chromebooks. So dumpster diving might be a good idea too if you really want them for free.

I won mine at auction, but most importantly when I went to pick them up I met a man who ran a computer recycling warehouse full of Chromebooks and old laptops.

Chip stewardship in the age of climate collapse: How removing profit and stopping planned obsolescence can help us form new relationships with technology.

Many of us view technology in an adversarial light. We see a world and cultures around the world being reshaped by technology. We feel at the same time more connected to the world of instant information, and yet at the same time so separated and atomized. Is this because of the technology itself? Or is the technology and its negative and positive impacts shaped by our socioeconomic conditions?

The reason why technology is so alienating, so pervasively interrupting our lives, making us feel ever-connected to the web where everything we do feels like some form of digital work - is because of capitalism.

This technology is being leveraged for one purpose: profit. And our social and political relations influence how technology is manufactured, how it’s used, and how it becomes a tool of oppressive corporate and state control compared to a tool for revolutionary global solidarity and action. Capitalism is driven by metrics such as GDP that completely divorce the economy from reality. The profits go up, the GDP goes up and that’s considered to be good. While all of it ignores the environmental, social, and political impacts that are caused by chasing these profits and endless economic growth.

Computing is based on these relations and came from the needs and wants of both the US government and corporations. The birth of computers was meant to create powerful methods of automating tasks for the purpose of statecraft or to maximize corporate profits.

In my work Open Source Societies I go into detail about the history of the internet and computers and specifically into the anarchistic and utopian views of the early internet. Ideas that not only corporations should have access to computers, with the revolutionary view that we can defeat authoritarian governments and corporate power by creating a global interconnected system of communication, open sharing of information, goods, and anything we needed to live life. This directly intersected with the psychedelic movement and with the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s.

The article touches on the both dark and utopian past and brings it into the present. What would computing and technology look like if we also changed our social relations away from capitalism and systems based on profit, but systems that focused on its impact on human and ecological life and on non-monetary mutual aid?

Everything would change. Because we wouldn’t need to build things for profit. We would question how and why our technology is manufactured the way it is. We would care for the technology that exists today and is just discarded, while fundamentally changing how we manufacture technology.

We can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet

The thought that we can continue mining the planet for rare earth minerals is insane, while we are essentially staring down the barrel of a loaded gun - still poised with a shovel in our hands ready to mine more resources. For what? For a few mega-corporations to make more profit? More and more resources are extracted for products that are essentially relegated to trash. We live in an increasingly throwaway society where resources are extracted, transported, and manufactured, all for them to be thrown away. We have actual chips and microprocessors, rechargeable lithium batteries, and sensors in “disposable” vape pens. It’s incredible the level of waste we see with older technology being sent to scrap yards to be melted down. When these machines work perfectly fine, all they might need is a different part or a new operating system. But it’s profitable to just destroy it.

We can’t keep doing this and we have to do whatever we can to change how these systems work from a fundamental level. From the design, the actual raw materials needed, the way they are manufactured and produced, how they are transported, and how they are decommissioned.

Permacomputing, Chip Stewards, and changing our conceptions of high technology

Just as we tend to the earth and help create rich and biodiverse ecosystems to help remediate the damage we have done. By moving away from traditional - profit driven - agricultural practices to indigenous-driven, bio-diverse permaculture practices, we too should look at other resources in the lens of stewardship.
It’s our responsibility to take into account the massive amount of technology around us. And to become not only land stewards, but chip and technology stewards as well. Stop the extractive processes and methods, and reuse and repurpose what is already out in the world. From there we can change how things are designed, their materials, their use to create technology that doesn’t destroy the planet, and is used to actually help humanity, not help profits.

What is permacomputing? Sourced from permacomputing.net

The path forward is both a fight against corporations and against the waste they have produced. It will require one one hand, a push back against their practices while also acknowledging that more than likely - they won’t give a shit about what we have to say. We can shout online all we want but there needs to be both a concentrated social and political effort to say to corporations - “You can’t produce computers then make them EOL after a couple years and basically brick them”. We can make them listen through a couple tactics, one way is protesting. But that will only get us so far. We need direct action, and because we have to simultaneously work within capitalism while also subverting it, we have to hit them in multiple ways.

Hitting their profits will force them to listen, we can do that by not just boycotting their bullshit but also making an alternative system. This is the prospect of dual power, building the world we want to see both within and outside of the current system. To hit their profit motives we make DIY computing, permacomuting, reusing old laptops and desktops into a socially accepted - and widely liked activity. Make hacking and tinkering not only cool - but the standard. Woah, you’re buying a brand new computer? Dude, I can give you one totally for free, that will work just as well from one I found on the street!

We find any and all technology, remake it, reuse it and give it out for free. We cut the profits of these large corporations by taking their waste and diverting it from polluting our environment and instead using it to give people more access to information. Free information networks and access to these networks where people can get access to everything they need for free. Even making our own community networks decoupled from the corporate control of internet service providers.

But it’s not just about having that decommodified alternative, but also thinking about the future. How can we fundamentally change the supply chain, design, and manufacturing of future technology? We can design everything to be interoperable and modular in a way that parts produced can work in other applications. We can use common design standards like a digital version of open structures. They are proposing an open standard to produce goods that can work together, are interoperable, and can be infinitely reused and remixed.

We can play around with different techniques and methods of manufacturing, if the main goal isn’t profit we can instead focus on making things that have positive impacts to humans and as little impact to the ecosystem as possible. We can reinvent the material science used in things like PCB manufacturing. Instead of needing to mine for the resources to make new PCB boards what if we used natural materials, like reinforced mycelium blocks to create strong and naturally created materials to act as a base? What if we directly reused things considered “trash” into new things.
A very influential experimenter to not only my work but many others is trash_robot who has also been working with trash, and doing different forms of permacomputing.

That material is made of cardboard, which can be soldered underneath to create circuit boards like they were made in the early days of computing. But imagine if we were able to say use mycelium to “grow” new boards, and implant traces into them to create fully organic computers with way less mineral and resource requirements than are required now? This is being done through some pioneering work of Andrew Adamatzky who is working on making fungal computers.

Imagine taking production and all people actually owning the means to produce, repair and remix technology. PCB manufacturing no long has to mine rare earth minerals in the congo with basically slave labor - ship those resources across the world for them to be used in manufacturing - then shipped again and again through the entire supply chain. A supply chain that runs on fossil fuels. What if instead, we localized production in the places where they are needed. We can produce new technology using new and novel methods of manufacturing that have less of an impact on the environment, without the need to ship them across the ocean.

These ideas intersect with social, political, and economic change. We can get back to truly innovating instead of building the same shit for profit. We can change not only how we interact with technology but each other.

Appropriate Technology and Convivial Tech

This isn’t to say that we need high tech solutions for everything. In some situations these things don’t make sense, and making a low tech alternative may be more viable. Less energy needed, less of a chance for things to break, easier to maintain. We have to find a balance in our use of technology. Even if we can liberate technology and use it for it’s truly revolutionary potential, we have to be careful not to think high-tech solutions apply across the board.

With that comes the need to let all people join in on the designs of systems, the people who will be using them having a say in how they work. There is a certain sense of conviviality to it, these technologies will be shaped by local cultures and local environments. And so we might see computing look very similar, maybe using a common production design to make them interoperable, but also entirely different, all of it able to work together but all of it being unique to the people who produce them.

The blog has since moved to:

https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

This article is a response to the first week of a course put together by the Institute for Social Ecology and Solarpunk Surf Club called “Solarpunk, Art, and Social Ecological Aesthetics”. This is part of a series of essays and works where I respond to some of the weekly prompts.

This weeks prompt:
What are the commonalities between social ecology and solarpunk? Do you notice any areas of tension between the two? How does art currently function, politically? How might it function in a social ecological society? What is the right relationship between an individual artist’s private visions and the social responsibility of an artist to the collective as a whole?

What we see is all we know

Your framework and understanding of the world will shape how you interpret the present, past, and future. Your ideas of what a possible reality is shapes what is possible and “realistic”. The realism of capitalist realism is just that, the framework for looking at the world and only seeing capitalist systems.

Capitalist tinted glasses - everywhere you look you see it reflected back to you. Almost all people (especially in the global north) are basically born with these capitalist realist glasses on. That completely shapes the views and conceptions of the future, what is possible in the future, what can change, and what we can do. It can be incredibly hard to break out of that cycle. To see the world and the future in a different way.

I wrote a pretty long work called “Solarpunk, Acid Communism, Capitalist Co-opting, and Learning From The Counterculture” where I touch on Mark Fisher’s description of Acid Communism or better titled - Post Capitalist Desire - and connect that with solarpunk. In what I see as an aesthetic or artistic way of describing what a new/future social and political counterculture may look like.

Yes, it can be hard to break out of the cycle of capitalist realism and see the world in a different way. That’s where the weird, the artistic, the visionary elements come into play to act as a psychedelic - from the greek psyche+delos - the mind visible. Art can act as a break from our assumptions of the world. To challenge the view of capitalist realism - to have a vision of what the world could be while also having a pragmatic understanding of how to make that happen.

We need to show that an alternative is possible. And not just pretty pictures, stories and music, but pictures of what the world could be with concrete political and social change. Stories of how we can build a better future in the now by changing our social relations, by looking at the ideas from social ecology, post-scarcity anarchism, indigenous practices, socialism, and other political frameworks and combining them with a story of what life might look like if we succeed. Music to listen to while in a community garden, about the work and actions we are putting in today to make tomorrow a better day, to prefigure the world we want to see. So these things aren’t just aesthetics or artistic, but combine together quite well with the real social and political theories that exist and are growing and transforming over time.

That’s where I see solarpunk combining with social ecology, to bridge the gap between prefiguration and speculation, imagining and showing people what the alternative could be, but also having a way to make it happen with a bottom-up approach.

Aesthetics and politics: Aesthetics as political action

Specifically talking about solarpunk, I don’t think that aesthetics are inherently tied to politics but are at the same time. The aesthetics are tied to the political based on who is interacting with the aesthetics, what they are showing, and how.

Take for example two different people, with two different views on life, looking to convey solarpunk aesthetics. The results of the art, literature, music, or whatever will be a direct result of what people are adding to it, the aesthetic is a vessel or a framework. What other people see solarpunk to be will be shaped by what messages people decide to convey with solarpunk and solarpunk aesthetics.

Let’s take the definition of solarpunk according to Wikipedia and contrast two different people using solarpunk esque aesthetics to convey totally different messages.

Solarpunk is a literary and artistic movement that envisions and works toward actualizing a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community. The "solar" represents solar energy as a renewable energy source and an optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism, while the "punk" refers to the countercultural, post-capitalist, and decolonial enthusiasm for creating such a future.

These two people are based on my own observations in the wider solarpunk community, and some of the common thoughts I see floating around from different groups who have different approaches to the same thing.

Person A: Person A might take this definition and the associated aesthetic and combine it with their own view of the world. They might think that a sustainable future means replacing combustion engine cars with electric vehicles. They might see the unsustainability of our world as a technological problem rather than a social one, that we don’t have the proper tools to be able to live in a sustainable way, and that we have to build those tools to help foster connectedness. Person A sees a way of addressing climate change by paying people to do regenerative farming, possibly with a cryptocurrency that is more decentralized compared to traditional fiat markets. They see the climate issues as an issue with incentives. If we incentivize people to act in accordance with the natural world, they will be more willing to do it. Person A sees an issue with our current culture, and wants to solve it with a cultural shift, cutting the middlemen who historically gatekept systems and opening them up. Person A believes that with more open market access - historically colonized and disenfranchised people can have better access to markets and make things a more even playing field for more people to make money and pull themselves out of poverty.

Person B: Person B might take this definition and the associated aesthetic and combine it with their own view of the world. They might think that a sustainable future means not just replacing combustion engine cars with electric cars, but replacing personal vehicles entirely with more robust public transit. They might see the unsustainability of our world as a social problem, that our social arrangements dictate how technology is formed and used. That even if we build all the tech we need for a better future, that won’t matter if we don’t change our social relations. Person B sees a way of addressing climate change by building dual power and anti-capitalist systems and social relations in the now. They see the climate issues as an issue with the profit motive itself, and the way that capitalism and other economic models force constant economic growth without addressing ecological impact. Person B sees an issue with our fundamental social arrangements that focus on unjust social, political, and economic hierarchies, and wants to shift social life to a more equal and communal life. Person B believes that a livable future will require questioning economics, and instead of focusing on profits, focusing on our resource impacts to the earth, and the social impacts to humanity. Person B believes that if people were given the tools and resources, they could decide how to live for themselves in a collective and bioregional manner. They could decide what makes sense for their lives and their cultures, and have the material needs to live a good life, no matter how that looks.

These two people see the same definitions and come up with very different approaches to solarpunk. They might be thought of as:

“Green growth decentralized markets” vs “Degrowth, revolutionary communalism”.

I personally believe that solarpunk as a literary genre, as an aesthetic, and as an idea rejects notions of keeping the status quo. Green growth is greenwashing, because the fundamental ideas of capitalism, market-based economics with a currency that will always create social and economic hierarchies are still baked into the idea. We will end up recreating the same inequities we see now, as those in the global north will have a marked material and financial advantage. Even in a completely decentralized free crypto economy, marginalized people will still be marginalized. The materials needed to fuel the extractive systems to hold up green growth will still be pillaged from marginalized people in the global south.

I wrote a longer article about this, and why I disagree with many people using the solarpunk aesthetic as a way to sell things called “Solarpunk: Diverging Paths And Where We Go From Here”.

I also talk about how capitalism co-opts movements and injects itself into radical ideas. This is how greenwashing enters into solarpunk by using a stereotyped - simplified version of the idea to create a new market to sell things. This part of the article also lays out the most common steps that capitalists use and have used especially when it came to the counterculture of the 1960s.

The cycle will repeat, but there is a general pattern to how movements, ideas, counterculture, genres, or groups get co-opted and financialized by capitalism.

• An organic group will form around something (art, music, political ideas, etc.) who are intrinsic to the thing itself.

• This group remains unknown until gathering populations or popularity behind the ideas.

• Capitalism ignores the group until there is a “viable market” to inject itself into. Only looking at niche groups as target demographics.

• The group grows more, producing things (can be ideas, physical objects, whatever), more people become interested in it.

• The community naturally makes boundaries to determine what this new thing might be and form their own languages, terms, methods, and culture around it.

• Capitalists view this as a new “target market” and attempt to financialize parts of the community.

• The community either accepts or rejects the introduction of capital.

• Capitalists then inject themselves into the community, learn how they operate and then create a stereotype of the group to compare back to other known market stereotypes.

• The stereotype is used to create commodity items, if the group has a distinct fashion, capital will attempt to quantify and emulate it. If the group has a distinct idea, capital will financialize it. The group qualities are gathered and anything that can be turned into a commodity will be.

• Capitalists use this stereotype to sell goods to the wider public and create their own interpretations of how someone can buy into the stereotype (capitalist subculture creation)

• The organic group’s original essence, message, idea, and intricate details are lost or ignored as the capitalist stereotype takes over the label of the community.

• The original community either rejects the hyperreal injection, turning themselves into an exclusionary group. Or accepts the hyperreal stereotype and the original community leaves due to the origin details being lost.

• Capitalists sell the idea, group, or commodity stereotype until no longer profitable. Then drops it when profits drop, or as popularity wanes.

• The cycle repeats with the next group of dissidents from previous or new groups.

Solarpunk & Social Ecology: The Political combined with the aesthetic

One of the major reasons (in my opinion) that the counterculture of the 1960s did not succeed was because the movement was defanged by the capitalist system eating radical ideas, and then selling them back to people. By and large that happened because the broader movements within the counterculture didn’t have any actual political or social goals, and so the aesthetic of the 1960s hippie was divorced from the social and political goals the hippies and counterculture as a whole had. The aesthetic became a shell, or a just a thing to buy and wear. The same thing happened with punk rock later on and the countercultural elements that came from the punk movement as well. Not all was lost from either movement, they both influenced the world in ways we can’t even describe, but in their downfall we see the same things that happened previously.

To me, social ecology and the ideas in social ecology, communalism, and post-scarcity anarchism are central to solarpunk. The core ideas and beliefs fit together in various ways, and it’s easy to see solarpunk art and connect that back with real-world political action to get us to those beautiful places.

There can be issues with political action and education though. It can be really hard to sway people and show them that the system right now isn’t working. It can be hard to logically explain every single factor to logically convince someone a better future is possible. The logical is a hard place to change, people get stuck in their ways. The capitalist realist glasses rarely come off when given hard scientific facts about climate change and the ways that capitalism is core to the climate disaster.

That is where art and aesthetics come from. It can blend emotion and logic. Art, images, and stories can touch people more than hard political theory and scientific data can. Like I said earlier it’s a break from reality, an actual vision of a critique or a vision of utopia.

Sure we can say to someone “Well you see based on principles borrowed from a large array of leftist traditions we can see the failings of the capitalist system, the constant alienation under capitalism, the income inequality, and the subsequent death this causes. The ecological impacts that constant growth for GDP sakes has on the world. We can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. You can see this reflected in the world of both Marx and Bookchin, where in 1875 ………”

Or you can just show them these videos. (It will be easier to open these in new tabs if on a desktop)

@lost.with.myselfyour weekly news report please tune in 24/7 for the rest of eternity #🤍

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@bone_meala more positive corecore tiktok #corecore #nichetok #jerma985 #vsauce #mrrobot

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@lost.with.myselftag yourself I’m the lingering feeling of dread #corecore #🤍

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@shinystickerShifting perspective #corecore

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There is a contrast between the bleak exploitation of capitalism, of income inequality, of loneliness - with videos and images that evoke hope, that say change is possible. To stand in the face of the shit storm ahead, and keep sailing on. These four short videos say so much to someone both in an emotional/artistic and logical sense.

Show and tell: Show the future and say how to build it - both with words and visuals.

What do these two images evoke?

A community garden is centered with people coming together to grow food collectively. A family zips by on a bike on their way somewhere in a walkable neighborhood. People are putting up solar panels but not just using high tech methods, but also using small scale wind and hydroelectric. The house next door also has a garden plot. The importance of community, collaboration, and renewable energies that don’t only rely on highly resource-intensive things like metals and rare earth minerals but are made sustainably at the local level. The importance of walkable, human and eco-scaled urban design, third places and common areas, car free zones where people can still get around.

All of this from one picture.

This image describes the complete jump from the 1980s to now, how car-centric infrastructure destroys the ecology and humanity. How it’s possible to regenerate degraded ecosystems. How our decisions about the world and how they should be designed ignore both our needs and the ecosystem’s needs. Huge changes like this are possible.

That’s the key. The big changes are possible. We also need a way to show how those changes might look. To write stories so people know what a better world might feel like. It won’t be a utopia, but an optopia.

As Optopia zine (who are really cool go check them out) says:

A place in between utopia and dystopia. Not a perfect world, but the best possible one we can achieve given our circumstances.

Included with this article is basically a super short zine of sorts?

The blog has since moved to:

https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

TL;DR

I made a tiny free store to share resources with my fellow neighbors and give things away for free that otherwise would have ended up in a landfill or thrift store. Adding on I’m going to add QR codes and RFID tags that point to more information like free ebook libraries and info on how to access banned books. The plan is to eventually create an off-grid solar powered server that can locally host that information. Eventually moving into making an automated tool library so people can borrow different tools and have access to them for free.

Overview

Recently I made a tiny free store and put it in my front yard for anyone to take whatever they needed - or leave things they wanted to get rid of but didn’t want either going directly into a landfill or ending up being resold in a thrift store. But why are those the default options for everything we do, to throw it away or sell it? We can’t create unlimited commodities on a finite planet, so why does so much go to waste?

That’s a big question being asked by a ton of people, and the answer might be a radical rethinking of how we produce, use, and discard things. We have everything we need resource-wise on this planet but our access to things is gate kept oftentimes by money or access. So what if we just decided to create non-monetary circular economies? Where people can just have access to the things they need, and when they don’t need something anymore they can pass it on and share it with someone who does - for free. Instead of filling landfills with things that are perfectly good, we can use and reuse things in a smart fashion to meet the needs of all people without things getting in the way of that.

I’ll break this down into two sections, the “how” of making a tiny free store and the “why” or the theory and thought process that goes behind circular/library economies.

Building a tiny free store

Doing this is super simple you need a couple of things to get started:

• A container or vessel to house all your stuff

• Stuff to add to your container

• A nice sunny day to put it out or commandeer an abandoned location (sunny day not required)

The first thing you will need is a container to house all of your free things! This can literally be anything, in my case I saw that someone was throwing away this small cabinet originally from Ikea. More than likely this perfectly good cabinet (with only a tiny broken metal piece on the inside) would have ended up rusting in a metal scrapyard. But you don’t need to wait for your neighbors to throw away highly specific Ikea furniture to do this, really all you need is a semi water resistant case of any kind.

Old newspaper boxes make incredible tiny stores, these are actually quite tiny on the inside and you can use old and abandoned ones or buy a whole lot from people selling like 50 of them for a pretty reasonable price.

Next, you will need to add some supplies. I have a ton of books that I finished but ended up collecting dust on my shelf. Had an entire bin of dishwasher detergent packs sitting in my closet, along with an organizer and a cute radio that we were going to donate to a thrift store. I had a ton of canned food that was all still good to eat but was a little too much to be holding on to. Digging in my seed collection I found some flower seeds that would work great with my local environment and tossed them in. Also had a box left over from a charity drive of toilet paper, which is super expensive and everyone needs so I added some in there as well.

I used a Cricut cutter (I know boo they use DRM and lock their stuff down way too much) to cut out stencils that I used to spray paint directly on the cabinet.

Below is a TikTok going over all of the details!

@hydroponictrashMade a tiny #freestore for my neighborhood. Still gotta water proof things but after that I should be good. Hoping that people drop some seeds off and we can share things and find things we want without throwing them into a landfill. #solarpunk #mutualaid

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Upgrades and adding more information

Eventually, I am going to add some QR codes, labels, and RFID tags that point to extra information. Some of these links will be educational material and other things to get people linked up to local mutual aid efforts in the area. Another big part of a free store / free library is providing books, and I want to add a link/QR/RFID link to a giant repository of books I’ve been collecting.

I want to also make a local intranet that hosts this information by running a solar powered off-grid server and intranet network. This is a similar idea to what I talk about in my article about building off-grid community owned networks.

It would also be really cool to eventually create a local community network that will host local services like a free ebook library server that anyone can have access to, media servers to host content, and things like educational services and governance platforms to help facilitate direct democracies in local communities. So the ideas of free and open access to information and the things we need carry over from the digital world over into the physical as well.

The “why” behind all of this: Prefiguration, Social Change, and Libraries of Everything.

We can see the cataclysm of the world around us as we feel the daily effects of climate change, as social systems fall apart, as income inequality gets worse, and as the global south is pillaged for resources to create useless commodities as the world burns. We have to ask why this is all happening, there are plenty of people who will give easy answers to what is going on. Easy to say scapegoats of people to blame. The issues are systematic, what is the systematic issue that is causing/ at the root of/ or central to some of the most pressing issues in our time? Capitalism. The system of capitalism can be found to be at the root or core of most of the major issues around us. With capitalism comes money and market-based systems.

With profit being the central driver behind market economics - things like environmental and social impact are ignored. The goal is to create as many commodities as possible for a little cost as possible and sell them for the highest price to maximize profit. The waste involved is ignored and is encouraged with practices like planned obsolescence. Where commodities are constantly being produced that are designed to break down in order to force people to buy more. What happens to these broken devices? They end up in a landfill at best, at worst they end up floating in a body of water leeching chemicals into the local ecosystem.

There are ideas and systems that can counteract these things, ideas and methods that say “let’s instead focus on what is the biggest benefit to social and ecological good”. Resource-based economics says that economics should be about meeting people’s needs, in the most environmentally sustainable way possible. Not about abstract profits and hoarding money. It’s about seeing what people need and addressing those needs without destroying our planet. Humans have lived on this planet for thousands of years, under an array of different social relations and ways of living. Capitalist, profit based economics that says we should profit while destroying ourselves and the planet is not the only option.

Prefiguration: Building the future we want to see

The future could look like a world without money and capitalist systems. One where we can produce things in line with our ecological impacts on the world while also not overproducing. One where people can have access to an irreducible minimum, free and open access to food, water, homes, communications, and the ability to live a good life. This can happen by shifting to a circular & resourced-based economy, being fulfilled by a library of everything approach.

In our current system, if you need a lawnmower to keep your backyard clean, you need to go and buy a lawn mower. Or you need to pay to rent a lawn mower from a company that will let you use it for a certain amount of time. This means that in your local neighborhood, almost every house has their own lawnmower. OK fine, but that is such a giant waste of resources, the metals that went into producing all of these lawnmowers, the man hours, the parts being shipped halfway around the world. All of that so multiple people can have their own lawnmower that sits in a garage or shed 90% of the month. What if instead, they had open and free access to a library of everything?
Tool libraries are great examples of this, so instead of every single person on a block spending hundreds of dollars on a lawnmower, what if they could signup for their local tool library, check it out for free, use it, and return it?

All of this could be based on a principle of usufruct, you have the ability to borrow things but not to destroy them, these things are held in the commons so all people can use and enjoy them. Sure things will mess up or break down, but they can be fixed! Everything held in a community commons where everyone has access to what they need, at no monetary cost.

There is a great podcast episode about all of this from the folks at Srsly Wrong. This podcast episode goes into complete depth about everything I’m talking about here.

https://srslywrong.com/podcast/189-library-socialism-usufruct/

There are also some amazing videos that go into depth about the topic:

The blog has since moved to:

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

This article was inspired by a tweet I saw that got me excited about how computer science (and technology in general), solarpunk, and democratic confederalism go well together. What I really want to dig into more is creating a sort of society based on the core concepts of the open-source movement. If that be in the software, hardware, or political or social realm - all of these areas would benefit from freely and openly sharing information in a way that maximizes autonomy, but also balances an open commons.

I would love to collaborate with other people, and build off and fork each other’s work to make something cool, maybe even actionable to show how we can have technological, ecological, and social change not just on the individual or local level, but as a collective, widespread movement. The views and ideas I have here are just from me, and it would be cool to combine ideas from a bunch of different people into possibly a framework for looking at basically an anarcho-communist/democratic confederalist/libertarian socialist/anarchist way of thinking about technology, and how we can use ideas from the political realm to change how we interact with technology and nature.

This article is broken up into two parts. The history of the early internet and it's ties to the psychedelic movement and the counterculture. And the modern interpretation of an internet if we change our social arrangements, and how free and equal organizing might afffect how technology impacts our lives. Skip to whatever part you care about but if you read the entire thing you will understand my argument better and build the ideas up.

Away from capitalist technology and towards a technology of the free and open commons.

Having worked in tech for a big part of my life, I can say firsthand that the tech industry as a whole is deeply engrained with capitalist logic. This is at all levels and all disciplines, from programming and computer science education, to networking, to hardware manufacturing and production, to cybersecurity, and even in the more “soft” sciences within tech like Governance, Risk, and Compliance. All of it, at every level, forces you to come face to face with the mechanisms of capitalism. All of your interactions that you have are based on market mechanisms.

But why is that?

How did the internet and our concept of personal computing and technology go from a psychedelic vision of a future where all people were free from the grapple of capitalism, corporations, and states. A place that all information could be shared freely and openly to all people at zero cost. A place where we could escape into other realms, into cyberspace and make anything our imaginations could conjure. To use technology to free people, to automate the means of production, to use it as a labor saver and to get back to communal, free and equal living.

How did that open, free and fundamentally strange vision of the early internet go from all of that, to a place owned and controlled by corporate power? Technology only being used as a means to an end, that end being profit. Selling every bit of data that can be harvested from what we do, creating digital footprints to buy and sell as a commodity. Creating an entire industry that is highly competitive, that requires anyone involved to bow down to market mechanisms, so the work that you do in the digital or technological realm never is to make a modern-day system like cybersyn happen, but just to generate profits for the next quarter.

Neoliberalism, Profit, and the Death of Innovation

Profits are the reason why technology is the way is. Profit determines what is important, what gets built, and what becomes realized. Not the real-world application of the code and tech, but how much money the software can generate. Not the impacts that a developer can have by making a groundbreaking project to help underserved people. But only the amount of money a company stands to make based on that developer’s work. And so real world impact, the benefits to the world and to societies at large are ignored, and profit is at the center of everything in tech.

This is how real innovation is killed. We see time and time again that the profit motive is not the best driver when it comes to technological and social innovation. In fact, profits usually tend to constrain research into subjects, especially research into topics that might eventually cut into profits. Companies can’t make money if they produce well-designed hardware and well-architectured software. Their profits lie in the planned obsolescence and inefficiency of products, to keep making more products into infinity.

One interesting question is what technology would look like if we came at it from a different perspective. What if didn’t focus on profits, and instead focused on other metrics? What if we focused on instead of what would make the most money, what would help the biggest amount of people with the least amount of input? Or focused on changing the disposable nature of tech and instead focused on modular, well-built, easily repairable tech that cuts down on waste and extraction?

Instead of a Capitalist based tech world, what if technology was based on communal ownership? Of stewardship to the lands and the ecology, questioning how we make the technology we use. A system based on free and open sharing of information, ideas, code, and not forcing intellectual property onto things like the enclosures that created capitalism. How could real-world uses of democratic governance like in Democratic Confederalism and other systems like it, blend with technology that recognizes the impacts both socially and more importantly ecologically in the world? This is where I see these things coming together. That is what I see in the solarpunk-esqe vision of the future.

Subverting the hypercaptialist tech system, the psychedelic computer revolution, and the history and modern-day movements towards communal freedom.

Before delving into some of the actionable things we can do right now, it’s important to touch on some of the history of the internet, technology, and our conceptions of what all of this used to be. As I said above the early internet and early computer scientists largely came from the public research sector and also had an incredible crossover into the psychedelic revolution happening in the middle of the twentieth century.

There have been historians who have connected the dots of how the early internet and the psychedelic movement crossed over. What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff is a great resource about this by someone with actual credentials and isn’t a weirdo on the internet.

I will give a very simple explanation and run down of how this happened. A lot of it was just because of circumstances, and the fact that some of the early engineers that were working in computing were in Palo Alto California, very close to the epicenter of the psychedelic movement that exploded out of San Franciso and also were connected to psychologists and other professionals working at universities in the area in the 1950s. Some of the early pioneers of computing worked at the Stanford Research Institute and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which created the early internet network, ARPANET.

Myron Stolaroff was an influential engineer in the area who was friends with another Stanford professor named Harry Rathbun, who would host psychedelic sessions in a cabin he owned. These meetings would eventually be called the “Sequoia Seminars” and it was here that Myron met Gerald Heard. Gerald Herd was a good friend and spiritual advisor to Aldous Huxley. So in a strange way, this was the first bridge forming of the computer engineering scene with the psychedelic community now forming in research labs and around Standford.

Myron broke off from the Sequoia Seminars to do more research into LSD and set out to give other engineers the compound. The International Foundation For Advanced Study (IFAS) was formed to do experiments with engineers and computer scientists to explore some of the creative potential psychedelics had.
Doug Engelbart (creator of the computer mouse and then head of the Stanford Research Institute) did LSD with Myron Stolaroff and both of them conducted experiments with other engineers to see if LSD would give them breakthroughs or creative ways to solve problems.

Engineers working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence lab also were experimenting with psychedelics and cannabis. This lab produced ARPANET for the US military which was the first computer network that sent data from one computer to another.

In 1971 ARPANET was used for what would become the first E-Commerce sale on a computer network was when engineers at Stanford bought weed from engineers at MIT using computer messaging. So really, the first transaction on the brand new internet was from a lab of stoner computer engineers buying weed online.

From LSD-fueled engineers to Corporate Control

So how did computing move away from the psychedelic weirdness of the early internet and into the forms of corporate control and capitalism that we see today? The parallels of what happened to the counterculture, and what eventually happened to the internet and in general computing, directly mirror each other.

I have another article Solarpunk, Acid Communism, Capitalist Co-opting, and Learning From The Counterculture that goes into more detail about how the counterculture of the 60s and 70s came to be, grow and eventually die. At the core of how the changes to the counterculture and computing intersect - was the combination of a couple of things.

• The rise of neoliberal politics

• The rise of finance, supplanting the traditional power structures

• The changes in consumer marketing and capitalism

There are a ton of different factors that played a role in stopping the counterculture from really succeeding. Read my article for a more in-depth analysis of this topic. But by and large, the counterculture didn’t have a cohesive political plan for change. This was largely because of how controlled media was at the time, along with cold war propaganda and a series of brutal assassinations and imprisonment at the hands of the US state. But capitalism was shifting at this time as well, politics had become to be eroded as the main source of power. And a new form of power would come along that was above even traditional politicians: finance.

The world of finance running the world was beginning to grow, as the political systems in the US started to fail and gave way increasingly to the power of finance and money to determine politics. Especially in Reagans’ term, we see neoliberalism rear its head.

It was less so that neoliberalism was a good plan, or a good idea, but it filled the gap. It won the minds of people so indoctrinated into capitalism, to keep perpetuating it, stopping the counterculture from changing the status quo.

This same thing can be seen in computer scientists like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs credited his LSD experience as one of the single most important parts of his life. A product of living in California, and being connected to other people in computing, and then the growing personal computing revolution. Steve Jobs didn’t become a hippy dropout, creating personal computers for the masses to have access to a free and open internet. He became a capitalist. Neoliberalism had the false promise, that we could solve the problem of the world with money. You could still be a member of “the counterculture” and be a capitalist too.

We also see this with Bill Gates, who in 1976 wrote an open letter condemning “software piracy” by other programmers, who at the time were sharing information freely. Software was seen as just instructions, not a commodity to be owned. This was also around the time that the open source movement growing, though engineers had been sharing their work openly, against corporate warnings back in the late 50’s.

As neoliberalism became the way of life in the US, more and more parts of computing became commercialized. Computing went from the realm of research engineers tinkering with machines, into a commercial product. Which included both the hardware and eventually the software. This also meant that as computer use grew, so would their use by corporations and governments to consolidate power. It was around this time that banks started using computers more and more, and eventually the computer networks to conduct business. This trickled into computer programming, which was increasingly becoming a growing job sector, with corporations creating their own languages and frameworks to further lock down the market, and force people into learning those specific platforms.

Cyberpunk, Corporate Control, Open Source Software.

Neoliberalism grew, and the corporate and banking powers used computers and computer networks to gain incredible profits. It was with the rise of computers that we see banks using them to handle credit and debt. Corporations increasingly put financial blocks to access the technology, including when internet access hit most people’s homes with dialup being controlled mainly by AOL and Bell telecom.

It was this new world of corporate power, that was over even politicians’ control, the world of corporate computer networks that William Gibson saw the cyberpunks. There were always people who loved computers, who understood them, who didn’t want the computer world to turn into a neoliberal wasteland. People who didn’t like the commercialization, and corporate control. And so hacking came to the forefront as a way to stop the corporate control of the networks and of computers, and as a method to fight back against things. Hacking (in the sense of computer hacking) had been around since computers were around, and it was basically changing programs to work better. Hacking the software to do different things. Through the 70’s hackers were moving from practical jokes and messing with software, to some of the hacking we know today. In 1971 a man named John Draper figured out a way to make free phone calls by using specific frequencies to mimic tones and get access to telecom-only commands, like making long-distance phone calls for free. But this was only the start, it was around this time in the 1980s that hacking and computer science exploded mainly because of personal computers. Bulletin boards were pervasive, filled to the brim with computer scientists, hackers, phreakers, crackers, and those who fucked with computers and technology at large. These were major inspirations to the creation of what would become the genre: cyberpunk.

Cyberpunks could enter cyberspace, searching for information on the net. The “console cowboys” of what really could be considered the wild west internet. People who wanted knowledge, who learned about technology so much that they could bend it to their whims. A single person in front of a keyboard could take down an international bank, steal classified information from Los Alamos Laboratories, or change financial information. The power at the hands of people was online, from anywhere there was an internet connection. This is where we see a lot of the utopic and simultaneously cynical views about the internet and the power that it could hold.

The culture was growing in the hacking and computer science world, that the internet should be a free place, and remain a free place. Free from the power of governments and corporations, and many times free from the influence of capitalism and commodification. People saw for the first time, the power of the internet. The ability to contact and speak to people across the globe in an instant. All of the world’s information was at your fingertips. You could create entirely new worlds in cyberspace, you could create your own realities with computers. Computers offered a balance of power, because people had access to information, to do what they wanted at any time.

Hacker culture, Open Source Software, and Internet Utopias

This was also the time and rise of Open Source, which was a kind of cultural undercurrent since the start of computing. As corporations gained more influence in computing, so did their lust for profits. To maintain their profits they would create custom operating systems and programming languages that were closed source, meaning that the corporation owned the code, and did not share how the software was built. Unix started out as an invention of AT&T, at first being free to academic researchers but after it gained popularity they locked it down and required payment to get updates. The lawsuit Apple v. Franklin did incredible damage to sharing source code freely as it sided with corporate interests to count computer programs and their source code as having the same status of literary works.

Born out of the hacker ethos that “information wants to be free”, the open source software movement really jumped off.

A quick side note, Steward Brand who said that famous quote at a hacker conference was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog in the late 1960s. Which was a pretty influential magazine that included free and open information related to technology and ecology. Steward wrote it on a kind of commune road trip, visiting different communes and ecological experiments during the height of the counterculture.

As software was being increasingly closed and commodified, Richard Stallman got fed up and founded the GNU Project in 1983. The goal and focus was that computers should be free, and the software running these systems should be free and open to anyone that wanted access to use it. It should be open to interpretation, to changes, to modifications. He also created the Free Software Foundation which also got involved with the legal side of the GNU project.

Richard Stallman is credited with creating copyleft. (As opposed to copyright) that was baked into the GNU General Public License. This was a legal punch to the corporations, as software created with the GNU licenses was forced to be open. People were free to have a legal framework protecting their code and forcing it into the commons.

Defeating hypercapitalist tech with the psychedelic hacker ethos

“Information wants to be free” is what stops capitalism from absorbing things. You make the free alternative first, put it out into the commons, and no one will want to pay for it. A great example of this is Wikipedia. They are a central pillar to the internet and I and many others would argue to humanity at large. It is a free site, collectively edited and worked on, with information out in the commons. There is no capitalist alternative to Wikipedia, because who the fuck would buy that? Sure capitalists can make specialized knowledge wikis, but again, if people share the information freely, they can’t turn a profit.

One of the many ways of decommodifying tech, in general, can be done using open and free information to circumvent capitalist profit. By taking over the means that they try to commodify. We can do the same by building our own worlds. We can build entirely new digital realities. We taught computers how to think and create, and make pictures from words. We can make communal, open, and free platforms for everything. Share any and all information for free with the entire world in the blink of an eye.

We have done so much, and yet corporations and governments still control the internet. We have to say fuck that.

Towards a new digital commons

In order to understand where we can go, we need to understand our past. To see that the free internet utopias were always there, with hackers, phreakers, crackers, computer scientists, weirdos, and nerds who just loved playing with computers. The psychedelic dream was kept alive in these cultures. We need to see how the counterculture was coopted and destroyed, see how the early internet went from free to corporate-controlled. We need to learn the mechanisms of neoliberalism, and now instead look at what neoliberalism is morphing into, a form of technofudalism mixed with oligarchic power.

We have to know and learn from our past mistakes in order to move forward.

But what does that forward look like? How do we actually get it and make it happen? How have things changed in our current day? What social and political lenses can we look through based on all of these changes?

This is where visions and practices of building a better future, prefiguration, come into play. This idea has been central to my own thinking recently but balanced with the fact that we have to learn history to learn how we failed in the past and learn from it.

With the cross over of the counterculture with computing, it’s pretty clear how the common occuences in both when it comes to capitalism and neoliberalism directly mirror eachother. Mark Fishers work Acid Communism and his lecture series Post Capitalist Desire talk heavilly about learning from the counterculture, and started to piece together the forms that a new counterculture make take in the modern day. Based off the lecture series outline (as it was cut short due to Marks unfortunate death) we can see the general overview of his vision of Acid Communism. It looked to be a sort of anarcho-communist view of the political reality, of a leftist political thought that wasn’t drenched in the old garb of soviet style communism, but embraced the weird freefom of the weird and the psychedelic.

In my article Solarpunk, Acid Communism, Capitalist Co-opting, and Learning From The Counterculture I go into detail in how I view Solarpunk and other movements and ideas like it as being part of the Acid Communist or really a view of a Post Capitalist framework. You can also listen to me talk about these concepts on the Solarpunk Now! Podcast.

There is a reason why that initial tweet set so much off in me, because I saw the direct connections between computing and tech, with the counterculture, with Acid Communism, combined with leftist ideas that balanced collective action and autonomy like democratic confederalism with Solarpunk. All of these domains and ideas have crossover.

Because what we are talking about is theorizing, prefiguring, and building the future that we want to see right now. A future that balances our social-communal changes with nature and the technology that we have now. We are talking about building a free and open future based on the common interests and liberation of all people, with both collective action and autonomy included into how our daily lives work. We are not just looking towards collapse, but hopeful in the things we build, hopeful in the face of climate change that we can change how and why we use technology, and our impacts to the world. We are talking about using technology to meet the basic needs of all people. Freeing all information, communication and access to not just the wealthy or those in the global north. We are talking about a countercultural movement driven not just by aesthetics or vibes, but concrete political goals mixed in with the libidinal desire to live in a communal, liberated, and free future. We can and will make these futures happen right now. It starts as always, at fundamentally questioning the roles all of this play. Questioning the roles and how computer science works, from education to execution, to the impacts that this technology has on the ecosystem.

Liberation through free information and tech, a path towards a hopeful and symbiotic future with our ecology. And how we make it happen.

A key to making a collective commons is to understand and ultimately subvert the mechanisms that capitalism and states use to maintain power. When you boil it down, power is maintained through scarcity. Mainly through physical scarcity (food, water, shelter) and also informational scarcity. That is access to information to gain autonomy in the areas that states and capitalists use as collateral over us to force us into their systems.

What we should aim to do is to free and democratize the collection, categorization, and dissemination of information. Especially information about gaining food, water, housing, and communications autonomy. This has to be combined with direct action, mutual aid, and dual power to meet the material needs of people, while we build these systems and build our autonomy.

How we build and run these systems both physical and digital hinge on us reimagining and changing how the foundations of these things are taught and done.

We have to change our relationship with computer science, specifically with software development and hardware manufacturing and infrastructure building away from capitalist and hierarchical modes of production. Move computer science away from a method of producing profit, into a method of producing maximum human and ecological benefits.

We need actual frameworks to change how we develop software that isn’t individualist and profit-driven, and instead have them be communal and pro-social. These frameworks for communal life can carry over into the real world. And work in similar ways to how we do mutual aid and direct action. How we structure our societies, cities, villages, and towns to foster autonomy and ecological restoration. Many of the ideas from social ecology and democratic confederalism can merge with the solarpunk/psychedelic/hacker ethos to form new ways of organizing and conceptualizing our technological, social, political and ecological world.

Circles, fractal systems, cybernetics, and general assemblies.

We can look to nature to see how to build and maintain systems that stand the test of time. Every natural system works in a cyclical cycle, many times a closed loop. If we want to build resilient systems, one way is to mirror what we see in nature, and mirror the methods and ways that nature self-balances itself. Pro-social behavior is a key in life, and we see it not just in animals, but with plants, fungi, and even invertebrates. Everything that every part in the system does, is connected with one another. And so to make resilient systems we should aim to make closed-loop, pro-social systems. Closed loop in that the system audits itself, and can self-regulate, where waste isn’t waste in the sense that we are used to, but waste is used as the foundation for growth. Pro-social in the way that understands that we cannot survive without each other, while also balancing the fact that we are all ultimately unique beings that deserve respect and autonomy while also being part of a larger collective whole.

Compare this to authoritarian, top-down, or scarcity-centric ways of thinking and systems. These systems are highly centralized, they rely on domination and subordination. These systems require an endless supply of resources and pawns to carry out the plans of a select few, who are in positions of artificial power to dictate the lives of others. Hierarchical top-down systems require extraction because those at the top must maintain their positions by extracting things either from the natural or social world. And through this extraction is an artificial scarcity. These types of systems maintain individualism, atomization, and separation in order to maintain the hierarchies.

So when we talk about systems we have to understand that the social and political leak into all forms of life. The system is at the core social and political and so the systems that we have in place will be dictated by our social arrangements and our political understandings and frameworks.

Back to the topic at hand, let’s take computer science and more specifically programming and development as an example. Most of the time developing code is deeply rooted in the mechanisms of capitalism and thus the mechanisms of individualism and hierarchy. I say most because there are ways of developing software that don’t rely on top-down authority, and that is the alternative structure we want to build on. As a whole though, most computing programming is done for corporate interests, or for institutions that are driven by a profit incentive (universities as an example), and so the entire idea of computer programming, from education to execution to how and why we make things the way we do, is dictated by the market and capitalist reasoning.

Most modern software is reliant on a complex supply chain of dependencies, or basically software blocks that make other software run. Instead of custom coding your own kernel, you use other software that can handle that. That is a dependency. Instead of custom writing software to handle encryption, you can use other software to help build something new and handle those functions. Over time though, modern software has become extremely reliant on these supply chains of information, for various reasons. Some of them, in the case of open-source software, are for good reasons - these modules save time when it comes to building something. Why reinvent the wheel, when you can just add the wheel on? On the flip side, dependencies have gotten extremely out of hand, because instead of rebuilding old code to fit modern standards or rethinking how software and applications run, usually a giant card tower is made. You get programs that are gigantic because they have so many redundancies, but this is for a very specific reason.
The reason why programmers need more and more software dependencies, and keep making inefficient software that relies on a million moving parts to function isn’t that developers want things to be that way. It isn’t because making reliable and capable software that has the maximum benefit requires basically a crumbling supply chain of dependencies. It’s because companies require that developers make a profit. The development work isn’t focused on how well the software runs, how much computing power it uses, how many people worked on a system to get it to work, and the labor involved. None of that matters. And that is the key to understanding the capitalist system, outside of profit and the economic impacts to it, nothing else matters.

This is reflected in the structure of how software development is commonly done as well. The business makes the decisions, the profits make the decisions. It’s not up to the UI/UX designer to make an accessible site, or the database engineer to manage how information is stored and retrieved for maximum efficiency. The profitability of the project is what matters and so any corners that can be cut to reach that, will be cut. Because profit is at the top of the list of priorities, you see that mirrored in the structure of software development.

The people at the top of the hierarchy determine the business needs. Ultimately they call the shots on what gets developed and pushed into production, because if the software or platforms people are developing don’t make money, it’s useless in the eyes of executives and shareholders. They dictate the profit motive down to the upper level managers, who control different parts of the business, and their teams work to come up with ways to implement the business’s needs. Middle managers usually oversee other managers but delegate tasks down to individuals. Typically for developing something these managers will then assign tasks to project managers, who oversee the development process. Then the project managers dictate what needs to be done and when to the developers and technical people.

One big issue is that the developers and engineers who will actually build these systems don’t get a real say in the final product. To make things worse, these groups are usually siloed off from each other. To the point that a UI/UX designer might design a site feature that is incredibly hard for a front end developer to make, and the data produced might not fit well with how the database is architected and might require rewrites of certain things. Many companies use SCRUM as a method to handle the development cycle with daily standup meetings and constant communication. And yet the communication from the people building the actual thing doesn’t ever make it past management. Most people have no idea that most of the time the engineers who will actually be making these things happen are the ones who know how much time something is going to take, who can do it, how to do it, and how many resources are needed. The people actually doing the work know exactly what needs to be done, and yet their opinions don’t matter. The business doesn’t give a fuck if the old code base was written COBOL with spaghetti code by one guy who didn’t add comments to his code. They want the project done. And so it’s the engineers that have to suffer through these problems, with project managers who are there to keep things on track.

The people who do the actual work in development and tech in general rarely get listened to. They know how long something will take, what resources they need and what needs to change to make things happen. But none of that matters to the business and the processes that go on day to day require the submission of all workers to the whims of those who own the business.

From hierarchical systems to consent and consensus systems

What if we fundamentally change how software development was done, and how technological development, implementation, and research was done in general? This would require a rethinking of the fundamental structure of the system to one that focuses on:

• Collective power balanced with individual autonomy

• Consent & Consensus

This is where we can borrow methods and ideas from ideas like democratic confederalism, social ecology, anarcho-syndicalism, anarchism, marxism, feminism, and other forms of leftist thought that don’t rely on top-down authoritarian structures to function.

We can understand these ideas as being about a way of organizing people that balances collective power with autonomy while also giving a way to have a kind of direct democracy that all people must consent to, and issues that affect all people must consent to. There are alot of different variations on the idea but as a whole you have different councils or circles, that intersect and come together into general councils.

Images below courtesy of Black Socialists in America

Groups can be thought of as circles, that handle each specific part that they are meant to handle. So that the people doing specific work can have autonomy in what they are doing. However, each circle doesn’t have the final say, other circles have to agree to changes and things happening. Each circle works together to form a cohesive whole. The same structure on the larger level looks the same on the smaller level. Within each circle, members are directly accountable to each other.

Some forms calls for representatives for circles, but that depends on the size and style of the organization. With a large amount of people in a circle, representatives might be needed. The key thing is that representatives have no power over the circle- or any power over each other, the people do. This means that representatives are directly elected and recallable if they break the trust of the circles or the general circle. Representatives are only there to convey the will of the circles they are set to represent. Compare this to how politics is done in the west, where representatives don’t have to represent their constituents. This duty to represent is backed up with both social and recall repercussions.

So each circle creates the larger whole, where everyone can consent to changes, and people come to a consensus. Does that mean that we need to vote to wipe out ass each time? No. The general circle lays some ground rules as to how things run, everyone consents and we go on from there. There can be pre-agreed-upon regulations to handle specific conflicts or things that may come up in the future and ways to handle it. Another big thing is that these agreements can be changed, they are moldable to be able to respond to changes in the environment. And these changes must come from the people, in a consent and consensus-based way.

These ideas are combinations from various ideas, but this is a modified form of democratic confederalism + direct democracy + sociocracy with some cybernetic principles in there as well.

To go back to our example earlier of software development. One that follows this framework moves away from a hierarchical structure to a more equal one based on collective power + individual autonomy and consent and consensus.

Now we can see the crossover happen, and understand that each function of the development cycle is deeply intertwined with each other. What impacts the database admins also has an impact on the back end developers, their work also ties into how the UI/UX experience will be. Everything is connected and big changes will have the consent of every circle to make sure that everyone is on the same page. The general circle could be a set of delegates from each circle who are directly elected, random sortition out of a group, or have no representatives and only be comprised of all people. It depends on what works best. And that is the thing. There is room to figure out and change to do what is best based on what everyone agrees on.

This structure can carry over into things like work run co-ops. Where all people in a company have a direct say in how things run. They all must consent and come to a consensus in the general circle to make large changes. But each circle maintains its own autonomy within to whatever degree the circle wants.

This idea can carry over into worker councils or different circles in a municipality that also intersects and maintain the same structure. Similar to in Rojava, committees can form that are basically medium-sized general circles that meet up together to make the municipal general circle. And that is where the fractalization idea comes into play. The smaller scale mirrors the larger scale.

All of this scales to even larger circles and general circles of multiple cities and eventually regions, to a global scale. A truly large confederation of autonomous and yet collective units.

I wrote a short story about this idea playing out in To The Left Of The Corner Store, which is a story that contrasts life in a corporate housing unit, to life on the lower streets covered in wildfire smoke, which is a kind of hypercapitalist hell scape, compared to federated villages living on the outskirts. In the piece, I wanted to think about what it might look like for two different ways of organizing society might interact (or in many cases clash).

Solarpunk, Computer Science and New Technological Utopias

We have gone from the history of the internet and the ties that early computing and hacker culture had to the counterculture and psychedelic movements of the 50s-70s. We have seen the rise of corporate computing and it’s comparisons to the counterculture and how radical movements were stopped, coopted, or destroyed by neoliberalism. And talked about social frameworks as a way out of these issues. But that’s not just all that’s important to this conversation. Let’s address the now, and the future.

The has been a lack of a future vision for a while. Neoliberalism and capitalism have hautology locked into both. The future has been canceled. Visions of a better world are discounted, and instead, we rehash the past over and over. Because this is profitable, because new ideas (or rehashing old radical ones) would challenge the power structure of these systems directly. So we are stuck on a nonexistent path of what seems like no way out.

We also have a looming challenge ahead of us, that of climate change, climate destruction, and ecological destruction. It’s very easy to slip into nihilism about the future ahead. A future of technofudalism, where the capitalist class cements it’s power, where automation is used to replace people and produce more profit while throwing those people into poverty. A world of endless extraction while the global north reaps the benefits and the capitalists and oligarchs maintain their lifestyles while we are left to die as the climate collapses.

But this vision assumes that there aren’t people who will fight back against this. That there aren’t alternative ways of life, of a future where we aren’t forced to die at the hands of climate disaster. A future where we can stop, regenerate, and help our world heal. A future where we can change. Some would say it’s utopic thinking. But I disagree. It’s the only way we fight for survival.

To give people the spark to survive, and possibly even thrive, we need to conceive of a future. Not rehash the past, or revive old ideas. But build on top of them, mold them to the modern day, to change our ideas and frameworks, to be able to imagine new ways of doing things. In order to do that we need to convey what is possible. That is what I see in Solarpunk and other prefigurative imaginations. It’s not enough to tell people we are going to die. We have to show people what is worth fighting for.

If you don’t know what solarpunk is, please watch this video!

One big reason why I was drawn to solarpunk was that it is one of the few things that doesn’t shun technology. Many people want to blame technology for our problems and not blame how capitalism and colonialism have abused technology to be used as weapons. Solarpunk is interesting because it’s a literary genre, an aesthetic, a type of movement that focuses on the intersection of ecology, technology, and social change.

And within that I can see it as a libidinal force, such as some of the topics Mark Fisher mentioned in Acid Communism, to help drive some of these ideas home. To not just give logical reasons, but a vision, an imagining. What would the future look like if we balanced the ecology with technology and changed our social arrangements in a fundamental way? What would my life look like day to day in a post-capitalist world?

In a lot of ways, I see solarpunk as an updated version of the old ideas in utopian socialism, combined with elements from the degrowth movement, anarchism, marxism, and democratic confederalism, all mixed into one. Because the core ideas in solarpunk mirror these philosophies and methods pretty well.

Not just that, I see solarpunk as a possibly new frontier of the psychedelic visions of the early internet, a free and autonomous internet built by the people, that combines with ideas from degrowth into new ideas like permacomputing. All being run by changing how we do things and our social relations away from hierarchy, to frameworks that foster communal action & autonomy like the circles/sociocracy/democratic confederalist/social ecology models.

The intersection of solarpunk with computer science and democratic confederalism will also combine ideas of the early internet utopias, with degrowth, elements of post capitalist desire, the psychedelic/the weird, with a fundemental shift in our social arrangements to be more equal.

Solarpunk / Post Capitalist Computer Science: The ecological internet and the computing commons

What would computer science and technology look like if we fundamentally changed our social relations, to make post-capitalist worlds a reality? It’s not enough to just change the system, as we have seen with socialist experiments of the past such as the USSR. Even after the means of production have been seized, if we have no idea how to live in free and equal ways, we will default to ideas that focus on hierarchy and power. One way to subvert the capitalist system is to build anti-capitalism and make it a mainstay of our social relations. Build anti-capitalist social relations now, grow it, expand, change, modify right now, to meet the needs of the future.

We can take a page from the utopic visions of the early internet and see that one path is making it impossible for capitalism (and colonial powers as well) to cement their power by making everything we can free, open and accessible. We can do this right now by creating dual power, by creating the future that we want to see - in the now. And that can start by fostering free and equal social arrangements like we talked about above.

Let’s look at technology. Let’s say that we combine the frameworks we mentioned to foster systems of communal action & autonomy + consent & consensus. Technology wouldn’t be made for profit, but the common good. Technology as a way to automate tasks that benefit people and save time. Technology as a means to share information, but also the keys to autonomy, food, water, and shelter. Computer science then would fundamentally change. Programming would go from a method of creating profit, to a way of interacting with computers that create things that help us and the planet.

Instead of the business determining what gets made and when, with top-down authoritarian rule. We can communaly design, conceptualize, and build the platforms, software, and hardware we need to give everyone a better life, for no reason other than that they are people and deserve to live happy lives. Instead of profit, we can focus on what will have the best impact on people, and the least impact on the ecology.

So in a way, computer science will look closer to the original visions of the early internet, but something even better, that the early internet utopias could not conceive of. Because of our technological advances, we need a way to think about the future that builds on those utopic visions of before and tailors them to what we have now.

Say for instance we can tackle issues to deal with food insecurity. Multiple federated circles can come together to meet the baseline needs of people. Urban gardening circles and Permaculture circles combine with Indigenous food knowledge committees and circles, that intersect with indoor farming circles, all of them coming together in a general agricultural committee across a region that also intersects with raising and caring for animals, biologists who monitor biodiversity, engineers who manage food infrastructure, the list can be infinite because all of these things are deeply connected. But you can see that this can happen across multiple regions, all coming back to the people living there making decisions for themselves. But this is just the base. We need a way to bring food to all people, where they are. That might require logistics, planning, and automating parts that may be so incredibly complex that a group of humans won’t be able to handle it but a computer would. All circles and general circles working together to come to a consensus about changes. The technology general council working with agriculture, engineering, transportation, energy, communications general circles so all people have a say in how these systems are built at a high level but the technological general councils still have the autonomy to build what works.

And development starts, maybe there is a need to automate indoor farms to automatically move produce into trains to go a short distance into cities where more people live. Maybe the human-managed permaculture farms nearby also need a way to move and transport produce along with the automated indoor farms. How do we handle managing when food will be moved to trains? How it will be moved? How the interaction between humans and the automated system will work? The tech circles break down into smaller circles that specialize in certain areas, maybe the database circle in the north east regional council has an idea about categorizing plants into a database to keep things organized. With the help of botanist circles in that region, they can come up with a cohesive plan. The UI/UX and human computer interaction engineering circles might have good input into how these plants are physically labeled when the enter the train cars, to make it easier for people on permaculture farms to interact with the automated systems and see what produce goes where with maybe a color coded system of barcodes. The disability circles are involved in the development process helping to pick accessible colors that people with vision impairments can see, but also other methods such as making specific textures on the barcode bands on the produce for those who might be blind to still interact with the system.

Development starts as a collaborative process, code is added into something like a federated git repository where code is shared, and anyone on the networks can view what is happening in an open way. Maybe another region sees this open source code for automating food labeling for automated food distribution and forks the code, making small changes to fit their local environment. Instead of profit being at the top of concerns, ecological impact might be the top concern. And so developers work to make code that can run on recycled chipsets and old architectures. The permacomputing circles might mine the mountains of ewaste, categorizing and maintaining an open library of computer chips, processors, and other units to cut down on the need of producing new boards and chips, but also to stop them from going to waste like the capitalists before them did. This new code goes through code reviews of peers who directly have a say in how that code is produced. Project managers don’t force deadlines on engineers from the top, but keep things running as people who can help facilitate the process and help keep people organized. This code then can be reviewed by larger circles, or a demo can be made to the regional general council to show how it works, and with consent and consensus the code is pushed to production.

Once that code is ready, infrastructure and engineering circles and councils work to make it all run. They maintain a new internet completely owned by the people collectively, on what started as small autonomous networks that grew out and connected regions, then the whole world. Other regions see the code get pushed to production, and that code is put in a communal and open repository where any community can pull the information, tailor it to their needs or environmental conditions and make improvements or changes to be pushed back to the global code repository. Where educational circles and committees can then use that code to teach new programmers and engineers how to make it all work, on free and accessible technology that can be downloaded from the community net for free, and then print PCB boards from say a sustainable material like mycelium combined with recycled metals from the waste piles at the local fabrication lab.

How do we build a future like this?

We can’t wait for change. We can’t wait for a revolution to just happen. We have to do whatever we can, no matter how small it may seem to foster communal & autonomous action right now. To change our own concepts of the future and how we interact with each other but also change other people’s perspectives. Sure we could preach about how amazing our thoughts are, and how this that and the other will work. No one will care. Show them the systems in action. Build anticapitalist systems that meet people’s basic needs without money and extraction.

We need to build autonomous systems, new social relations, and new ways of living right now. But what does that mean? We can use the frameworks and ideas mentioned in this piece to build out collective and autonomous groups that form circles and councils. We can make food general circles and councils, to try and grow as much food as we can while also regenerating the ecological damage we have done. We can build autonomous water capture and filtration systems and collectively run and operate them to give clean water to anyone who needs it for free. We can build community-owned internet by creating autonomous networks. We can not only imagine better futures but work to build them. To make a prefigurative dual power structure to address the needs of all people. To create free and equal systems for all people to live and enjoy life.

Do what you can at any level to foster these ideas and grow them. Maybe we can make a unified framework to build off. The first step is to imagine what would be better, and then do anything you can to make it happen.

The blog has since moved to:

https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for how other people use this information. This information is for educational purposes only. I also personally did not put together the archive of books, but found it online, so if you are a book publisher don’t sue me. If you’re mad that people are sharing banned books, you are part of the problem. This information is freely available, but combined in a way to enable people to circumvent the tyrannical laws being enacted in the US. Who is doing this? The republican party, christian nationalists, fascists, and those standing in the way of LGBTQA+ liberation and racial justice. So we will use whatever tools we have to combat their ideas, unjust laws, hierarchies and harmful views of the world.

Overview

This is a guide for making a portable server that can host ebooks and make its own wifi network for other people to connect to. You can use any computer to do this but a Rasberry Pi micro computer will work well, though there are also options for booting a Chromebook to a USB or using your regular laptop as a server as well. Once you understand the general how - executing it will be easy to wrap your head around it.

This project is a continuation of an off grid “internet” that I have been working on, which is an off grid solar powered server connected to a wifi network that has not only books, but movies, music, a chat server, and educational content. You can make a similar thing, though on a smaller scale to make it more portable.

Anarcho Solarpunk

Recipes For An Off-Grid 'Internet'

Introduction This is less so an exhaustive technical guide for making a DIY micro internet, and more so a group of recipes with ingredients that combine together to create whatever you need to create. Understand this to be a system of different parts that you can add or subtract from, and less so a “here is exactly how to do this” instruction manual. I d…

Read more

4 years ago · 32 likes · 13 comments · Anarcho Solarpunk

The server can be powered via a USB power bank and concealed, so you can walk around and broadcast a wifi network that allows anyone in the area to connect to your Calibre server library, and download or view any books that are in the library. The only way for someone to stop you from doing this is to find who is broadcasting the wifi signal, or to jam or de-auth the SSID (which is an insta felony) so it’s basically a censorship-proof way of sharing information. If someone does have the technical knowledge to track signal strength and figure out what person is hiding the server or where the server has been dropped, it’s easy to just take the SD card out and snap it in half to destroy the data.

A TikTok explaining how it works, and examples.

@hydroponictrashNow you can take a library of the most banned books with you and share it using a raspberry pi microcomputer, or any computer you want. Full build guide is included along with an easy to deploy image to flash, plug in, and start sharing. #anarchy #solarpunk #bannedbooks #fightfascists #bannedbooks #calibre #ebooks #resist #protest #bannedbook #bookcensorhip

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How To Use / Install

There are multiple options to install or download - a pre-made all-in-one image, and multiple ways that you can replicate this based on what you have on hand.

1. Download and flash a premade image to a Rasberry Pi 3 or 4.

2. Manually install the files using this tutorial to a bootable USB and use any computer you want.

3. Just download the books to share over USB without any extra tech.

1. Download and flash to a Rasberry Pi 3 or 4

Here is a full disk image of the server with all the files and services ready to go. All you need to do is flash the image to an SD card, then insert it in either a Pi 3 or 4 (This was tested on both), and that's it! By default it’s set to boot to the desktop to quickly modify things or modify the library, but I suggest putting it in headless mode.

Then all you have to do is give it power, and in a minute or two, your server is running.

The credentials:

User: library

Pass: library

It is highly recommended that you change the password!!! By default, SSH is enabled for administration and you don’t want randos getting SSH access to your server.

Update: Google banned the account hosting this so it’s been moved.

Click here to download the image and flash it with the instructions below

Use this key to decrypt: GyLpVItjAERB3PgbllTa-loodkKmqqTl76kDv1y4TYs

Update: Some people have had issues running the image, if you have a ton of problems it might be better to do a manual install.

2. Manual install

Below are all the commands to install this onto an Ubuntu image. This can be on any computer that can boot to Ubuntu Linux, which gives you a ton of options. A portable option is to make an Ubuntu Live USB, and install your services following the directions below. Not every computer can use it’s own Wifi card to make a wifi hotspot, so you might need to use an external wireless card.

Included is a full text list of all the commands to run, along with the HTML files for the splash page and everything you need to copy things. Or customize it all to whatever you want.
File and Config Git Repo

3. USB drive / Sneakernet

You can also opt to just save the books onto a USB drive and manually share the files. Obviously, this won’t have the same reach but, it gets the job done without having to use very much tech. You can also download the books, and share them on an NFS or Samba fileshare, or through filesharing on your phone (though that kinda sucks but it works for sending like one or two books). Sneakernets are quick and easy.

Update: Someone reported the files to google, and the account got banned.
New files are uploaded here. Use the decryption key to download it: qS8sa84soMAemNa8bLbsCKbx7RZKGZv2vLjjhjX4xqI

Background

You can skip this unless you want to read it.

Republicans, right-wing conservatives, Christian nationalists, fascists, and fascist street gangs/militias have made a concerted push to attempt to ban certain books and information from being taught in schools, or even accessible in public libraries. As the right wing rages about CRT and LGBTQA+ books “turning their children gay”, or “making kids question americas greatness” - access to information is quickly being stripped from people. This is done through state legal apparatuses, and increasingly at the local level with right-wing extremists flooding school board meetings to attempt to get school districts to ban books. This at times includes fascist street gangs like the Proud Boys (also to be known as the Piss Boys for their black and yellow insignias) and other ultranationalist and racist groups who show up to intimidate people who attempt to stop this.

The books they are trying to ban are overwhelmingly about the cruel history of the United States, and books that center or feature LGBTQA+ people, or talk about themes that conservatives deem to be “inappropriate” such as growing up, going through puberty, finding out that you are gay or trans, police brutality, or questioning religious fundamentalism. Their attacks on history are a concerted effort to erase the realities of white supremacy, slavery, genocide, and torture that the US is based and founded on. We will not allow people to erase the realities of history, we will not allow people to sugarcoat the reality of things.

A common reply to the words above is “But what about confederate monuments, remove them is erasing history!1!!”, If you are reading this and had that thought, I challenge you to look into the actual history of confederate monuments, who paid for them, and when they were erected. The history that shows that most of them were erected between 1900 and 1920, with the rise of the KKK and again in the 1950’s when Black civil rights were gaining traction. Same with the use of the confederate flag, and other pseudo-historical “facts” that conservatives love to say. Didn’t know that history? Exactly, because that information is actively being suppressed.

These attacks aren’t new, and as we are seeing the rise of fascism in the US, the same parallels are happening that occurred in history, when fascists took over before. The first book burnings by the NSDAP (The Nazi party) were LGBTQA+ books from the Institute of Sexology, burning over 20,000 books in Bebelplatz Square. The Nazi party didn’t start burning books about their political opponents, it was books about being gay and transgender.

One way to fight this censorship is to use the technology we have to circumvent their unjust laws, to give access to information to the people who want it. Stopping someone from reading a book because they might see themselves in those pages is their goal. To shut off access to the language of people to question right-wing ideologies, and to stop people from living the lives they want to live. Fuck that, information wants to be free, and anyone who wants to read these books should be able to.

With this, you have the ability to create your own library of banned information, to spread access to whoever wants it. Later on, I will share some other ideas on how this can be used. But no matter what, always stand up to fascist ideology, subvert the state, and fight for the liberation of information and people.

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Full step-by-step build guide with Ubuntu + Raspberry Pi

Installing Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi

I am using Ubuntu to set all of this up, though alot of these commands will work for OSX. For windows, just download etcher and run the executable. The rest of the tutorial is in Linux because that is what will be running as our OS and to run our services.

You can follow the official guide but I always have problems with using the rpi-imager that is mentioned in the docs. If you have to clear any data on an old SD card, the verification will fail and be all weird so your best bet is to use etcher.

First, download the package for Ubuntu, they have specific ones for the Raspberry Pi. Ubuntu Desktop is fine, and kinda preferable.

https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi

Next download etcher.

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Unzip etcher and run the etcher appimage.

sudo chmod + x balenaEtcher-1.7.9-x64.AppImage
./balenaEtcher-1.7.9-x64.AppImage

Wait a while for that to flash, then when etcher says it’s ready put your SD card into your pi and boot it. Follow the prompts, it’s really self explanatory. If you want during setup you can choose to auto login to the account. We aren’t going for security here but an easy-to-use plug-and-play server. If you don’t choose that you can always change it later.

Once you get logged in launch a terminal and update your stuff.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y 

That should get you updated with the latest packages and junk.

If you get an error about ‘waiting for the unattended-upgr’ or something, just wait, there are updates already being installed in the background.

Install Calibre

The Calibre client also includes the server but we will have to make a custom service in order to have the content server autostart on boot and serve up our libraries.

Run this to download and install Calibre.

sudo -v && wget -nv -O- https://download.calibre-ebook.com/linux-installer.sh | sudo sh /dev/stdin

Then just type calibre to start it.

calibre

Go through the wizard and select where your default library will go. We can add new ones so it’s ok to put it wherever, but the default works. On the next screen for devices choose smartphone. Then finish.

Next we need to make a library, Click the carrot next to Calibre Library and select Switch/create library.

Click the carrot next to Calibre Library and select Switch/create library.

Choose to make a new library and select your directory of where it will be. Tiny Banned Book Library works. In the prebuilt image, that is what the library name is set to and where you will add your books. Saving it in /home/Tiny Banned Book Library is fine.

Then add your books, click Add books then from folders and sub folders.

Press no when Multi file books comes up.

Remove the OG library from Calibre and then delete the folder on your filesystem (by default should be in /home). If you delete the file folder and then try to delete it in Calibre, it will freak out.
Deleting this will only show your Tiny Banned Book Library and save people the confusion when they do get connected to it.

Setting up the Calibre Content Server to auto start at boot.

Calibre has a content server that you can start manually in the GUI by pressing the “Connect/Share” button, but we want the server to start automatically and start serving our library without having to interact with it.

Now we need to make a custom service to make it autostart.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/calibre-server.service 

A text editor will open, copy and paste this in.

[Unit]
Description=calibre Content server
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=library 
Group=library
ExecStart=/usr/bin/calibre-server "/home/library/Tiny Banned Book Library" 

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

• Change the user from “library” to whatever your username is when you set up your server. The group should be the same value as your username. In the prebuilt image, the user is library by default.

• Your execstart should be the same unless you installed Calibre in /opt, change it if you did a custom install.

• Manually add the path to each library separated by a space and quotes. This will allow Calibre to read that it’s a separate library and include it in your server. If you dont know the path, change directories to your library folder (typically /home/youruser/) and then type “pwd” and that will print the working directory.

Press control + x to exit nano and press y to save your new file.

When you make changes to configuration files, you need to run a daemon reload to tell the machine to reload your configs.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl start calibre-server

You might have to stop the calibre server service if it throws an error. Just replace start up there with stop. Then re-run the start command.

sudo systemctl status calibre-server

Will show the server is running. To escape out of the status report press “q”.

sudo systemctl enable calibre-server

Makes the service start at boot.

If you want to modify the books on the server and launch the Calibre GUI, stop the Calibre service and rerun and it should work.

sudo systemctl stop calibre-server

Only stop the service if you need to. If you don’t want to modify the library, just leave it running.

Broadcasting Wifi

Next step will be to setup everything we need to get our pi or computer to create its own Wifi network. This information will change depending on if you are using a pi or a laptop with an extra networking card. If you are using a computer with an extra network card, be sure to change the commands that point to wlan to whatever your wireless card comes up as.
It is recommended that you install all of your dependencies ahead of time.

Then we need to stop resolved that way dnsmasq can work correctly.

sudo systemctl stop systemd-resolved

sudo apt-get install hostapd dnsmasq git build-essential libmicrohttpd-dev net-tools nginx dhcpcd5 -y

Might as well pull your git repos now too.

cd /opt 

sudo git clone https://github.com/nodogsplash/nodogsplash.git

sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt install -y netfilter-persistent iptables-persistent

Next we will install everything to get the Wifi up and running, keep in mind, from this point on the machine will not have internet access from here on out. So make sure your stuff is pre-downloaded. If for some reason you need internet access on the device again, comment all the lines out in your /etc/rc.local file. It’s easy to do, but save some time and do all your internet stuff at the jump.

sudo systemctl unmask hostapd
sudo systemctl disable hostapd

Modify your DHCP config.

sudo nano /etc/dhcpcd.conf

If you are using a separate network card, change the interface below to whatever it is after you run ifconfig. You can also change the network ranges the network will work on, if you change it, be sure to change it in the config files later on too.
Add this to the end of the file.

interface wlan0
    static ip_address=192.168.4.1/24
    nohook wpa_supplicant

Now we will get the DNS situated.

sudo mv /etc/dnsmasq.conf /etc/dnsmasq.conf.orig

sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.conf

Add the following to the file and save it:

interface=wlan0 
# Listening interface
dhcp-range=192.168.4.2,192.168.4.20,255.255.255.0,24h
# Pool of IP addresses served via DHCP
domain=wlan     
# Local wireless DNS domain
address=/#/192.168.4.1
# Alias for this router

The address setting above forces DNS to allow our captive portal to work offline.

Run this to unblock radio function in case it is blocked.

sudo rfkill unblock wlan

Next, we have to modify hostapd configs.

sudo nano /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

Change the info to be how you want it. The SSID is what the Wifi network will be called.

country_code=US
interface=wlan0
ssid=Tiny Banned Book Library
hw_mode=g
channel=7
macaddr_acl=0
ignore_broadcast_ssid=0

Then we need to stop resolved that way dnsmasq can work correctly.

sudo systemctl stop systemd-resolved

It might also be a good idea to make your services autostart, that way you can make sure your wifi is working and that the services start every time.

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

#!/bin/bash
sudo ifconfig wlan0 192.168.4.1 netmask 255.255.255.0
service systemd-resolved stop
service hostapd start
service dnsmasq start
#sudo nodogsplash
#nginx -t

After that is going your wifi network should work after a reboot. You don’t have to reboot right now, cause we still have other stuff to do. But if you want to double check your wifi connection from here you can. If you run into issues, double check and make sure you ran:

sudo systemctl stop systemd-resolved

Because that seems to be the biggest culprit.

Installing and customizing the captive portal

We want a captive portal to allow people to connect to the wifi and be redirected to a webpage that tells them all the information about the server, and how to connect and get access to the books. Nodogsplash is great for this, but one issue with Calibre is that you can’t download ebooks through Nodogsplash, so we have to make a landing page with instructions. If you redirect to the Calibre server in the captive portal, you will be able to read books but the point is to download them.

cd /opt/nodogsplash
sudo make
sudo make install

Once nodogsplash finishes installing modify the config file.

sudo nano /etc/nodogsplash/nodogsplash.conf

This will open a long config file. You are looking for five different settings in there.

• GatewayInterface

• GatewayAddress

• MaxClients

• AuthIdleTimeout

• FirewallRule

Go through and find those areas, then add your data to them

GatewayInterface wlan0
GatewayAddress 192.168.220.1
MaxClients 250
AuthIdleTimeout 480
FirewallRule allow tcp port 8080

Alternatively, you can peep the config file in the uploaded setup files.

Next run nodogsplash

sudo nodogsplash

Things might not be working correctly as we still need to tweak some things.

We can change the splash page by changing the HTML and CSS code that gets loaded. I created a custom splash page with the CSS and everything you need to get started that is included in the downloads.

/etc/nodogsplash/htdocs/splash.html

This is where the HTML will sit. If you want to use the custom splash page, rename splash.html and splash.css to splash_old.html and splash_old.css. Then rename your shiny new custom splash page to splash.html and splash.css. You can also change your config to point to these new files but, this is easier and you get to retain your old HTML in case you want it. Basically just replace the files in that directory and be sure to include the jquery and nice page CSS and js files in there too.
If you want to drag and drop the files into the directory, open a new terminal window and run nautilus with sudo.

sudo nautilus

Be aware that the page you want to edit is splash.html, Home.html is there as the OG template if you want it. If you want to make your own, you can take the HTML from the stock splash.html file and put it into your new one, it’s a small forum group that makes it easy to import into other HTML files.

Proxy server to connect to book.server site

After your user connects to your captive portal and sees your amazing landing page, they need to navigate to the actual Calibre server. So far from working on this project I don’t see an easy way to have the user connect to the captive portal, then have something open a web-browser separately. I know NDS allows for forwarding after you connect, but on iPhones and other mobile devices, you can’t download the books in the captive portal screen.

So we will use Nginx to make a proxy server so instead of having your users type HTTP://192.168.4.1:8080 , they can just type HTTP://book.server - pretty cool and easy.

First, disable the preconfigured host.

sudo unlink /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Then create your proxy config

cd /etc/nginx/sites-available

and create your config

sudo nano example.conf

server {

listen 80;

server_name book.server;

location / {

proxy_pass http://192.168.4.1:8080;

}

}

This says that any traffic on port 80 to book.server will redirect to our server running Calibre on port 8080. You can also do this with HTTPS and redirect 443 to 8080 but then you will run into HTTPS stuff with the server, and then you will need to make a certificate, do that if you want. But it’s not necessary

Next make your symlink.

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Test if the config works it should respond with “test successful”.

sudo nginx -t

Restart Nginx and the proxy should work.

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Autorun everything in a specific order

Next, we can set all of this to run when the pi is booted up. It is recommended that automatic login is enabled .

A very key thing to this is that we need to control the order that things run, but most importantly we need to self assign an IP to the machine. If an IP isn’t set, then the DNS settings won’t bind because we are pointing to a specific IP address and nothing will work. So we can manually run everything at the start of the machine.

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

Uncomment the rest of the file but leave the bash shebang at the top. Replace wlan0 if you are using a different network card and the IP if you opted to use a different IP address earlier. Just copy and paste if you have been following this guide exactly. If you want internet access again, comment out all of the lines in this file and restart and you should be set.

#!/bin/bash
sudo ifconfig wlan0 192.168.4.1 netmask 255.255.255.0
service systemd-resolved stop
service hostapd start
service dnsmasq start
sudo nodogsplash
nginx -t

We are telling the machine to set a static IP, then stop any other networking stuff that might mess with DNS, start our hostapd, then DNS settings, run our captive portal and then run our reverse proxy.

Then when you reboot your server, it should automatically login, set your IP address, stop your resolved service, start hostapd, start dnsmasq, start your captive portal and then start your proxy.

Open things up on another device and make sure you can connect to the wifi, are directed to your cool splash page, and when you press connect, the captive portal closes. Then open a web browser and go to your server, for this example by going to HTTP://book.server and making sure your books are visible and can be downloaded.

Headless mode

From here you should have your Calibre book server full of the books you downloaded, your wifi is running and you can connect other devices to it. Your splash page loads and when you click connect, will get you on the network. And you have verified you can download files, you are all set.

You can leave the desktop mode on, but leaving it on causes some performance drops. especially since this is more of a plug in and leave-alone box. So you can boot the machine into headless mode, and cut down on the processing power to be running a GUI.

This sill set the boot to go to a terminal instead of a GUI:

sudo systemctl set-default multi-user

Reboot or enter this in to go into a terminal start.

gnome-session-quit

To reenable the GUI you can run this to start the GUI boot sequence again:

sudo systemctl set-default graphical

Or while in the command line run this to reenable graphical stuff:

sudo systemctl start gdm3

Fixing potential problems with the image

Sometimes when you copy an image from a pi and use it on another, it freaks out and might boot to a screen complaining about having to do a manual fsck.

If that happens it will print out the drive name (usually /dev/mmcblk0p2)

So run:

fsck /dev/mmcblk0p2 

Replace the location if its different.

Then it will prompt if you want to fix issues, press A to accept all, and it will do a bunch of checks and when it finishes reboot and you should be set.

Another problem that came up randomly was the Wifi not running and the login screen out hang. Reboot and it might force you to fsck, do that process and you should be good.

The blog has since moved to:

https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

This article is mainly taken from my main article “Recipes For An Off-Grid ‘Internet’”, from the very end. I realize that very few people are going to scroll through a super long tutorial article and I wanted to post my thoughts on other ways this could be used. Offer up some background thoughts that went into it, and maybe some ideas that will spur you to take on a project similar to this.

Datarunners, closing the gap & seeing it in action.

While imagining the uses for this network and thinking about connecting communities, this got me thinking about bridging longer distances. Not every community will have someone who knows how to use RF to send digital data, or it might not be working for whatever reason.

Let’s say there are two communities with their own autonomous networks, but for whatever reason, say for instance a mountain between them, it’s really hard to relay nodes to connect the two networks. I imagined data runners, people who travel between places with servers to share data. Basically a sneakernet. Nothing new. But it’s interesting to think about now. Datarunners can have these servers and routers strapped to an ebike, ride between communities and share information. In the communities there can be something like a torrent server that is seeking files. Once a data runner comes within range of the community network, the seeker starts to download the files and then that is shared with the larger network. One community might use it to share news or important information in an encrypted format, datarunners can move that information physically, either because there isn’t internet access, or to circumvent surveillance, whatever. I guess they would be like digital encrypted mailmen, only that they don’t have to deliver the data, it just connects and does it for them.
This also segways into creating mutual aid networks even in areas that have no communication methods. Communities sharing food with eachother, sharing information, datarunners aren’t just traveling to move data, but are working with mutual aid groups in areas to move supplies and information. That might be news, or updates to the regional database of supplies for the community confederation to see what each place has and to move resources efficiently.

This got me thinking about the ways that I can do this right now. I posted recently about an ebike that I charge on my offgrid solar system. I can put the router and server in the side bags, and use a solarpanel strapped to the back to charge battery banks. I could make my cargo trailer into a mobile solar power station, and charge my bike when it needs to recharge. All without the need for an outside resource. There could be a blackout and I could still move goods and information around at 25 miles per hour. Moving between areas that might be hard to bridge and syncing our files with their networks. Sounds pretty out there, and pretty futuristic in a way, but the future is here, a better future is possible, we just have to build it!

Towards a slow internet: a symbiosis of technology and nature

Directly powering a server, a router and a node with solar power means that when the sun isn’t around, neither is the network. It’s a reminder of nature, and the fact that everything we do relies on nature to work. We live in a truly unsustainable time where everything is available 24/7 because we extract fossil fuels and burn them to keep things running. The internet is infinite but the resources to run the internet is not. Running things on solar really points out how interdependent we are with the sun, with our methods of harnessing and dispersing energy.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html is a great showcase of this. A website that runs entirely off solar power, it occasionally goes offline. When the energy required to run things runs out, it goes down. This is to say that sometimes we need to work with natural processes, learn that we come from the earth, we are part of the earth’s systems.
That is also to say that solar generation requires exploitation. The rare earth metals and materials needed are mined from the global south and used to make these panels to generate electricity. Degrowth means putting an end to extractive processes, and moving towards truly sustainable means. How do we make solar power without rare and finite materials? How do we move from supply chains based in capitalist exploitation and instead move to passive means of generation? Ways that we can reuse ewaste and other items thrown into scrapyards and forgotten instead of mining and manufacturing new things. How do we mine our waste to find the materials to make new things, instead of destroying the earth for the things we already have lying around in giant piles? These are things to think about. Solar power (PV solar power) is great, but we can’t ignore where it comes from, the people and countries their production impact, and the reality of our situation.

We know the issues, we know shits fucked. What are some of the solutions?
Moving into a place of symbiosis with nature, and learning from the natural environment. Mimicking what we see in this complex system. But wait, we need electricity for the important stuff. Medical equipment, mobility aids, safety systems. Yes, but let’s try to imagine other ways of generating electricity that don’t require extraction. What if we tool boilers from scrap yards and filled them with metal heat conductive piping with an inlet and an outlet and filled them with sand to make a sand battery. Passive solar uses no extractive minerals, just the power of the sun to boil collected rain water in a chamber. This steam drives a turbine to generate electricity, the steam is collected into sand batteries that radiate heat and capture heat naturally, another boiler is run from the excess heat left from the sand batteries. The remnant steam is then collected and then used as drinking water from going through the distillation process or recirculated through the system to cut down on water usage.
We can make passive generation systems out of scrap, we can cut e-waste streams with circular economies and economies of reuse, instead of destruction. There are other paths.

Expanding Horizons, Use cases, Ideas, Prefiguration, and Dual Power

So far this network has been about emergency situations, where we want to share information with each other without the hassle of having to develop things in the field, and without relying on the capitalist infrastructure that underpins our society today. But this really isn’t only about emergency times, because with these ingredients you can create so many different configurations and types of networks. We can move from different uses, imagine new ways that autonomous, off grid networks can bring to our communities and to our daily lives. There are ways to use this technology in highly beneficial ways. The goal in this section is to offer up ideas and ways of using this, along with other tech, in situations and areas that we normally don’t think about when it comes to autonomous networks. Parts of this will be speculative, a play on what if scenarios, but most of it will be for the real world.

The backbone of the community

You’ve been talking to your neighbors, maybe sharing food and supplies with each other. Other people in your apartment building are thinking about forming a tenant union. You and a group of friends want to turn the barren turf grass curbed areas and empty lots near you into a food forest by doing some guerilla gardening. Sure we can all share information on twitter, discord, facebook for the boomers. For more secure things we can use signal and protonmail. But what if there was a way to foster even more autonomy when it came to local organizing? So you decide to make a backbone network, one that will connect everyone in emergencies. But during normal times it becomes the community second, secure internet. Instead of getting together on discord to talk about what we are planting in the community garden, we use an Element server, with end-to-end encryption. We host videos on a media server that normally would get taken down if posted to social media. We switch people over to federated social media platforms and away from social media corporations that use surveillance capitalism to sell our personal data. We share books on the network, music, movies, help organize the tenant union on encrypted chats. We start pooling our money to source small solar power generation stations to put on our rooftop and around the block. We know things are changing, we are trying to make them good changes, but the world feels like it’s going to hell. Well. It kinda always had been.

It starts happening. You see more and more armed right wing groups in the streets and at protests. Your trans friends have to walk with someone home from fear of being attacked. Your state starts banning certain books in schools and eventually libraries. The election so many were hoping for goes the other way. The new government puts in draconian laws to monitor people for a list of crimes, sodomy, homosexuality, for reading banned books, for sharing the realities of the violence you see in the streets. The videos you upload of police beatings get taken down. The internet we thought was open, slowly becomes censored, keywords stopped. The new government uses the big data of tech corps to track people. Keyword warrants go out for anyone searching online for banned topics. “How to get an abortion”, “How do I know I’m trans”, “The history of slavery in the US”. Now all a crime to look into.

Your network becomes the only way to escape the grasp of the state. You airgap the network from the greater internet, keeping your communications safe between everyone. Everything is encrypted by default, and no intelligence agency can see what you are typing and sending. The videos that once were banned are played freely from projectors into the street. Showing people the reality of things. You spread your network more. Rolling blackouts happen from climate change ravaging the power grid. But your community has solar generator stations, now a lot after pooling your resources together. Your power stations help people power their medical devices, charge their wheelchairs, power the network, charge people’s devices to stay connected. You go from block to block talking to people, offering food, security and community. They ask if there is a way to help. There are a ton of ways, helping in the community gardens that have taken over every space of soil and rooftop. Helping with the community defense circle to keep the cops and right wing militias away from the community. They have computers, phones, routers that were sitting in the dark, now with power from a micro power station. Their routers aren’t special, but they don’t have to be. You connect them as nodes back to the network. More people add their own servers and information. Things spread, more blocks are taken back by the people. The chatrooms are full of people organizing supply runs, working with other communities, forming a federation of communities. Your book server gave people the info they need to make water filters, to make wind generators, to fix roads, whatever needs to be done gets done. People can talk freely, and live freely. You carve out the freedom you have been needing together. As a collective.

Spaces and Places

What if your local park had it’s own little server that had information about the plants you planted, the wildflower seeds you spread around a couple months back, and information on how others could help?

What if your local coffee shop looked like a normal one. But at any moment you had access to thousands of revolutionary texts. The once normal and quiet coffee shop becomes a hub of activists and revolutionaries.

A music venue has free music, when you come inside you are able to download albums for free. Musicians can release special tracks for the network, stuff you can’t get anywhere else. You are the first person to hear your favorite band’s new song after seeing them live.

It’s an interesting thing to think of sharing information in specific times and places. With the internet we are so used to the pervasive roar of data all around us all the time. Places are unique and some of the experiences you can have there are unique. It isn’t the same to look at pictures of a place, when you could go there and get a unique experience. A blend of the digital world and reality but also kept in check. This little digital world only exists in your local park, at the coffee shop, at this specific music venue. Picrust is an interesting example of this, websites in a point of space.

Protests and demonstrations

Most police departments have cell site simulators, AKA stingrays, that basically trick your phone into thinking there is a cell phone tower nearby with a strong signal. Once connected, the police harvest the data that any cell phone in the area is sending out. Unencrypted communications, text messages, phone calls, what websites your visiting or have open that are calling out to a server somewhere.
With autonomous and encrypted local servers protesters can create their own networks to stay connected while also not being connected to cellular service. With travel routers being powered by battery banks in backpacks. Multiple people in the crowd with a node, so if one person gets separated, the network stays connected. Encrypted messaging that never hits a cell phone tower, sharing pictures, data and map information.

Tiny Banned Book Library

As more states and school districts work to stifle access to information and censor what the youth can have access to, the more ways we have to find to circumvent these bans. Bring a router and a server to school, keep it in a bag. Plug them into a spot that’s hidden between a folding room divider. In the back of filing cabinets. Boot your chromebook into an OS off a USB and run Calibre. Broadcast all the books that they ban. Broadcast information about youth liberation, about the destructiveness of an educational system based in white supremacy. Give everyone access to books about deschooling, zines about where to get hormones, find healthcare, or get access to birth control. They won’t know how to stop it. They won’t know who is doing it. Never tell anyone where the servers are. Show up every day and broadcast the information they don’t want you to see. Make a walking tiny library of banned books and banned information.

Detention center drop boxes

Living in Texas, I have been aware of and have protested against the concentration camps, otherwise called “Detention Centers” where the US government locks people into cages for the crime of attempting to escape the poverty, violence, and ecological destruction mostly caused by US interventions in Central and South America, and the world at large. These camps are prisons, where migrants are locked, tortured, and die of preventable diseases and negligence. Another part of this is the lack of information from the outside world, and access to resources and information for people that could really help. The idea is to create drop pods with a small computer and a fileserver to drop into the gates of detention centers and include vital information, educational materials, and resources for people to access. Dropped in by a drone or by throwing the package, which can be a raspberry pi filled with information, and a touchscreen attachment to make a mobile tablet, encased in an impact-resistant case to be able to drop into the gates.

Prison Library & Information Network

The same idea can apply as the detention center drop boxes, but servers and networks set up on the outsides of prisons that broadcast books banned by prison officials and states that inmates might want to see. Including news, and general information that is normally kept from inmates. This would rely on the inside prison economy of contraband phones to be able to access resources. Even better would be a server that can also broadcast analog TV signals for inmates to be able to intercept information, or small radio stations to broadcast information to the inside of the walls.

Obviously this isn’t a perfect solution, but only a possible small solution to try and get more information to people normally cut off from it.

Community-controlled communication and power microgrids

With access to making autonomous communication networks and making autonomous power stations communities that normally would be ignored by states, governments and corporations can build their own infrastructures, and build the foundations for their own autonomy. We can imagine a rural community that internet service providers don’t want to provide services for, making their own community network instead. Maybe one that can relay and eventually reach someone who can give the network internet access. We can imagine an inner city neighborhood that doesn’t have access to high-speed internet, or really any basic services, making their own micro solar power generation stations, making free power stations for people to live and charge their devices. Cutting the profits of electrical companies who prey on low-income communities. No one’s power should be cut off because they can’t afford it, when we can generate power from the sun for almost zero marginal cost after supplies.

We can take these things and scale them up or down, change them to suit our various different circumstances and environments, and move closer to building the alternative in the now. To changing how we relate with each other, technology and the earth. We can start small, start big, actually have dreams of a better world in the face of global collapse. We can dare to have hope, to have the drive to change it all before it’s too late.

We have the tools, the knowledge, the drive. We already have everything we need.

The blog has since moved to:

https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

Solarpunk as an idea, a literary genre, an aesthetic, and a movement is relatively still small, new, and still starting to build out a cohesive idea of what exactly it is. But as things grow so do the ideas and ideals that flock to the ideas of a greener, more hopeful future. From being involved with the community and looking out and observing the landscape, we are starting to see distinct approaches and ideas revolving around what solarpunk is, and different approaches and tactics to build a better world. But what does building a better world really mean? One person's utopia, take for instance billionaire Peter Theil’s utopia would look like absolute hell to most people. We have to look at the means, the ends, the goals of what people want to achieve, and if those goals and methods are detrimental to - or counter to - the ideas central to solarpunk.

In general, there are two large paths growing in the community at the moment.

• People who view solarpunk as a fundamental questioning of our current systems of capitalism, hierarchy, domination, and exploitation - who seek to live in a world where we face climate change head on. By stopping the use of fossil fuels and moving to renewable energy. While also questioning methods of growth, and the exploitation that would require a perpetually growing renewable energy society, instead focusing on justice for all people. In general, building an egalitarian, horizontal society that moves away from old systems of oppression and attempts to live in symbiosis with the planet.

• People who view solarpunk as an aesthetic vehicle to move away from the current monetary system and to attempt to create markets and systems that are detached from nation-states. To use alternative currencies and markets to directly fund projects, those funds never being able to be stopped by state regulation or interference. Some with more socialist views may use cryptocurrencies as a method of exchange, and create a universal basic income based in these tokens. With the goal of decoupling society from current monetary systems and either using a market to address needs, or using tokens as a means of exchange between people.

One of these will lead to a fundamentally different world. Power and social dynamics, gender norms, and how we interact with each other and the planet being at the center of the social change needed to reach a post-capitalist future. Moving away from market based economies to a post-scarcity world based in mutual aid, and symbiosis with nature.

The other will continue the baseline structure that capitalism uses as a method of exploitation. That is markets and currency exchange. Those with already existing money entering into these markets can manipulate their way into controlling them. The actions of the economy only replacing fiat currency with cryptocurrency. The social inequity and issues we face now not addressed, but managed by market forces. Greener futures may be built by those who control the supply of tokens, which will lead to a stratified society of those who have the means, and those who are able to build better places for themselves, at the exclusion of others. The economic system requiring massively inefficient systems to run blockchain technology, even if they run off renewables, there is always a price for constant growth. And a social cost that will more than likely be ignored by market forces like it is today.

You may be thinking that assertion is harsh but I want to show how, cryptocurrencies are counterintuitive to building a better world. At best they might lead to a green growth neoliberal society where renewables are used, and climate change is met with economic forces. At worst, it will lead to a technofudalist society, where those who accumulate wealth are able to make kingdoms of their own, becoming defacto states, while also not changing the foundations of the social and political inequities we have in our world today.

Why a future based on cryptocurrencies will not be equal

There are inequities that are ingrained in currencies and monetary markets that carry over into cryptocurrencies. In an article I wrote for Solarpunk Magazine about NFT’s and solarpunk, I go into some detail about this, but I want to go deeper into those arguments. My core argument is this:

Cryptocurrencies (and fiat currencies and markets) will always create inequity and will always create negative hierarchical systems.

That is because the way that money and market systems function necessitate people to accumulate wealth, to exploit labor, to exploit resources, and to create power imbalances for the markets to work. Capitalist markets rely on central state intervention to work by interrupting changes in the markets, or ensuring that the capital system can never be exploited or stopped. There also needs to be some kind of enforcement of regulatory laws and a system to make sure that the markets keep operating. Where you see money, you see states, and where you see states you see police and law systems, in order for capital systems to keep running, violence has to be used.

Using an example, let’s look at a group operating in capitalist systems but entirely outside of the law. Drug dealers, narco traffickers, and the people who buy and sell drugs and chemicals deal in an essentially free capitalist market. In order to ensure their business transactions continue - the organizations need to maintain their production, distribution, and sale of their goods to the market of people who want to buy what they are selling. Drug gangs fight over territory, which is determined between the gangs and agreed upon. If one gang enters the territory of another, then violence will be used. Men with guns will show up, and do harm to someone because of these boundaries. With the main goal being profit, the lives of the users of the drugs they sell are not taken into account. The destruction of addiction does not matter, the death that the substances cause does not matter. Because the goal is to accrue profit, for the organization investors who took a risk in starting and maintaining the operation, and who act as shareholders require a return on their investment. At every level, the operation is maintained by the threat of death, and that men with guns will show up and kill anyone threatening shareholder value and the profits that the organization worked so hard to create.

Now let’s look at a corporation working within the laws in a capitalist system. Corporations, business owners, and the people who buy and sell goods deal in an essentially free market. In order to ensure their business transactions continue - the organizations need to maintain their production, distribution, and sale of their goods to the market of people who want to buy what they are selling. Corporations fight over market territory, which is determined by corporations and the government through regulation. If one corporation entered the territory of another then lawsuits will be filed, and if found guilty, the guilty party will be met by men with guns (the police). With the main goal being profit, the lives that are destroyed by polluting the planet, and enforcing legal contracts through the police, the lives of people are not taken into account. The destruction of capitalism does not matter, the death that capitalism creates does not matter. Because the goal is to accrue profit, for the organization investors who took a risk in starting and maintaining the operation, who act as shareholders require a return on their investment. At every level, the operation is maintained by the threat of legal retaliation, which is just a fancier way to say that men with guns will show up and imprison or murder anyone threatening shareholder value and the profits that the organization worked so hard to create.

At all levels of capitalism, both illlegal and legal, is the explicit threat of violence. Either from a legal state apparatus, or by the people directly involved. The entire system hinges on the threat of violence.

With that being said, if we want to live in a better future, do we really want to copy these systems of violence, and use them as a basis of building a better world?

Dissecting how money works we can look into the ways that it relies on exploitation, hierarchy and domination, even in so called “free markets”. Let’s start from two starting points, one that starts with us moving from fiat currency into cryptocurrency, and another that abolishes fiat currency and starts everyone with a flat rate of cryptocurrency.

Transitioning from fiat to crypto economies but never addressing core problems

In this scenario, we have defeated central banking by making cryptocurrencies the dominant currency mechanism. You wake up and say “gm” while payment processors fold under their inability to turn a profit because people are just exchanging their tokens with each other. Rapid inflation ceases because the money supply is kept stable by artificially changing the amount of currency in the market, because digital currencies don’t have to work like fiat money. We now have people, businesses, and DAOs exchanging freely with various tokens and chains. Smart contracts on various blockchains now hold private information and laws. Any interactions in the economy are automatically cross-referenced with the smart contracts & the chains and determined to be valid or invalid. Artists can sell their one-of-a-kind art, which can be traded and the artists can profit each time that art is traded. You can buy and sell anything you want!

But how do people move from fiat currency into crypto? Well it was gradual, the people who were smart and moved their investments into crypto early on, now see exponential growth in their earnings. They bought low and bought early. Meanwhile, the other population didn’t do that, they didn’t buy early and are not trying to get in while the market is hot, while crypto is on top. They were NGMI from the start because they made the wrong decision not to invest. It was their fault.

In order to make sure fraud doesn’t take place, we need authorities who watch the markets and also manage trades. These trading DAOs buy and sell on the market with exchanges, and everyone who invested in tokens who get bought and sold makes a profit. But what if someone physically steals an authentication USB or the physical card that people use to authenticate to the market? Well, security DAOs are created to ensure that investors can maintain security and physically retrieve their stolen yubi keys. Once you pay a security subscription, you get access to the security DAO, and with proof of liquidity, the more $SECUR tokens you have, the more of a vote you have with the DAO!

Looking at this situation, you can see the same inequities in today’s capitalism as you might see in a (slightly exaggerated) example. The individualistic idea that it’s peoples own fault for not interacting with the system, for not investing, for not having the money to invest. That’s the reason why they failed. The stock exchanges and hedge funds just renamed something else. The police and state violence is instead of being a police union, is a DAO where police officers can vote how the union runs by determining how many tokens each one of them has.

This future would fundamentally ignore the fact that only those with existing wealth, or who took loans to get the wealth, would have an advantage in the market. Because they had money upfront, they then could liquidate their assets and move things over from fiat to crypto. Sure proof of work was phased out because of environmental issues, now with proof of stake you have a pay-to-play system where those at the top of the economic ladder now have a giant advantage. Their token values call the shots, they determine how the market goes, they determine what laws are made, they determine how the society runs because they have the most liquidity. Because their holdings can buy the factories, the businesses, the means to make more tokens. To trade for more tokens or buy the raw computing power needed to mine digital tokens. What difference would this be from how the systems currently run?

Universal Basic Cryptocurrency Income

I personally see UBI as a transitionary path away from capitalism, into a more socialist system albeit, more of a social democratic system. But again, if we want to fundamentally change our social and political relations, just relying on UBI won’t get us there. UBI must be coupled with universal and free public services. Housing, healthcare, access to food and clean drinking water, communications, power, etc must be included alongside.

One thing that UBI does not address is the relationship between production & consumption, and the mechanisms of wage labor. Because the assumption is that people will still be working for a wage, supplemented with UBI. People will still be in the same market relations of those who work and produce capital, and those who own the means of production. Even if the means of production is owned by a worker’s state, there still is the core issue of wage labor, exploitation, and power dynamics that are inherent in capital systems. UBI is fine for a transitory path, but UBI should not mean the continuation of wage labor. All things should be universal basic rights, not just income.

So let’s continue with this situation of a UBI based in cryptocurrencies. There are some actual ways it would be useful. But we also have to ask some key questions. Why would we use cryptocurrencies over fiat currencies in a case where UBI was set?

Assuming it is a transition, there will be plenty of people who already have the cryptocurrencies, or the methods to produce more. So the same inequities are there. If we are talking about a complete restart of the financial system, expropriating cryptocurrencies and redistributing them, why would we want to deal with crypto over fiat currencies at that point, or currencies at all? If there is a push to redistribute wealth, why continue using the methods that lead to wealth inequality in the first place? Even if this wealth was redistributed by a “workers state” who cares if my new bosses are the “peoples party” if I still have to work to have access to meet my basic needs? Only the terms have changed at that point, when we are talking about these changes, we need real change, not shifts in definitions and terms.

My point here is even in say a socialist system that used cryptocurrencies as a means of exchange, there still would be the negative issues of markets involved with wage labor and inequities of exchange. If we did get rid of wage labor and market forces, there would be no need for cryptocurrencies or any currencies at all to be used. If the goal is to eliminate class, to eliminate domination, and unjust methods of hierarchy, then using money will not get us to that.

Green growth economies, inequitable climate transitions, and the burning amazon.

Another path would be what could be called “green growth” a term from The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism where a society acknowledges climate change, and the need to switch to an energy system based on renewable energy. But still keeps many of the market forces (currency, GDP as a measure of prosperity, market mechanisms). A green growth economy is one that many people advocate for, but don’t really think deeply into the underlying issues that are still present even though it might lead to a better world (for some but not all).

A green growth economy would still use GDP as a central measure of economic success, and would attempt to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energies. At the core however would be the maintaining or growth of the economic system to maintain a status quo and still maintain all of the power and social dynamics, just with cleaner infrastructure. We can still see here, that a capitalist green growth scheme would make a positive impact in reducing emissions, but it would not address core social, economic, and political issues. It also would ignore a key component to sustaining growth: raw materials.

The global south would be plundered for the rare earth materials needed to sustain a green growth transition if capitalist mechanisms were still kept. That’s because capital doesn’t care about the people affected, only that there is a seemingly “fair” exchange of goods for currency. The global north countries may institute a crypto based UBI, and move to renewables to run blockchains and the technology we are used to, while the global south is extracted for more minerals and resources to fund this growth. Solar panels with silicon and aluminum, lithium batteries for storage that need to be mined in poor countries and extracted, all of these things have an impact that has been ignored in the name of “progress” and a movement toward a capitalist green economy.

There are others who propose using cryptocurrencies to fund transitions, like using cryptocurrency for permaculture farming and regenerative agriculture. At the moment, most crypto infrastructure is run off fossil fuels with a very small percentage being run off renewable energy. And so we are talking about using a very inefficient and resource-heavy method of currency exchange to fund ecological projects, while ignoring the fact that producing the currency and keeping the markets operating is destroying the planet. This starts to look like the carbon credit model, where people and corporations buy carbon credits so they can say they did something good, while still polluting the earth and using fossil fuels, adding to climate change that will eventually make regenerative ag useless in the face of total ecological destruction.

Any capitalist economy (either run off fiat or crypto-currencies) cannot be both green and equitable. Because the economic forces of currency and growth require constant expansion and constant extraction of not only minerals and raw materials from the earth, causing more ecological destruction. But also extracting labor from poor people, to make the system keep running efficiently. The problem is that capital forces a system to only care about extraction and growth rather than the real needs and concerns of people.

The Alternative: Ecological, Political, Social, and Technological Justice

If the goal is to make a better world where we enter into a symbiosis with the earth and ecology, where we survive climate change and possibly reverse some of the negative effects, where we fundamentally change our social and political relations to be more horizontal and equal, we have to walk on a different path.

We have to collectively question our methods and systems and ask hard questions about the realities of these things. Sure we could have a green energy transition, but we also need to ask where the materials will come from. Sure we can change our economic relations, but if we don’t address the social aspects of life, we won’t see real long-lasting change.

It starts with an acknowledgment that we are all equal. That we are also not above nature and the ecology of the world, but part of it. It starts by saying “enough” to systems that perpetuate social ills, and start building systems that can make us all more equal, happy, and together both with each other and the earth.

In a previous article: Solarpunk, Acid Communism, Capitalist Co-opting, and Learning From The Counterculture I talk about some core issues that I see that are central to some of the issues we have in society now.

1. Hierarchy

2. Patriarchy

3. Domination

4. Violence

All of these things are tied into each other, they feed off each other and they are all central to monetary markets, capitalism and market functions in order to survive.

If we want an alternative, our methods need to address these issues along with focusing not just on energy transitions, but system transitions, social transitions, and transitions toward equality.

Solarpunk: Transitions to a just, equal, ecological conception of the world.

There is a large contingent of people who are tired of solarpunk being associated with cryptocurrencies and capital, mainly because we see first hand that these things don’t address core issues, but act as a bandaid or even make things worse. Solarpunk as a genre has been pushing the speculative limits of what we imagine to be a better future. A better future that is free from oppression, domination, and violence towards each other and the earth. We get there with a combination of tactics, philosophies, ideas, and methods from across the world and combining them with art, literature and aesthetics to not just talk about the how, but to show people what a better future really might look like. Some of these ideas come from eco-anarchism, social ecology, communism, the degrowth movement, circular economies and resource-based economies, in general solarpunk has become and started to solidify into the aesthetic and speculative method of a combination of various leftist thoughts.

A society based in mutual aid, cooperation, equality and symbiosis should be our goal to addressing core issues in our lives. This requires us to change our social and economic relations to match those goals, which in turn would require abolishing currency, market mechanisms, and forms of domination. Moving away from constant and insatiable growth, into a model that recognizes symbiosis, limits and an understanding of ourselves and of nature. Everything we do has an impact, every innovation requires an input, so we have to think of everything that goes into our systems. Where do raw materials come from? Who is doing work? What would our lives look like without money? How does this impact the ecology? All of this needs to start being considered.

Starting at the baseline of all people being equal, we can see that everyone needs access to live their life. That means housing, healthcare, food, clean water, communications, energy, and a life of dignity and accessibility should be a basic human right given to all people. We should also balance that with the needs of nature and the ecology, by making sure everything we do is not detrimental to the earth, and wherever possible benefits the ecological landscape.

We ensure that all people have access to have their basic needs met by basing our relations off mutual aid. The understanding that we are all connected and need to rely on each other and the earth to live. It’s not enough to help yourself, we need to help us all. In abolishing money and market mechanisms we can leave the ideas of exchange behind. You don’t have to pay to live somewhere, because you are a fucking human being, and you deserve the right to live. Full stop. Period point blank.

We have to acknowledge that capitalism has robbed us of those rights, and said only those with money can have access. We have everything we need to house all people. So why don’t we? After removing the profit incentive we need a new incentive, a life prosperity incentive, to make sure everything that we do is beneficial, not harmful.

An equitable green transition means not just extracting everything we can to make solar panels, but questioning how we can generate the energy we need without profit being the main concern, and how we can do that in a way that is equitable to people and the earth. This means innovating new ways of power generation and appropriate technology. It means changing our conceptions of technology and innovation away from what will make the most money, and towards what will have the greatest human benefit and the least impact to the natural environment.

This might mean using more passive methods for energy generation, storage, for lighting, and for living, for heating, and cooling. These passive methods would cut down on the amount of rare earth minerals needed to make tech that can make these things run. We can change how we make homes and move away from lumber structures with concrete and sheet rock, all materials made dependent on fossil fuels and fossil fuel-based infrastructure. Instead, we build with the earth making super adobe, or cobb homes, rammed earth buildings from the soil beneath us instead of extractive minerals that produce way more emissions. Instead of lighting our homes with electrical lights we could use passive skylights, light tubes to let in sunlight, or even bioluminescent algae or something like that. Heating can be passive by storing the heat from the sun into the thermal mass of earth homes, which emanates heat. Or fireplaces and stoves that use their vent pipes to emanate heat into the walls of homes, keeping them warm. There are ways to live a good life, with the modern comforts that those of us in the global north are used to, that arent based in extraction and exploitation. It takes a move from the cheap economy and lifestyles created by fossil fuel use, and towards methods that work with the earth and nature, that don’t require extraction.

Starting at the baseline of all people being equal, we change our social arrangements and our concepts of who we are and our relations with each other. Unjust hierarchies replaced with egalitarianism, where everyone has an equitable voice in everything. That does not mean that some ‘hierarchies’ may not exist, as an example of someone who has extensive construction knowledge leading construction projects. But these people would have to be democratically voted to lead, not just assumed because they are better than everyone else, but because their talents show they can handle the job, and that the people around them, agree to listen. Consent is the core of this, that all people consent to the lives they lead, and consent to all things. Sociocracy is a system that is a good starting point for this idea of a direct democracy. A social arrangement where all people must consent to changes, and any delegates are not strongmen or tyrants, but directly electable and recallable by the people. We find new and old ways of governing that don’t rely on domination, patriarchy, violence or hierarchy.

Starting at the baseline of all people being equal, and that we are also part of nature, we have to fundamentally rethink our interactions with waste streams, extraction, and production. Closed loop systems are used, with circular economies, and economies of reuse. Because profit is removed and human thriving is centered we can instead of focusing on what will make the most profit, choose what will have the biggest impact on people with the least ecological impact. We can create circular economies where everything is recyclable, repairable, and can be reused. We can agree democratically to use common standards of production so all parts can work with each other. When something breaks, it isn’t thrown away but fixed, reused or reworked into something else. We can understand extraction to not be based in extracting from the earth, but extracting from our own previous waste. We mine the landfills, the e-waste dumps, we mine the plastic floating in the ocean and use them as raw materials to make goods that can be used and reused, constantly stopping more waste from entering our environment. We can work with nature and come up with things like bioplastics, that work like plastics but are entirely natural and can breakdown or be reused. All of this attacks the notion of profit. Instead of what can make the most money, it should be what can be reused almost infinitely so the most amount of use is the central drive.

Starting at the baseline of all people being equal, we can transition now to a more equitable world by balancing the global north and the global south. By removing international loan debt. By fostering solidarity with the indigenous people who are fighting capitalist extraction that destroys their homelands. We can work together to stop capitalism and give alternative methods to living. We can make sure that the global south and those in poverty get wealth first, the extracted wealth returned to where they originally came from and those in poverty can live in dignity, with lives closer to the privilege we in the global north take for granted. That doesn’t mean that we rapidly industrialize countries, but we give power to the people to decide what they do with their lives. We focus on improving the wellbeing of all people, instead of improving GDP. We make sure that technological advances make their way to all people, especially those in poverty first, and specifically appropriate technologies that people consent to having, and not having it pushed on them. We can rebalance the inequity and give power back to all people.

How do we get a solarpunk future?

We do it by building our alternative systems within the existing system. Dual power and prefiguration are key, building the world you want to see now within the systems we currently have. But we can’t just stop at making everything a worker co-op and calling it a day. The real social and political changes need to happen to address actual issues. We need to make democratic, horizontal and equitable systems now, if we want to see them in the future.

Dual power and prefiguration means that we act now to build anticapitalist, egalitarian, equitable and ecological systems now, as an alternative. Instead of focusing on destroying capitalism only, we should work to build the systems we want, while also destroying capitalist frameworks. Instead of people fighting capitalism and having no clue what to do when it comes to food, housing, governance, or ecology. We make the systems ahead of time that sit not just in capitalist systems but in opposition to them. We make earth homes, we make permaculture gardens, we build alternative passive energy systems, we build the people’s free communication networks, we build free schools and educational structures, we do all of this now, so we have an alternative. We also need to make sure we don’t have one size fits all solutions but appropriate solutions based on the people who are living with those solutions. When people look out, downtrodden by the capitalist system where they have to pay money to live, eat, drink, to exist - and they look out to people making an alternative. They see people building mutual aid networks, living in symbiosis with nature, they see people existing as equals and consenting to the lives they want to live. They see a world built with disabled people’s needs first where accessibility is the default instead of a second thought. They see a world where extraction stops, where people say they have everything they need from each other and the earth. They see an alternative and want to help build that better world. They see that their life matters, that they aren’t expendable, that they are part of humanity and nature. They see their own power, not just as an individual but as a collective.

They see the alternative, it’s up to us all to build it.

Introduction

This is less so an exhaustive technical guide for making a DIY micro internet, and more so a group of recipes with ingredients that combine together to create whatever you need to create. Understand this to be a system of different parts that you can add or subtract from, and less so a “here is exactly how to do this” instruction manual. I do include instructions and some tips if you want to copy parts of my current build. Though after this you should have the tools or a starting place to make your own network to suit your unique needs. This is all modular and can scale up or down depending on how much you can spend, what you have on hand, and what you can get access to. Modularity, interoperability, and repurposing things is key to creating a better future.

I only used a Raspberry Pi computer in this becasue I already had one. After their bullshit on mastodon where the company said they hired intellence police officers and then got weird about people rightfully feeling weird about it, I’m no longer supporting them. Not only that they are impossible to find and people are price gouging online. The key thing here is that you can use any computer that can run Ubuntu to do this. You do not need a Pi to run this.

@hydroponictrash @hydroponictrash ♬ original sound - HydroponicTrash

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How this article is laid out

I’ve broken this down into sections, here is a rundown so you can jump to the info you want.

• TLDR section - Summary of what we are doing here and how the systems work.

• Book Repo information - How to download the entire library I put together.

• Goals & Constraints - What we are trying to do, and what issues we may run into.

• Technical Stack - The software that runs things.

• Building The Foundation - The core concepts to understand so you can make your own modular intranet network.

• Showing examples of the solar servers in action.

• Adding nodes to make the network bigger.

• Antennas and pirate nodes.

• Full technical step-by-step guide on building this on a Raspberry Pi.

• Speculative ideas of this in action and the uses.

• More ideas on how to use the servers.

TLDR

This article will be a guide on how to make a DIY local internet that can run off solar, or any power you can find. This network can include nodes to make a bigger mesh network. Neighbors can chat together on a server, useful in natural disasters or times where physically talking is hard. People can access a library of thousands of ebooks that include educational textbooks for impromptu schooling, technical guides on growing food, raising animals. Construction and building infrastructure. Info on everything from passive solar water filters to making windmill generators, to growing, processing and preserving organic food, making tools, sewage management and treatment, road building. All in one server to read or download on any device that can access the network. Also including a media server that can stream movies, music, saved youtube videos, and instructionals.
When people connect to the network, they can be redirected to a website that requires no experience in web design to build. The site can act as a landing page or navigation to your servers along with offering information. All without having to code.
Neighbors can use their existing routers with some added power, to bring more nodes onto the network, giving more people access to the books, music, videos, and communication networks.
This is like mycelium and mushrooms, a network of nodes that spread out and send information to the network.
This system is modular, with the ability to add whatever you want to it, and also works with almost any router and computer.

TLDR For Nerds

This network is basically just a mesh LAN connected together through routers either in repeater mode or using WDS to bridge routers together and create a mesh of sorts. Anyone can join and include their own servers and clients can read the data without the need for proprietary clients, all of it will run natively in a browser. The routers used are cheap travel routers that run off USB, but with inverters, larger routers that run off AC power can be used for better range. The routers used run openWRT. For those with radio licenses, you can connect these LAN networks and send data over RF to send the signal over longer ranges. You can combine this with LoRa for messaging or even weird shit like using RF to pull satellite images or weather information. The mesh is created by either using your own routers, powered by solar or any means of power, or by getting neighbors to power their routers and combine them into the network as nodes to further the range. This is platform agnostic and modular to scale up depending on what you have and can do. Everything runs on software that is FOSS, or is free and easy to install.

Book Repository

I’ve been compiling a giant library of books, textbooks, pamphlets and technical guides for a previous project called “Building a solarpunk future”. Most of the book comps you see have mostly a tinge of like disaster prepper shit, not the real stuff like canning and taking care of water contamination, but like how to survive in the woods with only a knife and preparing for EMP weapon attacks. I wanted this to be a little more realistic and focus on things that people actually need. Not just in emergencies, or not for when shit falls apart, but to build a better world. Tools and easy-to-access information that can be saved and dispursed quickly across a wide range of topics that are important to building dual power, or building new communities from scratch.

I can’t go into full detail here about every single thing but it’s massive. Most of the large parts are broken up into food, water, sanitation, construction, and tools. For food there are general permaculture guides, technical guides for food preparation and canning, technical guides for growing specific crops with easy-to-access information, organic pest control and finding plant diseases, raising animals, processing and harvesting food. For the water sections we have books on water collection, both with barrels and natural collection, water pumping, making wells and how to move water. Things about water treatment, water filtration, making low tech water filters all the way up to making city wide water treatment facilities. After that stuff about sewage, blackwater and greywater reuse. The education folder has a bunch of open textbooks to keep people learning. Infrastructure and Construction includes everything from concrete work, to biogas chambers, building earth domes and super adobe, electical, plumbing, HVAC, building roads and repairing roads, solar, repair guides on things, making wind turbines. The medical folder has info on keeping people well, and includes field medicine guides along with stuff like emergency childbirth, mental health and general surgery for small wounds. Under Tools and Manufacturing, there are guides to making bicycle ambulances, clay tile manufacturing, candle making, textile production, soap making. There is a ton of stuff in this.
This is version one, it takes a long time to compile this info and put it into categories. I want to expand the education category and add more books into various areas. But this should be a good starting place to build on or add to your existing ebook collections. Link is down below.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/124Ct-E2YtbZd_8G1d2W09dAMG-4Sx_8X/view?usp=sharing

Version 2 is up! Now with more info including stuff about sociocracy and other egalitarian ways of social organizing. A full new category called Inventory & Ecology Management with information about supply chain creation, management, inventory management, and ecological inventory management as well. More books were added to the earth and alternative construction category. Also more tech basics books and early childhood development and curriculum stuff. Version 3 should be out soon!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1up1sVOsX3Hbz7eME0s7-Ie8iI6Nm-nS4/view?usp=sharing

Goals & Constraints

There are specific criteria that are important to making a system that is easy to make, install, and maintain by regular people. Not every community will have someone extremely technical that can install telecom level communication networks. Not every community will have access to the best equipment or hardware. So there are constraints about making these systems:

1. Needs to be accessible to both technical and non-technical people.

2. Easy to make with off-the-shelf parts, easy to source hardware, or existing infrastructure.

3. Chat functions need to have local registration without internet.

4. Services can’t require client software that needs to be downloaded in order to work. Services must be standalone and accessible through a browser. (You can’t download apps off the Apple app store without internet)

5. Low power consumption / can be powered easily.

With the constraints, there are specific things that are helpful in emergencies, or in cases where a local internet would make sense like in hostile political areas where internet connections are terminated by police, military, or state powers.

• A chat server to communicate with other people.

• A book repository with information not just on survival, but how to thrive, build and rebuild.

• Media servers to have movies and music. Not just educational stuff but also entertainment.

Adding to that list would be maps, Wikipedia and other wikis, access to news and other information streams, weather information, and a lot more. But this article will mainly cover the three categories listed above.

Technical Stack

Working within those constraints and requirements is kinda hard. At first, I used the freedombox as a platform but I found it hard to use and maintain. There wasn’t anything that had things perfectly together but there are projects, software and tools out there that work well together. So I landed on using these services because they met some of the requirements of being easy to install/maintain and can be set up and administered by someone with very basic tech skills.

• RocketChat (for the chat server)

• Calibre (for hosting ebook libraries)

• Emby (for the media server)

• Hugo (hosting a simple, yet polished landing page for a captive portal)

• GLinet travel router (hosts the network and is powered by USB)

Before you dogpile me on twitter or in the comments of this post, there are specific reasons why I chose these for the tech stack over other things. I could have used Matrix and hosted the chat server and included all the bells and whistles like end-to-end encryption and federation. That’s great but this is for people to use in emergencies and cases where normal internet access is cut off. If you need to have a client downloaded before that all happens, how do you get your neighbor down the street to install the Element client when you don’t have access to the broader internet? (Yes you can host the APK for Androids but iPhones can’t install apps offline without doing some annoying shit, also do you want to be installing packages for like 30 different people?)
It’s way easier to tell them to connect to a network and go to a site. No need for a client or having to register online to get an account before an emergency happens. Again, this is a starting place. If you have the technical skills to use other platforms, do it! This is all modular, this is all customizable so you can tailor things to how you want it. I would love to see what you create! This is just a recommendation.

Background

(You can skip this if you want, but there are reasons why I wanted to create this)

Being Black and living in Texas I have become accustomed to seeing the ways that regressive, hierarchical, individualistic, racist, and capitalist systems fail firsthand. Texas is the only state in the US to have its own separate power grid that isn’t tied to the national interconnected grid. (Technically there isn’t a giant grid that is completely connected across the US but separate regions basically that can share power but whatever, you get the point.)

The power grid is maintained by a private company in an effort to deregulate power in Texas. With privatization and the grid being held in private corporate hands, that means regulation, winterization, maintenance, and upgrades come second to maximizing profits. The corporate “freedom” that comes with deregulation means that while the grid maintainers and operators gain massive profits, they forgo actually taking care of shit.

February 13-17 2021, winter storm Uri rocked Texas. Due to the changing climate, Texas saw one of the worst winter storms in recent history. We saw extreme cold for close to a week, keep in mind that because businesses want to maximize profits, homes, businesses, and infrastructure are not built to handle cold weather by construction companies. That would “cost too much” to adapt to our changing climate. Homes here lack any kind of heavy winter insulation.
The power grid was not prepared for extreme winter weather events. Why? Because the private corporations said winterization would cut into profits. There is a lot that went into the grid almost totally collapsing, but basically, electrical lines were getting damaged, power production plants were going offline because natural gas lines were freezing. A huge driver for the rolling blackouts was that the cost to operate the grid was getting too expensive, and so ERCOT, the board that regulates the Texas power grid decided to do rolling blackouts.

Around 700 people died as a result of the blackouts caused by corporate greed and climate change. (This number ranges, it’s said to be up to around a thousand people) Thousands lost their homes because of frozen pipes and destroyed infrastructure. The national guard and the state did nothing for the first three days, and the only people who were out providing hot meals, clean drinking water, and essentials were mutual aid groups.

This was a giant wake up call of the fragility of the Texas powergrid, we were minutes away from being in the dark for months. After this storm, seeing how many people died and lost their homes, opened my eyes to the pressing fact that we need to build resiliency NOW. We need autonomy from state oppression and neglect and to build local autonomy and power NOW. And so with that came ideas of fostering dual power, of making our own systems in the shell of the one currently falling apart.
With that came projects about water, food, and now electricity, communications and what I would consider to be a public utility, internet.

My goal is to help bridge the gap from speculative fiction, of imagining a better future, of prefiguration, and to bring those ideas into action in any way I can. But I’m not alone in this. Everything I do is for free, and released for other people to enjoy, work on, be inspired by, build and collaborate. The only way out of this is together. We start by building the infrastructure to make a better future. A more egalitarian one, without hierarchy, where we can intertwine our social change with political change. Intertwine technology and ecology, not for destruction, but for regeneration. A better future won’t come from destroying old systems alone. It will come by building social change, building autonomy and true freedom, building equality, building our connection with the earth and the ways we can stop destroying nature and instead living with it. We can change. And it starts with building.

Getting Started: Building the Foundation

Look at this article as a general framework of building an off-grid network. There are core concepts that once you understand, you can substitute out the details and make whatever you want. I put ‘internet’ in quotes in the title of this article because what we are making basically is a smaller-scale version of the ‘internet’. As a whole, computer networks have like three pieces. (Network engineers are seething rn but whatever)

• A client

• A server

• A router

Say you want to see a video on youtube. Your computer (the client) will make a request to go to youtube.com. The router takes that information and consults something that says the address of youtube.com and packages your request with your IP address. Think of routers as air traffic control, they determine who is on a network and where other computers are located. Your request basically gets sent through a giant game of telephone to a google network that your request was addressed to and is forwarded to the server. The server hosts different services, in this example it hosts media. That media then goes back through the giant game of telephone to come back to you.

Routers handle the network, servers serve out data, and clients receive the data.

The internet is basically like a giant game of telephone, or more like a giant mail system. With packets of requests that have senders and receivers being circulated by routers and other networking equipment to move information around.

Internet service providers are who connect your home to the larger network aka the internet. Think AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum, Hughesnet, Starlink, ya know, the corporate fuckers you have to pay every month to have access to a now basic utility. They control the giant networks that help your request get received by your targeted network. All of these steps, from leaving your house, to going to the ISP, to the giant networks that run the backbone of the internet, to the place that you want to access the information - all rely on infrastructure. All of this is powered by grid power, power plants, service lines, cable lines, fiber optic lines, satellites, datacenters, all of it interconnected to facilitate sharing data. The same idea applies to how phones work, there are giant networks that connect your phone to be able to make calls and access the internet.

But when natural disasters happen, or when governments take control of ISP’s and just shut off access to the internet, poof. It all goes away.

What we are doing here with the DIY off-grid internet, is becoming our own internet service provider by chaining and connecting the things necessary to make a network, then using servers to host information - that clients will connect to and get whatever info is served!

You can see above that we have a server connected to a router which is giving a wifi signal to your neighbors to connect to. Awesome! But the range will be limited by one router. Our goal is to create a network of other routers to act as beacons, making the wifi network larger, and allowing more people to connect to the network and thus to the server.

So now we are scaling up, connecting more routers as nodes to propagate and spread the network. A neighbor down the block agrees to use their router powered with a backup generator to act as a node. Another friend farther away has a big antenna and a solar battery bank and powers their router on and connects to the network.
So with three routers all connected together you are now giving access to the information on your server to a shit ton of people. This can keep growing to a city wide network, a state-wide network, a regional network, or a national network all owned and operated collectively by the people. This is a cool idea but let’s keep it realistic and local for now! There are projects out there like NYCMesh that are doing basically this exact thing at a way more professional level. They use professional networking gear to make professional networks. What we’re doing here is making a DIY network out of cheap goods, existing routers, and what we got laying around. Different circumstances call for different approaches!

Ingredients to an off-grid server network

Off-grid just means not connected to the power grid. So not connected to the power coming out of your walls. Off-grid systems work independently, so if the power goes out, they can still work because you are generating and storing your own power. There are a few ingredients or things that you need to get things going.

• Power generation

• Power storage (Optional / Depends)

• A router

• A server

Let’s start with an extremely simple example. I’m using a Rasberry Pi single board computer that is powered by USB. On it, I have Ubuntu as an operating system, and the tech stack I mentioned above, Rocketchat for the chat server - Calibre for the ebooks - and Plex for the Media server. For the router, I am using a Glinet AR150 travel router that is powered by USB. For power generation, I am using a cheap 9 watt folding solar panel from harbor freight they go on sale often for like $30.

The router and server are connected by USB to the solar panel, which is powering both. But if the sun goes down, so does the network, because in this example I am missing the power storage component.

If I add a portable battery bank to the mix, then I can power the router and server with the battery bank and recharge it off solar! What if the solar charging and the battery were combined?

We don’t have to just use portable battery banks, we can use anything that can produce power for USB devices. I have a ton of Ryobi tools because they all use the same battery. So during natural disasters, I can use a cordless chainsaw to cut fallen branches, but also use an inverter attachment to use the tool battery as a battery bank.

So you can start to see that we have wiggle room in how we setup the network, how we power it, and how generation works. You don’t have to use a Rasberry pi as the server, you can use an arduino, or a NUC, or an old laptop. You don’t have to use a battery bank to power the network, you can direct power it off solar and just have a daytime network. Or use your car, or a laptop to power the network via USB. Hell, you can hook up a bike to a generator and use pedal power. You don’t have to use the travel router, you can use the router you already have in your house, or an even bigger one with higher transmit capabilities. All of these parts can be switched out. The key to remember here is to have the core components in the system:

• Power generation

• Power storage (Optional / Depends)

• A router

• A server

Powering larger items

If you opt to use a laptop, external tool batteries, or to run a regular sized router, you will need access to Alternating Current (AC) power. The power that comes from the wall is AC power, solar power and the power that comes from battery banks directly are Direct Current (DC) power. So you need either a generator (they always have built-in inverters) or if you have a solar system or DC batteries, you need an inverter. I have a full article here, that goes over how to build your own DIY off-grid solar system, all the details behind what you need, batteries, all that good stuff.
You can replicate the same idea in the article but on a small to medium scale. Below is what you need to generate solar power:

• Solar Panels

• Charge controller

• Batteries

• Inverter

All the details are in that article on how to connect them but the goal is to have a place to generate electricity as long as the sun shines. You might not always have access to gasoline, plus gas generators kinda suck and are terrible for the environment. You can also buy pre-made kits, again, more info in that article. The important part of that is the inverter.

An inverter turns DC power, into AC power, allowing you to charge and power all the normal stuff you own. Inverters come in all shapes and sizes and you can hook up a huge inverter that can power a freezer, or a small one with just one plug. Either way that will depend on what you need. If you want to use a laptop as a server and a regular router, then you will need an inverter that can supply enough power to charge and power those things. This will add extra cost to building the main server setup or supply energy to nodes that propagate the network so there is a balance in sticking with low power USB devices with low range, and high power devices that need more infrastructure to charge, but have much better range.

Biomimicry: DIY solar-powered mycelium like network using nodes to spread the network

At the moment we have a small network of nearby neighbors who are connecting to the off-grid server network and enjoying the services.

But the goal isn’t to just give our immediate neighbors access to the network, it has to grow. We can take notes from mycelium, the network of fungal threads that grows in decay. Mycelium spreads by using mushrooms or nodes that come up, spread their spores and more mycelium grows. Our network is like mycelium, it comes from the decay of old systems and interconnects to share resources just like mycelium connects plants together to help them message for resources. The nodes come up and help spread the network out, sharing more information with the rest of the beings around them.

So how do we grow our network? By making nodes, or beacons that can connect to our router and basically act as a copy. This allows other clients who may be farther away to have access to the same network and the same services. The nodes will give off their own WiFi signal and they help the network reach more people than just one router.

How to make nodes/beacons

Most modern routers have the ability to use WDS to basically copy another router wirelessly. Different routers call it different things, some routers if you go into the admin console and change the mode - call it repeater mode. Others have a specific mode you can set the router to called WDS. Either way if the router is capable of doing it, there should be an option in the admin panel of the router to change the function to act either as a repeater or to use WDS to connect to another router.

When you turn WDS or repeating on, you will select your main router network as the source, then the new node router will reboot and basically clone our main router. With the new nodes online, more clients can join in and have access to the server or even start running their own servers on the network. Again you can use a generator or make basically mobile power stations to distribute through the area that charge off solar and have inverters to power AC items. I will go into more detail in the section about the network in action when it comes to communities. But as an example:

Powering nodes/beacons

The most important thing here is getting power to the beacons. We are under the assumtion here that regular internet access is gone. You might still have power, which in that case whatever. But if your area loses power then you have to figure out how to get things powered. For DC things, battery banks and small electronics can power the new nodes, and the batteries recharged by someone with off grid solar or a generator. For AC things you need a battery and an inverter or a generator to run things.

Increasing range

WiFi range depends on a lot, the transmit strength of the router, the location, obstacle densities, the client’s network card, the list goes on. There is a lot that goes into it and it’s hard to say real range values because every person's circumstances are different. But in general, the more power your router draws, the more transmit capabilities it has. The bigger your antenna, the better coverage you can get.

In this example, I am using travel routers to show the absolute bare minimum coverage you can get from a router that runs off USB and with small antennas.

So with the default antennas you can get about 60 feet from node to node before the signal starts dropping. Adding a 3 inch antenna to the beacon allowed for them to be spaced 100 feet apart. Both the router and the beacon with antennas scrapped from another router I found in the trash can get like 150 feet of range. And just setting the router in front of an old satellite dish, literally just sitting in front of the metal parabola boosted the range to 170 feet.

So about half a city block from node to node can propagate the network. But these are just for node to node. Let’s assume we left the default antennas on and connected a node to a router.

So we actually have 120 feet of coverage, the router and the node just have to be within range of each other, so the node then spreads the signal another 60 feet. Ok wow 120 feet isn’t a crazy distance. But keep in mind that with a router that is 1 inch x 1 inch big that runs off USB power, you can now connect people to the network in an almost four home diameter. Now imagine if you used a real router, even just a basic one, the amount of signal coverage you could get?!

A regular off the shelf router has way more transmit power than this tiny little router, even with the default antennas I can pick up the signal from an incredible distance with no modifications. There also are bigger routers with two antennas for basically the same cost as the one I’m using ($35) that still run on USB power but has almost double the transmit capabilities.

The biggest thing I want to show is even with the absolute tiniest hardware, you can make a network.

Antennas and DIY weirdness

I won’t get too into this but you can make antennas that boost the signal of routers out of some pretty basic stuff like chicken wire. This chicken wire parabola beams wifi signals almost three miles! All it’s made out of is wood and chicken wire stapled to it.

You can also make pretty simple antennas with brass disks and a default antenna, this one got a couple miles of range too out of basic materials.

Pirate beacons: Every office building and tower as a node

If you look at buildings, office buildings, really any commercial building you might see antennas on their roofs.

Some of these might be cellular, but many times they can be used to blast WiFi signals from building to building. In an emergency situation you can plug these antennas into your network (power the antennas and then attach them to a node) you can increase your range to an insane degree. The legality of this is…more than likely illegal if you did it. But it’s something to keep in mind. Alternatively, you could just pay to install your own antenna on the building. No clue how much that would cost but that would be the best way without catching a felony. Either way, just saying pirate antennas sounds cool.

In terms of maximizing your range, elevation helps. Minimizing your obstructions also helps as well. The less stuff between your connections, the better off you will be. If you can’t get a good signal and are using a battery bank, and have no other options for elevation - just say fuck it and duct tape the bank, server and router together, tie it to a rope and on the other end tie a rock to it, then toss the rock around a tree branch and hoist the setup in the air. You might think I’m kidding but I’m serious, it will help the signal clear any ground obstacles. Obviously you dont need line of sight all the time, but it helps in a pinch if say you live in a brick house where the signal can’t get through.

Building on the foundation / Technical summary & steps

Summarizing the foundation we talked about the basic ingredients and necessary parts to understand the system, and from there tailor it to what you have or what you can get. Again, this is all open-ended and modular for you to build off of based on your circumstances. So we have our foundation:

• Power generation

• Power storage (Optional / Depends)

• A router

• A server

Now let’s walk through how to put it all together and the steps it takes to get things working. This will act as an overview of what to do. More details are included in the full build. Even if you aren’t using the same hardware, the steps will be the same, and some of the tips will still apply.

Steps to get this running:

Skip whatever you don’t want installed. I recommend having a landing page/blog using Hugo so it makes it easier for users to interact with the server / quickly understand what the hell is going on.

• Figure out how the system will be powered, and what hardware will be used.

• Get your router powered on and up and running, connect it to a network with internet access.

• Install Ubuntu on your device.

• Connect your Ubuntu device to the router with internet via Wifi.

• Run updates on the Ubuntu install.

• Install RocketChat via snap.

• Install Calibre.

• Download books, create libraries, and organize them on the server.

• Configure the Calibre content server to auto start at boot. (Scroll to the bottom)

• Configure the paths to your libraries if you created multiple in the Calibre service configuration file.

• Install Hugo via snap to make the landing page for the captive portal.

• Create new site in Hugo.

• Create new post in Hugo.

• Create a custom service to make hugo start at boot.

• Install your media server.

• Set media server service to start at boot.

• In the router: add static IP/IP reserve for the server, set the reserve to the MAC address of the wireless card of the server.

• Create guest wifi (if needed sometimes routers force you to use a captive portal) and set a captive portal to redirect to the now static IP of your server.

• Modify Hugo config to bind to the now static IP address.

• Modify Hugo post to include links to your other servers.

• Turn off interactive login so Ubuntu doesn’t have to log in, it will just boot and start everything.

• Enable SSH so you can remotely log into the server.

• Make sure the only WiFi the server can connect to is your router. Forget any other networks you connected to (if applicable). You want the server to boot and connect to the right network.

• Test with a client to see if everything routes correctly.

• Find power source for node.

• Power on the node and wait to fully boot.

• Login to the admin portal on the node. You may have to change the SSID or the network name to something like “Emergency Server Node”.

• Find where you can change the router function to either WDS mode or repeater mode, or cloning mode. Each router manufacturer is different.

• Make WDS or repeater mode point to the main router for the emergency network.

• Router will reboot, test the connection and see if you can reach the server services at the static IP of the server.

• Repeat for more nodes, find power, change the SSID, set to WDS or repeating mode, connect back to either a beacon or the main router if in range, test.

In general, that is what you need to do to get this running. Remember that this is modular, so you can install Ubuntu on a laptop and your router can be a huge one that runs off AC power. Whatever you choose, at least you know a path to walk on.

Full step-by-step build guide with Ubuntu + Raspberry Pi

Installing Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi

I am using Ubuntu to set all of this up, though alot of these commands will work for OSX. For windows, just download etcher and run the executable.

You can follow the official guide but I always have problems with using the rpi-imager that is mentioned in the docs. If you have to clear any data on an old SD card, the verification will fail and be all weird so your best bet is to use etcher.

First, download the package for Ubuntu, they have specific ones for the Raspberry Pi. Ubuntu Desktop is fine, and kinda preferable.

https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi

Next download etcher.

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Unzip etcher and run the etcher appimage.

sudo chmod + x balenaEtcher-1.7.9-x64.AppImage
./balenaEtcher-1.7.9-x64.AppImage

Wait a while for that to flash, then when etcher says its ready put your SD card into your pi and boot it. Follow the prompts, it’s really self explanatory. If you want during setup you can choose to auto login to the account. We aren’t going for security here but an easy-to-use plug-and-play server. If you don’t choose that you can always change it later.

Once you get logged in launch a terminal and update your stuff.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y 

That should get you updated with the latest packages and junk.

If you get an error about ‘waiting for the unattended-upgr’ or something, just wait, there are updates already being installed in the background.

Install RocketChat via snap

This is super easy.

sudo snap install rocketchat-server

Update: the latest version of Ubuntu might have problems with the snap package, if you have issues run this:

sudo snap info rocketchat-server --channel=3.x/stable 

You can find the list of services by changing directories to /etc/systemd/system. These services are auto configured by snap so don’t create your own.
Check if the server is properly running.

sudo systemctl status snap.rocketchat-server.rocketchat-server.service

Set the service to auto boot when your server turns on.

sudo systemctl enable snap.rocketchat-server.rocketchat-server.service

Navigate to http://localhost:3000 and register for an account. Registration works offline too, this is a local install. Make new rooms and whatever.

Install Calibre

The Calibre client also includes the server but we will have to make a custom service in order to have the content server autostart on boot and serve up our libraries.

Run this to download and install Calibre.

sudo -v && wget -nv -O- https://download.calibre-ebook.com/linux-installer.sh | sudo sh /dev/stdin

Then just type calibre to start it.

calibre

Go through the wizard and select where your default library will go. We can add new ones so it’s ok to put it wherever, but the default works. On the next screen for devices choose smartphone. Then finish.

Libraries and organizing large amounts of books

I made a giant zip of books if you want to import them, or pick and choose what domains you want. Look at the top of the article for all the info in what’s in there.

Calibre has a hard time organizing books when it comes to the content server. You can’t easily set them into categories or just import them into folders. What you can do is make separate libraries for each “category”, just copy your general folder structure as separate libraries.

You can see that inside the “Food” folder of the books, there are other categories, if you just added them into a new library called food, you would have a shit ton of books that are from different parts of the food category. To make it easier for end users to find specific books you can make separate libraries for each. For example ‘Food - Animals & Farming’ ‘Food - Food Production’ excetera. That way when a user visits your book server it looks organized like this:

You can break out the domains if you want and add tags so if you are in “Infrastructure & Construction” and want to find info on super adobe, you can search that and adding tags to books that include super adobe info will help narrow things down. So for each folder or category or type of book you have, break them into separate libraries.

Click the carrot next to Calibre Library and select Switch/create library

Choose to make a new library and select your directory of where it will be. Name it the category you want. It’s easier to place all of your libraries together in a central folder to make it easier, but you do you.

Then add your books for that category, click Add books then from folders and sub folders.

Press no when Multi file books comes up.

Keep doing this for each folder or category that you want separated out. I say this for my own library and the book repo I’ve included, but again, do whatever you want. Your library might only have a few categories or groups so this might not be needed, it’s way easier to just drop them into one folder and call it a day.

Setting up the Calibre Content Server to auto start at boot.

Calibre has a content server that you can start manually in the GUI by pressing the “Connect/Share” button, but we want the server to start automatically and start serving our library without having to interact with it.

Now we need to make a custom service to make it autostart.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/calibre-server.service 

A text editor will open, copy and paste this in.

[Unit]
Description=calibre Content server
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=mylinuxuser 
Group=mylinuxgroup
ExecStart=/usr/bin/calibre-server "/home/USER/Documents/Library/Food" "/home/USER/Documents/Library/Food - Technical Guides"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

• Change the user from “mylinuxuser” to whatever your username is when you set up your server. The group should be the same thing.

• Your execstart should be the same unless you installed Calibre in /opt, change it if you did a custom install.

• Manually add the path to each library separated by a space and quotes. This will allow Calibre to read that it’s a separate library and include it in your server. Do that for each one. If you dont know the path, change directories to your library folder (typically /home/youruser/) and then type “pwd” and that will print the working directory.

Press control + x to exit nano and press y to save your new file.

When you make changes to configuration files, you need to run a daemon reload to tell the machine to reload your configs.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl start calibre-server

You might have to stop the calibre server service if it throws an error. Just replace start up there with stop. Then re-run the start command.

sudo systemctl status calibre-server

Will show the server is running.

sudo systemctl enable calibre-server

Makes the service start at boot.

Making a landing webpage with Hugo

I hate web development and don’t have the time to fuck around and make something look nice. You might not have any experience with web development either, but Hugo makes it super easy to have a kinda polished looking webpage without dealing with some of the headaches of making web servers. Keep in mind that this is wildly insecure, but this is just a landing page for people to see when they first login.

sudo apt-get install hugo

Navigate to a directory you want the server info to live in, I just put it in /home/yourusernamehere.

hugo new site offgridserver 

Change that last part to whatever you want, that is what the directory will be called and it will auto populate all the server info into there.

cd offgridserver
git init
git submodule add https://github.com/theNewDynamic/gohugo-theme-ananke.git themes/ananke

So here you will choose a theme, you can use the one above or find more here:

https://themes.gohugo.io/ from there you cana replace the git location URL and use the theme. From experience, some themes have dependencies that don’t work well on ARM architectures like the Raspberry pi, so some might not work. Find what does and one you like.

Next you will edit your main config file. That should be in your hugo server directory called config.toml.

nano config.toml

baseURL = 'http://example.org/'
languageCode = 'en-us'
title = 'Community Emergency Server'
theme = 'ananke'

Change the title of the server, this will be displayed so change it to something legit. Then add the name of your theme. If you don’t know the proper name look in your hugo directory. /home/youruser/offgridserver/themes obviously change that info to how your directories are.

Next make a post!

hugo new posts/welcome.md

That will create a markdown file in /home/youruser/offgridserver/content/posts

nano welcome.md

---
title: "About This Server"
date: 2019-03-26T08:47:11+01:00
draft: false
---

This server was created to help people connect with eachother, share books, information, chat, share videos and in general help eachother in a time of need.


There are a ton of books to read and download: [Book Repository](http://192.168.8.147:8080)

If you want to chat with your neighbors: [Neighborhood Chat](http://192.168.8.147:3000)

Want to watch some videos? : [Video Streaming](http://192.168.8.147:8096)

Look out for eachother, and remember that we get though this together! Not alone!

So this all works in markdown and requires no coding on your end, so most people can quickly start a basic webserver no problem and let hugo handle everything else.

Change the IP addresses in this to the IP address of your server. If you don’t know that you can use some commands to pull that information.

sudo apt-get install net-tools -y

ifconfig

Your IP address will be different depending on if you used Wifi or an ethernet connection. But since we are sticking with Wifi your looking for the part that says wlp— that is your wireless card. Yours will look different but here is the gist.

wlp5s0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.68.121

So add that IP into your about page. If you are using an Nginx reverse proxy (more on that later) then you can just put whatever proxy domain you want or the IP.

Next start the hugo server. It should run on http://localhost:1313

hugo server

Making hugo start at boot and bind to an address

We are going to make a custom service for hugo as well.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/hugo.service

[Unit]
Description=(Runs Hugo Server on Boot)

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/home/youruser/offgridserver
ExecStart=/usr/bin/hugo server --bind 0.0.0.0 --baseURL http://192.168.8.146/

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Change the working directory to the correct one and the IP to your correct IP address. Then exit and save the file.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

When you make changes to configuration files, you need to run that to tell the machine to reload your configs.

sudo systemctl start hugo.service

Make the server start at boot

sudo systemctl enable hugo.service

Hugo throws errors with actual descriptions, so if you have problems you will know about it. If your server has errors it won’t run so see what the error says by running this command to show the output of the tool.

sudo systemctl status hugo.service

A big gotcha: be aware of this!

When you plug in your server and power it on, it will try to bind to an IP address. If your router isn’t fully running and able to supply an IP address your server will bind to nothing and won’t start correctly. So wait for your router to fully come up, then turn on your server. Or you can just wait for your router to come up, and restart the server, and when it comes back it will be able to bind to an IP address.

Installing Emby as a media server

Go the emby site and find the installer for Ubuntu Arm64

cd ~/Downloads
sudo pkg -i emby-server-deb < whatever version>arm64.deb

Emby will start on port 8096, go there and go through the setup wizard, and point to the folder you want the server to pull your music, movies, whatever.

Then set it to run at boot.

sudo systemctl enable emby-server.service

So from here you now have a chat server, a calibre server to host books and other files, a home page for your users to navigate to and go to your different sites, and a media server. Now we have to add the networking part of things to get the server connected to a router, then modify our configs with our static IP, then add our clients and eventually our nodes and their clients.

Enable SSH for remote Access

sudo apt install openssh-server
sudo ufw allow ssh

Getting our main router running

This part will depend on your router. This is less so an exact guide, than an overall guide. All of this will be in different places and look totally different. But almost every router will have the ability to do the actions, the specifics don’t matter when it comes to where exactly static IP addressing is, it’s more so knowing that you need to do it, and finding where that is in your router.

First thing we want to do is log into our router, change the SSID for the wifi, and set a static IP for our server so every time it boots, it’s at the same place.

Typically the IP address of your router will be 192.168.1.1, my router is sett to 192.168.8.1 by default. There is a sticker under the router that will have all the info to log into the admin console.

You need to have the MAC address of the Wifi card to set your static IP.

To do that run ifconfig and take note of the MAC address.

ifconfig

Where you see ether and some data after that, that is the MAC address. If you are going to hardwire the server and the router together (I don’t really recommend it unless you have latency or speed issues with Wifi) use the mac from the lo category instead of wlan. In this case we want the server to automatically connect to our network over wifi, so we use the MAC address of the wifi card on wlan0.

Disconnect your server from the main network and connect to the guest network so you can see the proper IP address that the router assigns it on the guest network (It might be different)

Ok this is a weird quirk with my router here, in order to do a captive portal you have to have it on a guest wifi. Most routers will let you just do a captive portal on any network but whatever. Because of this, I am going to add my server to the guest wifi network.

Next because my router requires it I will add my guest wifi information and change the SSID of that. I’m setting the security to open so anyone can access the network without a password. I don’t want people knocking on my door asking for the password to access the network, or stopping people who need access from getting it because they can’t login. So leave it open.

Next we will set the captive portal, so when anyone connects to the wifi network, they will be redirected to our hugo server and the landing page we made.

http://192.168.9.147:1313/posts/about

By default with hugo your posts will be accessed by navigating to the /posts/whateveryounamedyouraticle directory.

A tip about having a guest wifi network

If you noticed our router is at 192.168.8.1 but we are setting our IP to the server to 192.168.9.147. Why is that? Because we now have two different networks, a LAN network that requires authentication, and another that is open so we can have the captive portal. It’s easier to have the server connect to the guest wifi, mostly because we are forced to by this router, but mostly because it makes it easier to manage and easier to access.

By putting the server on the guest network, where clients will connect, you save yourself from having to modify firewall rules to make the .8 network talk to the .9 network and it’s a huge pain in the ass. Yes this is less secure. But we want anyone to be able to access the server and not have to play with firewall rules when there is an emergency or the power is out.

If your router doesn’t require the use of a guest network to do captive portals, ignore this.

But wait, with changes to static IP addresses, come changes to config files.

So now we set our server with a static IP address, but now our config for hugo had a different IP address! So now we have to edit the hugo config to point to the right IP!

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/hugo.service

[Unit]
Description=(Runs Hugo Server on Boot)

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/home/youruser/offgridserver
ExecStart=/usr/bin/hugo server --bind 0.0.0.0 --baseURL http://192.168.9.147/

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

sudo systemctl stop hugo.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl start hugo.service

Ok, now we need to change our post in hugo because we have the wrong IP there!

cd /home/where you put your hugo info/content/posts

nano welcome.md

---
title: "About This Server"
date: 2019-03-26T08:47:11+01:00
draft: false
---

This server was created to help people connect with eachother, share books, information, chat, share videos and in general help eachother in a time of need.


There are a ton of books to read and download: [Book Repository](http://192.168.9.147:8080)

If you want to chat with your neighbors: [Neighborhood Chat](http://192.168.9.147:3000)

Want to watch some videos? : [Video Streaming](http://192.168.9.147:8096)

Look out for eachother, and remember that we get though this together! Not alone!

Save the file, hugo should autorefresh but if it doesn’t just stop and start the service again.

sudo systemctl stop hugo.service

sudo systemctl start hugo.service

Restart your server after confirming a few things:

• Your server is set to automatically connect to the correct wifi, all other wifi networks are disabled from automatically connecting or forgotten.

• Your services are all set to automatically start, reboot your server and navigate to them to see if they work automatically. If not go back and check if you enabled them.

Then you can reboot the server, then use another computer or your phone to connect to your new guest wifi and see if the captive portal brings you to your hugo landing page, then to all of your new services.

Congrats! You now have a server running services that anyone can see by joining your wifi network. They are greeted with a landing page with whatever information you want to add and can navigate to your sites.

Creating and connecting nodes

To connect a node to your network and expand it you will need to connect your other router to your main router using either WDS or by putting the router into repeater or extender mode. I want to stress this: every router manufacturer will use different terms. Best thing is to play with it until things work.

Some routers will use WDS as a completely separate mode, others will have extender modes that use WDS or call it mesh networking, it’s annoying but you have to figure out what the router will do by connecting it, and if it doesn’t work, factory resetting it. In this example, the router has a separate WDS setting.

Some routers also can work in WDS mode with different settings, so you can name the SSID something else and have it work as a clone of your main router, just under a different name. It might be worth it to change the SSID and set the captive portal for the router beforehand. So if you put it into WDS/Repeater/Extender mode, it has the settings you want. I changed mine to say Emergency Beacon 1.

After setting the SSID and the captive portal settings, set it into WDS/Repeater/Extender mode, again depending on the router.

Typically this will ask for the network of your main router, find it and connect it. Your second router will reboot and if you changed the SSID it will look like a separate network. But keep in mind this will act as if you had connected to the main router, even if you are out of range from the main router, but in range of the beacon. Pretty cool.

Connect your client to the beacon and double check if your captive portal works, redirects you to your hugo landing page and that you can access all the services you are running on your server.

If it all works, from here you can expand, add more routers, add more servers, give access to more clients and like mycelium spread the communication and information network.

Expanding the Network

So we have now made a network with nodes that connect wirelessly and added more nodes to that network. Or we just have a simple off grid network either way there are other things you can add to it to make things better from here. More than likely I will implement some of these in version two of this, but for now I leave these as ideas and possibilities to add onto the network and some more uses that you might find interesting or useful.

Adding wireless security cameras

Wyze makes pretty cheap IoT devices, which I have mixed feelings about the internet of shit, but I digress. There are really amazing things out that are legit useful. One of them is Wyze outdoor cameras. They are wireless, rechargeable cameras that can work offline and also have a basestation. They are waterproof and have night vision built in. You can record motion even offline to an SD card. All you do is set them up, put them into travel mode and connect your base station to your network. You can add four per base station.
You can use these when you have internet and also when you don’t have it.

LoRa for long-range communication backbones

To add more resiliency to the network you can use LoRa devices that use radio frequencies to communicate. CellSol is a cool project that works like the same idea here, only on a different communication protocol. They are usually super small and require very little electricity to run. They are great for bridging the gap when it comes to long distances.

Internet in a box project

Another cool concept is the internet in a box project. It includes videos, maps, educational platforms, a bunch of information. Not sure how it would work when it comes to our network here because it makes it’s own Wifi signal and network, which might mess things up but it’s worth investigating. Maybe you find something from that project and just install it on your server your own way so you have control of how it works.

Who the hell knows, only you do

I really can’t think of every single thing you can do with this. But you might have an idea of something cool. Build it! Share it! Iterate on this as a starting point. Share what you have done with everyone you can in the commons of the internet. Individually we can only imagine our own horizons, collectively, our horizons combine into the infinite.

Datarunners, closing the gap & seeing it in action.

While imagining the uses for this network and thinking about connecting communities, this got me thinking about bridging longer distances. Not every community will have someone who knows how to use RF to send digital data, or it might not be working for whatever reason.

Let’s say there are two communities with their own autonomous networks, but for whatever reason, say for instance a mountain between them, it’s really hard to relay nodes to connect the two networks. I imagined data runners, people who travel between places with servers to share data. Basically a sneakernet. Nothing new. But it’s interesting to think about now. Datarunners can have these servers and routers strapped to an ebike, ride between communities and share information. In the communities there can be something like a torrent server that is seeking files. Once a data runner comes within range of the community network, the seeker starts to download the files and then that is shared with the larger network. One community might use it to share news or important information in an encrypted format, datarunners can move that information physically, either because there isn’t internet access, or to circumvent surveillance, whatever. I guess they would be like digital encrypted mailmen, only that they don’t have to deliver the data, it just connects and does it for them.
This also segways into creating mutual aid networks even in areas that have no communication methods. Communities sharing food with eachother, sharing information, datarunners aren’t just traveling to move data, but are working with mutual aid groups in areas to move supplies and information. That might be news, or updates to the regional database of supplies for the community confederation to see what each place has and to move resources efficiently.

This got me thinking about the ways that I can do this right now. I posted recently about an ebike that I charge on my offgrid solar system. I can put the router and server in the side bags, and use a solarpanel strapped to the back to charge battery banks. I could make my cargo trailer into a mobile solar power station, and charge my bike when it needs to recharge. All without the need for an outside resource. There could be a blackout and I could still move goods and information around at 25 miles per hour. Moving between areas that might be hard to bridge and syncing our files with their networks. Sounds pretty out there, and pretty futuristic in a way, but the future is here, a better future is possible, we just have to build it!

Towards a slow internet: a symbiosis of technology and nature

Directly powering a server, a router and a node with solar power means that when the sun isn’t around, neither is the network. It’s a reminder of nature, and the fact that everything we do relies on nature to work. We live in a truly unsustainable time where everything is available 24/7 because we extract fossil fuels and burn them to keep things running. The internet is infinite but the resources to run the internet is not. Running things on solar really points out how interdependent we are with the sun, with our methods of harnessing and dispersing energy.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html is a great showcase of this. A website that runs entirely off solar power, it occasionally goes offline. When the energy required to run things runs out, it goes down. This is to say that sometimes we need to work with natural processes, learn that we come from the earth, we are part of the earth’s systems.
That is also to say that solar generation requires exploitation. The rare earth metals and materials needed are mined from the global south and used to make these panels to generate electricity. Degrowth means putting an end to extractive processes, and moving towards truly sustainable means. How do we make solar power without rare and finite materials? How do we move from supply chains based in capitalist exploitation and instead move to passive means of generation? Ways that we can reuse ewaste and other items thrown into scrapyards and forgotten instead of mining and manufacturing new things. How do we mine our waste to find the materiels to make new things, instead of destroying the earth for the things we already have lying around in giant piles? These are things to think about. Solar power (PV solar power) is great, but we can’t ignore where it comes from, the people and countries their production impact, and the reality of our situation.

We know the issues, we know shits fucked. What are some of the solutions?
Moving into a place of symbiosis with nature, and learning from the natural environment. Mimicking what we see in this complex system. But wait, we need electricity for the important stuff. Medical equipment, mobility aids, safety systems. Yes, but let’s try to imagine other ways of generating electricity that don’t require extraction. What if we tool boilers from scrap yards and filled them with metal heat conductive piping with an inlet and an outlet and filled them with sand to make a sand battery. Passive solar uses no extractive minerals, just the power of the sun to boil collected rain water in a chamber. This steam drives a turbine to generate electricity, the steam is collected into sand batteries that radiate heat and capture heat naturally, another boiler is run from the excess heat left from the sand batteries. The remnant steam is then collected and then used as drinking water from going through the distillation process or recirculated through the system to cut down on water usage.
We can make passive generation systems out of scrap, we can cut e-waste streams with circular economies and economies of reuse, instead of destruction. There are other paths.

Expanding Horizons, Use cases, Ideas, Prefiguration, and Dual Power

So far this network has been about emergency situations, where we want to share information with each other without the hassle of having to develop things in the field, and without relying on the capitalist infrastructure that underpins our society today. But this really isn’t only about emergency times, because with these ingredients you can create so many different configurations and types of networks. We can move from different uses, imagine new ways that autonomous, off grid networks can bring to our communities and to our daily lives. There are ways to use this technology in highly beneficial ways. The goal in this section is to offer up ideas and ways of using this, along with other tech, in situations and areas that we normally don’t think about when it comes to autonomous networks. Parts of this will be speculative, a play on what if scenarios, but most of it will be for the real world.

The backbone of the community

You’ve been talking to your neighbors, maybe sharing food and supplies with each other. Other people in your apartment building are thinking about forming a tenant union. You and a group of friends want to turn the barren turf grass curbed areas and empty lots near you into a food forest by doing some guerilla gardening. Sure we can all share information on twitter, discord, facebook for the boomers. For more secure things we can use signal and protonmail. But what if there was a way to foster even more autonomy when it came to local organizing? So you decide to make a backbone network, one that will connect everyone in emergencies. But during normal times it becomes the community second, secure internet. Instead of getting together on discord to talk about what we are planting in the community garden, we use an Element server, with end-to-end encryption. We host videos on a media server that normally would get taken down if posted to social media. We switch people over to federated social media platforms and away from social media corporations that use surveillance capitalism to sell our personal data. We share books on the network, music, movies, help organize the tenant union on encrypted chats. We start pooling our money to source small solar power generation stations to put on our rooftop and around the block. We know things are changing, we are trying to make them good changes, but the world feels like it’s going to hell. Well. It kinda always had been.

It starts happening. You see more and more armed right wing groups in the streets and at protests. Your trans friends have to walk with someone home from fear of being attacked. Your state starts banning certain books in schools and eventually libraries. The election so many were hoping for goes the other way. The new government puts in draconian laws to monitor people for a list of crimes, sodomy, homosexuality, for reading banned books, for sharing the realities of the violence you see in the streets. The videos you upload of police beatings get taken down. The internet we thought was open, slowly becomes censored, keywords stopped. The new government uses the big data of tech corps to track people. Keyword warrants go out for anyone searching online for banned topics. “How to get an abortion”, “How do I know I’m trans”, “The history of slavery in the US”. Now all a crime to look into.

Your network becomes the only way to escape the grasp of the state. You airgap the network from the greater internet, keeping your communications safe between everyone. Everything is encrypted by default, and no intelligence agency can see what you are typing and sending. The videos that once were banned are played freely from projectors into the street. Showing people the reality of things. You spread your network more. Rolling blackouts happen from climate change ravaging the power grid. But your community has solar generator stations, now a lot after pooling your resources together. Your power stations help people power their medical devices, charge their wheelchairs, power the network, charge people’s devices to stay connected. You go from block to block talking to people, offering food, security and community. They ask if there is a way to help. There are a ton of ways, helping in the community gardens that have taken over every space of soil and rooftop. Helping with the community defense circle to keep the cops and right wing militias away from the community. They have computers, phones, routers that were sitting in the dark, now with power from a micro power station. Their routers aren’t special, but they don’t have to be. You connect them as nodes back to the network. More people add their own servers and information. Things spread, more blocks are taken back by the people. The chatrooms are full of people organizing supply runs, working with other communities, forming a federation of communities. Your book server gave people the info they need to make water filters, to make wind generators, to fix roads, whatever needs to be done gets done. People can talk freely, and live freely. You carve out the freedom you have been needing together. As a collective.

Spaces and Places

What if your local park had it’s own little server that had information about the plants you planted, the wildflower seeds you spread around a couple months back, and information on how others could help?

What if your local coffee shop looked like a normal one. But at any moment you had access to thousands of revolutionary texts. The once normal and quiet coffee shop becomes a hub of activists and revolutionaries.

A music venue has free music, when you come inside you are able to download albums for free. Musicians can release special tracks for the network, stuff you can’t get anywhere else. You are the first person to hear your favorite band’s new song after seeing them live.

It’s an interesting thing to think of sharing information in specific times and places. With the internet we are so used to the pervasive roar of data all around us all the time. Places are unique and some of the experiences you can have there are unique. It isn’t the same to look at pictures of a place, when you could go there and get a unique experience. A blend of the digital world and reality but also kept in check. This little digital world only exists in your local park, at the coffee shop, at this specific music venue. Picrust is an interesting example of this, websites in a point of space.

Protests and demonstrations

Most police departments have cell site simulators, AKA stingrays, that basically trick your phone into thinking there is a cell phone tower nearby with a strong signal. Once connected, the police harvest the data that any cell phone in the area is sending out. Unencrypted communications, text messages, phone calls, what websites your visiting or have open that are calling out to a server somewhere.
With autonomous and encrypted local servers protesters can create their own networks to stay connected while also not being connected to cellular service. With travel routers being powered by battery banks in backpacks. Multiple people in the crowd with a node, so if one person gets separated, the network stays connected. Encrypted messaging that never hits a cell phone tower, sharing pictures, data and map information.

Tiny Banned Book Library

As more states and school districts work to stifle access to information and censor what the youth can have access to, the more ways we have to find to circumvent these bans. Bring a router and a server to school, keep it in a bag. Plug them into a spot that’s hidden between a folding room divider. In the back of filing cabinets. Boot your chromebook into an OS off a USB and run Calibre. Broadcast all the books that they ban. Broadcast information about youth liberation, about the destructiveness of an educational system based in white supremacy. Give everyone access to books about deschooling, zines about where to get hormones, find healthcare, or get access to birth control. They won’t know how to stop it. They won’t know who is doing it. Never tell anyone where the servers are. Show up every day and broadcast the information they don’t want you to see. Make a walking tiny library of banned books and banned information.

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View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

Introduction

The counterculture of the 1960s in combination with all of the political and societal changes of the time will bring vivid images to anyone living in the US or UK, and it remains the closest we have been in the imperial core to a revolution. A lot can be said about this historical time, and there are plenty of historians and people who lived through those times who can better articulate the history. If you want to learn more there are plenty of amazing documentaries about these times and I encourage you to delve deeper. So I will save the history lesson and invite you to look into what all was going on. I do think it’s important to add some historical context and background so I’ll be explaining the background history of some of these ideas.

From the Civil Rights movement, to indigenous sovereignty movements like AIM, the women’s rights and feminist movements, the Latino movements like the brown berets, Young Lords, and the NFWA, the LGBTQA+ rights movements all coalesced around the same time. Though almost all of these struggles, fights, and solidarity movements existed far into the past, at that moment of the 60’s-70’s there was an explosion in the popular imagination, of the social change that seemed to be happening all at the same time. The psychedelic movement combined with the social change and upheaval to create a massive cultural shift from the suits and suburbs of 1950’s white America into the vision of the hippies and radicals we all imagine.

And it suddenly vanished. Neoliberalism took over the psychedelic and social revolution happening at the time through the state’s usual methods of jailing, assassinating, silencing, and lying about the people at the heads of these various movements. Because many of them hinged on a central leadership, things quickly fell apart. In that crumbling, capitalists took advantage of the government infiltrating and destroying many radical movements. Capital took radical aesthetics and made it into a commodity. In this article, I’m going to try and break down the major points I see as connecting Solarpunk and a new counterculture beginning into the ideas of Acid Communism. More apt would be Mark Fisher’s description of Acid Communism as “Post Capitalist Desire”. I want to try and examine how movements break apart, and how we can learn from that to stop it from happening again when a new revolution or movement, or rejection of the current order begins to take a major form.

In my time looking at solarpunk, I genuinely see it as a nice catch-all term for a host of different philosophies and political lenses. Really it boils down to a way to show people a radically different future. Not just through the aesthetics but also by putting the spotlight on the political undercurrents that serve as the foundation of the idea. Though I am not stuck with the term it’s a good way of explaining a new push towards a different path of the future. Creating a drive towards new futures instead of old, forgotten, and failed pasts will require not just writing but art, music, and education to move people to act in the real world, creating real change. Post Capitalist Desire combined with the political education of today along with an aesthetics can help people wrap their heads around a new future. Very few people really have the time to care about abstract sci-fi utopias. You have to show people what the future can look like, and how we get to that future with real action, real social change, and real reimaginings of what our world can look like.

Black Music, Black Art, Civil Rights and the Inspiration for the early Counterculture.

Music, art, and literature have always played an incredible role in shaping culture. No two genres of music shaped the 20th century more than jazz and blues. Arguably jazz and the blues helped spread the social change of civil rights and produced some of the most potent protest songs of the era. Both were incredible musical artforms that also acted as a form of sung literature and a method of protest during times when open protest could mean death. Jazz was viewed for a long time as distinctly Black music and largely disregarded and hated by white society. However, jazz musicians were on the cutting edge of music production and of music composition and jazz became wildly popular with the rebels of the ‘20s-’30s. Capitalism doing what it did best attempted to commodify jazz with record labels creating their own all-white jazz bands. Black jazz musicians were often banned from performing at major music venues of the time and so all-white jazz bands that emulated their styles and performances took center stage. They made off with the record label money, while few black jazz musicians made it to the same economic levels as the people that ripped them off. There still were amazing Black jazz musicians who innovated and made their own distinct sounds and styles. There wasn’t a mass stage for Black protesting to happen (safely) at the time however, music circumvented that all by spreading the words of social change throughout America. The first majorly influential jazz protest song would be Billie Holiday’s 1939 rendition of “Strange Fruit” which reflected on the history and reality of lynchings in America. The release of this song caused such a strong backlash that the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger carried out a plot to give heroin to Billie, then when she used it she was thrown into prison for almost 2 years. After which she went back to performing on stage but was largely blacklisted from performing, the dip in shows meant she did sex work on the side to make ends meet. She checked herself into a hospital to get care however at the commands of Anslinger she was handcuffed to a hospital bed and refused medical care. She then died of heart and lung complications. The state had used its power to lash out and crush someone who sang about the injustices happening in America. Her performances and her music were so powerful in fostering rebellion that she had to be assassinated. Just like every person murdered by the state, their lives and messages lived on. This would happen time and time again to Black people who took a stand during this time, even in the face of death their legacies lived on as inspiration for more people to pick up where they left off.

WWII also exacerbated the chaos, anger, and frustration Black people felt and lived through. Many Black veterans risked their lives in segregated units fighting for the United States. When they saw what life could be like outside of the racism and segregation of the US when fighting in Europe. They were treated as people. Then came back to the US after fighting in the war to be denied the rights they fought for.

In the post-war chaos, a new form of jazz would differentiate itself from the easy listening white jazz of the ‘40s. Bebop and later Free Jazz. The musicians involved with bebop and later free jazz would directly influence not only the civil rights movement but the counterculture and psychedelic movements as well.

The Blues, Rock & Roll, Whitewashing, and Capitalism

The blues evolved from gospel and Black spirituals combined with work songs that at the beginning were more like poetry combined with call and response songs. Eventually, the lyrics got added with the guitar to form a unique sound. It spread mostly in the south and combined with various forms of ragtime jazz that sounds close to what we know as blues today. The blues (and jazz) were a major catalyst for the change happening within the Black community during the Harlem Renaissance. And it was touted as being the art form of the Black oppressed people and an art form that rejected black capitalism and assimilationism. Blues music grew mostly in the south but exploded when the first blues recordings happened. The first recordings were made by a Black woman named Mamie Smith in the ‘20s and it was so popular that “Race Records” became a thing and white record labels started paying attention to the Black people they so far completely ignored. White record labels only cared about this new form of music that had been circulating in the south after they could make money from it.

The blues grew in popularity and the lyrics grew from short stories about day-to-day life to much deeper topics. Racism, sexism, incarceration, living in this world while Black. They became beacons of reflection for Black people and arguably was the first mass media outside of newspapers and books that could hold a collective idea of Blackness from the south to the north. There was the ability for Black stories, protest songs and lyrics of dissent to be heard in the juke joints, bars, homes, and churches of people across the nation. The blues transformed over time into Black acoustic folk music and then fused again with new forms of jazz to create Rhythm and Blues. After WWII the blues guitar licks became electrified and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Elmore James started producing songs that would become the basis for Rock and Roll to exist.

Elvis Presley is a great example of capitalism co-opting and defanging an artform. Though Elvis said he was inspired by blues musicians. His music could be carbon copies of blues licks, just with the lyrics changed for a mass, mostly white audience. His success skyrocketed while the people who created the genre, who sang about the injustices happening in America were overshadowed, and most never saw very much commercial fame outside of Black communities. Record labels saw an opportunity with R&B and blues and wanted to use the dissent and excitement spawned from them to make money. So they signed and funded countless (mostly all white) bands to record music as this new profitable genre. It was a continuation of what happened to jazz, capital saw an opportunity, took creative and social power away from the people who pioneered the genre, then ostracized them for not falling in line. But again just like jazz, there was chaos that was coming post-WWII and musicians like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elmore James, BB King, and Fats Domino that were the rock equivalent to bebop and jazz.

What Do Music, Literature, and Art Have Anything To Do With Civil Rights and the ‘60s Counterculture?

Everything.

Art, music, and literature circumvent logic. They are methods and vessels for messages, feelings, and desires that interact with logic but target another major thing, emotion. Emotion and empathy are the fastest ways to teach and learn. It’s one thing to learn historical accounts of events. It’s another to hear someone sing about their experience. It’s another to see the artists’ portrait of what happened or how they felt. It’s another thing to read the first-hand account of what happened by someone who was there and really feel their emotions.

We put a lot into logical thinking but much of our existence is in the illogical and emotional realms. The key is to balance logic with emotion to convey not just logical fact, but emotion as well, to target empathy in the person to feel something about what is being said.

Radical change isn’t just with logic and facts, emotions and empathy are needed to spur action. Art, music, and literature aren’t just media to consume but the tools and vessels to share emotion combined with logic.

Beatniks, Gay G.I.’s, and Isolated Housewives

Every civil rights movement or group at the core is fighting inequality, violence, and the normality that excluded them. Civil rights will always foster a counterculture as long as the dominant culture is exclusive and violent to those marginalized. Every single marginalized group has a shared experience of not feeling part of the dominant society and yet at the same time, part of it in some ways. The issues and struggles of all marginalized people are intersectional. With that you see countercultures being created from all sides, areas, races, identities, and socio-economic backgrounds. If you are left out of society, you have something to change.

Some of the early waves of what would later be the hippies was a group called the beatniks. As with anything the term would come to be a negative one, and a term used to sell useless shit. But it started as a conception by Jack Kerouac in 1948 of an anti-conformist youth that was growing at that time. The “beatdown” generation was where the term originated from because the generation born from the late 20’s into the late 30’s had in general been beaten down. From WWI veteran fathers, then the great depression, and into the horrors of WWII, isolation, poverty, heteronormativity, and white supremacy. There were large swaths of people who felt left behind and excluded from “normal society”. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs were the prominent figures in the beat literary genre. All of them were writers and artists living in New York and San Fransico at differing times. It started out as a literary genre but grew from writing and poetry into art and music. But this group of friends really mirrored more of what was happening in 1948 and into the early 50’s. Living in low-income areas in New York city they frequented jazz bars that were mostly Black. This was in general extremely uncommon at the time for white people even in New York City to be in Black jazz clubs. Though New York City was better than the south in terms of segregation and Jim Crow laws, the city was still deeply segregated and racism was the norm.

At the time there were two distinct genres of jazz. The clean, easy listening jazz that had been appropriated from Black musicians. And the fast-paced, extremely experimental bebop genre that was growing in popularity in the Black community. Bebop was a simultaneous rejection and embrace of musical theory, a rejection of what the record labels wanted, and a rejection of the smooth jazz that played in white suburban homes. The movement towards a new Black musical subgenre coincided with a movement towards radical societal change.

With the beats living on the fringes of society in art and music circles, there was also the fact that Jack Kerouac could be considered Bisexual (though he never said he was, he did have sexual and romantic relationships with men and women) and Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs were both outwardly gay in a time when being gay could be deadly. Allen Ginsburg was actually sent to a psychiatric hospital after being arrested and was “treated” for his “homosexual tendencies” after which he wrote one of his most famous works: Howl. The beat generation and the counterculture growing around them, in New York City and San Fransico at the time involved people who intersected on the fringes of society. People who did not want to live the “normal” lives of mid century capitalist America and could not. Every community was connected in their exclusion from “normal” polite society.

Wearing a Straight Mask

It was potentially life-threatening to be gay in the ‘50s, either by losing your job, being dishonorably discharged from the military, being black listed, potentially being labeled a “pervert” by people around you, or just outright murdered. Previous to 1962 you could be arrested and charged with “sodomy” for the crime of having sex with someone the same gender as you. Many people also were forced into mental institutions, which was a very common occurrence at the time. One of the few solaces LGBTQA+ people had were in clandestine gay bars. Clandestine because establishments thought to be gay clubs would be routinely raided by police. At the beginning of the cold war both Stalinist Soviet Russia and the US used queer people as a weapon and a wedge. In both countries being queer was illegal/punishable with imprisonment and in the case of Stalinist Soviet Russia, being gay could land you in prison. Queer people were viewed as “a sign of fascism” or as “a sign of communism” depending on where they were in the world. The US state and the US state propaganda machine (popular media and advertisements) pushed the idea of the white nuclear family during this time. The ideals of mid-century post-war conformity. Conformity to what society expected of people of the time, which was to conform to heteronormativity. This left so many people in the dark, hiding from their families and from themselves. Being forced to wear a straight mask while either living their true life in secret or not living their life at all. Even with this social pressure and hatred, queer people found amazing ways to be queer, find ways in the bleak landscape of 50’s America to have hope and find joy with each other. There were two very important books and groups that emerged in 1951 and 1955 that laid the groundwork for the gay rights movement to kick off. Donald Webster Cory wrote a book in 1951 called "The Homosexual in America” that was an absolute revelation and in the book he argued publicly that queer people were an oppressed people.

“He associated gay life with democracy, freedom,
and healthy expression, and opposed it to totalitarianism. Homosexuals, he
claimed, “are seeking to extend freedom of the individual, of speech, press, and
thought to an entirely new realm.”

- The Liberal 1950s? Reinterpreting Postwar
American Sexual Culture by Joanne Meyerowitz

Around 1955 multiple activist groups were forming a coalition that would later be called “The Homophile Movement”. This was a combination of The Mattachine Society (gay men) and the Daughters of Bilitis (lesbian women) along with other groups that created magazines, literature and started making the building blocks of a political movement of queer people. These magazines were calling for gay civil rights in the mid ‘50s which was basically unheard of up until this time for there to be a movement for queer people to have political power and freedom.

(I want to add here that some of these groups tended to exclude transgender and non-binary people. Some said it was because “crossdressing” was illegal and would attract police. However, based on the accounts of people in the groups there seemed to be somewhat of a strict gender binary. This is important because even at the beginning of the queer activist movement trans people were commonly excluded. Even in a marginalized group, there were people inside the queer community who were marginalized. This is before the concept of gender identity as we know it today was even up for discussion. Let alone talking about the integration of white gay spaces with the gay spaces of nonwhite people and groups.)

This still remained the first major public push for queer people to interact in the public and political sphere to push for queer civil rights. The movement as a whole spoke about gay civil rights as a movement towards sexual liberation, greater sexual expression, and an end to the strict heteronormativity that America enforced.

Gay War Vets, Motorcycles, and Leather

Another part of the counterculture would arise after the horrors of WWII, motorcycle enthusiasts and Motorcycle Clubs (MC). Vets from the war became interested in motorcycles and the cultural understanding of the type of person who rode one was that of a rebel. That rebellious spirit is where MCs like the Hells Angels come from but a large amount of clubs popped up after the war. With the rebellion of straight war vets came an added rebellion of gay war vets who had to remain closeted while serving in the military. The Satyrs were a motorcycle club started in Los Angeles of mostly gay veterans who not only rebelled socially but sexually from the heteronormativity of the 1950s. This is where leather is first incorporated into gay culture and becomes a counterculture to a counterculture (Straight, cis motorcycle clubs). These clubs acted as a safe refuge for gay men to express themselves and live the lives they wanted to live. The hyper-masculinity both acted as a shield from scrutiny from the outside while also cultivating a distinct masculine gay culture that embraced and simultaneously rejected the norms of the dominant society.

The motorcycle clubs like the Hells Angels would become influential in the culture of rebellion, the aesthetics but also were involved heavily in how drugs and psychedelics spread through the US later in the ‘60s.

Isolated Women in the Suburbs

The suburban housewife was a staple of mid-century life and the epicenter of the alienation and isolation that happens under capitalism. The suburban housewife that was forced to work for no pay, to birth and raise children and be the personification of femininity. While their husbands were at work, they stayed at home in their perfect cookie cutter homes in a cul-de-sac alone for most of the day. It was no wonder at the time valium was starting to be the most widely prescribed drug to housewives. The anxiety was building in these suburban homes from the abject isolation women felt. Let alone women of color who not only filled the housewife role, but also had to deal with the overwheming racism of the time. This isolation created the incubator for the second wave of feminism that would free housewives from the confines of suburban homes. Women who felt the day-to-day tyranny and violence of their husbands, the overbearing dominance they had over their lives. The ability for them to be stripped of any previous skills or vocations and forced into the home, regardless of what the women really wanted. Millions of women trapped at home, alone and anxious of the ever-changing outside world that was leaving them behind. They were the first to feel the anxiety of the era, because the domination and exploitation were mostly pointed at them. They raised children in these environments. Who were supposed to uphold the ideals of the dominant culture. To be radical individualists. They raised children while holding in the anxiety of the future, and the anxiety of looking into the eyes of true domination.

The Psychedelic Counterculture & Reprogramming the Mind

Psychedelics mostly remained dormant and used as a tool by scientists, therapists, and psychologists in their early use in the modern west. This is talking about the modern psychedelic compounds and not the thousands of years of use and scientific study by indigenous people. Most of that information remained with indigenous peoples for thousands of years up until anthropologists spoke about their findings when speaking to them about their experiences and culture.

Psychedelic compounds and entheogens have been used for thousands of years usually administered in very specific settings by people with experience. They have always had a cultural significance and were used as tools or medicine, not for recreation. Ceremonial entheogenic practice was passed down from generation to generation and in most cases carefully maintained. Entheogenic use outside of spiritual, medicinal or ceremonial use wasn’t really documented, but based off the indigenous recounts of their ancestral practices, this was the realm of shamans and medicine men. Humanity has had a vast amount of time using psychedelic compounds and entheogens dating back thousands of years before the 1950’s and the rise of psychedelic use. This is an important topic to state at the beginning of all of this and something that ties into almost everything involved with the current psychedelic culture.

In most ways, the medical field in the 50s and 60s took entheogens seriously and looked at them as novel treatments to a giant list of mental and physical ailments. There was serious science being done with compounds like LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, Ketamine, DMT, and a whole host of analog compounds made by Alexander Shulgin and other pioneering chemists. There is an entirely new world when it comes to compounds and how they can impact the brain and the body in positive ways. Early mid-century psychedelic circles were mainly doctors and chemists trying out these compounds and experimenting with their effects, with a significant amount of success. A very common occurrence with psychedelic compounds is what is called “ego death”. While under the influence the subject might lose touch with reality, space, time, and the idea of themselves. These compounds can change someone’s life trajectory completely because of their ability to change consciousness. Sometimes so much so that people come out of these experiences feeling like totally different people. These can be both positive and negative experiences as many people who take these compounds can relive previous trauma or get stuck in bad mental loops. There are also many people who simply can’t do psychedelics due to an existing mental condition or for health reasons. Topics like this were being researched and understood by the research community at the time. Psychedelic drugs remained mostly unknown to the general public until the US government and the CIA took an interest in psychedelic compounds’ ability to change people’s conceptions of themselves and the world.

MKUltra, LSD Soldiers, and Breaking Out of the Lab

The CIA took an interest in LSD after seeing the potential of using it as a weapon. The MKUltra program was designed to test LSD as a chemical weapon used for brainwashing, interrogation, and torture. This was used along with a large list of other methods however, the testing program for using LSD as a weapon reached farther out to include volunteers who signed up for the program. Their experiments were mostly a failure and LSD really only proved that it was a powerful compound that could change the human mind and consciousness. Ken Kesey was a volunteer for the project and his experiences led him to become extremely interested in the use of LSD. He wrote the famous novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest after his experiences along with his time working in a psychiatric hospital.

Nearly at the same time, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert met at Harvard while Richard was working on his tenure as a clinical psychologist. The two met at the Center for Research in Personality where their initial experiments with psychedelics would begin. These two men would go on almost completely separate paths and influence the counterculture in their own ways both positive and negative. They both worked on various research projects specifically the Harvard Psilocybin Project and one of the most well-known experiments the Marsh Chapel Experiment to see the effects psilocybin had on religious experiences. Along with the Concord Prison Experiment that tested psilocybin on prisoners to see if the compound could be used to treat prison recidivism. During these experiments, Timothy Leary became obsessed with the potential power of LSD to transform individuals along with society and began giving out psychedelic compounds to anyone who was interested. This largely was the beginning of psychedelics leaving the mostly scientific and therapeutic environment and entering into the public sphere. Harvard caught wind that Leary and Richard were giving experimental compounds to people outside of research settings and they were both fired.

The psychedelic parties that Leary was putting together became prolific, and the amount of people outside of chemists and psychologists who came to experience LSD and other entheogens grew rapidly.

The Start of the Early Psychedelic movement.

It’s really weird and uncanny when you look at the historical connections between people and groups that formed in this time. This bit of text might seem kinda abrupt and disjointed but I really want to connect the dots between some of these influential people who aren’t talked about very often but were pivotal people in the formation of the psychedelic counterculture and in a large part some of the radical political organizing that happened in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There are many people left out of many discussions whose actions or work directly lead to many of the events in the ‘60s and ‘70s that tend to be forgotten.

The use of mescaline goes back almost 5,700 years and was used in ceremonial and religious practices by the indigenous people of the Americas. The first mention outside of these communities was during the Spanish invasion of Mexico around 1529. The Spanish colonizers saw the use of entheogens as a counter to catholicism because they were used in ceremonies and religious contexts so they attempted to outlaw the use by indigenous people. It didn’t work and actually spread the use of mescaline containing cacti further north and into trade networks that reached into the south and southeast portion of the so-called United States.

Mescaline was unheard of or studied by western science until 1887 when John Raleigh Briggs wrote down his experiences ingesting a small dried part of a peyote cactus. This could have been a result of the Native American Church forming between various different indigenous tribal nations that was actually a distinct religion that worked alongside the traditional religious ceremonies and traditions of those people. In 1888 peyote use was banned under the authority of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in an attempt to stop indigenous tribes from uniting under this new religious system springing up. The European colonizers in America were doing the same thing the Spanish colonizers did hundreds of years before then, attempting to stop the use of entheogens by indigenous people because of the importance they would play in native religious thought. In my opinion, it could also be said that entheogens and their ability to change human conciseness might have posed a multi-tiered threat to colonizers. On one hand, entheogen rituals and ceremonies brought indigenous people together physically but mentally as well. The indigenous people did not take lightly to both the Spanish and other Europeans stealing land, and many did not want to convert to Christianity at all. Entheogens could also act as a social bond of people, with a shared experience that could act as a counterbalance to imperialism. That is my own interpretation but for the most part, entheogens tended to be banned because those laws targeted indigenous sovereignty.

John Raleigh Briggs actually sold the mescaline extract on the market as a heart tonic even though peyote use was banned at the time for indigenous people. Around 1893 the compound was isolated chemically and was able to be synthesized in a lab and named mescaline.

The synthesized mescaline was sold openly in pharmacies while at the same time the indigenous people, who told scientists about their use were banned from using the plant-derived compounds. This is a cycle that would repeat. Keep this in your mind.

Humphry Fortescue Osmond was a doctor working in Canada who first associated entheogens with the term “psychedelic”. He is arguably one of the most influential catalysts in the psychedelic counter-culture that would come to influence the influencers. He was working on psychiatric medication and interventions when he saw that the chemical structure of mescaline looked very similar to adrenaline and started doing experiments using the compound. He was one of the leading doctors working on using entheogens in a medical environment specifically for therapy and not for physical ailments. Humphry Osmond spoke frequently to a writer who was interested in his mescaline research named Aldous Huxley.

Aldous Huxley became extremely interested in mescaline and wrote one of his most famous works “The Doors of Perception” about his experiences with the compound in 1953. (I think Brave New World is his most well-known work but I digress) This book would introduce thousands of people to the world of entheogens and psychedelic compounds. Huxley gained a cult following of people who were interested not just in his experiences but in him as well and he started gaining a large following of other writers and artists around this time. Aldous Huxley heard of a compound being produced that had somewhat similar effects to mescaline called Lysergic Acid Diethylamide or LSD through one of the many people researching the compound for therapeutic purposes at the time. Though LSD had been synthesized in the 1930’s it wasn’t until the ‘50s that it was really studied in medical environments for the effects of the compound on humans.

Psilocybin is the compound found in specific types of mushrooms that have a psychedelic effect and the use of mushrooms to produce hallucinations has gone back for thousands of years with pictures of these mushrooms appearing in mesoamerican art across the regions of so-called Mexico, down into Central and South America. The use of these mushrooms was unknown outside of anthropologists and historians who studied Aztec and mesoamerican societies and the indigenous people who cultivated and studied the mushrooms for medicinal and ceremonial practices. Very few people in the global north or industrialized countries knew they existed until research was starting with mescaline and LSD, and scientists were interested in finding more information about other psychedelic compounds.

Gordon Wasson was an ethnomycologist and at one point the vice president of J.P Morgan bank who wanted to study mushrooms after a trip in 1927 introduced him to the world of mycology, or the study of mushrooms. During this time he read about the use of Amanita Muscaria mushrooms in Siberia being used and he got funding from a US government agency to carry out work in Russia to study their use. Gordon Wasson’s research was funded by the MKUltra program, run by the CIA to find more information about these mind-altering compounds. (I want to reiterate, this is not some conspiracy theory. The CIA was looking at using these compounds as weapons, so when you look at things in that lens it makes sense.)

Gordon Wasson also found information about a mind-altering mushroom that originated in the mountains of Mexico and was funded again to do research in Mexico. There he met with a curandera (translated into “one who knows”) named Maria Sabina. Maria Sabina had come from a long line of healers and medicinal practitioners in the area who used these mushrooms both to help heal psychological trauma and issues in people but also used them for religious experiences. This was the first time that western people had seen some of these ceremonies and Gordon Wasson wrote them down to later be published. Maria Sabina wanted Gordon to promise that he would not disclose her name or the region she lived in to help protect and conserve the natural resources of the Psilocybe Mexicana fungus. These ceremonies and practices had happened behind closed doors by people trained in their use, and never had a westerner outside of Spanish colonizers had seen their real use.

Wasson included an excerpt in a 1957 Life Magazine article ‘Seeking the Magic Mushroom’ and that was the start of an entire craze that would change Maria Sabina’s life, Mexico, the United States, and the world. This article did not mention Maria outright but did spark an insane public and scientific curiosity into psilocybin. However, Wasson wrote a full-length book called ‘Russia, Mushrooms and History’ where he spoke in full length about the ceremony in Mexico, mentioned Maria Sabina’s name and where she lived. The exact opposite of what she requested Wasson to do. With that came a surge of people from around the world embarking on a journey to have a session with Maria. Aldus Huxley visited her right after Wasson published his article and a long list of influential people over the years came to her.

Here is a shortlist of recognizable names:

Walt Disney, John Lennon, Albert Hoffman (Chemist who synthesized LSD), Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, Timothy Leary.

The experience in 1960 that Timothy Leary had in Mexico changed his life. This was the first time Leary had done any kind of '“drug” and before had he viewed himself as a straight and narrow scientist. This experience is what spurred him to go back to Harvard and work with Richard Alpert to start the Harvard Psilocybin Project.

What about the people who influenced the psychedelic influencers?

Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Aldous Huxley, and Albert Hoffman are mostly credited for starting the psychedelic revolution but what I want to show is that they aren’t the only people who were the catalysts for the explosion of entheogens.

It was the indigenous people who told others about these compounds. As usual, history tells the story of the great men (usually always white, cisgender men) who created revolutions while ignoring the other people who got them where they were.

The real unsung and unrecognized people are Maria Sabina, the Mazatec people, and the traditions of indigenous people living in pre-colonized Mexico. The Comanche and Kiowa nations and the work of Quanah Parker in the Native American Church to have a way to protect the use of entheogens in Native American culture. The cultural craze around psychedelic drugs never would have happened and arguably the use of LSD would have remained locked into scientific and therapeutic uses and sold as a prescription drug.

There is a long history of entheogen use being used as a legal precursor to racist laws that targeted BIPOC. Peyote and the Native Americans, Cannabis and Black & Latino people, Opium and Asian & Pacific Islanders. All were persecuted by the use of plants and entheogens.

It’s these people that the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s owes its entire existence to. Even though people like Maria Sabina basically introduced the world to psychedelic mushrooms she died in poverty and remains relatively unknown outside of psychedelic research and culture. Very few people recognize the impact that she had on culture going on during the 1960s.

Black influence on the early counterculture and psychedelic scene.

Jazz was transforming during the ‘50s and bebop was a subgenre that was gaining in popularity as a new form of fast, improvisational jazz that revolutionized the soundscape of jazz and later electric blues. The genre had exploded mainly in New York City jazz clubs and in LA where the majority of jazz musicians both lived or toured. New York City was the epicenter of both bebops rise, and the residual changes from the Harlem renaissance socially that combined into the music and the social change in the Black community at the time. Jazz was always associated with cannabis and a large part of why cannabis was made illegal in the United States was racist laws targeting Black and Hispanic people over the use of the plant. Cannabis culture and jazz culture were intertwined including a large amount of experimental improvisation that would carry over later into electric blues and eventually rock and roll. It could be said that the use of cannabis combined with the experimental nature of bebop led to long sessions of complete improvisation, creativity, and spur-of-the-moment music. Many of these shows would sound almost completely different from day to day because of the nature of improvisation musicians would have. This would make bebop shows incredibly fun and engaging because you could expect each show and session to be slightly different. That also can underscore the trajectory of the Black community socially in a racist America, improvising, growing with chaos, and expecting change.

With many famous Black jazz musicians living in New York City in the ‘50s there was a large cross-over of Black culture and influence into other people in New York City and beyond. This was also the time and culmination of a large exodus of people from Puerto Rico to New York City and the sounds of salsa and merengue blended into bebop. This circles back into the beat generation, Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs who all lived in New York City at the same time that big-name people in jazz and up and comers like Thelonius Monk, Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Rouse, and John Coltrane were also living or playing in New York City. Allen Ginsburg would frequent a jazz club called ‘Five Spot’ that was one of the epicenters of bebops rise and where he met Thelonious monk. Again at this time, it was still risque/taboo even in New York for white people to go to Black establishments let alone be good friends with Black people. Segregation was not legally abolished at the time but socially cities like New York City were more progressive, you still have to keep in mind that most adults in this time were used to segregation. So to even bypass that in a social way was a big social taboo as many people still were virulently racist.

The beat generation had gained their understanding of the growing counterculture from the Black jazz musicians in New York City and their mannerisms and slang came directly from how the jazz musicians spoke and acted. They had started smoking cannabis because they hung around jazz clubs, learned from, and were inspired by Black people. The terminology of calling someone ‘cat’ or the term ‘cool’ ‘hip’, ‘daddio’ were all words and phrases taken from Black people and the beat generation wrote them into their works, which spread Black terms to people who never would have otherwise never adopted them because they would more than likely be segregated from Black people and Black culture. So the beat generation that inspired countless numbers of writers and artists got their inspiration directly from the cannabis smoke filled jazz bars in New York City frequented by the bebop jazz musicians who were experimenting with the cutting edge of music.

The stereotypes of early hippies (who were not called hippies at this moment) were really stereotypes of the beat generation, or what people called beatniks. The beat writers and artists directly got their inspiration from Black culture, specifically jazz subcultures in New York City. So the conception of beatniks as cosmopolitan socialists who smoked marijuana, listened to jazz music, and were into free love would directly come to characterize the early hippies. But the entire reason why cannabis came to be associated with hippies later on is because the stereotype of hippies was based on the stereotype of the beatnik, which was a stereotype rooted in Black culture. The same idea happens today with modern black culture and is still happening with cannabis, cultural norms, and Black music even in 2022.

Jazz cats showed the beats cannabis, now the beats would show them psychedelics.

Timothy Leary fresh off his experiences in Mexico starts the psilocybin project with Richard Alpert, while also speaking to Aldous Huxley about mescaline and his experiences with LSD though Leary only wanted to study synthesized psilocybin and had not taken LSD. Later on, he travels to New York City to visit Allen Ginsburg, who also read the Times article on “magic mushrooms” and was interested in them but also the research work Leary was doing at the time with Sandoz labs that synthesized both psilocybin and LSD. Ginsburg gathered a couple of different people he knew that might be interested, in this initial group was the poet Amiri Baraka, artist Willem de Kooning, along with jazz musicians Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk.

Thelonious monk met Leary in Boston while playing a show, and after his experience with psilocybin he immediately went to tell other musicians of the new world that psilocybin had opened up especially when it came to music. That was the first kick off of psychedelics entering into the jazz scene, and word of these compounds spread quickly.

That same year in 1961 Maynard Ferguson and his wife came to visit Timothy Leary in Cambridge. At the same time Maynard was visiting, Michael Hollingshead had come into town to visit as well where he bought LSD from Sandoz labs. He had done LSD and discussed his experiences with Aldous Huxley who introduced Michael Hollingshead and Timothy Leary. At this point, Michael Hollingshead had been good friends with William S. Burroughs and so the loop of jazz musicians, beat poets, and early psychedelic figures connect together.

It was at this meeting with Maynard Ferguson, Timothy Leary and Michael Hollingshead that Maynard convinced Timothy Leary to try LSD for the first time.

Shortly after Leary’s experience with LSD, the word about psychedelics had grown in the jazz community and largely in the Black creative spaces of the time. Thelonious Monk spoke to Allen Ginsburg shortly after that wanting to try LSD while he was in New York City playing a show at the Village Gate where Hugh Romney would open for him. Hugh Romney would go on to work on Woodstock years later and get his nickname “Wavy Gravy” from the infamous blues musician BB King.

Hippies, psychedelic rock, and San Fransisco

Timothy Leary started doing more experiments with psychedelics in a mansion in Millbrook, New York that became the central party house of anyone who wanted to try LSD or experiment in the various changes happening inside the psychedelic counterculture. The Millbrook Estate still remained a research hub and for the most part there was LSD fueled parties but less so for recreation, and even Leary at this time didn’t want the compounds to be looked at as a reckless tool at the time. He did want everyone and anyone who wanted to try psychedelics to try them. This is a place of contention because on one hand you can argue that throwing LSD parties and recording trips isn’t rigorous medical research, on another you can see the somewhat restraint that Leary had on haphazardly supplying LSD. Nonetheless his work there along with the spread of psychedelics between the beats, jazz musicians, and now surf rock crowds and folk travelers in California, LSD and psychedelics had gained momentum.

Ken Kesey bought a property in La Honda California and was hosting parties and living communally in the home right outside of San Francisco. This is where the infamous “acid tests” would occur with LSD supplied by Owsley Stanley, a prolific underground LSD chemist who also was the soundman to the band Grateful Dead. Kesey viewed LSD as a powerful tool but also used it for recreational purposes. Ken Kesey is really the reason why LSD started circulating so much in San Francisco because he was more indiscriminate with its use as opposed to Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and the like who at least had backgrounds in clinical settings. This was also the location where the “Merry Pranksters” would form which was a group of friends that decided to hang out with Kesey and try communal living. It was at the La Honda home that Ken Kesey started inviting the Hells Angels motorcycle club to his home. At this point the Hells Angels were involved in minor drug trafficking but they became one of the largest distributors of psychedelic compounds in the bay area over time. They had a reputation both for their loud motorcycles and their penchant for violence. Many of them were WWII or Vietnam vets and the mixture of PTSD and psychedelic drugs rarely created a fun experience. This house was where Hunter S. Thompson wrote his first major work about the Hells Angels.

In fact, Hunter S. Thompson was also good friends with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S. Burroughs in the early ‘60s because he became obsessed with them after reading on the road. His writing style that popularized Gonzo journalism was fleshed out while he was living in New York City, going to Black jazz clubs with Allen. Hunter Thompsons’ love for firearms was nurtured by William S. Burroughs who was also an avid firearm enthusiast.

After this meeting Ken Kesey along with Neil Cassidy (One of the main characters from on the road) and the rest of the La Honda commune gathered in a bus to drive across the country to the 1964 Worlds Fair. This was chronicled along in the book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” by Tom Wolfe that introduced many people to the idea of a “hippie” or to the growing counterculture that was growing. Though still at this time popular culture and American society were widely unaware of what was happening. Chandler A. Laughlin III who was involved with the original beats and Owsley Stanley ran two beat coffee shops in Berkeley, California just near the college that was a hub for Anti-War protestors, with poetry, radical literature, and other musical performances.

Chandler Laughlin along with about 50 people created a small insular community in the city that was a combination of psychedelic enthusiasts, musicians, artists, and radical activists. They would go on to sponsor a collection of concerts at the Red Dog Saloon. Laughlin got together a setlist that included Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Charlatans, and a couple of other bands. They called this “The Red Dog Experience” where the band The Charlatans would become the first psychedelic rock band to play live on LSD. They would recreate the concert in 1965 that coincided with The Trips Festival which was put together by Ken Kesey and Owsley Stanley who at this point had moved his old LSD lab into San Fransico after being raided by police.

Political Action in San Fransico and New York City

So far I haven’t talked about all of the political action that happened from the ‘50s into the mid ‘60s because there is such a wide spectrum of things happening at this time that I can’t cover all of them but this was the time and culmination of every kind of change happening in America. Black civil rights, feminism, the Gay rights movement, Latino farmworker unions, Anti-War protesters, Environmentalists, psychedelic dropouts, assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X all happened during this. The chaos of rapid change was on the horizon and there was a sense that the revolution was here.

1966 marked the high water point for the psychedelic movement as the Red Dog crew were putting on more concerts, San Francisco became a hub of change that was about to sweep America and was ground zero at the time for all of these different forces and people to combine. The Haight Ashberry and the Castro district became two areas that concentrated not only hippies, but old beatniks, bikers, students, anti-war protesters, and the growing gay community that all blended together because of the low cost of living and the growing excitement. With the cheap cost of living and the explosion of art, music, community, and psychedelics that attracted people around the US and Canada to move into San Fransisco. By mid-1966 there were around 15,000 people that could be labeled as hippies living in those areas which was a massive influx of people compared to the relative unknown nature of what was happening outside of marginalized communities.

Radical Politics After McCarthyism & Communist Experiments

During the 1950’s there was McCarthyism in America and The Red Scare that painted leftist politics in an extremely negative light to the majority of people in America. Keep in mind that this was not because Americans did not want to learn or could not bare the communist information, but because at the time media and propaganda sowed the seeds of fear in the American people. Many people lost their jobs, or were imprisoned because of their affiliation with communist or socialist organizations as the US government was paranoid about soviet invasions and communism “spreading” in the US. However, that does not change the fact that even during this time there remained principled communists, anarchists, and socialists who were living, educating, and building coalitions inside the US. The Communist Party of America was instrumental in working with labor unions in the 1920s-1930s and helping fight for civil rights in Black communities. After WWII communist theory was able to be accessed widely as people were interested in the ideas behind the Soviet Union and more groups started to form in the late 1950’s, early 1960’s. SLATE and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) were the early political groups that would form and blend with the Free Speech Movement and the Anti-War movement. SLATE and CORE would also go on to work with the Black Panthers who formed in 1966. Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) was influential to the formation of the Black Panthers and was a big reason why the Panthers would adopt ideas from Mao. This was also the rise of a social democratic party that pushed for more leftist ideas in the existing political parties.

Almost everyone involved in the early counterculture and early hippie scene was involved in radical politics in their own rights. Many were well educated on leftist theory and actively sought to establish communist and socialist ideals in the US. Each marginalized group brought their own ideas and contributions to society that remain as the bedrock for leftist organizations today. The hippie communes that most people talk about usually started in this early period of time and were legitimate experiments in communal living. The concept of free love, the loosening of heteronormative ideals and the sexual liberation of women is a by-product of the queer people and women who developed the ideas, who shared their views and influenced the early counterculture to question their ideas on sexuality and sexual freedom. Black people remained the bedrock of counterculture tendencies and were the reason why the counterculture grew at all. They were the reason why they were listening to the music they were listening to. Black activists always guided the counterculture towards anti-racism during a time when segregation was still happening and society at large was deeply racist.

The Black Panther Party was formed in October 1966 in Oakland California. Close to San Francisco and Berkley but it might as well had been a world away. The area had been heavily segregated and heavily policed, with constant police murders of unarmed Black people in Oakland, the flowers and LSD parties were a far cry from the brutality happening in Oakland by the hands of police. The Black Panthers were formed as a revolutionary anti-imperialist community defense league to not only keep watch for police brutality but to arm the community against the violence. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale would sell copies of Mao’s Little Red Book on Berkley campuses and that would fund the purchase of weapons. Stokely Charmichael called for "Black Power” and was the keynote speaker at the Black Power conference in 1966.

Happening in both San Francisco and New York City in 1966 were anarchist groups who were also directly working with and simultaneously critiquing the counter culture movement. The Diggers were a direct action group that could be described as “anarchistic” though they never set a definite ideology. The Diggers lived and did their work in the Haight-Ashbury and were vocal critics of how the counterculture movement was moving away from political action and into new age centrism without politics. They hosted parties and free music events with Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin along with doing direct action in the streets. They were known to be radical anticapitalists and wanted to create a society with no money. They made free food pantries, free stores, made temporary housing in the city, and provided medical care. Some left the city and created multiple communes to continue the anti-capitalist experiments along with organic farming.

The Youth International Party was also known as the “Yippies” also fell into the anarchist umbrella that came out of antiwar protest groups. They were anti-authoritarian and criticized capitalism infiltrating the counterculture. They viewed the non-violent tactics of some anti war protesters as purely symbolic. They were a loose group that incorporated people involved in multiple political actions and countercultural ideas like The Diggers, The Merry Pranksters, The White Panthers, and some of the people who would later be involved in the environmentalism movement. This is a time when alternatives were being widely talked about and carried out like free schools, pirate radios, organic farming, free stores, food and artist co-ops, and DIY publications. These were gaining in popularity both inside the counterculture and outside in broader political spaces.

The Summer of Love & The Summer of Capital Co-option

The Summer of Love is what 1967 would come to be called and started at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. The Human be-In would attract around 30,000 people into San Francisco which also attracted media attention. At this point, the counterculture message had spread to wider society and many people flocked to San Francisco and New York City looking for something. That something depended on the person but many of the people coming into San Francisco were not coming from the marginalized groups that birthed the counterculture. Many of them were coming from the previously segregated, affluent suburbs of cities around the nation. Middle-class kids who saw, heard, or read about the hippies who wanted to join in. Some came for the pure rebellion against the stiff society they grew up in. Others came specifically to try LSD and other psychedelics, others came for the new music genres and scene growing. The sudden rush of people coincided with the state of California classifying LSD as a schedule 1 substance and made it illegal. This caused multiple LSD labs to get raided and in return get shut down. With a rise in the profitability of LSD by drug traffickers because of rising demand, clandestine labs grew and the gangs that trafficked drugs started selling LSD and other analogs. This was something radically different because for the most part LSD and other entheogens were not sold, but given away. A single batch of LSD could provide 10,000 doses and so the profitability was not great compared to cocaine, heroin, or cannabis. So this black market sprung up and caused LSD to be sold, which made LSD a commodity. Anyone could buy and use psychedelics and it had truly escaped from people who cared about the setting that LSD was taken in and became a recreational compound.

Though many people saw Timothy Leary as the figurehead of LSD escaping the lab and medicinal circles, the largest catalyst for the abuse of LSD was Ken Kesey and his involvement with the Hells Angels and in turn, other groups that would become the backbone of clandestine LSD sale, as opposed to small time selling, or just giving it away. LSD and other psychedelics were being used by the people flocking to San Fransico who had no clue what the compound did, its effects, and dosage. With LSD labs being busted more labs started synthesizing analogs or using other types of compounds unrelated to LSD. There was an uptick in STP (2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine which is really DOM) which lasted much longer than LSD, had a lower dosage requirement, and a longer onset of effects. This caused people to overdose and could have negative effects as the psychotropic qualities could last twice as long as LSD. There was also the introduction of PCP (phenylcyclohexyl piperidine) which is not a traditional hallucinogen like LSD but is a dissociative compound, which in some people, and in certain doses, would cause them to become catatonic or violent as they disassociated rather than hallucinated.

With psychedelics being sold indiscriminately to people flooding into San Francisco and the sudden rise in population there were issues with crime and vandalism as criminals saw many of these people as peace-loving marks along with crimes of desperation like theft because San Fransisco had attracted many people with no other options in the wake of ‘60s hypercapitalism.

Out of this came some distinct groups. You had the people who were the foundation of the counterculture, the early inspirations, people involved in radical politics, and the marginalized people who really created the culture element around the early counterculture. And the droves of people coming into San Francisco from various different backgrounds but usually tended to have some means to travel. Many of whom were white middle-class people from around the country who in entering San Fransisco were first exposed to any kind of culture that differed from the dominant one in America. People who were there just for the art, or just for the music, or just for the drugs who brought their own societal baggage with them and many really did not understand the complexity that existed in the countercultural movement.

This happened because the idea of the hippie, of the countercultural rebel had been grabbed by media attention. Some wanted to seriously document the new tide in America that was pushing against the dominant culture, and others saw the events happening as entertainment. With that entertainment came capital, and with capital came the production of subculture, and stereotypes began to form. The stereotypes started with the beat generation and then started to morph as the counterculture grew. And so the thousands of people who consumed media back then were fed a stereotype, a caricature of a person, a hyperreal version of the counterculture that was produced and perpetuated by the same people who controlled the dominant culture.

The Diggers and other radical groups called this time “The Death of The Hippie”, as the influx of people into the Bay area and into New York City were unaware of the true messaging, experimentation, pain, and triumph of all the people who had been involved and led things up to this moment. All of this spurred a media frenzy and a panic around the nation about the counterculture and some of the same government organizations that had provided funding for LSD research were not producing propaganda about LSD claiming it was a dangerous drug. This ignored the fact that LSD was being taken recreationally by people who had no idea of the effects, on top of that there were also other compounds going around like PCP which were producing the effects that people associated with LSD. This scare caused so many people to associate the counterculture with crime and drug use, so much so that businesses that started that might have attracted hippies or the counterculture to them would be shut down.

During this time there were countless movies and dramas about hippies, exploitation films about counterculture that revolved around stereotypes and never had interacted with any of the real material concerns that people had. This painted the counterculture in whatever cultural light that movie studio executives, literary publishers, music labels, investment bankers, police, and politicians wanted to paint them as. They saw the counterculture as a combination of all of the civil rights actions happening in America as the central issue and wanted to do everything they could to discredit the claims of radicals and marginalized people, while also profiting.

With the media backlash came more people flocking into counterculture who had no idea what the counterculture was about outside of smoking cannabis, using LSD, and dressing in wild ways at psychedelic rock concerts. That is the stereotype that began to circulate and many people wanted to emulate it. This is the start of a huge change in advertising and this group of people would become part of a capitalist experiment on new ways of selling things.

The summer of love was in 1967 and 1968 would prove to be one of the most prolific years of the time. 1968 marked one of the bloodiest years of the Vietnam War and there was an uptick in antiwar protests, more and more concerts were being put on and the counterculture grew. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. There were weekly Be-Ins at Cambrdige park where the feminist movement grew. The Democratic Nation Convention protests involved the SDS, Black Panthers, and the Yippies. The prolific Olympic Protests where Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in recognition of the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement. Nixon winning the presidential election and the Apollo 8 mission.

All of this happened while the civil rights movement won a monumental court case Civil Rights Act of 1968 after the uprisings that happened after Dr. King was assassinated. The LGBTQA+ community gathering in public protests for their rights. Feminism was growing and expanding reproductive rights and a new attitude among women. The Anti War protests reached a crescendo as more people died in Vietnam. The Black Panthers were gaining full momentum opening chapters while the FBI attempted to infiltrate and stop the growing spread of insurrectionary Black politics. The formation of a Rainbow Coalition in 1969 with the Young Lords, The Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, White Panthers, and the Red Guard Party joining together with the Black Panther Party. The occupation by the California National Guard of Berkeley due to then-governor Ronald Regan which spawned the infamous image of a student placing a flower in the gunbarrell of a National Guard soldier’s rifle.

This coincided with one of the largest events of the counterculture and hippie movement, Woodstock. A culmination of all the psychedelic rock bands that had formed and were inspired by the Black jazz and blues musicians who had either been forgotten or ignored by wider audiences. Some of the pioneers of the sound played along with many of the bands and people who were at the forefront of the hippie and psychedelic sound and culture.

Later in that year there was the Altamont Free Concert that would be called “Woodstock West”. The Hells Angels were security and one of the members stabbed a young woman in the crowd to death. This caused even more outrage and cultural backlash to the counterculture, which at this point the Hells Angels were both a part and completely separate from most of the counterculture. Supplying drugs and psychedelics but also involved in extreme violence and trafficking harder drugs like cocaine and heroin. This was the legacy of Ken Kesey and his relationship with the Hells Angels coming to haunt the movement he helped to create.

The counterculture through the 1970’s would begin to wane, and the psychedelic revolution over as almost all psychedelics was made illegal, including for medical research. The growing war on drugs would clamp down on any large operations and the clandestine chemists fell into deeper obscurity as the precursor chemicals to synthesize compounds were also made illegal and watched by the DEA.

Many of the people who identified as hippies were people who wore the clothes of hippies, but lacked any kind of political motivation. The people that did and really rejected the stereotype of hippies and instead embraced political ideologies continued their communal experiments. Continued the exploration of sexuality, of eastern mysticism, and of change. Others gravitated to the new age movement, and fell into a wide assortment of new beliefs that borrowed from many different backgrounds. The new age movement was also the time of mass cults. Others bought into neoliberalism and the ideas of a free market global economy, and would go on to become business owners or enter into the Silicon Valley tech boom that would happen later on.

As the cultural phenomenon of the counterculture waned and the psychedelic revolution was killed by the DEA and the misuse of psychedelics, the political counterculture, and social revolution lived on through the mid 70’s and into the era known as neoliberalism. The foundations of modern political action were formed in the counterculture and into neoliberalism. Many of the ideas that we still argue about today were first spoken about during this time and regardless of how you feel about the counterculture and hippies, the fact of the matter remains clear. Things would be drastically different had those events not happened.

The next part of this will involve how capitalism came to co-opt the counterculture. First with the beat generation, jazz, blues, music as a whole, and art. Then moving into hippies and the characterization, stereotyping, and eventual co-option and destruction of a radical movement.

A Summary on the Beats, Early Counterculture and Hippies

This is just a piece of the larger picture and an important thing to understand when talking about modern political movements, futurism, and a new counterculture. I wanted to reiterate a point that usually is lost when people talk about the counterculture and psychedelic culture.

The counterculture, psychedelic revolution, and hippies would not have existed without marginalized people. Black music, art, and the fight for Black equality were part of the foundation to the start of the counterculture. Had Black jazz musicians not shared so much with the beat generation writers, much of the influence and catalyst for social change would have remained purely in the political realm. The social aspect, music, art, literature would all be impacted without the contributions of Black people and the world today would look drastically different without both jazz and blues music. There are plenty of historical and political takes on the change of the 1960’s but the fact that art and music were just as important to change cannot, and should not be ignored. The basis of culture that sprung from the counterculture movement and the reaction from it, all stems back to Black music, art, and literature.

Indigenous people were part of the foundation to the start of the counterculture. Psychedelics and other entheogens would have remained unknown and relegated to scientific study and pharmaceutical industries. If it was not for the Indigenous people of the southwestern United States and Mazetec curanderas like Maria Sabina, much of the psychedelic revolution would not have happened. Timothy Leary would have more than likely remained in psychiatry and most of the psychedelic counterculture and the hippies of the 1960’s would not have happened. LSD would have ended up as one of many back cataloged compounds or would have been used in traditional medical circles.

In this, I wanted to show how the counterculture was the first informal & formal coalition and combination of social ideals and political strategy that came close to intersectionality at a time when that should have been impossible. Black jazz musicians, Black blues players, early Rock & Roll musicians, artists, poets, the beat generation, queer people, women who were abused and tired of patriarchal domination, motorcycle outlaws, chemists, social dropouts, misfits, war vets, working-class people, communists, and Indigenous people all made up the social and political landscape that created the early counterculture.

Though some may paint the counterculture as nothing but “Bourgeoisie pandering and decadence” that only applies to the people who fell for the media personification of the radical. The people who thought they could buy their way into looking the part instead of being the part. The true people who made up the counterculture and allowed it to grow were marginalized, outcasts, working-class and creative people.

I also wanted to show just how connected all of these events were and the people at the center of things usually all knew each other or were connected in strange ways. Even in a time when media was limited, there were people who inspired massive change. I hope this shows that you too can inspire change, you too have the power in this fucked up and crazy time to do something and change the course. That is to also say it needs to be balanced with collective change. You can inspire change, but that change only happens with action. And that action happens as a community, as a force, not us alone but together. We have been collectively beaten down into thinking that we can’t change anything. We have been gaslit into thinking only we alone can change the world. There is a balance, you as an individual have power, and collective power is the ultimate catalyst for change.

Part 2: Capitalist Co-opting, Killing the Counterculture, Subcultures, and What Went Wrong?

With a background in what happened and the groups and people that lead up to these events there will be a central question in all of it.
What went wrong?

That is a hard question to answer definitively, again without explaining a bunch of history and boring the shit out of you. But there are some important points that I think culminate and explain the majority of the reasons why the counterculture was dismantled, the radical politics fragmented and the dreams of many people either crushed, temporarily halted, or forced to the margins of society.

• Media propaganda

• Intervention by the state and police forces.

• Capitalist Co-oping and movement capture by the wealthy.

• The structures of radical political parties at the time.

• The movements did not change fundamental social problems and frameworks that underpin society.

This will be hard to distill and I know I will miss some things, some of which will be cut for brevity as this article is already way too fucking long. But these topics should be addressed on their own before talking about the future because the past will reemerge in the future, in slightly different forms but the tactics and methods will remain the same. We should question the tactics and methods when talking about post-capitalist futures.

Sterotypes & Media Hype

To break up the counterculture, to co-opt it, and in the end profit from it would require it to first be stereotyped. These stereotypes remove the real wants, desires, actions, and realities of a people, movement, or group and instead focus on whatever concocted fiction that people want to project onto them. Using Jean Baudrillard’s definition of the “HyperReal”, the symbol of the reality becomes hyperreal, takes over the real meaning, and instead people care about the spectacle of the stereotype as opposed to the lived reality of the people the stereotype was based on.

The first stereotype of the early counterculture was of jazz, and the Black musicians who played the genre. In reality, jazz is a distinct musical genre molded and shaped by the lived experiences of the Black musicians who played the genre. The music reflected the feelings of the Black community, not in a hegemonic way but as a reflection of the overall cultural movement. In the ‘20s and ‘30s cannabis and alcohol were commonly used, though they remained part of the territory. Jazz at the time was party music and with parties come this sort of thing.

The stereotype that was produced was meant to demonize both Black people and the genre itself which was seen as “not real music”. And so a stereotype was created of the marijuana smoking, communist, criminal, Black man, who listened to jazz and defiled polite society. This stereotype stuck and was added to the list of other stereotypes of Black people at the time.

Circling back to the groups that were introduced in part one of this article, the beat generation, poets, writers, and artists were the next group stereotyped because they posed a threat to the dominant cultural identity. Many of the same tropes were used against them mainly because of their association with the jazz musicians in New York City combined with the blatant homophobia and painting of them as communist because many of the beat writers were anti-consumerist. The stereotype became a pseudointellectual poet, who played the bongos, smoked reefer, and that they tended to be gay, communists, or a combination of the both. Books and other pieces of media came out painting them as dangerous sex fiend artist bohemians. Allen Ginsberg wrote into The New York Times saying,

“If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash man.”

Then onto the hippies, which was a term that most people in the early counterculture rejected and later on despised. It was a continuation of the stereotypes of the beats but now added onto it was a long-haired, anti-war, pseudointellectual high on either weed or LSD, who talked about vague spiritual topics, wore tie-dye or fringe, didn’t shower, and didn’t want to work. There was also an element of danger and adventure, of motorcycle gangs and traveling around. In general it was a rebellious person who had long hair and did a ton of drugs and this personification was used everywhere and was used to paint the people involved in radical politics, the anti war movement, feminism or had really any civil rights movement as lazy drug addicts.

The media would use these tropes to both spin up outrage and cause more people to become interested in the growing counterculture. As more articles in magazines and newspapers were released, more people either came to despise the counterculture or want to join in. Though many people lacked the fundamental ideas of the counterculture many were sick of the dominant culture to begin with and saw the counterculture as a calling for something new. One of the main criticisms of the counterculture and hippy movement was that it was made up of upper-class, non-political people, which many times was true. Because they were buying into the stereotype of the hippie portrayed by the media.

Though can you blame people for buying into stereotypes when at the time there were only 3 TV stations? And the fact that the majority of people who would be interested in the counterculture read about it through the lens of the journalist writing the article. Some journalists covered the counterculture with an even tone, reporting back what was happening and interviewing people. Others filtered the events back to their audience with a stereotype in mind that ignored the complexity of the situation. The music of time did have radical messaging however, the media landscape back then was completely different. If you had no concept of radical politics and didn’t live in a major city you more than likely would have gained an understanding of the counterculture through news or other popular media.

To further state control over the growing discontent in the nation, the state used negative media portraits of the counterculture to justify crackdowns, arrests, violence, and assassinations. Media was the tool to ensure social cohesion, to make sure that wider society viewed the counterculture as dangerous drug fiends as opposed to radical ideologies reaching more people who might actually agree with what was being said. The wealthy and those who controlled capital saw it in their best interest to paint the counterculture in a negative light, because it would maintain the capitalist order and also allow them to profit off the situation.

State Interventions, Police Violence & Assassinations

At every turn, at every event, there was an attempt by those in power to make sure that any kind of leader was discredited, jailed, watched, stopped, or just plain killed. It happened time and time again and would be the most common method of stopping the counterculture and civil rights from succeeding in their revolutionary strategies. The Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) ran from 1956-1971 and was the program used by the federal government, the FBI and other intelligence agencies to infiltrate, disrupt and kill any groups that were associated with the counterculture or civil rights. The FBI infiltrated and disrupted almost every group involved in radical politics with a focus on civil rights groups. This included The Communist Party (CPUSA), Anti War groups, The Black Panther Party, The Nation of Islam, SCLC, Environmentalist groups, the American Indian Movement, The Young Lords and basically every major civil rights or radical political group operating in that time.

The federal government used psychological warfare, by following people, following their families. Bugging their communications and spying on them. Smearing their reputation in the media to discredit their actions and thoughts. Used police to harass individuals and lay siege on certain cities where groups were popular. They jailed anyone who was viewed as a leader under false pretenses and if none of those tactics worked, assassinated them. Fred Hampton, a central leader and co-creator of the Black Panthers was drugged and shot in his home by police. Dr. Martin Luther King was surveilled for years, followed by police and the FBI constantly called and mailed him urging him to commit suicide, then he was also assassinated. Malcolm X was killed by members of the Nation of Islam who were fed false information by the FBI after Malcolm left the group.

There was also a combined effort to stamp out the use of psychedelics and bad their use even in the medical field for research. This was done really out of a reaction to the negative effects that widespread, indiscriminate psychedelic use was having. For decades the medical research into entheogens has remained illegal and the chemists who otherwise would have been applauded for their work in synthesizing new compounds that could be used in breakthrough therapies were now back into traditional corporate chemistry, retired, or running clandestine labs. Only now are we seeing a resurgence in medical research into entheogens and psychedelic compounds but we are now decades behind understanding the positive impacts they could have in the world. Again the propaganda that came out was used to paint psychedelic compounds as inherently dangerous. That one dose could cause schizophrenia. Ignoring the fact that these compounds were given out indiscriminately, and that they can have harmful effects on people who should not be taking them. Ignoring the fact that many of the negative effects that were seen on the streets had nothing to do with LSD, but other compounds that flooded the streets because there was a profit incentive to sell whatever compound would make money.

The easiest weapon was the media, which was to change public opinion and force the general public to accept the strange reality that was happening around them. To view the changes in society as a foreign invasion, as something outside of the US, and to ignore the fact that the counterculture was started because of the issues in the country.

Capitalist Co-opting and Movement Capture

Capitalism uses multiple tactics to enter into spaces, monetize them, then attempt to copy the formula and replicate the original group, art, idea into infinity. The goal is to find a new avenue to produce a product or a commodity and to profit off the commodification of that item until it is no longer profitable.

They call this “finding your niche” because the majority of the capitalist market is dominated by large monopolies that control almost every aspect of our lives already. Our food, shelter, water, electricity, clothing, anything you can think of is dominated by large corporate monopolies. Capitalism’s end goal is to commodify and profit off everything it can, to extract everything it can as quickly as it can for the most profit. With that goal, capitalism and capitalists (the agents of action for the system) always seek to find new places and ways to profit.

The co-opting and financialization of the counterculture happened very early on, but also capital is always late to the game because they do not care about messaging, but profitability. If ideas, music, art, whatever are too niche, if not enough people would buy a product sold then it is ignored. Only until the item in question gains momentum and the possibility of a market demographic forms, will capitalists care about it. In talking about the counterculture let’s go back through the historical examples I gave earlier and look at how capitalism took over the counterculture in the mid 1960’s and eventually captured some of the political movements.

The cycle will repeat, but there is a general pattern to how movements, ideas, counterculture, genres, or groups get co-opted and financialized by capitalism.

• An organic group will form around something (art, music, political ideas, etc.) who are intrinsic to the thing itself.

• This group remains unknown until gathering populations or popularity behind the ideas.

• Capitalism ignores the group until there is a “viable market” to inject itself into. Only looking at niche groups as target demographics.

• The group grows more, producing things (can be ideas, physical objects, whatever), more people become interested in it.

• The community naturally makes boundaries to determine what this new thing might be and form their own languages, terms, methods, and culture around it.

• Capitalists view this as a new “target market” and attempt to financialize parts of the community.

• The community either accepts or rejects the introduction of capital.

• Capitalists then inject themselves into the community, learn how they operate and then create a stereotype of the group to compare back to other known market stereotypes.

• The stereotype is used to create commodity items, if the group has a distinct fashion, capital will attempt to quantify and emulate it. If the group has a distinct idea, capital will financialize it. The group qualities are gathered and anything that can be turned into a commodity will be.

• Capitalists use this stereotype to sell goods to the wider public and create their own interpretations of how someone can buy into the stereotype (capitalist subculture creation)

• The organic group’s original essence, message, idea, and intricate details are lost or ignored as the capitalist stereotype takes over the label of the community.

• The original community either rejects the hyperreal injection, turning themselves into an exclusionary group. Or accepts the hyperreal stereotype and the original community leaves due to the origin details being lost.

• Capitalists sell the idea, group, or commodity stereotype until no longer profitable. Then drops it when profits drop, or as popularity wanes.

• The cycle repeats with the next group of dissidents from previous or new groups.

This is just a rough explanation without going extremely deep into economic theory. There is a recurring pattern that happens, at the end of the cycle the original message is gone and replaced with only monetary exchange. The words and meanings are there only to serve as an intellectual lure to bite the hook of capitalism. Let’s look back through the start of the counterculture to view the cycles.

Jazz:

Jazz remained unknown outside of Black communities and the people who lived near them. It was a musical genre that was and is distinctly born out of Black communities and the methods of musical arrangement mirror some of the same arrangements of older forms of music like spirituals, gospels, work songs, and call & response medleys. As the musical artform grew there were also white people who were interested in jazz, and would often play with Black jazz musicians or form bands together. This was in the early 1900s when the two races were kept distantly apart with segregation. Out of this time came all-white jazz bands who were allowed to play at any music venue. While the Black jazz bands who originated the music were forced to play at Black only music establishments or required to enter backdoors and to not interact with any white people in segregated musical spaces.

White jazz bands gained more attention to capitalists who now saw this niche music genre as a way to profit and so they were booked more often for live shows and also recorded more often. Record labels and event planners would then want to capitalize more on the genre and would fund bands of their own. Bands that lacked the distinct background the genre had originally started as and emulated the sounds of “jazz”.

With the hyper commodification of the genre combined with the media being mostly owned by white people, white audiences began to expect that the jazz that was more popular was what “real” jazz was. Which many times was only an emulation of the original art form. It was an emulation without the substantive political and racial underpinnings that the genre had.

The artists who were excluded from the music industry at large just made their own record labels, clubs, and forms of distribution. The innovation that came from the ‘20s and ‘30s would pave the way for jazz to become the most popular genre of music in America. It also became universally hated in some communities and was viewed as subversive party music. However capital was quick to sell the aesthetics of jazz back to people. How the musicians dressed, how they spoke, what they did all became a commodity to sell. With that popularity came boundaries of what was popular, and what could be sold and what was too experimental. So the experimental musicians went to create their own unique subgenres until they gained enough of an audience to attract capital again.

However, advertising and capitalism at the time were very different from what would come later on.

The Blues, R&B, Elvis, and Rock:

The blues, R&B, and soul would succumb to the same cycle. The genre would be made by a distinct group of people with very specific messages that came from the lived experiences of those people and often included political calls to action. This genre was ignored commercially until it gained popularity within that distinct group of people. Capitalists sold the music and created and funded their own versions of the genre based on what was profitable and fit into the stereotyped guard rails. Watered-down versions of the genre became commercially successful while the people who created and innovated it at the core were left behind. The core people either left to create a new iteration or subgroup and others were left behind in the genre while others who came after them, who lacked the cultural and political background succeeded commercially. The social and political messages inside the music were discarded for empty entertainment.

Capital co-option of the socio-political aspects of the counterculture.

Up until the 1940s advertising had grown but maintained a common messaging pattern of “here is a product and here is why you should buy it”. Advertizing mainly focused on utility though it started gaining more into the zone of identity. Advertizements always had a target market, selling housewives soaps or dishes or selling businessmen suits. These were directed at specific people but also relied on some forms of logical reasoning.

There was someone who used emotion and the hyperreal to guide advertisement. Edward Bernays is touted as the father of public relations, American propaganda, and the catalyst and creator of what would become capitalism's new tool that would arise after WWII, lifestyle marketing. Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and used psychoanalysis to come up with new ways to psychologically manipulate people. One of his early successes was tying the rebellion of the flappers and of suffragettes with smoking. At the time women did not smoke and the tobacco industry was steadily looking to open up a new market. Edward Bernays created a campaign to call cigarettes “Torches of Freedom”. Manufacturing the idea that women who smoked broke the cultural taboos of the time, and that smoking was a sign of rebellion.

In that, he had targeted a specific demographic and type of woman, used emotional signaling and feelings to sell the idea that spending money on an addictive substance would lead to freedom. That cigarettes were part of the lifestyle, part of the identity of the suffragettes. Cigarette smoking in women skyrocketed after Bernays planted women smoking into protests and used the media to portray suffragettes as rebellious women, who smoked the cigarettes the tobacco corporations paid him to sell.

He also was a vague Malthusian, who thought that the masses of people only thought with a herd instinct and that a small elite could and should rule and dictate society. Crowd dynamics and the ideas of “mob mentalities” were popularized again because of his views about people he viewed as intellectually inferior to others.

This new type of marketing and propaganda would move from targeting logic to targeting emotion. More specifically targeting how people viewed themselves. Advertizing started to associate products with feelings, products with the types of people they were. The products became something that someone bought not just for the utility of the product but also because they were the type of person to buy it. The product represented who they were as a person and who they were in society.

These tactics were used many times leading up to the counterculture, and it involved making subculture markets. Finding niche groups of people and advertising products directly to them, or introducing products into the culture or group to circulate and become a staple of that infiltrated identity. A good example of this new view of advertising combined with the previous capitalist cycle is in blue jeans. After WWII there was a rise in hotrod culture and motorcycle clubs comprised of mostly working-class men who would have worn working clothes. Part of this would be denim which was associated with miners, workers, and other working-class people. Hotrod and motorcycle groups gained a stereotype as being rebellious and the working class look, born out of necessity became associated with jeans and leather jackets(which was protective gear for riding motorcycles). The movie Rebel Without a Cause popularized blues jeans into popular culture, and this caused a boom in sales of blue jeans. It wasn’t just the idea that jeans and leather jackets were the uniforms of working-class people because they served a function, but because the advertising, movies, and media portrayed these objects of capital with rebellion. You could look the part of a motorcycle-riding rebel by simply buying blue jeans and a leather jacket. It didn’t matter if you actually rebelled against any of the systems in place, it didn't matter if you worked on cars, or even owned a motorcycle. You could buy your way into a lifestyle, into a way of life that signified your values, that showed that you were a rebel without a cause because you owned specific brands and products.

With that came the hyperreality and performative nature of capitalism that was growing during this time. You didn’t need to interact with any part of reality and you could exist as an idea, as simply an aesthetic by buying products.

The beats dealt with capitalism and media creeping in as well, when more and more attention started circling around their work. The stereotype was created, and then people sold the products related to that stereotype. Unfortunately, it was not a profitable endeavor as the beats lived on the edge of poverty for the most part and were anti-consumerists, outside of stereotype books and media. They looked in general like everyone else in New York City at the time and so the stereotype of the beatnik came from the outside understanding of the beats mixed in with previous ideas of bohemians of the time in general. There wasn’t a lot of profit to be made outside of media because they were hard to pin down as an easy to package commodity.

Watering Down Politics, Selling Aesthetics & Media Cycles

The cash cow for capitalism, the sharp rise in the ability to sell products and profit in the’60s came from the rise of the hippie and the rise of the hippie stereotype. This was the preamble to the tools that neoliberalism would use to cement cultural power years later.

The term hippie came out of jazz slang about hip, which morphed into hipster over time and then morphed again in 1965 in a September issue of the San Francisco Examiner called “A New Paradise for Beatniks”. There were multiple articles written in Time magazine and other newspapers that painted the growing counterculture in specific ways. Some of the media hysteria was around the drug use, others because of the radical politics of the early counterculture. These articles would spread the background of the counterculture, and eventually be labeled as hippies.

The stereotype that came about was rejected from most people who were at the center of the counterculture. They had serious methods of changing society through social change, through entheogens, through eastern religions, with communities, and growing ecological sentiments. And they viewed the term as watering down the real ideas that many people had, and that ignored the critiques that the counterculture was mounting against the dominant culture.

Music was a method for spreading revolutionary messages to a wide amount of people, and the popularity of psychedelic folk and rock that was growing from electric blues, rock and roll, and surf rock meant there was a new musical market for corporations to capitalize on. Record companies started funding their own small bands, moving the sounds of small existing bands into the newly popular genre that was gaining momentum. In that you see a countless amount of small bands that played the sound of psychedelic rock and folk, but were devoid of any of the underlying political messaging. Music hat was made as pure entertainment, for record companies to profit from. This happened while people in the core of the counterculture were fostering and making their own methods of distribution with some of the most influential bands that drove the entire musical soundscape.

The aesthetics were also something interesting that led to the hippie stereotype bleeding over into an identity in contemporary society. Most people who were politically active in the counterculture also had a sense of anti-consumerism and that mirrored in the vintage and secondhand clothes that eventually became known with hippies. The rejection of normal male and female beauty standards with men growing long beards and women going braless was a direct rejection of the dominant cultures’ beauty standards and gender expectations. There were cultural items from both Native American and Black culture that people outside of those cultures would wear. This was an aesthetic, the bell-bottom jeans, long hair, tie-dye, fringe, that was seen in newsreels and magazines. This portrayal of the counterculture stuck in the popular imagination and started spreading and the same thing happened as before except there was a change in how most advertising and media worked. After 1967, the summer of love and Timothy Leary being labeled “The most dangerous man in America” there was both a backlash and a flood of people interested in the counterculture who often did not come from the types of people who were originally involved with the counterculture. They might have been upper-middle-class suburban kids who saw the rebellion as pure rebellion, unaware of the political undertones the counterculture really represented. They might have been in the same class but wanted to actively reject the future their parents expected out of a suburban, privileged young person.

There is a separation between the real culture that was building and growing and the media-driven culture that said all you had to do to be part of the counterculture was to buy the clothes, buy the music, and that’s all you needed. Though there was an obvious pushback from the people who viewed this consumerism as antithetical to the political aims of the countercultural groups. Capital has been successful in creating the stereotype, removing political messages, and replacing them with commodities. It defanged much of the political messaging because you could not tell who was genuine and had genuine critiques of the dominant society and who was looking the part they saw in movies and in magazines.

Can We Blame People for Wanting to be a Part of Something?

I say these critiques because they were shared with people of the day about hippies and the hippie stereotype after everything had happened. But can you really blame people who, given the media landscape of the time, were learning as much as they could? Sure it is easy to say “oh the hippies were really just a bunch of rich kids dressing the part” (which in some ways I am saying that) but also want to add more nuance to that take. Most people who grew up with the internet have zero clue what it was like in the 1960s and how media worked. There were a handful of TV stations, you had print media, which if you didn’t know about radical political prints you more than likely would not seek it out. That time was very different from today, both socially and politically. And I want to reiterate the same methods of movement capture and political defanging still happen today, even with the internet.

Subcultures and Exclusion as A Method of Defanging Radical Ideas.

Speaking on capitalist stereotypes as a method for injecting itself into groups and ideas, I want to talk about subcultures, when they form and how capitalists can shape and form subcultures to grow when they profit and be destroyed when they don’t profit.

Subcultures in themselves form naturally when a group of people either disagree on some specific points in the dominant culture or agree about others. They usually try and differentiate themselves from the dominant culture as a way of fostering a community, a larger group that all agree on a basic set of information. Usually, subcultures will make their own unique slang, their own fashion, music, art styles, and sometimes political ideologies. They tend to start with people eventually finding each other, agreeing on what they all have in a common interest, and then adding some general barriers of definition. These barriers help determine some of the criteria of the group but most of the time they aren’t extremely exclusionary at the start.

The goal that capitalism wants to achieve is either opening these groups to be as vague as possible, to create a wide market to target with commodities. Or to force infighting in a subculture, breaking them down into smaller sections and creating markets to sell commodities with an even more targeted approach. While at the entire time only dealing with the hyperreal stereotype of these groups, removing any cultural or political background the group had and only interacting with it as a target market.

Big Tents, Big Problems

Capitalism uses big tent tactics to water down subcultures or groups, infiltrate them and then control them. Big tent means keeping a broad coalition of people inside a specific idea but not addressing underlying social relations and how people act within groups. Let’s use environmentalism as an example. Capitalists are responsible for climate catastrophe, and their actions constantly cause harm to the environment. Capitalism requires constant extraction, manufacturing, and consumption to exist, without that it dies, so it will manufacture needs to force consumption to continue. They are the target and enemy of environmentalist activists.

To water down the hatred of capitalists, they attempt to interject themselves into the movement as a foundational pillar. This tends to come in the form of funding, either through private corporations or through nonprofits. They fund projects, which allows environmentalists to pay for supplies, buy things and do environmentalist work all while the capitalist class continues to profit. They start to be the reason why environmentalist action happens, not because these actions require money but because capitalist relations still happen in environmentalist spaces. People ask how will they afford the tools and raw materials to do forest restoration, without thinking that forest restoration can be done without the need for tools and raw materials. The financialization of social relations helps to keep money flowing even in groups that are against capitalism.

The capitalist social thought process continues, while the capitalists become the foundations of the movement. Then they slowly introduce members and people who are pro-capitalists into environmentalist groups. They use the same stereotype tactics to blend in and learn how they operate, then mimic them. They start to say “Hey we can’t afford to do climate action without BP and Shell corporate-backed think tanks funding us, maybe they aren’t so bad.”
When there will be inevitable pushback against capitalism injecting itself into groups fighting the issues capitalism created, those people are painted as against environmentalism. They don’t want to help the earth because they are against the people funding environmental projects. Why don’t they want to play along and stop complaining?

And so the people with radical politics, the people who start environmentalist movements and have well-defined political goals and reasons are pushed out. The capitalists and capitalist sympathizers then go on to say they need to make environmentalism open to all opinions! Not just those of the fringe weirdos who reject capitalism, and who founded the environmental group. We need to be inclusive of everyone and stop canceling ideas!

Then capitalists and political ideologies that embrace hierarchy and capitalist frameworks come along to profit. They start to tell environmentalists what they should look like. What products an eco-minded person should buy, what eco-minded people should wear and talk like. What they should consume.

All the while opportunists take advantage of the “Let’s be open to all opinions! We need a big tent” to push their own actions. Environmentalist capitalism slides very easily into the hands of eco-fascists. The power structure is the same, just the messaging has to change, and when eco-fascists come to talk about overpopulation, or capitalists say buy this product, people start to believe it.

That is a hyperbolic example but I want to make a point that big tent politics needs to have its limits. It’s one thing to be open to differences in opinions, it’s another to create power structures that allow abuse to go untouched and for domination to creep in. There are plenty of marginalized people who have been burned by big tent ideas, big tent social justice organizations that allow abusers and racists to interact with the groups because they refuse to add barriers that say “Please no racists” at the expense of the people in the group. The refusal to add guidelines or barriers in an effort to keep things as open as possible is exploited by capitalists and other people who operate in extremely hierarchical frameworks.

Fragmentation as a Means to Make New Markets

Another tactic is to split groups into extremely limiting subcultures to force them to become hyper exclusionary. The groups start to fragment and create very specific guidelines into each group and subgroup until each one only has a fraction of the original members. That is fine for something like an affinity group, where like-minded people create their own small ephemeral spaces based on a strict agreement on what the group is about. It’s different when talking about larger groups and organizations. In this fracturing, capitalists find it even easier to determine what boundaries each group makes, and from there can find a way to market to them because they have determined what is the in-group, and what is the out-group.

In this tactic capitalism tries to create subcultures with a rigid in-group and a rigid out-group. In this rigidity, they are able to easily conceptualize what each group wants, and from there market directly to them. Again by superimposing a stereotype or hyperreal version of the group based on their boundaries.

Structural Issues Inside Political Parties

There is a common thread between various groups that either came into prominence in this time or were working at this time. The structure of certain political parties. One can critique how various leftist political parties/ideas/groups formed their ideologies but you can’t do that with a modern frame of knowing the historical impact afterward. You can’t critique the groups that were attacked without understanding the political landscape of the time. The common thread between all of the groups and parties was that they (pretty much) all relied on central leaders and centralized forms of governance. The Black Panther Party was structured largely around Maoist principles and mirrored many of the Marxist-Leninist parties of the Soviet Union and other communist countries at the time. This led to a stratified group of leaders at the top who led the group as a whole, though there were regional chapters and city-level chapters the control structure still relied on central leaders on each front. The US government saw that fact, and actively targeted anyone that could resemble a leader either through false imprisonment or assassination. Because the Panthers relied on a central leadership to guide how the organization ran, there were easy targets for the intelligence agencies to focus their attacks. After the central leadership was removed from the party, a power vacuum started because information and power flowed to the top, then back down from the party leaders. This tactic would be used to overthrow entire governments during this time and remains the first counterintelligence tactic the US government uses.

There were (and are) members or former members of the Black Panthers who saw the path of central leadership as a path towards the organizations’ destruction. This mostly can be viewed as a reaction to attack, a formation of a central group helps stop group infiltration. But on the ground, there were members who brought up real concerns, who had real issues but were ignored by leaders. Kuwasi Balagoon and Ashanti Alston were two prominent members of the Black Panthers who didn’t want the organization to become highly centralized and spoke openly about the need to change the methods people were using. This is what tends to happen to revolutionary struggle historically, a movement with a ton of momentum grows, a small vanguard or central leadership appears and solidifies power, the current order or state assassinates or jails the leaders, and the organization falls apart into a power vacuum. After that capitalism and the state swoops in to commodify and capitalize on these power imbalances.

A major caveat to that is the fact of the difference in political landscapes. With the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam being held as examples of revolutionary change by marginalized and working-class people it’s no wonder why many of the political groups at the time mirrored these ways. If you disagree with Marxist-Leninist approaches to organization, you cannot ignore the fact that leftist political education in the US after McCarthyism was not as comprehensive as we know it today.

Revolutions Not Addressing Fundamental Issues in Society

My personal interpretation is there are 4 pillars that make up the foundation of issues in the world. This is reductionist but that’s the whole point. It’s hard to see how systems as a whole interact with each other on a macro level, with all of the details that go behind them. So we can boil things down to their essential elements, what common attributes align across multiple topics.

The 4 pillars of social destruction and ills:

1. Hierarchy

2. Patriarchy

3. Domination

4. Violence

Every issue plaguing us shares these core elements in some ways and the core elements intersect with each other. Using white supremacy as an example you might start going down the rabbit holes of details into it. There is so much complexity in just that term that it becomes somewhat of a daunting task to layout every point about it. However, there are the core elements present in white supremacy when you boil down the structure that white supremacy has. Supremacy means there is some kind of hierarchy, that one group should reign supreme. There are strong elements of patriarchy as most of the power relations within and outside of white supremacy lead back to male supremacy. There are very few white supremacists who believe in removing total power from males. There are obvious tones of domination, the domination of one race over another. Of course, there is violence, at every level and at the core of how that framework operates and the byproducts of white supremacy even just existing in this world.

We can leverage that to talk about capitalism and capital relations. There is a hierarchy that always forms.

• There are those that have money, who own the means and methods for creating goods or services.

• There are the people who exchange their labor for money to pay for goods and services.

• And there are people who are entirely left out of the system.

At the core of capital markets is patriarchy, from the historical use of money, but also because capital maintains patriarchy. Though patriarchal modes existed before capitalism, it’s baked into the notion of it. Domination is a requirement of profit, either over people or over the environment. And capitalism can only exist with violence. With every deal or legal arrangement, there is the backing of some form of violence if that deal does not go through correctly. Or some kind of central authority to regulate the market with the threat of violence or domination in some form. Abolishing capitalism will not end hierarchy, patriarchy, domination, and violence but seeking to end those things in our social relations would abolish capitalism.

For all of the changes the counterculture wanted to create, there still was a fundamental lack of engaging with some of the core concepts of social destruction. Without addressing some of those issues, there remained the underlying rot that would cause those changes not to overtake the dominant society. Hierarchy existed in marginalized groups like the queer community where white cisgender people were on the top of the hierarchy, people of color and transgender people were on the bottom. In some of the radical political groups women were still expected to handle the care work, to take care of meals, and to do the administrative work. That mirrored the dominant society’s view of women and the domination of men even in progressive groups. Even in experimental communes there still remained violence and abuse.

Even in some of the political revolutions like in China, even though women were given more of an even playing field, Mao Zedong’s wife was treated poorly by other people in the revolutionary party that said she only became a revolutionary because she slept with Mao. There remained a hierarchy that instead of capital ownership was a hierarchy of party bureaucrats and leaders. There still remained violence in the state, but also domination in the social constructs of Chinese society left over by the conservative and traditional social constructs that underpinned Chinese society. And the same was true in the US, where revolutionary change refused to confront the traditional and conservative social constructs that underpinned American society.

I also want to acknowledge that these events were the start, the foundation to the socio-economic and political ideas that we have today. Some of these questions were just starting to be brought up in American society, so we can’t expect the counterculture that birthed so many social and political movements to have all the questions answered as it all started.

These social constructs are powerful and they can be changed by acknowledging that they are there and working to change them along with our social relations and politics.

A successful revolution can’t happen without addressing the core problems of our societies. We can change social orders, but if we don’t change our social relations we are doomed to repeat history.

Conclusion: Did The Counterculture Go Wrong? Did The Counterculture Fail?

I don’t think the counterculture failed. It was dismantled by state intelligence, assassinations, media propaganda, and media landscapes of the mid-century. It was the start of many new sparks and social movements, the spark to many new ideas that would come to grow over the years and are still growing. Even if some of the groups dissolved over time like The Black Panther Party, they remain the closest we have come to in the US to an almost complete transformation of the dominant society. There are many issues to learn from these times, many things we can see in hindsight and use when looking at new futures and looking at ourselves. If anything it shows that even in the imperial core, change can happen.

The ‘60s was just the start, just the spark.

Part 3: Post Capitalist Desire, Acid Communism, and The Politics of The Anthropocene Future.

“The Spectre of a World That Could Be Free”

We have lost the ability to imagine new futures, to imagine our way out of the mess that neoliberalism and now a modern mix of technofudalism. The future has been forever canceled and we have tended to get stuck in a loop of looking at the past. Rehashing old aesthetics and ideas forever, vaporware is a great example of a critique of this, a recognition that we keep returning back to the past. The past is stuck on a loop with the speed and pitch turned down, never thinking what is on the horizon and floating around in the abandoned shopping walls of our youth.

Jaques Derrida coined the term “Hauntology”, where the cultural past repeats. This combines with ideas from Mark Fisher that he talked about in Capitalist Realism, that capitalism cannot allow for people to imagine a world without capitalism.

“It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” - Mark Fisher

Some people are imagining the future, and it looks bleak, it looks dark in the face of climate destruction, famine, violence, water scarcity. The world looks like a bleak reality, and nothing we can do can change it. This is “taking the black pill”, climate doomerism, and a resignation to death that looms in the future. I know a ton of Gen-Z age people who pretty much live in a constant state of nihilism and depression about the future, and they have a good reason to look at the future with dread, our current path is unsustainable.

There are also others who have hope. Not a naive hope that everything will work out but a controlled optimism that things can change. A controlled optimism that the social, economic, and environmental systems can change for the better. A new rise of leftist politics after the events of 2020 with the pandemic and the George Floyd Uprising & wave of social justice protests. There is a renewed spirit in people organizing to create a more just world, radically different from the one we’re living in today. Ideas around gender, sexuality, masculinity, feminity, race, economics, ecology, work, life, death, rest, play are all coalescing under the surface. In a time when we're are more atomized as ever, the internet has kept social bonds together and has even made new ones. As quarantines happened, and the streets emptied there was time for people to think. For normal working-class people to think and have a moment to breathe. The pandemic woke up a lot of people who were forced to work with the public when very little was known about the virus. They saw how the economy only functioned when they remained exploited. The essential worker kept society running and yet the state and the wealthy only wanted to make sure social cohesion and profits kept going.

There is a new counterculture growing in people, who have seen mass death and the horrors that neoliberalism and capitalism have made. From the youth who have a future with no retirement, no pensions, no good-paying jobs, climate destruction, and exploitation. There is a revival into changing consciousness, expanding our awareness, and growing communities that are connecting the dots of intersectional politics and praxis. The world has fractured and the social landscape is shifting away from capitalism and exploitation, looking for something else.

Should We Repeat The Past?

People are looking to reject capitalism, to not accept the exploitation they face at work, to stop being taken advantage of, stolen from, being forced to work for next to nothing or just to survive. That rejection leads to a lot of different places but they usually fall into leftist politics. A common thing you see in leftist political spaces is obsessions with different schools of theory, and the tribal lines some people draw between these distinctions. I won’t go too deep into the different factions and differences between leftist ideologies but a common thing in all of them is that they rely on pretty old theory. Not to say that Karl Marx or Peter Kropotkin are wrong because they wrote at a different time. But there are two different ways of reading political theory that had very different consequences.

1. Political theory is looked at as building a framework of understanding and recognizing the nature and core concepts, while also understanding the historical context.

2. Political theory is used to build a framework but meant to be followed as written.

Some people will take political theory word for word, while ignoring the socio-economic and material conditions of the time and ignoring those same conditions now. That is to say, sometimes you can use political theory word for word, but when talking about techniques and tactics that idea falls apart. We can’t use text from 19th century Germany and Russia and directly apply them to modern-day Detroit. Can we use some of the ideas directly? Sure, when they make sense and are in general universal ideas. However using the same revolutionary tactics that Mao used in the Cultural Revolution today would not produce the same results, because the socio-economic conditions are radically different. Political theory should be a guide, there are people in history that thought of systems way ahead of their time. Brilliant thinkers whose ideas have led to massive changes and countless revolutions. But we can’t rehash the past and expect the same (if not better) results. What we need is a synthesis, to take the best of leftist political theory and update the tactics, methods, and approaches. Capitalism has radically changed, and always slightly morphs depending on the environment. If we attempt to destroy capitalism with the same tactics and methods we used in the past, those attempts will fail. We need to morph leftist politics to outpace capitalism, and we can. Capitalism is incredibly slow at picking up on change, again because it requires a feedback loop of stereotyping in order to produce new markets. We have to change fundamentally to update our methods to the modern-day, to fight a modern capitalism.

Acid Communism, Psychedelic Socialism & A New Counterculture

Acid communism is an interesting term most associated with Mark Fisher and was the last piece he was working on before his tragic death. Read the entire intro here.

I won’t take words out of Mark Fishers’ mouth so please read that text for the full understanding but I will offer my own understanding/rundown of what I took from the text.

Acid communism is an idea fleshed out by both Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert. They worked together and bounced ideas off of each other for a while until Mark Fisher’s death. You can listen to Jeremy Gilbert in an amazing podcast called Acid Corbinism FM. The idea was around thinking about a different kind of counterculture. One that combined leftist politics with a kind of “libidinal marxism” which is a spin-off of Jean Lyotard’s idea of a libidinal economy. In Acid Communism Mark Fisher explains that the counterculture was not an entire failure and that in general, it was a start.

For all of the failures that happened, as I explained in the previous historical section, all of it came to an end because of capitalism, neoliberalism, and state intervention. The counterculture of the ‘60s was a direct movement towards a social and cultural revolution, and some members of the early counterculture were extremely politically motivated.

What lacked, later on, was the fact that there was no cohesive vision of the future. There was no common understanding of a political goal or a unified idea of what the goal even was. There were the yippies, Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, Anarchists, and Soviet-style communists all offering different ideas. Keep in mind, this was the first time many of these ideas had been applied widely in the US. To think all of these ideologies would form a cohesive idea while they were just starting to coalesce along with feminism and queer liberation is ignoring the material conditions of the day.

If we want to have a cohesive view of the future we can’t do it by rehashing the ideas of the past, and we have moved on to need a new way of looking at leftist politics. Because capitalism has changed drastically since most of the leftist political theory was written, and the mechanisms work slightly differently with the amount of technology present in modern times. Thinking about a new cohesive view of the future will require compromises and changing things around, we can’t rely on preexisting definitions alone to move forward if we want a radically different future. Sure we could follow an existing leftist ideology again, but it will more than likely fail to get off the ground or create the same issues as an existing leftist ideology has created.

In Acid Communism Mark Fisher talks about it as politics + aesthetics + culture + psychedelia to create a new shift in leftist politics.

The acid in Acid Communism can mean LSD, like a psychedelic compound-driven communism but Mark Fisher doesn’t seem to mean that everyone should take hallucinogens and that will bring communism. But more so is the idea of psychedelia, of changing your perspective on the world and looking at things in a new way. Seeing the world for all the weirdness and outside of the capitalist conditioning that we all have and the capitalist social relations that are engrained in us. I’ll touch on this later because I personally agree with both ends of that outlook, but that will require more explanation.

But also acid could mean like a real acid, an acidification of the current social norms and an acidification of communism itself, to move the conception of communism from a statist, authoritarian, or state-capitalist model and into something different, into a different conception of communism.

The communism in Acid Communism should look different from our previous conceptions of communism. There should be a rejection of authoritarian, bureaucratic rule and instead focus on creating a classless, moneyless, egalitarian society that also values freedom both as an individual and as a collective. Many people in the early counterculture rejected the calls to model social movement on the Soviet Union or Marxist-Leninist thought and instead wanted to embrace new ideas that incorporated socialist ideas with other ones to create a push to a new idea of communism. In many respects, the socialist and communist movements of the time crumbled because they were unwilling to change their tactics. The old guard of political activists wanted to maintain the strong militancy of previous revolutions and didn’t want to engage with the leftist movements who rejected that and wanted something different. There was a sense that the new leftist counterculture was not principled or serious but that ended up being mostly projection about the inability for communist movements to change their ideas and conceptions about what a social revolution could look like in the US.

If “the counterculture led to neoliberalism”, better that the counterculture had not happened. In fact, the opposite argument is more convincing — that the failure of the left after the Sixties had much to do with its repudiation of, or refusal to engage with, the dreamings that the counterculture unleashed.

Acid Communism also points out that the social and artistic ties into the political. The goal should be a combination of art, music, literature, culture + psychedelia, entheogens, or consciousness expansion + political action. A cohesive political action that ties together various forms of leftist political thought together. One that is built for the modern-day that can morph and move as capitalism morphs and moves. Because art, music, and literature go beyond pure logic, they convey way more than just text or education. These mediums can even deliver messages better than just telling someone about a new kind of politics. The internet has fragmented the attention spans of most people, and our conceptions of the world are way more than just logic. We have to show people what a new politics will look like, show people what a cultural change would sound like and how it would work. Not just tell people to read abstract political theory but show them firsthand the theory in action, or the theory that comes to life in music, art, and literature.

I should say that some of these ideas are my own personal opinions going ahead. Though you might not agree with everything I say or offer, let it be a seed to grow into better ideas.

Putting The Acid In Acid Communism: Psychedelia, Breaking Reality, Libidinal Marxism, and Ego Death

There are multiple ways of breaking through ideology, of looking at the world in a radically different view, in questioning what really is important in life, and who we are fundamental as people. This can happen in a couple of different ways, some of which would need to be foundational to changing people’s perspectives on the world. Because capitalism forces everyone living it to not be able to imagine a world without capitalism we have to find ways to subvert that mechanism. We have to wonder how to combat capitalist propaganda and show people alternative ways of viewing the world and viewing themselves. I will be talking about some of the general concepts that might be tools in opening up people’s minds to change:

• Embracing psychedelia and the weird

• Using psychedelics and other entheogens to produce altered states

• Encouraging sober altered states without the use of psychoactive compounds

• Methods of breaking autopilot, capitalist reality

There is nuance in all of these that should be explained in more detail, but these can be potent steps to short-circuiting capitalist conditioning.

Embracing Psychedelia and The Weird

I use the term psychedelia as an adjective of what a psychedelic experience would be like or feel like and not literally as psychedelic experiences. Psychedelia is weird, it shows how strange our world can be and how interesting life can be at times. It forces us to question what seems normal and what seems avant garde. It’s embracing being different, of being unique, not in a neoliberal capitalist way of buying objects to differentiate yourself but a real admission of being your real self, regardless of the environment. The weird and weird people really are labeled that way because they don’t feel the need to adhere to social norms. We should all actively work to question social norms because largely, they can be really strange (in a bad way).

Art and experimental music fit right into this idea of weird psychedelia, being potent tools to point out the weirdness of everyday life. Experimentation and change in art can carry over into the experimentation and change of our social and political systems.

The acid in Acid Communism could also mean acidifying reality, breaking down the notions of what we deem normal and abnormal. Neurodivergent people are keen to point out the absurdity in neurotypical life, the strangeness of normality, of social cues and conventions that are entirely abnormal.

Embracing psychedelia and the weird as an embracement of freedom, of freedom of expression and relation. Of the freedom to question and challenge social norms and to push concepts of what is normal to their limits. As the group, the Weather Underground wrote in a manifesto:

“Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks"

Using psychedelics and entheogens to produce altered states

Disclaimer:

Starting off, psychedelics and other psychoactive compounds have their place and there simply are some people who should not take them. Full stop. There is a narrative in psychedelic communities that these compounds can cure diseases and that everyone should take them. I disagree and recognize that for people with existing mental health conditions, psychedelics and hallucinogens can make their conditions worse. Some of these compounds should also never be used on people under the age of 25, to protect the development of young people’s brains.

Psychedelics are very interesting compounds because they change the user’s perception of reality, can shift time, space and in some compounds and doses produce vivid hallucinations or complete breaks with reality. Hallucinations are not the goal, they might be (sometimes) fun experiences but these compounds produce effects that are extremely important outside of seeing interesting patterns.

An extremely common experience with psychedelics is the feeling of being one with everything. This happens to so many people on so many different compounds that it is a common baseline that most psychedelics share. There have been studies into psilocybin where people feel an absolute connection to the universe, to people, to nature. It’s a phenomenal experience that some people feel during religious experiences but not many people feel in their normal lives. This experience of oneness can be life-changing, and allow people to understand their connection to their fellow humans, the world, and nature for the first time. Many people come to leftist politics from their experiences with psychedelics, and it is common to see people who were not politically motivated before psychedelic experiences, fully engrained into capitalist modes of life, and afterward look for a way to foster collectivity with other people and do political action to help nature.

Another experience would be ego disolvement or ego death. Common with high doses or strong psychedelics, this is where a person’s concept of who they are dissolve away and for the first time can see themselves from an outside point of view. Normally we have an idea of who we are, but these experiences can break this concept to show that who we are is just a concept, sometimes just a collection of stories that we tell ourselves, other times they are concepts from outside of us, things that we picked up from our parents in childhood. Taking these compounds can force people to question who they are on a fundamental level, to challenge not just reality but their own concepts of their life and what kind of person they think themselves to be. This can be extremely jarring, but many come out of these ego death experiences viewing themselves in a completely new way. Some think of it as almost a rebirth, because they felt their own sense of collected and inherited selves melt away and feel like they can finally build their own character and unique sense of the world.

“If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.”

- Terrence Mckenna

I also want to add that psychedelics and entheogens can be dangerous when in the hands of abusers. Because psychedelics can produce altered states of consciousness where someone might be more susceptible to someone taking advantage of them. An underlying thing to consider is that entheogen use can only be safe when separated from rape culture. This is why it’s important to address patriarchy and domination in these spaces, and challenge social normals around rape and rape culture. To make sure that anyone dispensing these compounds is trained, vetted and routinely audited for misbehavior.

In the right setting, with the right people, these therapies can have dramatic effects on people. We also have to work not just on individual issues, but societal and structural ones as well. Many of the ailments that are treated with psychedelic or compound-induced therapy are deeply personal. But many can be influenced by social impacts and structural inequities. As with anything, there is nuance about the topic that not very many people want to acknowledge. We have to understand that psychedelics can help transform an individual’s life when given in the right dose, setting, and by a nonabusive guide or therapist. But we also have to recognize the structural issues that influence our lives and aim not only to make a more equitable, horizontal, and democratic society, but also change how these compounds are used and viewed.

Fostering Sober Altered States

Entering into altered states of consciousness doesn’t require the use of psychedelic compounds or entheogens and can be done by anyone. Talking here about reaching transcendental states while dancing in a nightclub, while working out, while hiking in the mountains, when doing yoga, when meditating. The zen of working with your hands and doing a mundane task, the zoning out when looking outside of a window at the morning sunrise. Capitalism kills wonder because it forces us to always rationalize things, to always quantify things and never just stand astonished at any form of beauty without asking how much something costs or feeling bad for not being productive. The times of wonder and contemplation taken away from our hands while we force ourselves to monetize every waking moment. That meditating, just sitting and not thinking thoughts is either a waste of time since you could be producing capital, or is only a respite to maintain your sense of sanity during the work day. The mindfulness poison fed to us in response to the mental health crisis plaguing our society has been a reaction by the wealthy and by our jobs to trick us into thinking our discontent with the world is individual. That the issues in the world are not because of capitalism, but because of us, and we should meditate and be mindful. Be mindful not to transcend or renounce materialism, but to rest your brain and get back to work because your boss needs your stress levels lowered so you can be productive.

Entering into altered states, meditative states, trances, a sense of awe at nature can short circuit your perception of the world. Meditating can clear your mind of all the default racing thoughts that just get worse in these stressful times. Using your mind to clear time and space to think, Zen Buddhism has some interesting takes on work and meditation. A common idea in zen is to make work a meditation, not to make the work more productive but to carve out time to think for yourself at any time. Even while being forced to work for money you can meditate while working, subvert the control that capitalism wants to exert on you by stopping working-class people from having the time and energy to question the system at hand.

Immersing yourself in nature, and taking in the beauty that it has to offer can give you a new lease on life. You don’t need to be in a beautiful forest to take stock in nature, it can be a field of wheat, or sand dunes, or the concrete in a city cracked open by a blooming flower. Take any and every opportunity to take time and think, take time and question, and enter into your own altered states.

Breaking Through Capitalist Autopilot, Agitprop, and New Forms of Pop-aganda

Have you ever been driving around, or commuting on your normal route in a state of nonthought, acting our your daily routines of working, commuting, eating, sleeping, and suddenly you snap out of it? You’re at the wheel of your car looking at the stoplight and your vision comes back, suddenly the world is real again. You feel off, like you were transported away from your body, doing actions on autopilot. Living the life of routine made you zone out. You were there but you were simultaneously somewhere else. That is the feeling of being on autopilot, of living life without truly living it. Domination, capitalism, and hierarchy thrive when as many people as possible learn not to think, learn not to question, and just follow the routine. In many ways the capitalist autopilot is a defense mechanism to just get through the day. To just get through life with as little issue as possible, and in return, we just end up consuming without any issue or thought. This capitalist autopilot is a state of mind, but it is fostered through media and propaganda. Going to work, commuting, or logging in virtually, then the work day and the return back to your life. You have maybe 4 hours of free time before the cycle repeats. In this cyclical process capitalism breaks your personality down and forced you to work, day in and day out and only reserve your weekends for 48 hours of respite even though the majority of working people use their weekends to catch up on housework or do domestic work on the weekends. The 4 hours of free time afterward become a time to “decompress”, to “relax” with the tools and methods that the capitalist system produces. And so we consume, media, games, drugs, alcohol, consume this time to take our minds off the crushing reality.

This cycle repeats daily for most people, and sometimes you wake up at the steering wheel going 40 miles per hour and thinking “What the hell am I doing, all of this is so crazy, why was I zoned out?”. The acid of acid communism used to add the element of psychedelia to break reality, as subconscious reminders that this world is so strange, and to snap out of the capitalist autopilot state. Memes and art do this really well, one second you can be mindlessly doomscrolling Twitter and see a meme that all of a sudden shocks you into thinking. It’s an interruption in the psychological cycle, and we should work to make more of these things to shake people out of the “normal” lived reality they are forced into.

These shocks to the autopilot system are summed up by one word: abnormality.

Humans have amazing pattern recognition skills, and we are used to noticing them things are different or out of place. An antidote to capitalist autopilot is agitprop and pop-aganda. Agitprop being anything that gets people politically motivated, or at the bare minimum makes them suddenly question their day. It’s an old term from USSR times but I like the idea of using the information to jolt people into thinking. A better formulation could be called pop-aganda or using memes, music, art, and literature to jolt people into thinking critically. Pop-aganda would attempt to inject radical thoughts into people’s everyday lives through art, through difference, through abnormality. But how do we reach people in the internet age, when most people are falling into ideology online, and increasingly our entire lives are being pushed online.

Escaping the Echo Chambers, Nuance in the Use of the Internet

There is a lack of nuance when talking about leftist organizing in the modern age. There are people who say that you can’t organize online and that we should be doing physical direct action and organizing in the real world. There are others that reject this and want to use online spaces to organize but oftentimes only go online to talk about issues and never take their actions into the real world.
Both approaches are extremely limiting but both have incredible benefits.

The internet has moved from the wild west of random sites set up by developers and small personal pages to multinational corporations creating their own internet hubs. There was a sense in the early internet, just like the early counterculture that this new system could radically change our world and that we could create an entirely new one in cyberspace. Free from corporate oversight and governmental control, we could interact with people across the world in milliseconds and be transported into amazing virtual worlds. That wild attitude still exists today and the countercultural and hacker elements of the early internet succumbed to the same fate as the ‘60s counter culture did of corporate neoliberal capitalism coopting these new communication networks for the sake of profit. They watched how the early internet was built from the ground up, created their own conception of cyberspace, then injected corporate and capitalistic interests at the foundation of various projects and areas. Then they monetized interactions, and increasingly monetized everything they could to make a profit. They looked to create their own networks of corporations online, their own social media platforms, chat rooms and markets that they controlled.

It’s only until relatively recently that algorithms have decided what we see online. Before there were things called webrings, collections of websites produced by the community where other people could look up things that interested them. They still exist in the echos of GeoCities and some art projects exist in relative obscurity just like how the web used to be. You had to know what you searched for or you stumbled onto new ideas just surfing, or from chat rooms. Algorithms designed for one purpose, advertizing, became the governors of who saw what and when. I could write another article about the development of the internet out of the ‘60s counterculture because it is incredible how connected the two are.

With algorithms determining what we see, on platforms controlled by corporations, with the express purpose of advertising and selling commodities, we have fallen into an echo chamber. I would say this internet echo chamber is comparable if not worse than the media echo chamber of the 1960s. Increasingly people online are shoved into silos and fall down pipelines of information. It has become harder to get information to the masses of people without having it fall into small groups that already agree with the ideas you are trying to spread.

On the flip side, it is increasingly harder to organize outside of the internet with constant surveillance by corporations, governments, and police. Buying any kind of advertising space or visible space in the public is so expensive that only businesses can afford to use the same means that capitalists use. Neoliberalism has fractured our ability to conceptualize collective political action. The ideas of meetings have been poisoned by capitalism, and even socialist meetings can sometimes model themselves on old corporate meeting structures. Neoliberalism and capitalism has poisoned our conceptions of collectivity. Group projects in school, office meetings that go on and on, subverting government institutions like the postal service with more bureaucracy and inefficiency are on purpose. It’s to ruin our sense of working together and dealing with government agencies to make us not conceptualize a world where we do work together and a world where there is no government, but people interacting with systems they are actually a part of.

So we need to both organize online and take our efforts to the streets. Defacing art, putting slogans in public areas, dropping banners over highways, signs in street medians. Posters at the local coffee shop, zines left outside of smoking sections of office buildings, injecting art and messaging everywhere, to jar the senses.

So when people are in capitalist autopilot, driving on their morning commute, they see a sign that wasn’t there the day before in the median:

“Aren’t you sick of working while someone else profits?”

They see someone wearing a fantastically weird outfit with a hand-painted back patch:

“100 companies are responsible for 70% of global emissions”

Make the world into a giant art piece, the weirder the better. Jolt people awake.

The Communism of Acid Communism

There is something to be said about taking tribalist approaches to collective political action. There are countless amounts of different leftist political groups that differentiate from each other, some at a fundamental level. But there is a bit of common ground between most leftist political ideologies. In general, we all want to see the rise of a better future. We want a political system based roughly around some of these central ideas:

A classless, moneyless, and egalitarian society, free of exploitation.

Taking that I would also add a couple more things to that.

A classless, moneyless, horizontally governed, egalitarian society, free of exploitation, and patriarchy. A society that values the relationship of nature and humanity.

In explaining my interpretation of Acid Communism I want to blend various ideas from leftist ideologies into a framework based on some of the ideas of Acid Communism posited by Mark Fisher, modern culture, and the points I made above.

Acid Communism for the Modern Day

We should aim to address the core issues that prevail in societies, not just in capitalism.

1. Hierarchy

2. Patriarchy

3. Domination

4. Violence

And combine that with the political end goals:

A classless, moneyless, horizontally governed, egalitarian society, free of exploitation, and patriarchy. A society that values the relationship of nature and humanity.

To reach these goals and address core issues we should aim to make a synthesis of various leftist ideals that in their stereotyping entirety can come together into something new, not entirely new but a shift in the current ways we are doing things. We should take the best ideas from Anarchism, Marxist-Leninism, Social Ecology, Anarcho-Syndicalism, EcoAnarchism, Democratic Confederalism, Mutualism, Maoism, Marxism, Post-Civ, Communalism, and Libertarian Socialism and add them together.

Anyone entrenched enough into leftist political theory will see ideologies that are diametrically opposed to each other sharing space. You might not be able to see how they can agree, and most of the time they don’t.

But there are valid criticisms of all of them that can help to form something akin to a conception of Acid Communism.

Towards a New Conception of Communism

A new counterculture might grow to embrace new combinations and conceptions of communism that divert away from the classic statist communist and socialist governments of the past. In my opinion, Acid Communism would look like Anarcho-Communism combined with elements of Communalism, Green Anarchism, Social Ecology, Democratic Confederalism, Marxism, Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, LGBTQA+ Liberation, and Anti-Racism. With the express goal of ending hierarchy, patriarchy, domination, and violence of all forms.

What the hell does that all mean?

It would be to abolish unjust social and political hierarchies of state power and return control back to the people, with common ownership of the world and means of production. Changing our social relations to rid society of domination, patriarchy, and hierarchy while also championing the freedom and autonomy of the individual. A recognition of individual freedom combined with collective action and solidarity. Instead of command economies, an Acid Communist world would base things around mutual aid, mutual respect, and caring for both humanity and the earth. A recognition that cooperation, not competition is how we should live our lives and focus on making sure every single person has their basic needs met.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs - Karl Marx

The power of the people would be to self-organize a confederation of peers, and unlike current states would be a bottom-up rule of the people with anyone in a representative delegate position directly accountable and recallable or randomly selected from a population of comparable people. On a local level, this would mean that people are free to form unions and collectives on a whole host of identities, roles, nationalities, etc. Issues would be directly voted on by the people, delegates would take those issues into regional councils, then into general councils. It would be a rule of all people for all people, as opposed to capitalism where those with the most money call the shots, or various forms of state communism where the real power was held in a type of bureaucratic elite. Delegates would not be like representatives like in current representative democracies but would be directly recallable and only act as messengers of their councils. They would hold no real power, because real power would be held by the people.

Changing Economic Relations and Environmental Relations to Post-Scarcity Eco Centered Economics

We should aim to change our economics, or the way that we live to something radically different and base our relations on mutual aid, mutual respect, and meeting everyone’s basic needs. Capitalism requires scarcity, it requires that there be people who do not have food, clean drinking water, or shelter, simply because of how capitalist markets work. If there isn’t profit to be made, it won’t get done. Taking care of the poor is not profitable and so people are thrown out of the system and left to fend for themselves.

In a communist society, we would instead make meeting everyone’s basic needs the foundation of our economies. We have enough resources to feed everyone, we have enough land to house everyone and we have clean water to share and methods of producing clean water that isn’t profitable in capitalism, but is extremely useful in an Acid Communist one. We do this by changing the methods and systems we use to grow food, transport goods, manufacture things, and fundamentally live. This can be done by switching from large centralized systems into distributed, localized ways of operating. There are economies of scale and some things are better done in large centralized ways. But there are others that localism can address, like food security that ties into climate change, the environmental impact of shipping food from farming zones into living areas, and all of the processes that go behind that.

Food production should happen on a hyper-local, with every community growing food not in a factory farm method, but moving towards permaculture and growing food forests. Understanding that us growing food can have positive impacts on the environment instead of negative ones. This changes out water use, switching from water-intensive factory farming to permaculture means that we conserve water use, and with proper land management, we can actually trap and regenerate natural stores of freshwater, instead of drying out wells and aquifers. In cities, we work on retrofitting highrises and existing buildings to hold multiple uses, housing combined with local manufacturing and production, growing food inside indoor vertical farms, recreation, all inside spaces where local communities can thrive.

Moving away from fossil fuels to renewable and passive energy systems, moving our personal transportation away from individual cars to free and widespread public transit with trolleys, trains, electric busses, and electric cars that don’t require the extraction of rare minerals like lithium.

The key would be managing our impact to the environment and instead of extracting and destroying, working to regenerate the land. Instead of our economic relations being based on scarcity we base it on abundance. We aim for a post-scarcity economics, because we have everything that we need already, it is about changing the systems in place to address the problems of the ecosystem and humanity.

I could go on and on explaining all of these ideas and basically breaking down exactly how an Acid Communist, or Anarcho-Communist type society might work but I will supply you with some ideas to use to grow your conceptions of these ideas.

This guide completely outlines exactly what I’m talking about here in much greater detail

This video explains in much more detail into some of the inner workings of a possible Acid Communist system.

Explaining all the fine details would make this essay even longer, and there are people who have explained things way better than I can. If some of these ideas interest you I would read Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Murray Bookchin.

Addressing Hierarchy, Patriarchy, Domination, and Violence With Liberatory Communism

Hierarchy, patriarchy, domination and violence are all interconnected issues and their mechanisms for control all depend on each other. If we want to have a social revolution we have to address some of the core issues behind human relations to make things better. Hasn’t all of humanity been trying to reach the goal of a better society through pretty much all of humanity? Yes, but we are are a unique time in history, where things have added together to form a unique condition for fundamental change. We now have the language and understanding, that in order to build a better future we have to do so together.

We should create an intersectional politics that includes all people and views to make sure that society addresses not just everyone’s basic needs, but everyone’s basic concerns. We can live in a future where we are united, not just under class, but under the differences of our identities and the similarities those differences include.

Girlboss Capitalism & Working Class Racists: Why Identity Politics and Class Consciousness Can’t be Separated to Reach Intersectionality

Identity Politics as a concept came out of the political revolutions of the ‘60s and from Black feminist circles. The idea is that politics and our political conceptions are deeply rooted in our identities. The identities of marginalized people shape their political outlooks and their political outlooks shape identities. That is to say that the issues affecting Black people will be different from say Native Americans because of the interaction of identity with politics and politics with identity.

There are unique issues that affect different people, and to really understand how to solve people's unique issues we have to understand how their identities make them different and understand the unique circumstances they face. That isn’t to say that we should only focus on how people are different but we need to recognize and learn about those differences to have compassion and understanding that would be impossible to really know without being in that situation.

Identity politics relies on its interconnection between class consciousness because identity politics on its own, and separated from the commonality that class creates can lead to dark places.

Capitalism has co-opted identity politics in recent years, and had taken a radical idea of learning how we are all different and require unique understanding to fully know, but ultimately we are all connected. Instead, capitalism uses identity politics to create markets, create division and create tribalism that matches the mechanisms that capitalism uses to break up radical ideas. It does this by taking radical critiques of capitalism, stereotyping and simplifying ideas, and separating them from political implications.

Some examples would be “girl boss capitalism” or “black drone-strike operators”. Radical political groups wanted to point out that in order for change to happen, more people from marginalized groups need to become part of these systems to change them. Their unique outlooks on life would give them a different perspective, and in that would help shape the system from the inside to be more equitable. Calls for diversity in the workplace were because marginalized people were left out of conceptions of being a marginalized person in a workplace. By companies hiring more people of color or who were part of the LGBTA+ community, those organizations would be changed because of a new perspective driving action from people who know what it’s like to be a marginalized person. There are specific political implications to this that capitalism attempts to strip out. It creates a generalization that marginalized people only want to see other marginalized people in positions of power. So then you have messaging of hiring more women, that women need to become CEOs and use the same power structures of exploitation and domination, and that should quell any issues that marginalized people have.

That ignores the fundamental contention, that marginalized people ar marginalized because of the systems at hand of hierarchy, domination, and exploitation.

It really doesn’t matter if a marginalized person is leading the system, because the system perpetuates domination and patriarchy, domination and patriarchy aren’t solved just because a marginalized person is in charge of a company.

Capitalism isn’t suddenly “woke” and fixed just because there are more gay managers. Lockheed Martin isn’t absolved from suppling weapons used to kill innocent civilians because they had a Black person piloting a drone. Capitalism has and will continue to use performative diversity as a weapon as it strips the political intentions of people away from them.

Class Reductionism, Police Unions and Class Illusions

On the flip side of identity politics as a uniting force there is class as a uniting force. The end goal is to dissolve social relations until class is gone, and instead we are all equals. But operating with class in the current system we are talking about working-class people, the wealthy and capital owners/bourgeoisie.
Class can be a uniting force no matter what, two radically different people who both are working-class have that in common, and their goals align in ending the capitalist exploitation that keeps them working while the wealthy profit. This is a very Marxist conception of class solidarity, that all of the working class are united in their needs to end the requirements of class and economic hierarchy all together.

Are police working class? Are the militaries that bomb civilians made of working-class people? Are police unions like labor unions? What does it say when someone falls into a class category but their actions directly work to make sure that hierarchy and capitalist domination remain?

This is where the reduction to all revolutionary issues down to class only fall apart. Because there are people who would be considered working class, but work as mechanisms or tools of oppression and violence.

Differences in Identity + Class Consciousness = A United Humanity

Identity politics can only exist well when combined with class consciousness, and class consciousness can only work well when combined with Identity Politics. In our differences, we can understand our commonalities. In our current class we can see that we are all fighting for the same things. But these things combined won’t mean that a revolutionary change won’t just carry over the same social relations that existed before. Sure we can understand our unique identities and learn where we have things in common but if we don’t tackle patriarchy, violence, domination, and hierarchy we won’t be able to reach true freedom.

Intersectionality Means Change at the Core

Hierarchy, Domination, Patriarchy, and Violence are at the core of each other and require each other in many ways to function. Hierarchy can only maintain control by using domination and violence. Patriarchy can only exist when there are forms of social hierarchy that favor men. Violence is a universal part of all of them and is the tool that all of them use to maintain power. You see these mechanisms in social orders that maintain strict hierarchies, there are those at the top and those at the bottom.

To achieve intersectionality is to recognize the individual and the collective, to recognize identity politics and class, and to find common issues and how our socio-politics creates social conditions that create problems.

The struggles of Women also match with the struggles of Queer people, the issues Black people face also affect the neurodivergent. We can understand that each of these groups has their own unique circumstances and issues but also can immediately see commonality. A barista and an accountant share the same problems, as do a truck driver and a teacher, or a chef and an electrician. They are all bound by class, their struggles intersect and yet diverge depending on what their lives are like.

Fighting patriarchy means fighting toxic patriarchal masculinity. It does not mean fighting or hating men for simply existing, but fighting the system of domination that centers men as dominators. It is a system of strict social codes and norms that are forced onto men and fundamentally damages them. Patriarchy is deadly to everyone, especially women and femmes, but also dangerous to men. It is a system that is the basis of hierarchical thinking, because it places men above everyone else. bell hooks wrote an amazing book, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love that points out that patriarchy intersects with domination and violence to destroy everyone.

“When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent, but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.” - bell hooks

Feminism’s goal is to dissolve the patriarchal power structures in our social relations, it’s to free women from the domination model but also to free men. I use men and women here in a general sense and want to recognize that transgender and nonbinary people also fit into these distinctions because all of our social relations involve these mechanisms.

While breaking down patriarchy we break down domination, we break down predatory behaviors born out of patriarchal thinking and hierarchy. While breaking down patriarchy and domination we help even social relations between sexual identities, and in turn whittle away at heteronormativity. While chipping away at heteronormativity we also deal with transphobia and ideas around gender binaries. All of these things interconnect and for true change we need to address these social relations to make a truly egalitarian and equal world.

By smashing hierarchies of all kinds, social, economic, gender, sexual, racial, etc we destroy the power relations of domination, patriarchy, and violence. By dissolving one form of power we dissolve another and to get rid of capitalism we also will be getting rid of the underlying structures underneath it.

Meeting Basic Needs as a Means to Solve Core Issues VS. Capitalist “Free” Markets

Violence, crime, drug use, poverty, and death are all symptoms of a larger system. A system that does not meet the basic needs of everyone. Instead, it enforced strict hierarchies to make sure those who benefited from preexisting social privileges, or who had existing capital are at the top. A system that prioritizes profits will never truly look after all people, there will be people who are not profitable to help and that are left to die. Violence, crime, theft are all symptoms of poverty and wherever you find poverty you find these things. Because people lack their basic needs like food, water, shelter, comfort, and community, they will do whatever they can to survive. This is the system that free-market capitalism has created. There are plenty of people living great lives, and some who are unbelievably wealthy. And yet for every successful person in capitalism are thousands of other people who could not succeed for a whole list of problems. Many completely out of their control. This is not a system of freedom, but one of domination. And in capitalism you see all of the core issues of hierarchy, patriarchy, violence, and domination.

Meeting peoples basic needs but also meeting all of their needs in general will produce a world that is much more equitable and beautiful than the one we have now. Meeting everyone’s needs means giving power back to people to live amazing lives. That means food, clean water, shelter, community, childcare, education, healthcare free with no questions asked. Why? Because we are all people, our lives intersect and at the end of the day the struggles of all people are the concerns of all people. A society based in mutual aid, respect, and basic dignity means not letting people go without.

Food, Not Bombs: Self Defence Without Militaries and the State

A very common criticism from Marxist-Leninist/statist theorists about anarchistic forms of leftist organizing is that without a military or state, capitalism will always attempt to stop other systems before they form, many times with force. There is also an argument that there are violent people out there who would never the less persist, regardless of how society is formed. I agree to an extent though I would argue that most acts of violence are either done out of desperation, lack of healthcare, and access to mental healthcare, or are done by hierarchical groups to maintain power and order.

The answer is to address the core problems in society first, while also fostering a holistic self defense culture in all people. Everyone should learn acts of self-defense, and self-defense rarely ever looks like armed self-defense (Though there are times it is needed). Thinking outside of firearm or armed self-defense and thinking of all the other forms can help us to understand how we create a culture of mutual respect and mutual defense of each other. One of the largest self defense skills would be conflict resolution, which can take many forms along with de-escalation tactics. To quell violence as much as possible, when it is possible before situations escalate. It’s easy to imagine a society armed to the teeth and ready to shoot, but things don’t need to be like that and before the guns come out we should try and calm the situation as much as possible.

Notions that humanity is inherently violent by default are disagreeable, one because we are products of our socio-economic environment. And two that horizontal governance will stop violent and power-hungry people (where they do exist) from gaining the mechanisms of power. If we make an equal society, people championing inequality will not have a captive audience if they have their basic needs met. They won’t be able to wield political power or control others if the governance systems stop people from abusing others as a foundation.

I posit that taking care of someone and their family is the greatest weapon. Giving people food, clean drinking water, free education, and healthcare for nothing but just being a person. Above all giving people freedom and autonomy.

Inoculations to Capitalist Co-opting

Taking cues from the ‘60s counterculture and the current day internet culture we can start putting together ways to innoculate movements against capitalist co-option on the social level. This won’t be and can’t be an exhaustive list but these ideas might add some resiliency to a potential future countercultural revolution.

• Avoid creations of hard in-groups and outgroups on trivial differences.

  The creation of strict subcultures allows for movement capture because it’s easier to pin down specific groups. By trivial differences I mean very minute ones, there needs to be general guidelines on things (see the issues with big tent politics). But also it can’t be ultra exclusionary. This is a hard balance to achieve but remember to keep your morals.

• Foster an aesthetic rooted in DIY and upcycled things, not commodities.

  Usually there is an early attempt for capitalists to copy the style of a specific group or movement, or even try and put a specific style or way of looking that gets reabsorbed into the group. Make it so it’s impossible for them to sell anything.

• Morphing and changing throws off their trend cycles

  Embracing the weird, acid part of acid communism would mean not keeping things in a fixed idea of things. Keep things fluid and changing just like experimental art. Capitalists will always be two steps behind as they try to keep up.

• Attack structures and ideas, not people

  Don’t be a dick to people if they disagree with things(except Nazis and fascists, fuck ‘em). Only deal with the disagreements with the substance they are talking about. Attacking people isn’t productive and often times you will be able to find common ground outside of the kneejerk reaction to you. “Be ruthless with systems; be kind to people.” Michael Brooks

• Make things hostile for marketing

  The worst thing for a marketer is for them to try to make a niche space into a market and everyone in that space rejects the entire idea. Spotting companies setting up their tendrils into something, calling it out, and making the landscape impossible for them to sell anything.

• Foster anti-capitalist social arrangements

  Wherever possible, try to make exchange deal less and less with money and capital exchange. Basing your actions on mutual aid in all things will cut down on the expectation that money will, or is required to exchange hands. Though we do live in capitalism and there are times when money will exchange, maintaining that monetary exchange is not the only important thing will make sure that people can just do things for others and that there are more incentives to life than monetary exchange.

• Parody their messaging if capitalists do stereotype you

  If there is a hyperreal personification or view a group, pointing out the contradictions in their personification can show people that their idea of things is twisted by capitalist stereotyping.

• Question who is running the platforms and outlets

  A very common tactic to slip corporate interests into ideas is for them to become the funders and bedrock of communities. Always be asking who is running things and why. Not to a paranoid level but be willing to question the motives of people or groups and their end goals.

Acid Communism in Action: Dissolving Inequality With Dual Power and Creativity

How do we get closer to getting rid of capitalism and fostering a mutual aid society? How do we go from capitalism, and hierarchy into more horizontal ways of living?

Dual power & prefigurative politics

Building dual power means building ways of life alongside and within hierarchy and domination. We live in a capitalist world but we can start carving out alternatives now, start working to move the needle from domination to a freer, more egalitarian way of life. This is where prefiguration comes in, we are creating the world we want to see and not just imagining it. In order for a free, horizontal & democratic, and mutual aid society to grow, we have to start making the foundations of those systems now. We have to prefigurate the futures that we want to see by building autonomy in a system that tries to strip us of autonomy.

That means taking back the tools of oppression from our oppressors. Gaining autonomy in our food, water, and shelter so hierarchical systems can’t hold our lives over our heads. We won’t listen to bosses forcing us to work to live if we have everything we need without them. Here are some ideas that can build dual power and give back autonomy and freedom to people, on top of working to fix our social relations to be more horizontal.

• Creating urban and suburban guerrilla gardens to create local food stores for local communities. Switching food supply chains from only massive factory farms but to bring nature and food closer to the people.

• Foster localism in all things we do to bring clean water to all people, create off-grid infrastructure like water collection and filtration for everyone so the state can’t use water as a tool of oppression.

• Expropriating land from governments and occupying it to build free housing, schools, and food forests for all. Then giving that land back to the indigenous people of the area to control their land again.

• Forming community self-defense forces to keep police out of communities and making sure we address the core causes of crime, scarcity, before they happen.

• Growing horizontal and democratic governance in every part of our lives using frameworks from democratic confederalism like unions and communes. Or using sociocracy as a baseline framework on how unions and councils interact.

• Put an end to fossil fuels by shutting down drilling operations and pipelines. Instead focusing on renewable energy that can be high tech, low tech, or passive.

• Ridding our social relations of patriarchal and domination-based interactions and instead, educating everyone on how to live with people on an equal footing.

• Creating free health clinics, free schools, and free transportation networks starting first with those struggling the most in capitalism to make sure the poor and working-class get access first.

There are so many other things we could do immediately in capitalism that could make monumental changes. So many things that I simply can’t list all of them without making an entirely new piece of work.

We should make change fun, we should make every protest and meeting a party instead of a serious ordeal every single time. We should inject the weird into politics and instead make expropriating land to grow food, or building free housing out of natural materials something exciting. Acidifying politics to blend with music, art, and literature. To bring music and dancing to every revolutionary action. To add beauty to our lives as we carve out a better future. To be able to love freely and have the freedom to be with whoever you want without social norms keeping your life in a box. To have experiences that change your outlook on life and connect us all together. The revolutionary struggle becoming one large wave of art and music, expression and love. Change both in the world and in ourselves. To be able to build a life outside of domination, and to truly be free.

Acid Communism, Learning From the ‘60s Counterculture, and to New Futures: A Summary

A new form of revolutionary politics should learn from history and the people that worked to create the world we inherit. We learn from the mistakes of the past to build better futures and a better future is possible.

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” - David Graeber

We should escape from capitalist realism and the hauntology of looking to old systems when trying to make something new. It’s good to take parts from the past and use them, but more effective to learn from the past and rework them.

The new liberatory politics should embrace the individual and collective power that everyday people have. We should embrace freedom of expression and freedom to live one’s life free of domination and hierarchy. We have everything we need on this planet, regardless of what corporations or politicians say. We can make these radical changes now, starting small and growing, learning from previous counterculture movements to make a new one. We can fundamentally change our social relations and stamp out patriarchy, domination, hierarchy, and violence. While tacking those changes we heal some of the issues that plague specific groups of people, and people as a whole. Once we build dual power, autonomy, and a new way of relating to each other, we can move things in the right direction.

Solarpunk, Eco-Fiction, Futurism and Acid Communism

In the last year I came across the idea of solarpunk, which really struck a chord with me in a way that other labels or ideas really hadn’t in the past. The idea of solarpunk really got me excited to combine a couple of different parts of my life that I kept somewhat separate but also started seeing that they were all connected in many ways. Solarpunk as an idea and aesthetic really combined multiple things that I was not expecting to find all together. Positive futurism, nature, and ecological regeneration, technology, social politics rooted in mutual aid, all of these things I saw as being part of the solarpunk umbrella. Solarpunk is still in infancy compared to other literary and aesthetic genres but I think it ties into ideas in Acid Communism and offers some interesting additions to political action that I haven’t really seen come up as often.

What is Solarpunk?

Solarpunk is a genre and art movement that envisions how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability, climate change, and pollution. It is a subgenre within science fiction, aligned with cyberpunk derivatives, and may borrow elements from utopian and fantasy genres. (Wikipedia)

There is also an early manifesto by Adam Flynn back in 2014:

Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and more importantly for the generations that follow us – i.e., extending human life at the species level, rather than individually. Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have (instead of 20th century “destroy it all and build something completely different” modernism). Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.

My own interpretation of solarpunk

To me, solarpunk is an interesting term to describe a literary and aesthetic genre that combines environmentalism, social change, technology (both high and low tech), art, and near futurism. There are a ton of commonalities with solarpunk and some of the visions of the ‘60s countercultural revolution. The biggest one is the revival of hoping and dreaming for a better future. Most of the radical experimentation that came out of the counterculture can be seen in modern culture today. But combining that with modern social politics, technology, and ideas of new futures together is something I haven’t seen very often. Same with the idea of Acid Communism because it posits a social movement to a kind of Anarcho-Communist way of life through aesthetics and art, and solarpunk directly mirrors those ideas of showing people the future, along with how to get there.
There are some interesting things I’ve seen while taking part in the solarpunk community. Some people interpret solarpunk as being just about solar panels. Which yeah, solar is in the name, but solarpunk is more so about renewable and ecology-centered ways of living and less so about the specific technology of solar photovoltaic panels. There have also been interesting ideas around cryptocurrencies and a couple of other things that require more detail and nuance and should get their own place.

Solarpunk has been one of those things that I find describes me very well, I work in tech and have always had a bunch of hobbies and interests (thank you ADHD). Those hobbies and interests were wide but I love plants and was starting to get into alternative homes like earthships. I had always called myself an environmentalist though I felt excluded from some environmentalist spaces that were widely white and an older crowd in my area. I was involved with politics and political movements, spent time doing art, photography, and creative work in my free time. Built furniture, spent my time hacking computers, and working on automation projects. And one day it all clicked when seeing the term solarpunk from a video by Saint Andrewism. All of a sudden it all was able to be combined together, things that at one time seemed pretty distant were in fact all connected. I feel like a lot of other people feel this way too or had a similar experience getting introduced to the concept.

Where Solarpunk Adds Nuance to Interesting Ideas

I want to break down some of the core features of solarpunk that I think add somewhat of a unique perspective to ideas. Most of these will be self-evident and in no way originate from solarpunk but I think the way they interact is unique in some ways.

• Intersections of technology and nature

• Intersections of social change and technology

• Intersections of social change and nature

Intersections of Technology and Nature

Solarpunk as a whole seems to be questioning where technology and nature can meet, intertwine and even be symbiotic relationships with each other. But technology isn’t just high-tech gadgets or futuristic robots, technology exists on a spectrum, and on that spectrum are various degrees of impact to the environment, both positive and negative. Along with that comes the spectrum of Passive technology, Low tech technological solutions, and High tech futuristic things.

The solar in solarpunk can mean solar panels, but it can also mean the power of the sun, of illumination, of the energy needed to sustain life on this planet. Solar being an understanding that nature has power, produces power and humans can learn to live in accordance with that power of nature. Passive technology is a big staple of that idea because passive solutions to problems don’t require a ton of materials or technological inputs. Passive technology works by being simple, but effective and takes advantage of some of the natural occurrences in the world that technology tries to automate. A great piece of passive tech would be making passive building, buildings that are more efficient and use the power of the sun and evaporation to ad advantage. Instead of trying to build around the natural forces, embracing them. This might look like passive homes means to absorb solar heat in the winter, storing the heat passively in adobe. In the summer, awnings set at a specific distance can keep the summer sun out of the home and allow the space to cool itself. Or in earthships how they are built to recirculate water multiple times, and are usually heated and cooled without HVAC, instead using passive solar heating and passive cooling. Burying a pipe into a mound of dirt and blowing air into a home instead of using HVAC works because the buried pipe is naturally cooled by being partially underground. Its ideas like these that show how much our ancient ancestors knew, and how advanced humanity has always been. We assume that living in the modern age that we are somehow special compared to ancient people, but their technologies and methods were the baseline of innovation. Many times passive options outperform technological ones because they are simple and don’t require any external inputs.

This balance with nature is important because most futuristic sci-fi or ideas about the future always focus on technological progress as a sign of future growth. But that also doesn’t recognize that we live on a finite planet with finite resources. We can’t sustain a high tech utopia while using extractive minerals that require massive mining operations. A common idea or theme in solarpunk is to blend technology with nature and to critically question how our technology can impact the planet.

We have created massive amounts of e-waste and there are entire countries choking on the smoke of e-waste breakdown facilities that melt the PCB boards down to extract rare earth minerals from them. This is caused by capitalism and profit incentives, but we need to think critically of how we would maintain a high tech society that would also not destroy the planet. That would require interoperability and modularity, computer parts could be standardized to be reused in other applications when something fails. PCBs could be made not with rare earth minerals but with natural and natural derived materials that don’t require mining. That still ignores the already existing technology in the world and mountains of e-waste we already have. An interesting reality is that even old computers can still run, and the majority of e-waste is not from damaged goods but “obsolete” products thrown out because of consumerism. Just one laptop from 2005 would have more power than the computers that ran the entire lunar launch missions in the ‘60s. So we have mountains of waste because capitalism refuses to reuse things. Solarpunk points out that things don’t have to be this way, and that high tech solutions can only work if things are reused, upcycled, or changed.

Renewable Exploitation: Lithium and Rethinking Renewable Energy

There are critiques in solarpunk and in general all environmentalist groups about not thinking about the foundations of change into a more renewable energy system. One large part of switching to renewables would be the issue of storing the energy and using it at a later time. This is almost always done using lithium-ion batteries which require an entire industry of mining to prop up. Entire countries like Bolivia could be invaded for their lithium stores, just to fuel the expansion of renewable energy storage in the global north.
The biggest reason we are stuck using lithium is because of cost and size. There hasn’t been enough research into alternative energy storage because there is less of an immediate return on investment, and less chance of profits. This has been a reoccurring issue with technological innovation, the jumps that we could make are held back because of profit incentives. Corporations will only choose what is profitable, not what is more ecological or efficient.
Am I saying that renewable energy is bad? No.

But we should question the foundations we see in renewable energy. Where do the raw materials come from, who had to mine the minerals to make the aluminum frames of solar panels, or the silicon that went into the cells?
A question that comes from that is: How can we change our production of energy storage and how can we invest in science to find actually renewable energy storage?

Some of the alternatives have been used for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, and the same technique of critique of technology comes into play. How do we balance passive, low tech, and high tech solutions to not destroy the earth, but to actually regenerate it?

Flywheels and compressed air are interesting storage devices that aren’t often mentioned as alternatives to lithium batteries but can revolutionize how we store power and the amount of materials we need to extract from the earth. There is also pumped water energy like the kind used in dams but created in artificial ways so large rivers and waterfalls are not needed to transfer stored energy.

But why are we assuming that we should maintain the same amount of energy use? If we were able to make homes more efficient by using natural insulators we can cut the need for HVAC which is one of the largest energy sinks in a home. Using passive lighting can cut electrical lighting usage during the day. All of these things are connected and tie into ideas of degrowth, and questioning the foundations of our relations of energy and nature.

Intersections of Social Change and Technology

The internet has given us access to more information than we can even fathom. At our fingertips in a millisecond, we can have access to any piece of information that we could ever want, we can communicate wirelessly with people across the world. We can enter into new realities and virtual altered states and travel to known and unknown worlds. We can create new music, art, and literature digitally and share this date for free with anyone at any time. We can replicate data infinitely, share it instantly, even share 3D data and have someone print it into reality on a 3D printer. Technology has progressed immensely since the counterculture and it really can’t be reiterated what an amazing time it is to be alive and have access to such powerful tools.
Solarpunk as a genre has been questioning how humans interact with technology (again using passive, low, and high tech definitions), in a way that really questions how and why social change happens when technology advances or is present.

Social change is easier now because we have an instantaneous connection to people. Climate change isn’t hidden behind newscasters and corporations and we can watch live, on the opposite side of the world the devastation that is happening. The beauty that is happening, the change that is in all of us happening in the world. The darkness that lurks and haunts us and the light of a sun rising over the horizon. We can see it all without the same filters of the past and know and connect with each other in another way.

But technology alone won’t create a better future. And speculative fiction recognizes that fact. The high tech basis can be liberatory but also has the deeply ingrained social inequities of our society baked into them. These black boxes that seem so amazing were all created by humans, with human biases. Technology can be used to free and enslaved people at the same time. To give people jobs and also take them away. The machine learning we think will solve the world uses classification data that is sorted by a human, and their biases and views of the world end up represented in the code. Technology is not separate from social conditions and I would argue they are both intertwined together so deeply that they can’t be separated without ethics coming into play.

Positive technological change can only happen with positive social change.

We should recognize the potentials of using technology as a way to coordinate social change on a massive level. The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street are two examples of mass change and protest happening because the internet allowed for more people to collaborate and communicate. The social network platforms and tech that we use to inspire and organize people should be run by people, not mega-corporations and is another key part of solarpunk, decentralization and democratization of technology. We should also keep our attention on the algorithms that increasingly put us into echo chambers. Taking a page from the counterculture we should escape the bounds that capitalism and corporations use to keep our ideas insular. Online spaces can help connect us together, collaborate, think and image a future. But that future won’t happen without action in the real world, without the Acid Communist idea of being weird and adding breaks with reality. Interrupting normal programming, breaking up the normal flow of everyday life with a message. Taking the ideas we gather and work on online and putting them to the test.

Intersections of Social Change and Nature

There needs to be a social and political change to tackle climate change. Like I said earlier this social change will need to be intersectional and not just be political, but a social transformation and a transformation in our social relations. Solarpunk as a genre focuses on intersectionality a ton and many stores involve how we as people interact with nature and how nature interacts with us.

Prefigurative Fiction and Aesthetics in Solarpunk

Because of critiques of social relations, politics, technology, and how they all interact with nature being core to solarpunk I really do see it as a type of prefigurative politics. The things I read and the art I see coming out of the movement are truly inspiring and really make me feel transported to a near future where we don’t only survive but thrive. Hope is something that is hard to come by in 2022 and to read things and be around hopeful people who are essentially looking down the barrel of a gun and trying to make the world a better place anyways. There is much more philosophizing, theorizing and thinking on solarpunk that deserves its own full-length work. I think importantly solarpunk as a movement, an idea, and literary genre is pushing climate fiction to better places outside of bleak dystopias. It also doesn’t tend to be purely utopian but also acknowledges the fact that large-scale change during climate change will not be easy, and it will require an incredible amount of work to make the world better. But at least there are people out there who think it can be done and are actively trying to show and tell people what that world would look like.

I think that is very important to show and tell people what a better world can look like. Theory alone can act as a foundation but if you show someone a short story of someone in a workers council, show someone what the world would actually work for the average person, how different life would be, and how we would react with each other on different levels. That will get the theory in. Showing people what a mutual aid society looks like, how they built it, the troubles they had along the way, showing people living through climate change and adapting life in the near future to help each other and the earth, the ideas and social changes that need to happen will sink in. Solarpunk to me is a prefigurative political genre because the focus is on regenerative futures, and about changing how we live with each other and the world. About getting rid of old systems of hierarchy and domination and instead living with, and for, each other.

There is an inherently political tint to the genre because making a better world involves political change. It involves social change, technological change and systems change. And I personally think those changes can and should happen. We have to imagine a better life, and build it.

Credits

Below are people and groups that inspire me and have influenced some of the text here:

Errico Malatesta

Peter Kropotkin

Ashanti Alston

Mark Fisher

David Graeber

Gilles Deleuze

Adam Curtis

Hamilton Morris

@anarchopac, @professordarwin, @_saintdrew, @buildsoil, @sjklapecwriting,@_reallifemag,@readinhabit,@communalfreedom,@D__nickles, @lilykayross, @Cjugendstil, @PhilosophyCuck,@SrslyWrong,@KeirMilburn, @NotJustYouHere, @jemgilbert

I might work on other spin off pieces from this like connecting the counterculture and psychedelic scene into the creation of the internet. Along with some more solarpunk specific ideas and musings on what that world might look like.

Feel free to post and remix the images in this post. Just don’t be a douche and sell them as an NFT. Otherwise feel free to share.

If you work for a publisher and are interested in me writing something like this but longer and more polished let me know. I work full time and don’t get paid to do any of this writing.

The blog has since moved to:

https://blog.hydroponictrash.solar

View the latest version there; major updates to each article have been made, and new posts are only going to be on the new blog.

I wanted to make a TL;DR guide on my latest long-form piece: Solarpunk, Acid Communism, Capitalist Co-opting, and Learning From The Counterculture just because it’s so long, and I want to make it easier for people to get the gist. I encourage you to read the full piece, but maybe some of the summaries will get you interested to dive in.
Also have some digital art mixed in there and some resources and cool people to follow or read in the credits.
Hope you read the full thing, and keep working towards a better future!

Summary

In the article, I wanted to show some of the links and background that I don’t think get talked about often about the start of the early 60s counterculture. I wanted to challenge the assumptions many people have about the counterculture and point out that the counterculture and psychedelic revolution of the 1960’s would not have happened without the contributions of Black and Indigenous people.

Going into things and talking about who really influenced history, the reasons why psychedelics are even known, and some of the things that often get overlooked when people talk about the psychedelic scene and the counterculture as a whole.
I don’t think the counterculture of the 60s failed at all, and really it was just the first spark that would create our social and political landscape of today. It was the first time where civil rights of all marginalized groups came together.

There is a lot we can learn from the countercultural mistakes and take that and combine it with a modern form of politics. A real reworking of politics to not slip back into lost futures, or rehash the same tactics of old leftist politics. To come up with a new way to envision the future. Mark Fishers’ last work was about an idea he had of “Acid Communism”. He sadly passed away while working on the idea, and right in the middle of his lecture series Post Capitalist Desire. I wanted to interpret his work so far and build on some of the ideas. In this building, I think about how capitalism infiltrates groups and ideas and some methods of strengthening movements against capitalist co-option.

In general I think we need a new way of looking at the world. The stakes are too high not to imagine new ways of politics that don’t fall to capitalism and also don’t fall into the old ways of authoritarian communism. I offer some ideas of what Acid Communism could be categorized as and build on the idea of libidinal marxism. My own interpretations on Acid Communism and the importance of showing people through art, music, and literature the future instead of just telling them to read obscure theory. How can we cultivate a new idea of leftist politics that leaves behind authoritarianism, central leadership, and cold bureaucracy and instead work to embrace a politics rooted in individual and collective freedom, horizontal democracy, and putting an end to domination.

Stressing that political change won’t happen if we don’t change our social relations. Most of the ills in our world can be boiled down to a couple of core issues that act as foundations to other issues and interconnect.

1. Hierarchy

2. Patriarchy

3. Domination

4. Violence

In the end, I tie in some ideas about prefigurative futures that fall into the ideas of Acid Communism, specifically solarpunk. Talk about my own conceptions of the growing genre and some ideas I think tie well together and ideas from looking at the failures of the counterculture to actually try and build a better future.

Narrative Flow / Section Gist:

Who influenced the influencers?

I start out talking about Jazz and blues music as a method of protest through art and how Jazz and the blues came to influence not only the music of the 60s, the counterculture, and psychedelic culture - but the entire social landscape and culture.

Going through how jazz and blues music would morph into rhythm and blues and then into rock and roll, but also showing how the involvement with capitalism in those genres mirrored how capitalism copies and defangs radical ideas.

There is a connection between jazz and the beat generation, who would directly inspire the 60s counterculture and directly lead to the psychedelic movement.

The early counterculture came together because of marginalized people coming together. Black jazz musicians, beat generation poets, underground Queer communities, early feminist housewives, motorcycle clubs, war vets, scientists, chemists, academics, dropouts, rebels, artists, poets, political activists, and weirdos all ended up creating the wave of the 60’s counterculture.

It’s interesting to see how jazz influenced the start of the psychedelic scene and how psychedelics came to influence jazz in a large interconnected cycle. Also showing how there were people connected in these different realms and all in general had ties to other people in some really interesting ways.

Also included is a history of how psychedelics came into western science from indigenous people and show the people who truly were responsible for psychedelics to ever reach outside of strictly scientific and medical settings. A Mazatec healer named Maria Sabina and the Indigenous people of the southwest along with the Native American Church.

Hippies, Psychedelic Rock, Political action and the Summer of Love

This section talks more about how psychedelics made it into the mainstream and how the counterculture grew rapidly. Acid tests being done in communal living experiments, writers, and artists who started flocking to the change. The first psychedelic rock venue and show with The Red Dog Experience. Also highlighting some of the radical politics that was growing and exploding at the time and going into detail to show how all of those struggles were interconnected with the psychedelic revolution and the antiwar movement.

Going through the summer of love and the start of the cultural phenomenon of the “hippie” and also showing what some called “the death of the hippie” from the eyes of the early counterculture.

Weaving through the late 60s and early 70s, the rise of political movements and the rise of Neoliberalism and the backlash to the counterculture.

Part 2: Capitalist Co-opting, Killing the Counterculture, Subcultures, and What Went Wrong?

This section goes into detail about how capitalism took over and eventually killed the countercultural waves but not the political movements of the day. Also showing that the movement would have succeeded if the state had not interfered, jailed, or assassinated people to stop the tides of change.
I go into some observations across different places on how capitalism gains control in movements and how it breaks them down, including a pattern that I’ve seen play out multiple times.

Talk about how capitalism changed and morphed advertising to use the counterculture as a testing ground for neoliberal capitalism and some of the strategies it used to do it. Going into how movements and ideas are fractured and how subcultures play a role in capitalism.

Also go into more detail into reasons I see why most political parties failed or started to fail at this time, and some of the internal issues that led to things not panning out. I also make sure to add nuance and focus things around the material conditions of the time, and be sure to show that without state intervention, the counterculture would have created an entirely different world. (By counterculture here I mean the countercultural movement, psychedelic movement and political and civil rights movements)

Also go into some core ideas and issues that movements face along with thoughts on social and political change needing to be a fundamental shift in social relations before political change can happen.

Part 3: Post Capitalist Desire, Acid Communism, and The Politics of The Anthropocene Future.

In this section, I build on an idea characterized by Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert called “Acid Communism”. Or alternative Post Capitalist Desire, which was the name of the lecture series Mark Fisher did before his work was cut short from his tragic death. Building on his ideas of a kind of psychedelic socialism, and exploring the acid part to maybe mean using entheogens like LSD or an acidification of communism into something new.
I go through and add on some political thought that lines up with the curriculum of Mark Fishers’ lecture series, and attempt to shine a light on the underlying idea of combining a form of libertarian socialism through art, music, and literature.

Also wanted to add some ideas about breaking capitalist realism, injecting social change into art, and escaping the new echo chambers we find ourselves locked into on social media.

How do we address hierarchy, patriarchy, domination, and violence with a modified libertarian socialism and combine both identity politics and class politics together to make a holistic approach. While also critiquing identity politics on their own (girl boss capitalism) and class politics on their own (red-brown alliances, etc.)

The key is that intersectionality is at the core of change. And to have that change we have to change our fundamental social relations from capitalistic and exploitative ones to social relations based on mutual aid.

I also go into some ideas in how to stop capitalist co-opting and some tips that might make it harder for capital to creep into your life.

Solarpunk, Eco-Fiction, Futurism and Acid Communism

In the end, I talk about future conceptions and a new(ish) idea popping up called solarpunk that fits almost perfectly in the idea of Acid Communism. I talk about what solarpunk is to me and how it has some unique viewpoints at combining nature with social change, technology, regeneration, and new futures. With some added critiques of technological progress, ideas around degrowth, and questioning how the future will look.
I more than likely will write a full article specifically about solarpunk, the good, the bad, and some ideas about how it can spur change.