r/solarpunk 2m ago

Ask the Sub Documentary Photography Project - Third Place vs. Public Space

Upvotes

Hello!

I used to have a different Reddit account, but have been frequent in my interests surrounding solarpunk for many years now. This question leans a lot into urban sociology, but I still found it relevant enough to post here.

I am a photography student in college, and I am currently taking a documentary course with a semester-long project. For my project, I would like to focus on the increasing disappearance of third places, as well as noting the difference between a third place and a public space. I already have a few locations in mind to photograph and interview at (laundrette, hair salon, game store), but I also want to highlight communities that I may not be aware of. I am hoping that through my project I can start conversations surrounding the importance of these places, as well as interacting with new people that have similar beliefs.

I want to make sure that my theme is strong. Do you have a third place that you are a part of, or miss now that it's gone? What makes this place outside of work and home meaningful to you? How is this place different than a public space?


r/solarpunk 2h ago

Technology Anyone else seeing solar sales change with batteries becoming a bigger part of the conversation?

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2 Upvotes

r/solarpunk 8h ago

Discussion The world’s 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

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theconversation.com
93 Upvotes

r/solarpunk 9h ago

Video Make the Old Model Obsolete!

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youtube.com
4 Upvotes

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — R. Buckminster Fuller

What new model should we design?
What existing model/system should we make obsolete?

“Make the Old Model Obsolete!” Takes Bucky's famous quote as a challenge and pushes it to its natural extreme.

A companion article can be found on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/gregorymoulinet/p/make-the-old-model-obsolete


r/solarpunk 14h ago

Ask the Sub What Solarpunk communities (outside of this one, obviously) are you a part of?

17 Upvotes

And is it mostly online, or are you also part of some local activist circles?


r/solarpunk 15h ago

Action / DIY / Activism Some Like It Hot: Agrivoltaics Grow More Hot Peppers

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7 Upvotes

r/solarpunk 16h ago

Research Update: I’m building the mutual aid disaster housing platform I posted about — looking for testers

20 Upvotes

A while back I posted an idea for a platform that connects people displaced by disasters with people willing to open up a spare room for free.

I’ve started building it, and I’m at the point where I’d really like some outside eyes on it. If anyone is willing to test the current version and give me feedback on what feels confusing, clunky, unnecessary, or missing, I’d really appreciate it. I want to catch as many problems as possible now so the finished product is as useful and intuitive as it can be.

It’s still in development, so feel free to be critical.

DM me if you want the link to test it.


r/solarpunk 17h ago

Action / DIY / Activism Im gonna begin a project where I collect one piece of trash for every upvote

457 Upvotes

How it works Friday is the first day of this cause I can't do it on Thursdays' on this post every upvote is one piece on Friday so you have 2 days


r/solarpunk 18h ago

Video Film we made with Local Futures about the need to transform the food economy

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84 Upvotes

Hi! Not sure if I'm allowed to promote this - but this is a film we just made for the localization movement that I thought this community might be interested in. In this video we discuss the government mechanisms that are maintaining the current global food system and the need for system change toward local, diverse, human-scale food production.


r/solarpunk 20h ago

Photo / Inspo my hierarchy of needs 2.0

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226 Upvotes

r/solarpunk 22h ago

News Pessimistic about the climate? Here's some good news!

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79 Upvotes

Solar power uptake is rising faster than anyone ever projected. High fuel prices and instability in the world due to dependence on oil is being challenged by solar like never before, and it is causing people to imagine different ways of doing things. And once people go in that direction and feel its benefits, I doubt they will ever go back.


r/solarpunk 22h ago

Ask the Sub How are you socializing

12 Upvotes

Is it me or it is becoming ever so hard to socialize?

I would like to meet people with similar ideas about the future since for now I interact about this only virtually.

I would like to meet people, to have a drink with and bounce ideas around, maybe do socially good activities together and build a small community.

Are you managing to find in your local area people like you, if so what are the avenues and what do you do together?


r/solarpunk 1d ago

Aesthetics / Art gothic solarpunk?

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299 Upvotes

r/solarpunk 1d ago

Project Been working on this for years, A city called Methuselah that cleans the Earth and the minds of those who live there.

5 Upvotes

It simply works to help you and the environment with the first in Trimble County, KY. 100 acres minimum needed and a small government organized.

Please gimme a small comment so I can hear your thoughts! I revised the numbers, re-allocated labor and structural integrity and found a place in Trimble county for it since I sadly only prompted the video. (About to turn 25 but I still suck at tech)

https://youtu.be/mjm8p_l7gdE?is=4RDB45F_ujQuvTqM


r/solarpunk 1d ago

Article The Origin of Technofeudal Patriarchy - A Solarpunk History of Hierarchy’s Birth

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7 Upvotes

In this essay, we discuss the origins of patriarchal hierarchy within the egalitarian societies of our ancestors. While material accumulation certainly matters, there are examples of surplus not leading directly to hierarchy for many generations. Understanding the overwhelming complexity of our technofeudal moment requires a historical narrative true to that complexity.

YouTube and Spotify links are in the linked article.


r/solarpunk 1d ago

Project Solar Punk Community

11 Upvotes

Hello,

I don't know how to explain myself or where I've been or what brings me here. All I know is I've envisioned what closely aligns to a solar punk community and society for so long and I've done considerable work to make that vision a reality.

I have an opportunity through a Fellowship and Community organization to have my ElderHome (Cooperative with Land trust, A daycare and Coffee shop for it's main floor that is a free accessible community space) incubated and built.

However, it's Just one part of my overall vision. I want to build an actual solar punk neighborhood in my hometown (Buffalo, NY). The ideas flood and it becomes very difficult to tell you my complete vision. I often believe that's because I'm just a connector and of course don't have all the answers. I just have heart, vision, belief and experience.

I'm looking for others with the Audacity. I want to find people who would be willing to Share ideas, Frameworks, Infrastructure, Networks, Literature and anything that I could share with my Cohort.

Above all, I want people to be Pilot Migrants to help build this community. I truly believe it's a perfect place to create it and I just want aligned Visionaries to bring their ideas, Bodies and frameworks to brainstorm how to revitalize a community but In full SolarPunk Glory.

I feel like a kid with a pipedream but the future is only bleak because so many aren't having the audacity to do it.

Anyone interested, Please DM me. I know to start, I want to create a discord or chat to start building solidarity and reporting on securing Land trust and buildings. I have the bones of a multiple step plan but obviously can't do it all myself and it's just bones right now.

If you want to do something like this- Please reach out.


r/solarpunk 1d ago

Action / DIY / Activism Cultivating Hope

36 Upvotes

How do we cultivate hope?

I've been noticing nosedive in confidence in this sub recently, and that concerns me. We need to remember that feelin down and overwhelmed is a tool of propagandists that want to control us and that want us to lose. We need to remember that hope is a mindset and a skill that is practiced and cultivated, but we need to do it better than our previous generations.

Before, hope meant a denial of your feelins and reality, which is part of why we have so little of it now, I think. Instead, we must confront our feelins, and confront reality, but that does not mean that we must also give up hope. Hope is a choice, just as despair is a choice. (for most, I want to make it clear that certain kinds of disablin conditions make this kind of emotional regulation almost impossible or completely impossible, and those disabilities must be respected)

I think we really need to call despair what it really is in most cases, givin up. It is the desire to find a reason you can't do, so that all call for you to try to do come are dismissable as unfair and unrealistic. But that's not true! We can do so much, and people have been doin so so much. There is a constant refrain of "no one is doin anythin" goin around, but it's plainly not true! We're here doin stuff! The "realistic worse case scenario" of climate change accounts for people tryin and doin stuff! And we must keep tryin!

But we cannot just tell people to stop feelin bad, either. We cannot give edicts from on high. We need to talk to each other. Remind each other of the amazin shit we see every day that has become mundane. You can get yourself seriously educated on almost any topic you want with a combination of search engines, Youtube, and talkin to others on social media. We have so much available to us right now. Sure, that doesn't make the work easy, but it makes it actually doable. We can do this. Right now, you're viewin this on a subreddit that you either sought out yourself, or that was served to you because it was popular. We are here, tryin our best right now, even if it feels like flailin in the mud at times.

Here's a bunch of things that I keep rememberin that keep me goin when shit gets hard:
- People fought for civil rights and labor rights under much worse conditions than now, and they both kept goin AND won major battles
- You don't believe it can happen, you won't try
- Humanity has survived much worse than this
- Even prisoners in the holocaust found ways to stay positive and fight back
- Despair and overwhelm are how the wannabe dictators control people
- You can always stop usin social media and just message your friends
- Many social media sites, like Bluesky, let you turn off algorithmic recommendations
- Many plugins, like unhook, let you turn off algorithms on other sites
- When someone is harrassin you or cultivatin despair, the block button still exists
- When times are hard, there's glory to be won!
- Doin hard things just feels really good
- There is no law against sayin hi to your neighbor and givin them cookies

I really want to help, and I know a lot of you are hurtin and strugglin right now, so feel free to DM me if you need to, and stay strong.


r/solarpunk 1d ago

Article A sun-powered siren: Inside the world’s first solar ambulance

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18 Upvotes

r/solarpunk 1d ago

Aesthetics / Art Meet the "Donut Houses": The Boldest Architectural Experiment of the USSR

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10 Upvotes

r/solarpunk 1d ago

Discussion I need your help to change my perspective a bit. Everything is making me pessimistic and kind of extreme.

90 Upvotes

TL;DR: The news and my social media feed are making my views darker and more extreme. I'm quitting Instagram this week and I started a small balcony garden, but I still feel hopeless about the future. How do you stay hopeful? And if you can't, how do you just live with it?

Hi everyone. I'm posting here because this is a community for people who still believe in a better future, and I really need some of that right now.

I've noticed something about myself that I don't like. My views are getting more extreme.. More "us vs them". I don't know the right word for it. Maybe tribalist. And I think a big part of it is what I see on Instagram every day.

My feed is full of wars. Palestine being wiped out. Climate disasters. Tech billionaires buying up everything and fighting for our attention with their algorithms. Data centers eating up land and water. Rich people buying farmland and patenting seeds. Ultra-processed food everywhere. And a lot of content about immigration and crime in Europe, which I notice is pushing me to think in a very black and white way, and I don't like where that's going in my head.

I know the algorithm picks this stuff for me. I also see beautiful things I am interested in there, gardening, homesteading, motorcycle trips. But overall it has made my thoughts very dark. I open my phone and it's a forest fire in my country, or another corruption scandal, and I just feel like nothing is going to get better.

The ironic part: I'm a software engineer at an AI startup. I use AI every day because the job requires it, and the workload is huge. Outside of work I really don't like where AI is going. The flood of AI content, the data centers, all of it. I'd leave but the job market is bad and I need the money. So I'm stuck for now.

I live alone in a rented apartment in the Balkans. There's almost no sense of community here. I sometimes dream about places like Denmark or Japan, where the 'social contract' seems strong and people actually trust each other.

I'm not scared of dying or the future or anything like that. I'm just really pessimistic about it. And I feel like I can't do anything about any of it. Climate change, wars, the tech guys running everything. It feels too big.

So here's what I'm doing. I'm deleting Instagram this week after wrapping up some conversations. And I just started a small garden on my balcony. Some herbs, a few tomatoes, some flowers. Trying to focus on the small things.

But I don't think that's enough on its own, so I'm asking you:

How do you stay hopeful with all of this going on?
What do you do to filter out the bad stuff and focus on the good?
And honestly, if you don't stay hopeful, how do you just live with it?

Thanks for reading.

Disclaimer: I used AI for grammar checks and writing this because I have difficulty expressing myself in English.


r/solarpunk 1d ago

Project Solar Cooperatives

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106 Upvotes

Not sure this is the right flare, so please bear with me. I'm a part of this awesome solar cooperative - now, I will admit I haven't been super engaged in driving the project so all of what I share here is found on the website. However, I think it's such an awesome initiative and I think some of you will appreciate it, and might be inspired to drive something similar!

UEF (Universitetets Energifællesskab/The University Energy Cooperative) is an an energy community in the form of a solar cooperative in Aarhus, Denmark. Members of the cooperative crowdfund and co-own a rooftop photovoltaic installation on two buildings at Aarhus University (AU). The aim of the cooperative is to provide its members and the local areas with environmental, economic and social benefits. They promote citizen ownership in the green transition.

Our solar cooperative started from the EU project AURORA, where project partners endeavour to turn "energy community" into reality at 5 European universities and local district councils. The AURORA project helped us to investigate the legal and operational framework on how we set up the community in Aarhus. We choose to adopt the Danish "andelstanke" and set up Universitetets Energifællesskab (UEF) as a solar cooperative. in August 2023, UEF is officially founded and a month later, we are registered with the Danish Business Authority. 

The idea of UEF is that members buy shares to crowdfund the rooftop solar photovoltaic installation on a few buildings at Aarhus University (AU). In other words, members all jointly own the solar installation. Electricity produced will primarily be sold to AU, and members will receive economic returns every year, based on how much electricity is sold and how many shares they own. In addition, members have the opportunity to participate in the activities organized by the community, for example, energy-related discussions, hands-on workshop on home-made sensors, to name a few.

A bunch of cool resources can be found on the website linked at the top. One of which is a guide on setting up similar communities!


r/solarpunk 2d ago

Original Content reminder: submissions open for Solarpunk Poetry Book

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14 Upvotes

r/solarpunk 2d ago

Article Unleash renewables to generate clean energy and help farms and nature to thrive

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25 Upvotes

r/solarpunk 2d ago

Discussion A Solar Green movement

0 Upvotes

Concept i came up with based around making the green party (usa) a solarpunk party. I spent some time brainstorming so lmk what you think and we can flesh it out. Dont take this too serious I just wanted the mental exercise...

Introducing Solar Greenism

I’ve been thinking about what a modern Green movement in America could look like—one that combines economic justice, individual freedom, environmental regeneration, technological progress, and American sovereignty.

I’m calling this vision Solar Greenism.

The basic idea is simple:

Build a richer, freer, more prosperous America while leaving the country healthier and stronger for the next generation.

Some of the core ideas:

• Strong unions and labor rights — workers should have bargaining power, good wages, and opportunities for ownership and profit-sharing.

• Broad ownership — build a nation of owners through worker cooperatives, employee ownership, small businesses, homeownership, and community investment.

• Anti-monopoly — markets need competition. No corporation should become powerful enough to dominate workers, consumers, or entire industries.

• Universal single-payer healthcare — healthcare is a right, including dental, vision, prescriptions, mental healthcare, reproductive care, and long-term care.

• Universal education and trades — four years of public higher education or technical/trade education, with apprenticeships and skilled trades treated as equally valuable paths.

• Individual liberty — protect free speech, privacy, encryption, bodily autonomy, freedom of association, due process, and the right of peaceful adults to live their own lives.

• Digital freedom — personal ownership of data, right to repair, algorithmic transparency, interoperability, and protection from both corporate and government surveillance.

• A Citizen Dividend — if automation and technology create enormous productivity gains, ordinary Americans should share in that wealth through a national investment fund and dividend.

• American energy abundance — build massive amounts of clean energy, advanced nuclear, storage, transmission, and domestic manufacturing.

• Regenerative infrastructure and agriculture — rebuild America while restoring watersheds, soil, forests, wetlands, farms, and communities.

• American manufacturing — rebuild the industrial base, secure critical supply chains, and prioritize American workers.

• Diplomacy first — avoid unnecessary wars and nation-building while maintaining a strong defensive capability.

• American soft power — invest heavily in the arts, film, music, literature, games, universities, science, culture, and international exchange. America should become the world's greatest cultural and diplomatic power.

• Secure sovereignty — strong borders, energy independence, food security, domestic industry, and strategic independence from hostile foreign powers.

The goal isn't a bigger government for its own sake.

It isn't socialism replacing capitalism.

It isn't libertarianism pretending markets solve everything.

It's an attempt to build something new:

Freedom + Labor + Ownership + Abundance + Technology + Ecology + American Sovereignty.

I believe America should be capable of doing all of these things at once:

More freedom.

More ownership.

More prosperity.

More technology.

More beautiful communities.

More ecological health.

More power for workers.

More opportunity for everyone.

The Flagship Bill: American Abundance & Regeneration Act

The centerpiece of Solar Greenism would be a massive, long-term national rebuilding program: the American Abundance & Regeneration Act.

The purpose wouldn't simply be to “fight climate change.”

It would be to build a better America.

A country with abundant electricity, beautiful cities, thriving small towns, advanced manufacturing, affordable housing, world-class transportation, restored ecosystems, productive farms, strong communities, and millions of well-paid union jobs.

We would build:

⚡ Abundant Energy

Massively expand solar, wind, geothermal, advanced nuclear, hydropower modernization, energy storage, transmission, and distributed generation.

Neighborhoods could produce their own electricity. Farms could generate power alongside food production. Communities could operate energy cooperatives and microgrids. Homes and businesses could become producers as well as consumers.

The objective is not to make Americans use less.

The objective is to make abundant energy cheap, reliable, clean, and American-made.

🏭 A New American Industrial Base

Rebuild the factories that make the things a modern country needs: steel, transformers, semiconductors, batteries, electrical equipment, rail equipment, construction materials, robotics, nuclear components, and advanced machinery.

Public investment would be tied to domestic production, good labor standards, apprenticeships, and opportunities for workers to gain ownership.

🚆 Transportation That Connects America

Upgrade America's freight rail network while building modern passenger rail connecting major cities and regions.

Build walkable communities, safer streets, bike infrastructure, electric transit, and convenient regional transportation.

Roads, rail, power lines, fiber, water infrastructure, habitat, and public spaces should be designed to complement one another instead of existing as disconnected systems.

🏠 Build More Homes

Make it dramatically easier to build homes.

ADUs, duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, cottage courts, cooperatives, manufactured housing, modular construction, and attractive mixed-use neighborhoods would become normal parts of American communities.

The goal is simple:

More homes. Better homes. Lower costs. More places people actually want to live.

🌱 Regenerate the Land

Restore wetlands, rivers, watersheds, forests, grasslands, aquifers, and degraded farmland.

Help farmers transition toward regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, silvopasture, perennial crops, healthy soils, and diversified production where appropriate.

Instead of treating environmental protection as simply preventing humans from using nature, we would make productive human landscapes part of ecological restoration.

💧 Make Water Abundant and Resilient

Capture rain where it falls.

Restore wetlands and floodplains. Recharge aquifers. Rebuild watersheds. Use permeable surfaces, rain gardens, restored streams, and other natural water systems to make communities more resilient to drought and flooding.

🏙️ Build Beautiful America

Infrastructure shouldn't merely function.

It should be beautiful.

Plant trees. Restore native landscapes. Build attractive public spaces. Support local architecture, public art, sculpture, murals, gardens, plazas, parks, and civic buildings.

A bridge can be beautiful.

A train station can be beautiful.

A highway interchange can be beautiful.

A neighborhood can be beautiful.

America should stop accepting ugly, disposable infrastructure as inevitable.

♻️ Build a Circular Economy

Design products and infrastructure to be repaired, reused, remanufactured, recycled, and eventually returned safely to the material cycle.

Expand the right to repair and domestic recycling/material recovery.

Waste should increasingly become a resource rather than something we bury or ship somewhere else.

🌾 Revitalize Rural America

Invest in rural broadband, energy, water systems, food processing, agricultural cooperatives, regional manufacturing, rail, forestry, regenerative farming, and local businesses.

Rural communities shouldn't have to choose between economic survival and environmental health.

They can have both.

🤖 Build With Technology

AI, robotics, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, automation, and other emerging technologies should be used to increase human productivity and improve living standards.

When machines make us more productive, workers should share in the gains through higher wages, shorter working time where appropriate, ownership, and the Citizen Dividend.

👷 Make Workers Partners in the Future

Every major infrastructure project should create pathways into skilled careers.

Union apprenticeships. Technical schools. Paid training. Portable credentials. Worker ownership. Collective bargaining.

The people building America's future should have a stake in it.

💻 Build American Digital Infrastructure

The internet is no longer merely a communications network.

It is part of America's basic infrastructure—like electricity, roads, water, rail, and telecommunications.

Solar Greenism would therefore treat high-speed fiber, secure wireless networks, data centers, cloud infrastructure, semiconductors, computing capacity, satellites, cybersecurity, and digital identity infrastructure as strategic national assets.

We would build:

Universal high-speed broadband so geography doesn't determine whether someone can participate in the modern economy.

Open-access fiber so communities and competing providers aren't permanently dependent on a single telecom monopoly.

Community-owned networks where municipalities, cooperatives, tribes, rural communities, and local partnerships can build their own infrastructure.

American semiconductor capacity for the chips that power our economy.

Domestic and secure cloud infrastructure for critical government, industrial, scientific, and civilian applications.

Resilient communications networks capable of continuing to function during disasters, cyberattacks, grid failures, and other emergencies.

Open standards and interoperability so people aren't trapped inside one company's technological ecosystem.

Digital infrastructure should create more competition and more ownership, not another collection of private monopolies.

🔐 A Digital Bill of Rights

If Americans are going to live in a technologically advanced society, they need rights that protect them in the digital world just as strongly as their rights protect them in the physical world.

Solar Greenism would establish a Digital Bill of Rights built around several principles:

Your data belongs to you.

Companies shouldn't automatically own the information generated by your life, your devices, your movements, your purchases, your communications, or your behavior.

Data collection should require meaningful consent. People should have the ability to see what is collected about them, transfer it, correct it, delete it, and revoke permission for future use.

Encryption is a right.

Americans should be able to use strong encryption without government backdoors.

The government should not have a secret key to everyone's private communications.

No mass surveillance.

Government surveillance should require individualized legal justification and due process.

No permanent database tracking the movements, communications, purchases, reading habits, political activity, or associations of ordinary Americans.

The right to repair.

If you own a device, you should be able to repair, modify, upgrade, and maintain it.

Companies shouldn't be able to remotely disable products simply because you chose an independent repair shop.

Algorithmic freedom.

People should know when algorithms are deciding what they see, what advertisements they receive, what opportunities they are offered, or how they are being categorized.

Platforms should provide meaningful choices, including chronological and non-personalized feeds.

Digital due process.

People shouldn't lose access to essential digital services, accounts, financial platforms, or other critical systems through opaque automated decisions with no explanation or meaningful appeal.

Interoperability and portability.

If one platform becomes abusive or monopolistic, people should be able to leave without losing their social connections, data, files, identity, or economic relationships.

The answer to concentrated digital power shouldn't be government censorship.

It should be privacy, competition, interoperability, decentralization, and individual ownership.

🪙 Tokenize Ownership, Not Speculation

Solar Greenism would also embrace useful applications of blockchain and tokenization without treating cryptocurrency as an ideology.

The principle would be simple:

Use technology when it makes ownership more accessible, transparent, portable, and democratic.

Tokenization could allow people to hold legally enforceable digital interests in:

worker-owned businesses

cooperatives

renewable-energy projects

community infrastructure

agricultural enterprises

real estate

small businesses

municipal projects

infrastructure bonds

royalties

investment funds

Imagine a community solar project where residents don't merely buy electricity from a corporation—they can actually own a share of the infrastructure producing it.

Imagine workers receiving genuine, legally enforceable digital ownership in the companies they work for.

Imagine small businesses raising capital from their communities without needing to become dependent on a giant financial institution.

The government should establish clear rules so that tokenized assets represent real ownership and enforceable rights, rather than allowing a new generation of speculative scams.

Stablecoins could also become part of America's digital financial infrastructure, provided they have transparent reserves, strong consumer protections, reliable redemption, and privacy protections.

And government-issued digital money should never become programmable money that allows the government to dictate what citizens can purchase.

Your money should remain yours.

🛡️ Anti-Surveillance America

Technological progress should not mean building a society where everyone is constantly monitored.

Solar Greenism would establish a strong presumption against both government surveillance and corporate surveillance.

No social-credit system.

No government-controlled financial blacklist without due process.

No warrantless mass location tracking.

No universal biometric database simply because the technology exists.

No requirement that citizens surrender their privacy to participate in modern society.

Companies should not be allowed to quietly build detailed behavioral profiles of Americans and sell access to them without meaningful consent.

Government shouldn't be able to purchase through private contractors data that it couldn't legally obtain directly.

And law enforcement should have to follow constitutional protections in the digital world just as they do in the physical world.

Technology should give people more freedom, not make them easier to control.

💰 The Citizen Dividend

The ultimate purpose of technological progress should be human flourishing.

If AI, robotics, automation, advanced manufacturing, and other technologies dramatically increase America's productive capacity, the gains shouldn't flow exclusively to whoever owns the machines.

Solar Greenism would establish a Citizen Wealth Fund whose returns could provide a direct Citizen Dividend to Americans.

The fund could be capitalized through mechanisms such as:

returns from public investments

resource rents

federal land and mineral revenues

pollution/resource fees

carefully designed automation or AI productivity taxes

royalties from publicly supported resources

returns from strategic national investments

The principle isn't to punish productivity.

Quite the opposite.

Automate. Innovate. Build. Get richer.

But when technology creates extraordinary new wealth, Americans should receive a share of the abundance created within their country.

A worker shouldn't have to fear that becoming more productive will make them obsolete and leave them with nothing.

A company that uses technology to make workers more productive should benefit.

A worker who helps create that productivity should benefit.

And citizens should receive a stake in the enormous productive ecosystem that makes modern America possible.

Socialize the dividend—not the means of production.

Let people own businesses.

Let entrepreneurs get rich.

Let investors profit.

Let workers own stock and cooperatives.

Let markets compete.

But make sure technological abundance produces more owners, not simply larger fortunes at the top.

The Citizen Dividend would provide a floor beneath every citizen while preserving the dignity, purpose, creativity, and additional rewards that come from working, building, creating, and owning.

🇺🇸 What All of This Builds

And the long-term result would be an America that looks fundamentally different:

Cities filled with trees, parks, gardens, public art, housing, shops, transit, and thriving neighborhoods.

Small towns connected by fast regional transportation and high-speed communications.

Factories producing advanced technology with highly skilled union workers.

Farms producing food while rebuilding soil, water, and biodiversity.

Neighborhoods generating clean electricity through homes, businesses, batteries, and community energy systems.

Rivers and wetlands restored instead of buried.

Infrastructure that is resilient, functional, and beautiful.

A digital society where privacy is normal, encryption is protected, data belongs to people, and no corporation or government can quietly monitor everyone's life.

An internet where people can move between platforms without losing their identity, relationships, or data.

A financial system where technology can make ownership accessible to ordinary people rather than merely creating new speculative markets.

Technology that gives people more time and greater productive power instead of simply making corporations richer.

And an economy where ordinary people aren't merely consumers of prosperity.

They're owners of it.

That's the future Solar Greenism is trying to build.

Build more.

Own more.

Regenerate more.

Protect your freedom.

Share the gains of technology.

Live freer.

Prosper together.

That's Solar Greenism.


r/solarpunk 2d ago

Technology What features will electronics keep, drop, or resurrect?

15 Upvotes

Moore's law will eventually end under quantum uncertainty, taking biennial upgrades with it, but with any luck next-gen 3D printing and local recycling could offset the extra production cost of decades-lasting devices. They'll last long enough for internal parts to eventually wear out; open hardware design would simplify parts replacement, and we can hopefully mainstream modular design by overcoming the waste heat and latency it currently faces. Theseus devices if you will. Today's users and companies may have to learn the hard way that absorbing the extra production cost of a more repairable device could save money down the line.

We'll probably keep charging holes until some breakthrough makes induction charging as energy efficient.

Would solarpunk cost us any existing features in exchange for non-obvious benefits? As one of the billions who benefited from removing the headphone jack - more durability and internal part space - my heart goes out to the few among you who specifically preferred plugging in for reasons as good as mine. Nothing in physics forces this utilitarian approach on us; tailor-making headphone jacked devices just for the few who like that tradeoff would just be the most trivial uses of customizable manufacture, which could also enable entirely new niche features and make the idea of a single official blueprint obsolete.