@alxd@writing.exchange
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alxd

@alxd@writing.exchange

Programmer, hacker, #solarpunk, educator, activist and a wannabe writer fascinated by how technology is portrayed in culture - and how that affects human lives.

Co-author of https://podcast.tomasino.org/@SolarpunkPrompts #podcast , exploring realistic stories of our climate future with all their traumas and hopes.

Languages: 🇦🇺 🇵🇱

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alxd, to books
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Refining my criticism of , I think I arrived at the core of what bothers me:

It's relatively easy to say whether science fiction is hard or soft when it comes to physical technology, but much harder when it comes to social ones.

The Ministry uses blockchain and a few other buzzword techs the same way other books use nanorobots: they magically solve complex problems. Here: social ones.

Few readers can spot that outright.

alxd, to hamburg
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I just learned that part of our group will not make it to and would like to sell their tickets. This year's Congress is happening in , Germany.

Currently 2 available, soon maybe another 2, 175 EUR each, the price we bought them for.

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

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

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

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

alxd,
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@Gargron I am willing to take another shot and implement a simple frontend-only "A, B, C and D boosted your post", I just want to know if there's any point, or if the PR will be ignored / deleted. Is there a place where it should be discussed first with the maintainers?

alxd, to solarpunk
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A about cyber- , old databases of fallen giants. A race against time to find treatments to a new pandemic which might have been already discovered, but were put aside as not profitable enough. Doctors, hackers, bioengineers braving through old corporate-speak like an ancient language to understand: what happened to the cure?

This and more in the last : The Pharmacists!

https://podcast.tomasino.org/@SolarpunkPrompts/episodes/the-pharmacists

alxd, to photography
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Since starting the hacker graphic novel project nearly a decade ago I learned how hard it is to explain communities using a visual language.

It makes me even more happy to see my photo from a meeting circulating on the Internet, promoting the organization.

There's just so much joy in the faces of activists and makers from Denmark and Ghana working together on grassroots projects, chilling after a conference.

Full album https://www.flickr.com/photos/gig_/albums/72177720300869819

alxd, to Blog
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of Mastodon: can you recommend any practices for designing a / blog?

I'm writing my small at https://alxd.org/ but I'm seeing the limitations of my half-custom theme and Pelican engine.

Is there value to tags? A search function? ?

Is it better to have a homepage in one language? All languages? Dependent on user browser? Should un-translated posts show up in other langs?

alxd, to random
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Does anyone here use ? What is your experience with them?

The lack of the audio jack port bugs me (Fairphone really has something against them), but I'm curious overall.

alxd, to climate
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Given the latest shooting in Panama - https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/american-lawyer-77-shoots-dead-2-protestors-for-blocking-a-highway-in-panama-dramatic-scenes-caught-on-camera-101699512061391.html - I'm thinking about the role of violence in the upcoming .

I agree with KSR "The Ministry for the Future": we are going to see a lot of targeted assassinations and violence both from the defenders of status quo and the revolutionaries. It's a very hard topic, one I have little experience in, but I have one strong belief:

alxd,
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I think that 's visions of the sustainable future - and our road there - can limit the upcoming violence and struggle.

By making the future imaginable, we can go towards building something instead of just acting out our anger. I'm not saying that there will be no conflicts or antagonisms, but as we're seeing today - a lot of "rebel" movements fizzle out if the anger is all they have. They don't build, whether in real life, or in fiction (as per my https://alxd.org/solarpunk-lenses-and-foundations.html ).

alxd,
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Seeing a vision of a future can be also a boon for people clinging to status quo, as often their decisions can be rooted in fear of the unknown change, not being able to imagine what their life would be with all this "sustainability".

Writing for them will be very different than writing for people who already "bought in" (sic) the ideas, but in my opinion it's one of the best way of depolarizing groups which are currently against the climate movement.

alxd,
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That's one of the pillars of the I co-create: allowing people to imagine their own life during the times of change - and in a Solarpunk world.

Who will they be without their identity of coal miners? Where will they live if not on the flood plains their family inhabited for generations? What will they eat if not meat?

We need to make those things imaginable, and suddenly there will be a lot fewer opponents of the climate movements.

And a lot less violence.

alxd, (edited ) to solarpunk
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I'm proud to announce that the is back with the second season thanks to the awesome @tomasino !

The intro is available at https://podcast.tomasino.org/@SolarpunkPrompts/episodes/season-2-introduction and the new episodes should follow weekly! You can also find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Audible and everywhere else ;)

If you want to get for your , or just want to explore s, feel free to jump into it!

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

"The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber & Wengrow

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

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

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

We are exploring those realms for a reason.

alxd, to Podcast
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I'm writing the final prompts & research of the . I really love the last one. Ties everything together so well :)

alxd, (edited ) to solarpunk
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A few days ago an old question surfaced on the reddit:

"What makes the Solarpunk movement ?"

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

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

alxd,
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What’s a win state for cyberpunk characters? Who are the ones others tell stories about? It’s the martyrs. Cyberpunk glorifies the rebellion to the point of expecting some kind of cyber-valhalla (it’s so cool), blinding us with awesome neons, shiny chrome, making us forget we can do something else.

alxd,
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For me the best indicator of whether a narrative is Solarpunk is a simple question: can it portray Wikipedia, as a project? Not a means to fight The System, not a tool for manipulation of the masses by the corps and the government, but as a Great Civilizational Project.

alxd,
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Because for me, Wikipedia, despite being flawed and imperfect – is a Great Project. It’s something that generations of science fiction writers dreamed about: THE Great Encyclopedia, containing (almost) the totality of human knowledge, available to everyone, for free, at any moment. Built by every one of us, as an Editor, Researcher, Scientist, where it’s our communities editing and improving it, arguing and building consensus.

alxd,
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It’s a success for the whole civilization, a Wonder of the World, impossible to imagine if it didn’t exist in the first place.

It’s so unimaginable that even today, we cannot tell stories about it, because we lack the hieroglyphs! We cannot see the librarians as heroes! Teaching, sharing knowledge, archiving the history of your language and region before it’s too late cannot be dramatic!

alxd,
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In my opinion, that’s where the lies in : in building alternatives instead of taking part in a hopeless struggle. In not allowing to be written into someone else’s narrative, to become a safe – predictable – rebel. It’s accepting the grassroot movements, collaboration with all its conflicts, imperfections, as something beautiful and worth telling stories about.

alxd,
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Move quietly and plant things. A quiet work of thousands, millions of people working towards a better tomorrow, towards alternatives, planting small seeds of hope and improving the world bit by bit, to grow a forest which will sprout with the power of millions of trees. Scientists and engineers working on free software, activists trying to convince the unconvinced, educators sharing knowledge: people believing in new narratives, punk- towards punks who got stuck in their old battles.

alxd,
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@faassen I've been researching "how to talk about FLOSS and hackers" for over a decade and I think this is something which should be foundational for Solarpunk writing: being able to write not only about heroes like today's narratives, not only about tech and infrastructure (like Cory Doctorow and many other writers), but about the social structures we create, new ways to interact with each other which are not market- or hierarchy- based.

With all their dramas! :D

alxd, to solarpunk
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idea:

Survival game where you learn to be a part of an ecosystem and slowly abandon your unsustainable "tech tree" replacing it with sustainable, local solutions.

A lot of games are trying to replicate very expansionist core loops, be it Minecraft's, Factorio's and so on, which see the player as a force acting on the environment / ecosystem, not working together with it.

Why not change it?

alxd,
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Building on an older thread about , I recently played and I think it's a brilliant example of what I meant with the mechanic above:

You keep building an outpost. It might succeed or fail, but it's always eventually blown by the storm and you need to start anew. Yet every time you learn something, you improve a little, and the element keeps the game fun.

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