The unbearable lightness of solarpunk: utopian visions and invisible infrastructures

Transcript

good morning Prague I'll reiterate Reese's comment you know wow what a crowd I'm sure you're all sat in your hotel rooms working that hangover off watching the live stream that's cool means gives my gives my voice a bit of room to echo which is nice so yes hello my name is Paul Graham Raven I am a researcher in sustainability sustainability Transitions and infrastructure Futures I'm also a practicing critical futurist and I'm an author and critic of Science Fiction uh my core expertise and as much as I have one is understanding how the stories we tell about Futures shape the lives we end up living now it's in some ways very difficult and challenging to to follow Rhys actually

uh because he's talked about a lot of the same stuff that I'm going to talk about uh and he's he's like a proper lecturer right I I I've spent 12 years in the Academy I just can't I can't do that that well I do a different thing I guess one way of saying it might be that uh Rhys has been the good cop I'm afraid I'm I'm going to be the bad cop today that is a role I take on very grudgingly I don't I don't want to have to do this but that's just the way it is I'll be honest it's a bit of fun but so I am likewise going to talk about uh solar Punk uh Solarity as it sometimes referred to in the academic literature and particularly I want to talk about solar punk as utopia now Rhys talked

about this to some extent I'm going to take a slightly different uh it's you know it's the same Theory but I'm going to take a different angle on it because I want to use it as a bit of a heuristic for thinking about different forms of Utopia always almost sort of categorizing them if you like so Anna's Reese pointed out Utopia is a kind of like the earliest form of futurism right it's a form of Storytelling about Futurity uh it kind of emerges after the Middle Ages it replaces the eschatology of the Christian mindset uh in the in the Middle Ages in Europe and it fundamentally recognizes that Human Action and choices can affect the form of life in Times to come so the term utopia is worth thinking

about before we start so it has a double meaning okay so it's based on uh not just one but two Greek words which said in Greek means something slightly different because Greek is a more sort of a tonal language where slight change in tone changes the meaning of the word but English doesn't work that way so if we say Utopia there's only really one way to pronounce it but in Greece in Greek there are two slightly different ways of pronouncing it and one of them comes out as uh I suppose if you over emphasize the pronunciation so uh Utopia uh is not place or no place non-trace if you like whereas Utopia means good place and so Thomas Moore who wrote the original book from which the word Utopia comes was

very much it's debated whether he was doing it deliberately or not but he's very much kind of playing on that tension between imagining a good place but also imagining a place that is not a place right it's non-existent but it's also not here whether in space or in time this tension is in all utopian narratives which are plentiful as Reese has pointed out so there are yeah and this is a simplification but we can think of there being three different forms or modes of Utopia narrative right those three modes are the classic or what I call the Constitutional Utopia the technological Utopia and the critical Utopia we'll look at those very very briefly

so the uh the classic utopian form it starts with Thomas Moore's Utopia arguably Scholars debate this Scholars debate everything that's what Scholars do what's really important for this argument is to bear in mind that the classic Utopia is always a blank slate right it leans very hard into the non-place thing by definition and by practice to write about a complete rewriting of the way Society works you have to imagine a space where the existing Society is not you need a blank slate you need an open field in which to build that new idea you've got to go somewhere that is unknown in order to do things

differently now I call the classical fall in the Constitutional form because one way of describing how the classical Utopia works is it posits a society which has been perfected through what we would now describe as policy a policy making a bit of law in there as well that's why constitutional but fundamentally you know policy decisions made in how things are run it's a form of top-down social change which if you think back to the fact that this was created in a time of Kings this is before democracy right that makes sense you know change happens from the top down and uh technology not really I mean technology was a thing but it didn't mean what technology means to us now which is a complex thing as again recess

pointed out but one way of really sort of nailing down what the Constitutional Utopia is about is it's kind of defined by an idealism right it's not you know it's about clearing the space and saying right let's build from the top down an entire new way of doing Society but through social relations first and foremost so then you have the technological Utopia now this again is very sort of contended by Scholars but I tend to say that technological Utopia starts in the late 19th uh in the late 19th century uh Jules Verne H.G Wells you get that first emergence of the technological as a as a force in the history Alessandro talked about this very lucidly yesterday

uh it becomes a popular and proletarian genre through uh American pulp science fiction in the post-war era and so there is that sense that the technology of Utopia was actually enabled by Technologies which enable the cheap production and distribution of story as well uh and the technological Utopia fundamentally rejects the possibility of perfection that is inherent in the classical Utopia right classical Utopia says we're going to make a perfect Society by designing it from the top down as a new set of social relations technological Utopia says I don't like the sound of that I'm not convinced we can perfect things I'm too rational to believe that it's a very rationalist genre rejects the possibility of perfection and it's also deeply suspicious indeed

of political roots to betterment right the technological Utopia wants to improve Society but it's not really convinced that politics can do it and that actually is often quite hostile to the idea that politics can do it I think a lot of the classic 50 science fiction the example I tend to go to is Robert heinlein's the roads must run it's basically a short story about union busting but it's also a short story about how we can improve the city through uh through you know basically escalators that are Pavements it's a classic of the time I don't think much of it myself so there is so the classic Utopia is I oh drama are you okay man

okay uh yeah so if the classic Utopia is defined by idealism the technological Utopia is defined by optimism the optimistic assumption that advances in technology can fix social problems Reese unpacked this brilliantly in the previous uh talk if you haven't seen that go back and watch it it's far more lucid and interesting than I could have made it I'm just trying to skip through here but the point is that the technology Utopia is fundamentally triumphalist capitalist and solutionist now the critical Utopia is it's kind of a if you know if you know your dialectics it's kind of the synthesis of the previous two right it comes out of the new wave science fiction of the late

70s which was in turn a response to the failure of the hippie dream of the late 60s the hippie dream can be thought of as a kind of attempt to do classical Utopia in opposition to the technological Utopia of the post-war period that fails there's a realization okay that model isn't going to work again it didn't work the first time either we need to try something else the critical Utopia rejects both the top-down Perfection of the classical Utopia and the solutionist anti-politics of the technological Utopia and I think I make the point there one way of defining it and I'm flagrantly quoting my own papers here because that's just a thing you've got to do sometimes the critical Utopia concerns the depiction of a utopian project in the process of undergoing its inevitable failure even

as it sustains the critique of the status quo implied by all utopian modes so and again just poking on another thing Rhys said and unpacking a little bit further so in utopian scholarship we make a distinction between optimism and hope now the words are less important than the meanings because it turns out that in different languages people use the same words in the opposite ways what's important is the distinction meaning and I go to a great writer called Rebecca solnit on this who if you're interested in solar Bank environmental issues read Rebecca sonnet she's really really good she's an amazing writer great human being the sonnet distinction is that optimism is is the assumption that basically everything will work out fine it's like

stuff is bad yeah but you know it'll get fixed the thing with optimism is fundamentally passive right it's sort of like yeah it'll be fine that will get fixed but you know by someone the passive voice is being used right it will be fixed who will do the fixing or what will do the fixings not really it's not really in there that's why it's not my problem it'll be fine hope is a different thing because with hope there is the assumption that yes things could be better but only if we work for it and always against the inevitable encroachment of entropy of difficulty of things going wrong so how does solar Punk score as a Utopia in terms of those three modes

so uh it's still a young genre it's much more popular and successful as an aesthetical Vibe as a sort of an image making system um it's you know fiction written under the badge of solar Punk at the risk of being very very sweeping is mostly not very good and that's actually because of exactly what Rhys was talking about right the problem with solar Punk is it has this glorious Vision but it you know it articulates the future that we want but it does not connect us to it it does not articulate in that sense right it's very good you know that's where we want to go but how do we get there that question is very very hard because solar writers tend to be optimistic they want it to be a comforting alternative literature to

cyberpunk and so there's this kind of like oh we don't want to talk about the you know it's like you know we want to be optimistic it's going to happen it's great that question of how that question of how we get there no just I just want to write stories set in the nice city with all the trees on the on the buildings and yeah I get it I get it it's nice now successful solar Punk Utopias in literature tend to be non-places not in the sense that they're uh you know because there are no places left to like colonize in the world or at least there are very few it's very hard to imagine a blank slate where you can just build a new civilization but they tend to be non-places in time right one of the tricks of Science

Fiction is the displace in time rather than space so okay okay well this this non-place is in the future rather than over there in South America so in that sense it has elements of the classic Utopia uh and sometimes you know the it's also set in places where you know the implicit thing with us with solar bunkers it's set in a place where putting some solar panels and windmills and everything has basically fixed the environmental problem right so it's you know it's an optimistic Tech Utopia we throw Tech at the problem problem solved there is a bit of reflexivity in there there is a bit of understanding yeah I've been talking to people over the last uh day and a half and there is some understanding that maybe it won't be

that simple uh but not really as much as there could be right there is this real showing away at a lot of solar Punk uh from the question of the process right it articulates the vision but it does not articulate the route there so I mean it's solar Punk then a future we want I mean it's a nice dream it's reset right it's inspiring it's seductive you know I look at those pictures they're like [ __ ] yeah I want to live there that'd be great but the question of how we get there tends to be skipped over right it tends to be reduced to uh actually in a lot of the the stories that actually kind of work as stories most of the what you know the way the place that's being written about got to be a solar Punk Utopia is basically everywhere else

basically burnt down and these smart sensible people have built a little Enclave where it all kind of worked out again the important questions are about uh uh largely avoided right how did it happen how does this Utopia get built where does it happen for whom does it happen and what does it cost so I want to think about blockchain ethereum whatever we're calling it in the same way okay okay let's think about the blockchain as a utopian narrative now I think yeah the reason I've been invited here is because you know blockchain has been suggested as one way towards you

know to articulate that solar future how viable is that is the question I'm trying to ask Rhys has already shown the similarities between this as some of what I'm doing is kind of repeating and building and what he's done there one way to put this in the language of programmers I suppose is you know as I said earlier reason's been the good cop I'm I'm your bad cop today to put this in programmer language right I am your ethical pen tester right I am your ideological red team I'm your adversarial analysis okay I am I'm gonna go hard here I'm not going to apologize for that however

I am going to be as generous as I'm able I want to strong man this argument okay I want to give ethereum the blockchain the best chance it has to stand up but this is going to be a critique okay and I'm not gonna there we go Okay so we've considered solar punk as a utopian narrative uh let's do the same for the blockchain now we can skip over this quite quickly because Rhys has done a lot of the work for me which is great so it's you know it's really really hard to deny uh a lot of heroic claims are being made for blockchain just at this conference

right this is all stuff I got from the the Comfort schedule uh uh you know yeah so some of these you know permissionless Market creation create a better world reduce inequality universal access to all knowledge and like unlock energy flexibility which will be secure and transparent mind you accelerate Net Zero bootstrapping impact markets still not sure what that means smart cities uh which you'll note I have tagged as the zombie Utopia because it just won't [ __ ] die smart cities just will not die uh web 3 marketplaces offer Evolution above the status quo I'm again evolution of What Not sure closing the Justice Gap okay and what I want to be really clear

about is I'm trying to strong man this argument and I believe in the sincerity of the people making these claims right this is important I trust that the people saying they think it can do this really believe it can genuinely believe that but I'm still going to try and tell you why you're wrong blockchain is utopian form uh you know the the obvious one to start with is the technological utopian form right it's you know it's really undeniable reasons made the case total optimistic optimism and technological solutions as a way of articulating the future coupled with a deep distrust of old forms of political action and the state

okay no doubt about that at all there are elements of the classic Utopia in there as well I'm thinking about those dowels which were kind of like yeah we'll just buy some land and start a city um and that's worked out well hasn't it uh but also the whole coders law thing right and as someone who was like writing on the internet in the mid-naughties I don't think when Lessing talked about code AS law I don't think he meant it as a good thing I think it's worth going back to that and taking another look but yeah so the code is law thing is a constitutional structural reordinary right coders law is very much that's kind of you know Blank Slate you know we'll just rewrite a whole new set of laws these old ones aren't working let's start from scratch what could

possibly go wrong and there's the placelessness of Internet discourse as well right it's you know it's you know where are we going to do it oh everywhere anywhere you know it's like no you have to do stuff in the world because the world is not the same everywhere is it a critical Utopia well I mean I could make a joke about the whole ongoing inevitable failure thing I'm not going to do that but there isn't a lot of reflexivity uh or internal critique in this space the fact that you've had to import me to do this ideological red teaming thing is an indication that maybe you haven't got enough sort of native reflexivity in this scene right uh if there was I wouldn't be here I'm very glad to be here I'm having a nice but nonetheless you should have you

should be doing this for yourselves right but so what right you know what's what's your problem Paul um blockchain may be under the hyper utopian so what uh this is you know this isn't a Sci-Fi story Paul this is a revolutionary revolutionary economic technology uh you know don't don't judge it as a story that's just unfair we've invented an amazing thing here don't judge it that way so okay let's park the utopian thing we'll come back to it later and let's move down a level and let's think about those economic promises because there's a sort of more detailed narrative down here isn't there what claims are made for the blockchain and how do they match the evidence so the main claims as far as I can tell

because wading through all the stuff that's been written about the blockchain is you know I don't have the time I have like a day job to do and stuff but I've tried to read a bit around and the big deal as far as I can tell is perfect efficient free markets right this is the economic dream right we will make the perfect efficient markets and those markets will be decentralized and non-hierarchical and implicitly free of State interference so I mean you know again pretty utopian but we're leaving that aside but how do those promises stand up on their own terms that's what I would have asked now and does it match up with the whole Justice and environmental ideas of the solar Punk Vision that it's trying to be married to

all but the most crazy economists would admit that the perfect Market is like a perfect circle you can describe it in theory but it's impossible to make one in the real world there's no time to go into great detail about uh the different meanings of freedom but we can talk briefly about the distinction between freedom to and freedom from and the point I'm going to make here is that both of those are good things but they are meaningless in the absence of the other one okay if you have Pure Freedom too which as an outsider looking in is how a lot of this blockchain stuff seems to work it's like yeah you've got the freedom to transact with whoever you like which also means you have the truth you have the freedom to screw anyone over you like and you have the freedom to get out

of there with your identity concealed and suffer no consequences for it whereas freedom from is you know the freedom to not have people do that to you right and it's great to have freedom too when you're the person who comes out all right you know who leaves the uh who leaves tornado cash with all the ethereum in your back pocket it's not very nice to be the little guy who got screwed over by her it sounds great on paper but in practice it looks it looks like the wild west and that's kind of appealing right I like cowboy movies I don't know if many people in the ethereum scene have ever watched the series Deadwood you really really should watch Deadwood partly because it's great TV but partly because

it has a lot to say about the way this world works okay and there's an important lesson in there there's the the old joke about a Gold Rush right you know how you make money in a gold rush you sell shovels you don't mind gold you sell shovels has anyone been looking at nvidia's stock price recently just gonna throw that one out there for you but okay let's leave that aside maybe that can get fixed I'm sure it can code is law right we can fix that it's not a problem we'll fix that so efficiency efficient markets that's what we want right efficient markets will make everything better what could be wrong about efficiency

the economic argument for free markets hinges on efficiency and in a sense that argument is actually true but the sense in which it's true is very particular and it turns out that efficient markets tend very strongly not to decentralization but actually to Monopoly so economics is a very weird discipline for lots of reasons if you want an example Google the term spherical cows or homoeconomicus would be another one all disciplines all Fields all uh or communities of discourse use words in a special and particular way and it's always worth checking those particular meanings when those communities start making big claims about what they can do

so free markets are efficient what does that actually mean maybe someone here would like to give me the vernacular definition of efficiency right if I said to you oh my car is very efficient uh what would you what would you think I was saying someone like to someone like to step in what about you sir if I said my car as efficient what would you think I was saying about my car using less using less gas yes that's right and that's I think generally when we hear someone talk about efficiency that's generally what we think uh so I went to the dictionary and the uh Oxford English Dictionary says yeah yeah efficient means effective adequately operative right there is definitely this implication that an

efficient thing uses as little if something as necessary to get the job done this is almost completely opposite to what an economist or an investor thinks efficiency means well an economist or investment person thinks efficiency means and I'm just going to read this out from Investopedia economic efficiency is when every scarce resource in an economy is used and distributed among producers and consumers in a way that produces the most economic output which is to say profit and benefits to Consumers every scarce resource an efficient process or Market in the

economic sense uses everything anything left unused anything not profited from that's inefficient Now using all the stuff doesn't sound very sustainable right thus the unspoken rule of the game efficient markets and but okay let's assume let's assume that's you know but that's not no no that's not what we mean we mean the other sort of efficiency and the other sort of efficiency The Frugal efficiency but you get another problem there because even when it's the other sort of efficiency you get the same problem in a different way there's an economic idea actually from the 1800s I think originally a guy called jevons came up with the jevons Paradox which describes the way in which greater efficiency leads to cheaper

inputs which work which works as a market signal for ever more production okay if something gets cheap Android an efficient market people will just use the stuff that doesn't need to be used because it's just like cheap it's crazy you can't leave it there being efficient use it up and this applies to clean energy too right you can think about the cost of something not just in terms of its cash cost in terms of its emissions cost right so if we make energy production cleaner the cost in terms of emissions goes down and so more uses are found for energy which demands more energy production foreign

doesn't take place on a piece of paper it takes place in a world where resources and customers are unevenly distributed that's why we invented Logistics right but Logistics adds to the imperative to centralize because it's more efficient right um one of the examples I use here a lot is milk production like before refrigeration and trucks you know most milk herds but just little herds of cows on the outside of the town and the milk guy would like put some milk in a churn that he couldn't refrigerate and he'd take it into town and he put each chair in a shop and they just Ladle out the amount of milk he wanted fresh on the same day um but you know as things get you know the city grows and the Farms move outside and you start being able to truck and refrigerate stuff and at that

point it's like well I'm in competition with that other farm and if I can save money by producing more stuff and tracking it from further away and refrigerating it for longer and mixing together milk from multiple sources this is how we end up with like huge you know 10 000 Cow Dairy Farms in the middle of [ __ ] nowhere that produce loads and loads of methyl emissions right hugely intensified production in one particular location the absolute opposite of decentralization and Logistics itself tends to Monopoly for exactly the same reason which is why Jeff Bezos is I think at the moment not quite the richest man on Earth but very very close right there's three markets are working pretty good for Jeff

Mr work Paul we're going to fix all this code is law we'll fix it you know this is exactly what we're trying to get away from this isn't how it's supposed to work well I mean actually it is this is actually the core of what we call uh you know what we sometimes controversely call neoliberalism right which is the water the economic water in which everyone in this room has been swimming for the last 40 years free markets and decentralization stem from a deeply incompatible uh yeah there's a paradox here that is not resolvable and there's radical new economics that the blockchain promises starts to look actually a lot more like the same old

economics that is worried about losing its job especially as all of a sudden protectionism is back in fashion bloody States right they spoil everyone's fun but it does it does seem though there is some there is some fandom actually for centralization in in the blockchain world uh here is your friend of mine Peter Thiel uh rather boldly riffing on Tolstoy in An Essay with the blunt title of competition is for losers uh and it sounds there like he's pretty he's pretty keen on centralization actually Monopoly sounding pretty good to Peter and let's also think about Sam Altman right who is basically saying to the US government oh please please regulate us because I can afford to comply with

regulation and my competitors cannot build me a moat Mr Biden um okay let's assume let's assume that the biggest names in blockchain don't represent what it's actually about let's assume that somehow the software will fix the Paradox of free markets and Monopoly formation there is another problem we need to talk about and that is the issue of infrastructure how am I doing for time okay this is all those problems I've just talked about it's fine fixed all that that's fixable we'll assume that for now you've still got another problem now infrastructure is a big and like every

scholarly term kind of contested means different things to different people I am a sort of I literally call but I'm interested in concrete infrastructure the pun is deliberately intended I am talking about like pipes pylons roads Railways that sort of real sort of heavy uh heavy infrastructure now I know that you know the first meeting of coders uh when code is here infrastructure I think oh no I know what infrastructure is flops right computation you know we're going to build a blockchain future we're going to need a whole lot of computers uh I live in Sweden there's a lot of these getting built in Sweden do you know why because the energy is really cheap in the North of Sweden because there's lots of hydroelectric power and because it's cooler so you don't have to call the data centers quite so much but again the data center is pretty kind

of centralizing isn't it um and the thing with the data center is the computation doesn't happen where the user of the competition computation is you know so you've got to build that somewhere else so you've got to think okay where am I going to build my data centers and I don't know maybe maybe we could maybe Paul maybe what we'll do instead of diet centers is well you know it's more distributed everyone's got their own machine uh you know it doesn't have to all be in one place we can we can spread it around we can decentralize it okay that will be much less efficient much less efficient if you'll need more machines uh it will actually be less efficient in energy terms it will produce more waste heat uh you know as much as I hate to say it data centers are very efficient

in both sides of the term well okay now we've got to fix for that Paul's not a problem okay uh so the energy that powers the data centers got to get that fixed as well um you know and it's it's you know that's how energy gets around uh you know sadly Tesla didn't do the whole wireless energy thing that he promised us maybe if he comes back he will but you know you've got to get that energy somewhere and it's like oh this is this is going to be a solar Punk future pool we'll just have we'll just have solar panels everywhere windmills maybe is fine we don't need big Power stations somewhere else okay okay yeah cool cool fixed so but even so uh yeah you need to connect to all those

computers together because this is a network phenomenon right so uh yeah bandwidth as infrastructure uh and you know it's like that you know the internet is a very physical thing we talk about is this weird sort of placeless non-place but it's like you know it is a solid physical thing uh the way it feels is decentralized but actually structurally it's highly centralized what's really interesting as well is if you follow those lines those are basically the Old Colonial shipping routes from the 17 and 1800s I like really very exactly it's a brilliant book called sinews of war and trade by uh Layla khalili which you should really read but okay you know we'll fix that and and we don't need cables we'll just you know

they'll be Wireless like you know 7g or whatever I mean great but you're still going to have to like build all those seven details you're gonna have to like run cables to them so they've got power from your wherever you're getting your power from and uh yeah we can fix that Paul okay okay cool that's cool that you can fix that but that means that because the thing is when you start saying oh great yeah we can we can do that we can do all this spatial stuff it's like well whose land are you going to do it on because as recent events have shown right when you start doing things on people's land that they don't want you to do people start throwing explosive [ __ ] around right we don't like the state the

state's a bad thing it's like yeah I count myself as an anarchist too I don't like the state but I'm not naive about what the state can do right the anarchist definition of the state is it is a thing that has the Monopoly on violence and if you start [ __ ] with States they will use it but okay we'll fix that we'll work out a way to deal with the states Paul it's fine we can do that we'll fix it let's let's just go through some of the the assumptions we've made right so uh the blockchain blockchain Utopia won't fail or Focus over like every other Technologic Utopia balance of freedoms will be found that that cures the whole world West [ __ ]

the Paradox of efficiency in Monopoly will fix that somehow marketizing environmental goals won't trigger the jevons Paradox again you know maybe it's possible I don't know uh the system won't be eaten up by sort of crypto Amazon uh the big shots will stay interested when it stops making them money you'll find a way to transact with the nation-states that already exist without in effect becoming the thing that you're against because if you're a thing if you're an entity that can interact with a state on an equal level in all but name you are a state but assuming all that oh no it's Colombo one last question

how do you deal with that this is uh this is somewhere I don't know exactly where in Alta Mongolia uh this is where rare earth metals come uh this is a big uh you know a vast sort of square kilometers Lake of radioactive sludge and the people who work there level on the edge you can just see it in the background there uh yeah this is where rare earth metals come from uh and in Sweden where I live uh up north where the new battery factories are being built uh just happens to be near some of the biggest lithium deposits on Earth which just happened to be on the land of this army people but it's fine because the swedes have never actually signed that whole un thing that says they have to be nice to uh

indigenous people so that's probably fine and you know it's it would be efficient it would be efficient to use that lithium just right there next to the battery factories that will be that'll be fine so look even if you fix all those assumptions that I listed we can't get away from this you need to find a fix for extractivism and the fundamentally exploitative nature of Supply chains right because stuff has to come from somewhere to get to you and the places that stuff comes from look like that and when you finish with stuff as reset it's like you know when stuff gets yeah well we'll just we'll throw that away you have to throw it away somewhere

so you know both ends of the supply chain ultimately end up looking like this that's the price of your little solar pump Utopia in the middle right you think of those professional shots of you know Singapore solar pump zones you have with the fancy the trees and all the looks great right you need to remember that if you turn that photo over you see that every time so yeah the unbearable lightness of solar Punk and blockchain little Prague literary reference for you there am I saying how am I going to conclude this so first and first and foremost solar Punk is not an

alternative to cyberpunk it is what cyberpunk looks like for the winners if you actually read the cyberpunk novels that everyone quotes so often but doesn't seem to have actually paid any attention to it or this is always implicit right always implicit the rich people live in these wonderful arcologies and space stations or enclaves where everything looks [ __ ] great but everyone else is like living in converted warehouses trying to hack some money out of the big company down the road until the supply chain is fixed you cannot have the Solar without the sludge and a solar pump future for the few won't last because eventually the lithium miners are going to turn up with torches and pitchforks there's a reason why so many of the big player Libertarians are preppers you

know maybe if you're lucky you'll get a job with them you know maybe you can run their Network or something you ain't going to see the sun very much living in that bunker though if you think technology will solve your problems you don't understand technology and you don't understand your problems so coders are Engineers right and it's a powerful and transformative episteme I was raised by Engineers it's a problem-solving discipline fundamentally and it's achieved amazing things but it has been promoted over the other epistemes and that has distorted the way the world Works in incredibly dangerous ways engineering is brilliant at Solutions but you [ __ ] suck at identifying the really problematic issues that matter that's why you need the Arts that's

where you need the humanities that's why you need the social sciences it's why you need to actually talk to people who don't spend all day on a [ __ ] laptop because those people understand the qualitative and the contextual you do not to reiterate Rhys again there is no technological fix for social problems we cannot innovate our way out of the cumulative consequences of our obsession with innovation right it's sort of like you know the house is on fire we'll just you know throw more fuel in there that'll that'll do it that'll do it I won't do it so can we blockchain our way to solar Punk

I'm not convinced solar Punk is buildable full stop I think that's kind of inherent in it maybe maybe Alessandro's permaculture description yesterday was you know there were some clear steps and processes there there was an Ethics there I think there's maybe you know there's an articulation there that could be followed maybe we could build it that way but it's blockchain the missing link no no way absolutely not many of the nice people I've spoken to have admitted that they're uncertain what it even means you know what is you know we love this thing but we're not sure what it means we're not sure what its values are and that's the [ __ ] problem right you build first and you think later wrong way round take a tip from the Rastafari measure twice cut once

maybe blockchain will have some role to play right you know it's not going to go away I understand that but it's not going to fix everything either it doesn't get to be the hero the desire to be the hero is the problem so if you were to ask me well you know I'm I'm a person who's passionate about the blockchain I love this stuff I think it's important it's what I'm great at it's how I make my living it's like cool I'm not saying stop what I'm saying is stop assuming it can fix everything if you were to say to me okay well what should I do to build a more sustainable to build a world that's ecologically sane that's what you want to do you don't have to quit doing your blockchain stuff

but if that's what you want to do the best thing you can do close the laptop go outside and talk to people thank you [Applause] yeah no pressure okay too much pressure cheers [Music]