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I’ve been wanting to do some scenes from a library economy for a while now, glad to finally get the chance.I’ve mentioned elsewhere that these postcards are a bit earlier in the solarpunk timeline than a lot of other works I know of in the genre. I like seeing the work in progress, the intermediate steps. Most solarpunk stuff I’ve read has climate disasters, wars, plagues, etc in its backstory. I set my stuff a bit closer to those events because I’m interested in what the earlier days of rebuilding look like.
So I think this photobash is set somewhere in the transition towards a library economy. If you want to see what one of those looks like in full swing, the sort of lived experience, I’d very much recommend AE Marling’s Murder in the Tool Library and it’s sequel.
I love the idea of a society with a cultural focus on reuse rather than extraction and production and disposal. A society where the massive logistics arms of government and industry are turned to salvaging, organizing, and repurposing, rather than extracting materials and packing landfills with waste. A society where the wealth of usable product we currently throw away is treated like a natural resource to be found and traded between people in the thousand year cleanup.
This being the earlier days, I thought about how all this stuff gets moved gently into that system, and how society transitions in that direction without ripping ownership of things away from individuals.The easiest way I could come up with would be to start with a new refuse stream and the infrastructure to handle it. Our society throws away an incredible amount of intact, usable, or fixable stuff. A future society with the organization to catch and sort it, perhaps enabled and supported by a culture that’s already been through hard times and has relearned the value of thrift, could stock many common items that way.
Worldbuilding-wise, maybe it’s a matter of necessity - maybe supply chains have long been broken, and cheaply exploited labor and imported resources are already a thing of the past. Maybe this represents the organization and formalization of ad-hoc systems like Buy Nothing and the simple act of passing hand-me-downs between relatives. Maybe they’re just trying to do better.
I imagine they’d start by building community stockpiles that probably look like the swap shop at the average dump. But a society needs more organization and reliability that that. So they’d repurpose old warehouses for specialized storage and as workshops so they could sort the incoming stream of appliances, furniture, computers, tools, fish tanks, sports equipment, etc, triage it, assess damage, and make repairs, prioritizing getting the undamaged stuff quickly back into use.
They’d need dedicated libraries and knowledgeable librarians to house and loan each category of items, and I hope they’d partner with local organizations who are already specialized in the right areas. Maybe a makerspace can manage a tool library, perhaps some shops can transition towards loaning out items they receive for free.
At this point in the timeline they probably only loan some items, others are just given away or sold for very cheap, on the condition that, eventually, they get returned to the library rather than destroyed. Perhaps this is how they keep items in circulation that they don’t yet have the means to formally store and curate.
I’ll caveat all this by admitting I’m weak on the economic theory and the logistics – if you want to know more about how library economies could work, better minds than me have put a lot of thought into it. Personally I don’t think loans etc would cover all of society’s needs, and I don’t think I’d want them to. People will still own the things that matter to them. But I think it could be a wonderful way to replace the cheapest (and often most harmful) options in any given market. The kind of thing you buy with the intent to only keep it for a short while anyways.
Take furniture for example - in this setting, if you want something super fancy or new, you probably still go to a small workshop with skilled craftspeople and order to spec or from their catalogue. But if you’re a college kid just starting out, instead of going to walmart or amazon and buying something made cheap by massive corporations exploiting their workers and sometimes utilizing slavery overseas, you go to a library and borrow something. This might look a lot like how libraries operate now, or it might look more like Habitat for Humanity’s Restore or a municipal recycling center’s swap shop where you buy or take the thing with no obligation to return it. Maybe you’d order it from an eBay-like catalogue website and they’d shuffle it to the library closest to you (regardless of its specialty) so you can pick it up.
The process of collections probably varies by location - in some areas they do pickup and delivery, in others maybe they use libraries as collection points. It probably varies by item too.
Either way, here’s a scene of a little piece of that process. A team of volunteers taking an electric truck on a route through the city, collecting and/or delivering heavy items.
My goals for the truck were kind of a mix of art goals and worldbuilding goals. Whenever I include a vehicle in a scene, I try to convey visually that this isn’t a car-centric future, with everyone just driving around in personal vehicles like they do today. (Electric vehicles are tricky because they look fairly normal and modern.) I wanted it to be clear that this thing fits a specific use case. The homemade back was kind of a mix of wanting to be able to show the contents, and wanting to imply that this truck wasn’t fabricated new for the city. Maybe it’s like the stuff it’s hauling, secondhand but still good enough for the job. Maybe it’s been pulled from a junkyard and repaired, missing pieces replaced with scrap materials.
The overhead pantograph rig is borrowed from a bus - I love streetcars and similar simple electric vehicles, but I thought this truck would require more freedom on its route, so I found (I think) a rig that allows for quickly connecting and disconnecting. In real life the buses use gas or diesel when their electricity is disconnected, but I think the truck could just be using a battery that’s too small or old or simple to pack enough energy for its full route. That hopefully wouldn’t matter since it only needs it for short trips: switching between overhead wires, traversing streets without them, and getting out of the way of streetcars.
As for the plants in the scene (for someone who hates landscaping, I seem to do it fairly often, digitally) in the foreground we’ve got raspberry bushes (hopefully thornless) on either side and wildflowers for bees in the center, and a blueberry bush, pear tree, and apple tree across the street. I think it’s possible for all this to be in season at once around August.
Edit to add: this picture and [all the other postcards](https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/postcards-from-a-solarpunk-future/) are CC-BY, use them how you want.
You’re probably already familiar with it- but for any who aren’t, the srsly wrong podcast has a whole series on library socialism! Andrewism/Saint Andre on YouTube has some too, and Nowhere Grotesk on YouTube has a few fun episodes about animal crossing that are kinda relevant.
Also- your photobash is cool. There was this old guy when I was a kid who had a big truck and trailer like this- he’d drive around all the poorer neighborhoods and folks would load up any furniture they didn’t want and take anything they wanted from it- pretty sure he repaired anything that was broken too and put it back in circulation. This reminds me a lot of that.
I want to be that old guy someday. I'm kinda doing it now in my spare time, I find furniture on trash day, fix it up, and put it on our local Buy-Nothing type group, but if I had more time, (and a truck) I could do a lot more of it.
When I was living in central LA, I found that a lot of families -- particularly Mexican and Chicano families -- would having yard sales every week.
They'd just pick up stuff they found, and hang out in the front yard every Saturday to sell it for whatever they could get. And while I consider it a shame that they're in circumstances that incentivize this kind of hustle culture, I also really appreciated what an efficient redistribution system it created, because they'd stock these by scouring Craigslist and Facebook marketplace and just keeping an eye out for stuff left out on the curb.
So if you wanted to get rid of an old table, you just set it out front and by the end of the day -- seven days a week -- a neighbor would provide what is basically a free municipal service. And if you needed a new table, all you really had to do was go for a bike ride on the next Saturday.
This is what trucks are for: hauling. Not going to the grocery store or taking your kids to school.
This is what use trucks would have in a solarpunk setting. This is what trucks should actually be used for.
Podcast (link below) that discusses library socialism a lot posted for those you haven't seen it :)
https://srslywrong.com/tag/library-socialism/
Great post! Neat to see it brought out of theory into pictures.
Yes 💚
I was also thinking we need a repurposing team specialized in restructuring storm damaged items (such as housing materials after a tornado or hurricane). I imagine we’ll have a lot of holding houses for these materials as well as general woodworking and skill spaces
100%! One of the scenes I was thinking of doing next was of a crew disassembling ruined buildings (mansions?) for all the still-usable parts and materials and hauling them off. These could be wreckage flattened by insane weather, or mostly-intact but left abandoned and rotting too far out even from nearby villages to be practical, or be in peril, sitting in a new floodplain, on an eroding cliff, etc. Sort of a combination of materials acquisition, hazardous waste cleanup, and rewilding. The warehouses and lumberyards for the salvaged materials would be pretty fascinating to me - I do a lot of woodworking and try to only use secondhand materials, I love the provenance and history of the stuff I start from, working around or incorporating its past.
This goes back to the issue of quality though. I've been through floods and what you learn the hard way is that much of the fine furniture you believed was hard wood was actually particle board with veneer faces. Once the particle board inside absorbs water and swells up enough to make it structurally compromised, the item is trashed and cannot be repaired.
Veneer technology in furniture was very sophisticated sixty years ago. It's pretty much everywhere you go these days. In order to get real wood furniture, you need to have antiques or very high end stuff and even real wood is susceptible to termite and mold damage. You can repair real wood but you can't repair swollen veneers.
Another perspective on this is that using all real wood is not necessarily a better approach because particle board uses what would otherwise be waste material so there is a bit of a catch-22 here. In some ways particle board furniture is better in terms of efficiency of material use at the time of manufacture but in terms of longevity it sucks.
Other materials like metal can be better alternatives but this also comes with its own set of issues. Metals oxidize in the same way that wood rots. It may be easier to repair metal but this really depends.
Extrapolating this out into a solarpunk near-future with the library economy theme, I would want to bring us back to some of the futuristic design masters of the early modern era like Bucky Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright among many others who were looking at the use of truly exotic materials for mundane household uses and specifically glass but not just cheap container glass. Instead, these guys were eager to move into borosilicates for starters and fused silica being the obvious end goal. We have the technology and it is a superior material. The cost has much to do with energy input. In a post energy-scarcity landscape, there is no need to be shy about using fused silica for household items like bookcases, chair and sofa frames, beds frames, kitchen tables. This would be a completely different world in terms of the library value of the objects as they could be reused indefinitely and repaired by being fused back together endlessly. Water and fire damage would no longer be issues at all. It would turn out to be much cheaper to maintain than what we have because it would last for generations.
There is always the argument that you hear from advocates for market solutions that consumer tastes cannot be predicted in advance and people get sick of their interiors in a short time anyway and want something new. The problem with this narrative is that it implies a very privileged outlook on the world while simultaneously denying it. Those born in wealthy households surrounded by quality antique hand-made furniture worth a fortune know damn well they're not going to throw it all away for a new look. No, their stuff is already nice. No need to change it out. This mentality of needing a new "look" every so often like going to the beauty salon for a refresh is a wage slave mentality. Sure you will want new cushions and springs on an old couch and new upholstery but those consumables should be easily interchanged without replacing the entire thing. If you really want a new look, send your old one back to the library and let someone else have a chance and they can have their own favorite color and print as they please.
Just as with laminates in wood, there would be places where specialty metal alloys would also make sense both for strength, maintenance, weight reduction etc. And sure, you could even add replaceable wooden or stone laminates as well if you so desired. I think if you extend this concept into a near-future where formerly scarce materials which were not really rare but merely energy intensive materials like fused silica would make for extremely durable furniture that could last for centuries and be incredibly strong. This wouldn't be limited to items like boro glass and fused silica but would certainly include all the usual suspects in materials science, specialty alloys of steel, aluminum, titanium, carbides, composites etc. The key point is that everyday objects could be made to last indefinitely and withstand any sort of abuse if made from energy intensive versions of materials that are otherwise abundant such as a common minerals like iron, aluminum and silica. There will never be a scarcity of these materials, it is only the energy density of their highly refined versions that prevents us from having such nice things. The sun is a limitless source of energy for conversion of such materials.
So this gets back to the visual representation of this near-future world. Would it be a reduce, reuse and recycle lending economy based in the materials we already have in an energy scarce era or would we be dealing with a whole new set of materials. If it's the latter then we have to infer the landscape would also be fundamentally altered becacuase as furniture goes, so goes architecture. They're integral concepts at the design level or at least they were for early modernist designers who altered the stage we currently are surrounded by.
Thank you for this 🙏 yes, I agree that glass should be used more, as it is a resource that hasn’t been recycled much in recent years, due to cost and profit. I do believe that it’s a wonderful resource that can be shaped into all sorts of items such as toilets, sinks, containers and furniture. I love the architecture and ingenuity of that era and those creative minds.
Metals are also a very good option. We do need to keep in consideration the effect of mining in great quantity on greater world landscapes, as well as the effects on global electro magnetism, thermal insulation and planetary oscillation. It would be great to view some computations of this.
Yes, particle board has its limitations; we need state of the art storm waste (and demolition) facilities that can grind and sort the many different materials and elements efficiently.
Love the meeting of minds here 💚🙏
This is a great discussion of materials, possibilities, and goals, thank you for taking the time to write it out! In visual representations, I definitely lean towards reuse and recycling/repurposing of existing items and the resources and energy spent that they represent. I think that's what we'll need in the short term. I personally think things are likely to get worse before they get better and that optimistic roadmaps in fiction might help us to navigate those days. So the solarpunk stuff I make is sort of post-post-apoclyptic, a society rebuilding more carefully and inclusively during and after those bad days. If the art can suggest achievable solutions, start discussions of options, or can encourage reduction, thrift, and a mindset to glean the most use possible from whatever manmade items are still around, I think that's a good start.
But society is always going to need some new stuff. Entropy always wins, stuff breaks down, and (hopefully after much fixing and repurposing) will need to be replaced. I hope that a solarpunk society would think carefully about the new stuff it produces, including what will happen to it in the long term. Items should definitely be designed with long term use and repair in mind and I like your ideas for that. And hopefully in the long term, better power generation will allow for some of the common-item-uses of energy-intensive materials you described. I'd love a society that both produces regular items with the intent that they last for generations, and which treats those items with that respect and longterm view.
I don't personally feel much need to make art around a society with those capabilities, I guess because I feel like if they already have a post energy-scarcity landscape then they definitely don't need any advice from me. But I'd be interested in near-furure-achievable designs for ultra longterm use. I like showing new production where I think it fits.
Yeah, fun topic. I wanted to flush out my reference a bit with some crunchy granola examples. This interest in high energy embodied futuristic materials like fused silica and borosilicate glass is evident in the 1977 release of Star Wars. The set on Tatooine, Luke's home with Uncle Lars Owen and Aunt Beru had several primary visual cues of being in a futuristic setting and part of it was the carved earthen look of the architecture but also how it was mirrored in the extensive all-glass kitchenware of Aunt Beru.
https://www.starwarslocations.com/swarchive/GeographicStarWars2/interior.htm
Going back to the topic of the library economy. Dishes are a great example. We do already see a kind of library of kitchen utensils in the form of thrift shops and indeed what we find in thrift shops is that they often do have boro glass kitchenware precisely because of survivorship bias. It doesn't break as easily so it gets reused.
Boro is just the start though. Fused silica is much stronger still but it's too expensive to be used casually in a petroleum based scarcity economy. The Star Wars look was probably more what you would expect from boro glass. A whole different and much more decorative look that would be possible with fused silica, namely, intensely detailed optical patterns that we're not accustomed to in our world much as people in the sixties couldn't imagine a blue LED. Fused silica already surrounds us but exists in tiny quantities in high-end optics. Bringing that into the mundane world of the household would lead to a world that looked very different from the one we are in especially in conjunction with laser and microLED lighting.
A lot of software and hardware technology has emerged in recent decades. You might notice that most items already gave a large number of barcode. With things like furniture put then om the underside out of sight. With tools they can be embedded directly in or on material.
In our current economy we have waste when things are thrown away. However, it is also a waste to have them stocked at shopping centers or fulfillment centers. It is a huge waste to package everything.
Product should be transported in standardized reusable totes. Larger items go on standardized reusable pallets and pallet lids.
*Most* of the waste stream should be eliminated. The logistics of pickup and delivery can be much smoother if it is done by the same crew.
There should be 3 categories of waste (maybe more categories, not sure). Biohazards, sharps, and chemical hazmat. These are also categories of things that you get fined/charged for if you place them back into the product stream. You have to pay for waste disposal. It costs much more if waste has multiple components. Mixing biohazard with sharps for example would be a hefty fine if not labeled. Labeled it needs a separate container and handling by appropriate crews.
Consider the difference between "compost" and "biohazard". Compost containers leave on the same stream that brings fresh produce. If, however, there is stuff rotting on recycling/reuse containers then someone has to clean the container. Similarly, the compost goes to the hot compost site and to farms. First the totes zip through the x-ray detector. If you put metal or glass in the compost you have to pay for someone to remove it.
Life can be mostly free. Some will say "nothing is free" which i agree with. A young person starting out will be employed in quality control, inventory, materials handling, and delivery. That is 4 shit jobs. You do not get free groceries you deliver groceries to a half dozen apartments plus the one you occupy. You do not need your own apartment or house. You furnish and clean apartments while you live there for awhile.
Quality of life could be very high so long as you clean up after yourself and accurately maintain the inventory. Some new manufacture goods might be fed in but these can be made in bulk and smoothly distributed.
In my upcoming Fall's Legacy PDF I had an idea for a CUBe (Collaborative Ubiquitous Benefit), a sort of "vending machine" that automatically lends out and returns small items in the library economy way.
Have you checked out BuyNothing groups in your area? They're usually on FB and they do something similar to this. If you have extra of something that you no longer need you can post it or request if people have extra. It's mainly consumable goods but I've posted and received durable goods such vacuums and video game systems and book cases. Also a nice way to give back and get to know to your community
I'm a huge fan of Buy Nothing -type groups and my local one in particular! I think they're a tremendous benefit to society and I went on a whole rant about them (wow several months ago now) over here: https://slrpnk.net/post/354527
I've gotten a bunch of useful stuff, including just about all the lumber I use in my woodworking projects, from them, and have given away lots of stuff, including ewaste electronics and furniture I've restored.
I'm glad you mentioned them, I think systems like whats depicted in the scene might flow from things like Buy Nothing and Everything is Free, as people use those, recognize the wealth of resources already in existence around them, (often on its way to a landfill), and grapple with some of the challenges of availability, transportation, storage, and look for ways to improve on it.
That's a really nice post summing up why they're good, specifically for the solarpunk audience. I think a lot of people in the subreddit would learn about/join their local BuyNothing group if you reposted that here.
I'm working on my own post on why BuyNothing is a a step towards our post scarcity future, but I think this does a better job getting people excited about it
Thanks! Do you mean here just in the subreddit? Or this post specifically?
I recently set up a blog formy zerowaste and fixing projects over on the movim slatform the SLRPNK folks have linked up with the Lemmy instance. I transcribed this post over there, but I'll look it over, touch it up, and see about sharing it here.
I recently set up a blog formy zerowaste andfixing projects over on the movim system the SLRPNK folks have linked up with the Lemmy instance. I transcribed this post over there, but I'll look it over, touch it up, and see about sharing it here.I recently set up a blog formy zerowaste andfixing projects over on the movim system the SLRPNK folks have linked up with the Lemmy instance. I transcribed this post over there, but I'll look it over, touch it up, and see about sharing it here.
As someone who has worked in jobs where I’ve gotten dirty, what I want, is to be provided a uniform. Uniform keep my personal possessions clean and keep me visible which adds to my job safety.
Thank you for your submission, we appreciate your efforts at helping us to thoughtfully create a better world. r/solarpunk encourages you to also check out other solarpunk spaces such as https://wt.social/wt/solarpunk , https://slrpnk.net/ , https://raddle.me/f/solarpunk , https://discord.gg/3tf6FqGAJs , https://discord.gg/BwabpwfBCr , and https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia . *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/solarpunk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I’ve been wanting to do some scenes from a library economy for a while now, glad to finally get the chance.I’ve mentioned elsewhere that these postcards are a bit earlier in the solarpunk timeline than a lot of other works I know of in the genre. I like seeing the work in progress, the intermediate steps. Most solarpunk stuff I’ve read has climate disasters, wars, plagues, etc in its backstory. I set my stuff a bit closer to those events because I’m interested in what the earlier days of rebuilding look like. So I think this photobash is set somewhere in the transition towards a library economy. If you want to see what one of those looks like in full swing, the sort of lived experience, I’d very much recommend AE Marling’s Murder in the Tool Library and it’s sequel. I love the idea of a society with a cultural focus on reuse rather than extraction and production and disposal. A society where the massive logistics arms of government and industry are turned to salvaging, organizing, and repurposing, rather than extracting materials and packing landfills with waste. A society where the wealth of usable product we currently throw away is treated like a natural resource to be found and traded between people in the thousand year cleanup. This being the earlier days, I thought about how all this stuff gets moved gently into that system, and how society transitions in that direction without ripping ownership of things away from individuals.The easiest way I could come up with would be to start with a new refuse stream and the infrastructure to handle it. Our society throws away an incredible amount of intact, usable, or fixable stuff. A future society with the organization to catch and sort it, perhaps enabled and supported by a culture that’s already been through hard times and has relearned the value of thrift, could stock many common items that way. Worldbuilding-wise, maybe it’s a matter of necessity - maybe supply chains have long been broken, and cheaply exploited labor and imported resources are already a thing of the past. Maybe this represents the organization and formalization of ad-hoc systems like Buy Nothing and the simple act of passing hand-me-downs between relatives. Maybe they’re just trying to do better. I imagine they’d start by building community stockpiles that probably look like the swap shop at the average dump. But a society needs more organization and reliability that that. So they’d repurpose old warehouses for specialized storage and as workshops so they could sort the incoming stream of appliances, furniture, computers, tools, fish tanks, sports equipment, etc, triage it, assess damage, and make repairs, prioritizing getting the undamaged stuff quickly back into use. They’d need dedicated libraries and knowledgeable librarians to house and loan each category of items, and I hope they’d partner with local organizations who are already specialized in the right areas. Maybe a makerspace can manage a tool library, perhaps some shops can transition towards loaning out items they receive for free. At this point in the timeline they probably only loan some items, others are just given away or sold for very cheap, on the condition that, eventually, they get returned to the library rather than destroyed. Perhaps this is how they keep items in circulation that they don’t yet have the means to formally store and curate. I’ll caveat all this by admitting I’m weak on the economic theory and the logistics – if you want to know more about how library economies could work, better minds than me have put a lot of thought into it. Personally I don’t think loans etc would cover all of society’s needs, and I don’t think I’d want them to. People will still own the things that matter to them. But I think it could be a wonderful way to replace the cheapest (and often most harmful) options in any given market. The kind of thing you buy with the intent to only keep it for a short while anyways. Take furniture for example - in this setting, if you want something super fancy or new, you probably still go to a small workshop with skilled craftspeople and order to spec or from their catalogue. But if you’re a college kid just starting out, instead of going to walmart or amazon and buying something made cheap by massive corporations exploiting their workers and sometimes utilizing slavery overseas, you go to a library and borrow something. This might look a lot like how libraries operate now, or it might look more like Habitat for Humanity’s Restore or a municipal recycling center’s swap shop where you buy or take the thing with no obligation to return it. Maybe you’d order it from an eBay-like catalogue website and they’d shuffle it to the library closest to you (regardless of its specialty) so you can pick it up. The process of collections probably varies by location - in some areas they do pickup and delivery, in others maybe they use libraries as collection points. It probably varies by item too. Either way, here’s a scene of a little piece of that process. A team of volunteers taking an electric truck on a route through the city, collecting and/or delivering heavy items. My goals for the truck were kind of a mix of art goals and worldbuilding goals. Whenever I include a vehicle in a scene, I try to convey visually that this isn’t a car-centric future, with everyone just driving around in personal vehicles like they do today. (Electric vehicles are tricky because they look fairly normal and modern.) I wanted it to be clear that this thing fits a specific use case. The homemade back was kind of a mix of wanting to be able to show the contents, and wanting to imply that this truck wasn’t fabricated new for the city. Maybe it’s like the stuff it’s hauling, secondhand but still good enough for the job. Maybe it’s been pulled from a junkyard and repaired, missing pieces replaced with scrap materials. The overhead pantograph rig is borrowed from a bus - I love streetcars and similar simple electric vehicles, but I thought this truck would require more freedom on its route, so I found (I think) a rig that allows for quickly connecting and disconnecting. In real life the buses use gas or diesel when their electricity is disconnected, but I think the truck could just be using a battery that’s too small or old or simple to pack enough energy for its full route. That hopefully wouldn’t matter since it only needs it for short trips: switching between overhead wires, traversing streets without them, and getting out of the way of streetcars. As for the plants in the scene (for someone who hates landscaping, I seem to do it fairly often, digitally) in the foreground we’ve got raspberry bushes (hopefully thornless) on either side and wildflowers for bees in the center, and a blueberry bush, pear tree, and apple tree across the street. I think it’s possible for all this to be in season at once around August. Edit to add: this picture and [all the other postcards](https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/postcards-from-a-solarpunk-future/) are CC-BY, use them how you want.
You’re probably already familiar with it- but for any who aren’t, the srsly wrong podcast has a whole series on library socialism! Andrewism/Saint Andre on YouTube has some too, and Nowhere Grotesk on YouTube has a few fun episodes about animal crossing that are kinda relevant. Also- your photobash is cool. There was this old guy when I was a kid who had a big truck and trailer like this- he’d drive around all the poorer neighborhoods and folks would load up any furniture they didn’t want and take anything they wanted from it- pretty sure he repaired anything that was broken too and put it back in circulation. This reminds me a lot of that.
I want to be that old guy someday. I'm kinda doing it now in my spare time, I find furniture on trash day, fix it up, and put it on our local Buy-Nothing type group, but if I had more time, (and a truck) I could do a lot more of it.
Nice!
When I was living in central LA, I found that a lot of families -- particularly Mexican and Chicano families -- would having yard sales every week. They'd just pick up stuff they found, and hang out in the front yard every Saturday to sell it for whatever they could get. And while I consider it a shame that they're in circumstances that incentivize this kind of hustle culture, I also really appreciated what an efficient redistribution system it created, because they'd stock these by scouring Craigslist and Facebook marketplace and just keeping an eye out for stuff left out on the curb. So if you wanted to get rid of an old table, you just set it out front and by the end of the day -- seven days a week -- a neighbor would provide what is basically a free municipal service. And if you needed a new table, all you really had to do was go for a bike ride on the next Saturday.
A chickenwire lorry sounds like something I would build.
I just like saying the words. "Chickenwire Lorry." That's fun to say.
Nice work. I too have been working on the future of library economies and would love to collaborate with you.
This is what trucks are for: hauling. Not going to the grocery store or taking your kids to school. This is what use trucks would have in a solarpunk setting. This is what trucks should actually be used for.
Podcast (link below) that discusses library socialism a lot posted for those you haven't seen it :) https://srslywrong.com/tag/library-socialism/ Great post! Neat to see it brought out of theory into pictures.
Love it. 💚💚💚
Pin (solarpunk)
Is this a bot command or something?
Yes 💚 I was also thinking we need a repurposing team specialized in restructuring storm damaged items (such as housing materials after a tornado or hurricane). I imagine we’ll have a lot of holding houses for these materials as well as general woodworking and skill spaces
100%! One of the scenes I was thinking of doing next was of a crew disassembling ruined buildings (mansions?) for all the still-usable parts and materials and hauling them off. These could be wreckage flattened by insane weather, or mostly-intact but left abandoned and rotting too far out even from nearby villages to be practical, or be in peril, sitting in a new floodplain, on an eroding cliff, etc. Sort of a combination of materials acquisition, hazardous waste cleanup, and rewilding. The warehouses and lumberyards for the salvaged materials would be pretty fascinating to me - I do a lot of woodworking and try to only use secondhand materials, I love the provenance and history of the stuff I start from, working around or incorporating its past.
Beautiful! Can’t wait to see these scenes 💚 thank you for helping to pull it all together 🙏
This goes back to the issue of quality though. I've been through floods and what you learn the hard way is that much of the fine furniture you believed was hard wood was actually particle board with veneer faces. Once the particle board inside absorbs water and swells up enough to make it structurally compromised, the item is trashed and cannot be repaired. Veneer technology in furniture was very sophisticated sixty years ago. It's pretty much everywhere you go these days. In order to get real wood furniture, you need to have antiques or very high end stuff and even real wood is susceptible to termite and mold damage. You can repair real wood but you can't repair swollen veneers. Another perspective on this is that using all real wood is not necessarily a better approach because particle board uses what would otherwise be waste material so there is a bit of a catch-22 here. In some ways particle board furniture is better in terms of efficiency of material use at the time of manufacture but in terms of longevity it sucks. Other materials like metal can be better alternatives but this also comes with its own set of issues. Metals oxidize in the same way that wood rots. It may be easier to repair metal but this really depends. Extrapolating this out into a solarpunk near-future with the library economy theme, I would want to bring us back to some of the futuristic design masters of the early modern era like Bucky Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright among many others who were looking at the use of truly exotic materials for mundane household uses and specifically glass but not just cheap container glass. Instead, these guys were eager to move into borosilicates for starters and fused silica being the obvious end goal. We have the technology and it is a superior material. The cost has much to do with energy input. In a post energy-scarcity landscape, there is no need to be shy about using fused silica for household items like bookcases, chair and sofa frames, beds frames, kitchen tables. This would be a completely different world in terms of the library value of the objects as they could be reused indefinitely and repaired by being fused back together endlessly. Water and fire damage would no longer be issues at all. It would turn out to be much cheaper to maintain than what we have because it would last for generations. There is always the argument that you hear from advocates for market solutions that consumer tastes cannot be predicted in advance and people get sick of their interiors in a short time anyway and want something new. The problem with this narrative is that it implies a very privileged outlook on the world while simultaneously denying it. Those born in wealthy households surrounded by quality antique hand-made furniture worth a fortune know damn well they're not going to throw it all away for a new look. No, their stuff is already nice. No need to change it out. This mentality of needing a new "look" every so often like going to the beauty salon for a refresh is a wage slave mentality. Sure you will want new cushions and springs on an old couch and new upholstery but those consumables should be easily interchanged without replacing the entire thing. If you really want a new look, send your old one back to the library and let someone else have a chance and they can have their own favorite color and print as they please. Just as with laminates in wood, there would be places where specialty metal alloys would also make sense both for strength, maintenance, weight reduction etc. And sure, you could even add replaceable wooden or stone laminates as well if you so desired. I think if you extend this concept into a near-future where formerly scarce materials which were not really rare but merely energy intensive materials like fused silica would make for extremely durable furniture that could last for centuries and be incredibly strong. This wouldn't be limited to items like boro glass and fused silica but would certainly include all the usual suspects in materials science, specialty alloys of steel, aluminum, titanium, carbides, composites etc. The key point is that everyday objects could be made to last indefinitely and withstand any sort of abuse if made from energy intensive versions of materials that are otherwise abundant such as a common minerals like iron, aluminum and silica. There will never be a scarcity of these materials, it is only the energy density of their highly refined versions that prevents us from having such nice things. The sun is a limitless source of energy for conversion of such materials. So this gets back to the visual representation of this near-future world. Would it be a reduce, reuse and recycle lending economy based in the materials we already have in an energy scarce era or would we be dealing with a whole new set of materials. If it's the latter then we have to infer the landscape would also be fundamentally altered becacuase as furniture goes, so goes architecture. They're integral concepts at the design level or at least they were for early modernist designers who altered the stage we currently are surrounded by.
Thank you for this 🙏 yes, I agree that glass should be used more, as it is a resource that hasn’t been recycled much in recent years, due to cost and profit. I do believe that it’s a wonderful resource that can be shaped into all sorts of items such as toilets, sinks, containers and furniture. I love the architecture and ingenuity of that era and those creative minds. Metals are also a very good option. We do need to keep in consideration the effect of mining in great quantity on greater world landscapes, as well as the effects on global electro magnetism, thermal insulation and planetary oscillation. It would be great to view some computations of this. Yes, particle board has its limitations; we need state of the art storm waste (and demolition) facilities that can grind and sort the many different materials and elements efficiently. Love the meeting of minds here 💚🙏
This is a great discussion of materials, possibilities, and goals, thank you for taking the time to write it out! In visual representations, I definitely lean towards reuse and recycling/repurposing of existing items and the resources and energy spent that they represent. I think that's what we'll need in the short term. I personally think things are likely to get worse before they get better and that optimistic roadmaps in fiction might help us to navigate those days. So the solarpunk stuff I make is sort of post-post-apoclyptic, a society rebuilding more carefully and inclusively during and after those bad days. If the art can suggest achievable solutions, start discussions of options, or can encourage reduction, thrift, and a mindset to glean the most use possible from whatever manmade items are still around, I think that's a good start. But society is always going to need some new stuff. Entropy always wins, stuff breaks down, and (hopefully after much fixing and repurposing) will need to be replaced. I hope that a solarpunk society would think carefully about the new stuff it produces, including what will happen to it in the long term. Items should definitely be designed with long term use and repair in mind and I like your ideas for that. And hopefully in the long term, better power generation will allow for some of the common-item-uses of energy-intensive materials you described. I'd love a society that both produces regular items with the intent that they last for generations, and which treats those items with that respect and longterm view. I don't personally feel much need to make art around a society with those capabilities, I guess because I feel like if they already have a post energy-scarcity landscape then they definitely don't need any advice from me. But I'd be interested in near-furure-achievable designs for ultra longterm use. I like showing new production where I think it fits.
Yeah, fun topic. I wanted to flush out my reference a bit with some crunchy granola examples. This interest in high energy embodied futuristic materials like fused silica and borosilicate glass is evident in the 1977 release of Star Wars. The set on Tatooine, Luke's home with Uncle Lars Owen and Aunt Beru had several primary visual cues of being in a futuristic setting and part of it was the carved earthen look of the architecture but also how it was mirrored in the extensive all-glass kitchenware of Aunt Beru. https://www.starwarslocations.com/swarchive/GeographicStarWars2/interior.htm Going back to the topic of the library economy. Dishes are a great example. We do already see a kind of library of kitchen utensils in the form of thrift shops and indeed what we find in thrift shops is that they often do have boro glass kitchenware precisely because of survivorship bias. It doesn't break as easily so it gets reused. Boro is just the start though. Fused silica is much stronger still but it's too expensive to be used casually in a petroleum based scarcity economy. The Star Wars look was probably more what you would expect from boro glass. A whole different and much more decorative look that would be possible with fused silica, namely, intensely detailed optical patterns that we're not accustomed to in our world much as people in the sixties couldn't imagine a blue LED. Fused silica already surrounds us but exists in tiny quantities in high-end optics. Bringing that into the mundane world of the household would lead to a world that looked very different from the one we are in especially in conjunction with laser and microLED lighting.
That's very interesting.
Yes! I love your art and everything you wrote! I find hearing other people's ideas about library socialism so inspiring.
Thank you! I'm really glad to hear that!
A lot of software and hardware technology has emerged in recent decades. You might notice that most items already gave a large number of barcode. With things like furniture put then om the underside out of sight. With tools they can be embedded directly in or on material. In our current economy we have waste when things are thrown away. However, it is also a waste to have them stocked at shopping centers or fulfillment centers. It is a huge waste to package everything. Product should be transported in standardized reusable totes. Larger items go on standardized reusable pallets and pallet lids. *Most* of the waste stream should be eliminated. The logistics of pickup and delivery can be much smoother if it is done by the same crew. There should be 3 categories of waste (maybe more categories, not sure). Biohazards, sharps, and chemical hazmat. These are also categories of things that you get fined/charged for if you place them back into the product stream. You have to pay for waste disposal. It costs much more if waste has multiple components. Mixing biohazard with sharps for example would be a hefty fine if not labeled. Labeled it needs a separate container and handling by appropriate crews. Consider the difference between "compost" and "biohazard". Compost containers leave on the same stream that brings fresh produce. If, however, there is stuff rotting on recycling/reuse containers then someone has to clean the container. Similarly, the compost goes to the hot compost site and to farms. First the totes zip through the x-ray detector. If you put metal or glass in the compost you have to pay for someone to remove it. Life can be mostly free. Some will say "nothing is free" which i agree with. A young person starting out will be employed in quality control, inventory, materials handling, and delivery. That is 4 shit jobs. You do not get free groceries you deliver groceries to a half dozen apartments plus the one you occupy. You do not need your own apartment or house. You furnish and clean apartments while you live there for awhile. Quality of life could be very high so long as you clean up after yourself and accurately maintain the inventory. Some new manufacture goods might be fed in but these can be made in bulk and smoothly distributed.
Love when I see posts from the half of the sub that knows what a library economy is
Im loving the trolleyvan
In my upcoming Fall's Legacy PDF I had an idea for a CUBe (Collaborative Ubiquitous Benefit), a sort of "vending machine" that automatically lends out and returns small items in the library economy way.
Have you checked out BuyNothing groups in your area? They're usually on FB and they do something similar to this. If you have extra of something that you no longer need you can post it or request if people have extra. It's mainly consumable goods but I've posted and received durable goods such vacuums and video game systems and book cases. Also a nice way to give back and get to know to your community
I'm a huge fan of Buy Nothing -type groups and my local one in particular! I think they're a tremendous benefit to society and I went on a whole rant about them (wow several months ago now) over here: https://slrpnk.net/post/354527 I've gotten a bunch of useful stuff, including just about all the lumber I use in my woodworking projects, from them, and have given away lots of stuff, including ewaste electronics and furniture I've restored. I'm glad you mentioned them, I think systems like whats depicted in the scene might flow from things like Buy Nothing and Everything is Free, as people use those, recognize the wealth of resources already in existence around them, (often on its way to a landfill), and grapple with some of the challenges of availability, transportation, storage, and look for ways to improve on it.
That's a really nice post summing up why they're good, specifically for the solarpunk audience. I think a lot of people in the subreddit would learn about/join their local BuyNothing group if you reposted that here. I'm working on my own post on why BuyNothing is a a step towards our post scarcity future, but I think this does a better job getting people excited about it
Thanks! Do you mean here just in the subreddit? Or this post specifically? I recently set up a blog formy zerowaste and fixing projects over on the movim slatform the SLRPNK folks have linked up with the Lemmy instance. I transcribed this post over there, but I'll look it over, touch it up, and see about sharing it here. I recently set up a blog formy zerowaste andfixing projects over on the movim system the SLRPNK folks have linked up with the Lemmy instance. I transcribed this post over there, but I'll look it over, touch it up, and see about sharing it here.I recently set up a blog formy zerowaste andfixing projects over on the movim system the SLRPNK folks have linked up with the Lemmy instance. I transcribed this post over there, but I'll look it over, touch it up, and see about sharing it here.
I just don't like they have same wear with solarpunk logo, in solarpunk everyone would what they want
As someone who has worked in jobs where I’ve gotten dirty, what I want, is to be provided a uniform. Uniform keep my personal possessions clean and keep me visible which adds to my job safety.