#what does privacy mean in solarpunk

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

In Season 5 Episode 3 of Solarpunk Presents, Christina chats with transdisciplinary technologist Stephen Reid about relationship solarpunk and lunarpunk have to crypto and web3. If lunarpunk is what solarpunk gets up to in the shadows of a moonlit night, that suggests that lunarpunk is inherently more interested in privacy, security, and anonymity, especially from the watchful eye of the state. That would further mean that where solarpunk is interested in renewable energy, sustainability, appropriate technology, and social justice, lunarpunk is interested in the tools, like cryptography, cryptocurrencies, and web3, that safeguard our privacy and anonymity and potentially protect us from tyranny. Do we need lunarpunk’s fixation with using tech to protect our privacy to counterbalance solarpunk’s sunny optimism that everything will all be fine to break through to a better world? To learn more about Stephen, his philosophies, and his work, check out https://stephenreid.net/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sponsored listings are a ripoff…for sellers

Tonight (November 29), I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Not all ads are created equally sleazy. The privacy harms from surveillance ads, though real, are often hard to pin down. But there's another kind of ad - or "ad" that picks your pocket every time you use an ecommerce site.

This is the "sponsored listing" ad, which allows merchants to bid to be among the top-ranked items in response to your searches - whether or not their products are a good match for your query. These aren't "ads" in the way that, say, a Facebook ad is an ad. These are more #payola, a form of bribery that's actually a crime (but not when Amazon does it):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola#U.S._investigations_and_aftermath

Amazon is the global champion of payola. It boasts of $31 billion in annual "ad" revenue. That's $31 billion that Amazon sellers have to recoup from you. But Amazon's use of "most favored nation" deals (which requires sellers to offer their lowest prices on Amazon) mean that you don't see those price-hikes because sellers raise their prices everywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Forget Twitter: Amazon search is the poster-child for enshittification, in which Amazon locks you in (for example, with a year's shipping prepaid through Prime) and then you get recommended worse products while sellers make less money and Amazon pockets the difference.

Sellers who don't sell on Amazon are dead in the water, because most US households have Amazon Prime and overwhelmingly, Prime users start their search on Amazon, and, if they find the goods they're seeking. After all, they've prepaid for shipping.

So sellers suck it up and pay a 45-51% Amazon tax and pass it on to us - no matter where we shop. A lot of the junk fees sellers pay are related to Prime and other fulfillment services, but an increasing share of the Amazon tax comes from the need to pay to "advertise," because if they don't buy the top result for searches for their own products, their competitors' ads will push them right off the first page (those competitors spend money on advertising, rather than manufacturing quality).

There's a lot of YOLO/ROFLMAO in those ads: search for "cat beds" and 50% of the first five screens are ads - including ads for dog products, apparently bought by companies adopting a spray-and-pray approach to advertising. Someone selling a quality product still has to outbid all of those garbage sellers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is at the root of Amazon's Pricing Paradox: while Amazon can defend itself against regulators by citing sellers whose prices are lower and/or whose quality is higher, it's nearly impossible for shoppers to get those deals. If you click the top result for your search, you will, on average, pay 29% more than you would if you found the best bargain on the site:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

What's more, you can't fix this by simply sorting by price, or by reviews, or some mix of the two. The sleaziest sellers have mastered tricks like changing the number of units they sell so the total price is lower. For example, if batteries are normally sold $10 for a four-pack, a sleazy seller can offer batteries at $9 for three units. A lowest-to-highest price-sort will put this item ahead of a cheaper rival.

Researchers found that getting a good deal at Amazon requires that you make a multifactorial spreadsheet by laboriously copy/pasting multiple details from individual listing pages and then doing sorts that Amazon itself doesn't permit:

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3645/

There's an exception to this: Amazon and Apple have a cozy, secret arrangement to exclude these "ads" from searches for Apple products. But if you're shopping for anything else, you're SOL:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11

These payola markets are bad for buyers, and they cost sellers a lot of money, but are they at least good for sellers? A new study from three business-school researchers - Vibhanshu Abhishek, Jiaqi Shi and Mingyu Joo - shows that payola is a very bad deal for good sellers, too:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3896716

After doing a lot of impressive quantitative work, the authors conclude that for good sellers, showing up as a sponsored listing makes buyers trust their products less than if they floated to the top of the results "organically." This means that buying an ad makes your product less attractive than not buying an ad.

The exception is sellers who have bad products - products that wouldn't rise to the top of the results on their own merits. The study finds that if you buy your mediocre product's way to the top of the results, buyers trust it more than they would if they found it buried deep on page eleventy-million, to which its poor reviews, quality or price would normally banish it.

But of course, if you're one of those good sellers, you can't simply opt not to buy an ad, even though seeing it with the little "AD" marker in the thumbnail makes your product less attractive to shoppers. If you don't pay the danegeld, your product will be pushed down by the inferior products whose sellers are only too happy to pay ransom.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

[rotationalsymmetry]

My own two cents (on top of the many great suggestions above): apartment buildings (and condos with a similar design) are by themselves very sustainable compared to single family housing even if you do nothing. They're high density housing! They're more land efficient than stand alone houses, more efficient in terms of the materials that go into building them, and more energy efficient because it's more efficient to heat or cool a bunch of small units stuck together than a bunch of separate units surrounded on four sides and on top by the elements. Also for buildings with nice extras like a swimming pool, it's far more efficient to share a pool between a bunch of people than a single household.

Toilets: there's some options for water efficiency, the lowest tech one is just not flushing every time you pee (it's ok if you aren't willing to do this but it is an option), next up is putting a brick in the tank, more complicated/sophisticated is they do sell things you can add on to a toilet to make it save water.

Showers and sinks: situationally it might be possible for you to buy a more efficient showerhead or faucet head, or a device that attaches to what you already have. Faucets that have the water come out in one stream use more water for the same amount of pressure than heads that create a spray.

Community gardens or guerrilla gardening: gardening outside your apartment. If you're attached to gardening, which you don't have to be. Sprouting can be done inside with very little light btw, and there's some forms of composting that can be done inside but you will need a place for the compost to go when it's done.

Other outside sustainability projects: does your park and rec department have a native plant restoration area that needs volunteers? (There will be a volunteer page on their website.) is there a local organization that plants street trees or advocates for more bike lanes? Are there any organizations that do something else that would make the world a better place that really need someone to call up members to renew their donations, do data entry, or update their website? (Volunteering: jobs that need a lot of people to do them get explicitly mentioned, jobs that need one person or extra skills often don't and involve talking to a person. For some organizations getting involved just means showing up to a meeting; for organizations with paid staff, you can email the volunteer coordinator and say what you're interested in doing. If you happen to have time off during the day on weekdays, daytime volunteers are extra useful.)

If/when you do find a group to get involved with...some groups will sort of grab you and try to wring everything you've got, so a very important political engagement skill is to recognize your own boundaries and be able to say no. This is vitally important. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Get involved, but also get involved at a level that is sustainable for you. Which might mean alternating periods of more involvement and periods of less involvement, that's fine.

I don't know if you're into bicycles, but if you want to learn bicycle repair that seems to me to be a very relevant skill. I'm not sure if learning tech stuff (right to repair stuff, open source stuff, internet privacy stuff) is solarpunk but I don't see why it wouldn't be.

Hard skills like gardening/cooking/mending/etc are very good, but also consider: working on soft skills. Emotional management/staying cool in a crisis. Small talk/being able to hold a conversation with someone you just met, and being able to go from small talk to more meaningful or more personal topics. Learning how to exit a conversation gracefully. Learning how to remember people's names, if you aren't already solid on that. Learning how to bring up a complaint without unnecessary hostility. Learning how to take a complaint. Learning how to handle yourself when two people you like have a dispute. For more organized groups: learning how to take notes, how to facilitate or chair a meeting, how to talk to people about an organization or project in a way that they want to get involved, how to handle the sorts of conflicts that can break a group apart. How to plan organizational structure so that people feel safe to have disagreements, so that people can identify and respond appropriately to someone who is eg sexually harassing other people on the group, and how to handle leadership roles to avoid getting one person entrenched in an official or unofficial leadership role. And as mentioned above, how to figure out your own limits so you can keep doing this stuff, and how to create group cultures that encourage everyone to find their own balance so they can keep doing this stuff.

Eventually: Tracking and transmitting instititional knowledge so that when you leave a group, what you've learned doesn't leave with you. Teaching/mentoring newer people. Networking with other organizations to share knowledge between organizations.

Hello I was wondering if you had any advice for solar punk dwellers that live in apartments. I always see all these cool add-ons to houses to make life more sustainable, but a lot of them I can't really do while living in an apartment. Also my apartment is fully indoors so it doesn't have a balcony where I can put stuff outside. However, I have started an indoor garden.

Hi! Indoor gardening is a fantastic place to start. Beyond that, it can really depend on what you're interested in. If gardening is really your thing, see what kind of gardening resources are around! Is there a community garden in your area that you could participate in? Would your apartment complex be interested in letting you start a garden for the complex? (They may be more interested than you might think - it's an amenity they can promote to future tenants, it engages current tenants, and they don't have to pay for landscaping on the area you turned into a garden.) If you have a lot of gardening experience, are there people in the area who want to learn that you could work with? If you're new to gardening, is there someone in your local Food Not Lawns group who would be willing to teach you more in exchange for some work on their garden?

Speaking of Food Not Lawns, see what other groups are around in your area that you could get involved in. Food Not Bombs, Freecycle, and Buy Nothing are other good groups to look for. There's also likely groups specific to your area - you may be able to find them by searching on Facebook, but more likely by connecting with other people at one of these bigger groups and asking.

Beyond that, I highly recommend cooking, mending and sewing (see our #mending, #mend and make do, and #sewing tags), and building some community. Meet your neighbors and get to know them! (I love cooking as a vehicle for this - humans often bond over food, and bringing over cookies or inviting them to share some homemade soup is a great way to connect.) You could start a free pantry in your apartment complex or building, or talk about a tenants' union. You can also try similar stuff at work, like a Breakroom Free Box. If politics is more your speed, you can do some activism (see our #activism tag) or even get involved with local political organizations and push them to be more progressive. Especially in local politics, one person can make a big difference.

For more ideas, we also have the following tags:

#apartment solarpunk

#dorms and small spaces

#community building

#mutual aid

#fiber crafts

#diy

I'd also encourage you to check out this post and this post, which are previous answers to similar questions.

I hope this gives you some places to start. If you have more specific questions, feel free to send in another ask!

- Mod J

[soyosauce]

The Audacity Of Hope In The Private Eye

Warning: mild spoilers regarding the overall premise of the comic The Private Eye. All images are from the comic and can be purchased here. 

The Private Eye is a unique experiment in many ways. A thought experiment, a unique format, hell, Brian K. Vaughan, Marcos Martin and Muntsa Vicente elect to diverge from how the medium is even sold. PANELSYNDICATE has every issue and both volumes of the comic available to the masses in a pay-what-you-want format. Every single thing about this comic book from the opening pages tells you that this is no ordinary experience; or book. 

And it's right. 

In this cyberpunk future, Paparazzi are still despised and hunted...but not for the same reason we know today; there's a twist. The comic follows a young P.I who works to get at the truth behind the facade people put on; "literally". You see in this future there is no Internet, none at all. The ramifications are really interesting.

People have real life avatars, of a sort. If you're "low brow" you'll essentially be wearing a costume; if you're rolling in dough, you might have a hologram, instead of a mask, covering your face. Everyone is obsessed with their privacy and people are not messing around. If you want to find anyone who is old enough to drink, you'll need a P.I; the paparazzi. Who chases them? The Press!

In a wonderful inversion, the people who dole out justice are the people who write and fight for inches and columns. The F.B.I? You mean the national news, of course. There is bad journalism and good, but what really matters is the statement that the truth is synonymous with reporting. Something sorely missing, here and now. Justice is something you have to see with your own eyes, electronic surveillance is a bust; it doesn't exist. People live multiple lives, present multiple avatars and appearances, and have multiple identities (in terms of government issued I.D). 

Humanity's need to define itself has spilled out onto the streets, in order words. Because the Internet is gone, this alternate future went a different way. Still filling the cracks and holes we find in our Online world now, though. It makes for an extremely interesting setting. And it begs the question: what the heck happened? 

The ramifications of the cloud being globally disseminated are felt throughout the story, though not fully explained. 

We follow P.I who has a series of flashbacks from time to time, fleshing out the world some more, along with his life and his fundamental motivations. But the real effectiveness of portraying the world full of secrets by showing the avatars being lived in folks while also never having more than the broad strokes of what happened expounded upon, Is the tension. What fun are masks, avatars, and cyphers when the fear of being unmasked isn't Online anymore; it's present. And from time to time people mention the event that changed everything, simply referred to as "The Flood." Things aren't peachy. Figures. 

We don't even learn the actual name of P.I for some time in the comic. But we do know he's subversive. It's depicted In his choices of what he imbibes, his reading list, his choice of profession; everything, really. He won't even get a drivers license. And in this freedom for himself and his identity, comes his weakness: the reliance upon others who are integrated in the system. He needs a wheel-woman to get around. He needs his clients to survive. He needs them happy, too.  

He's just out there trying to earn a living, unmasking folks by word-of-mouth business practices and keeping the lights on.

So when a client that hires him to dig up dirt on them in order to be vetted for a high ranking position ends up dead, P.I is forced to go on the run and try to uncover the mystery himself, lest he be charged with the crime himself. 

The world isn't that different, either. The largest changes from our society are shown right away but as we read more, society really seems fairly similar. This is effective at creating an ever-present sense of the uncanny in the book, leaning into the noir roots.

The commentary on technology is nothing new for cyberpunk but the presentation, along with the reshuffling of certain aspects of society, is perhaps the most elegant way to be provocative. The hunger of humanity to take and never be satiated did not come from the Internet it was inserted into it because we created it. And that hunger merely takes a different form without it present. The fact that your kink can be your mask still does not make it OK, in the eyes of society. The need to connect with others, desperately, as the technology that makes our lives easier stands in for the real work we ought to be doing, results in an untenable situation; always. The Internet was never the problem. And of course, we already know this.

In addition to these cyberpunk themes, ever present. We also get to enjoy a noir tale, a coming-of-age story, and some solarpunk ideological stances—all mixed into one. It lays bare some fundamental questions and extends questions about our relationship to the Internet in some fairly terrifyingly effective ways while remaining morally grey; ultimately tasking us with providing answers. This book tells you what it's about when it shows you, before it tells you, that what P.I consumes, he is. From then on you'll find no comfort in these pages—and wouldn't have it any other way.  

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

A Self-Driving Auto Dystopia

Bad solarpunk me, but true child of the western US, I like to drive.  And I don’t mean to the grocery store, but to beautiful places, especially ones I’ve never been to before.  What could be better than the freedom of the open road and all the wonders my car can take me to see? 

Yet, having lived nearly half my life now in Europe, I've spent a lot of time on buses, streetcars, and subways, and know the joy of travel by train.  You can’t get everywhere on public transportation, but—admittedly more ideally than in actual practice, since they tend to be running late and (especially with the trains) are so often so crammed with people, there’s barely even anyplace left to stand—you can kick back in your seat, go sweetly to sleep, and wake up in a whole new place (hopefully one that comes before your stop, not after). 

Add those two things together—all of the freedom without the hassle of having to do the driving yourself—and you get utopian dreams of self-driving cars.  We wouldn’t even need to own one.  In fact, owning one wouldn’t even make any sense, when we could just hail one through our phone or our watch or the chip in our brain, or wherever it is that the technology has gotten us to by then.  Up it would roll and in we would go, buckle up, and we’d be off in peace, quiet, comfort, and security.  The most strenuous thing we’d have to do is figure out how best to pass the time between us and our destination, especially if we’re not feeling sleepy.

I’m no futurist, but I think I have that all pretty much right. It’s not hard, really.  It would be just like being a passenger in a car, except with a more sociable seating layout and without the stress of our best friend’s impatient husband’s road ragey driving.  Except that last week reality came crashing like a drunken dystopian moose into my sweet dreams of self-driving cars.  

I don’t know why it wasn’t front page news.  It barely even got mentioned by the news sites I peruse, and only on some of them at that.  Never mind the autos of the future, the cars of today are already a privacy nightmare.  As in, if your biggest fear of a self–driving car future is of the hacker who takes over and crashes the car you’re riding in, guess again.  Our biggest fear should be of the car companies themselves and the future they're aiming to create for us. And the present they've already got us corralled in.

Here's the news you probably didn’t catch: On September 6, 2023, the Mozilla Foundation released a study of privacy and security issues in cars. All 25 major brands of automobile that they surveyed failed to pass muster, making cars, as they point out, by far the worst case they have ever examined.  In short, your car knows everything about you that your smartphone does (because you’ve let them talk to each other) about who you are, where you live, where you go, where you shop, what you buy, who you associate with, who you’re having an affair with, what music you’re listening to, what your sexuality is, and what genetic tests you’ve taken.  Plus, your car collects data about how you drive—how fast, how often, how far, how aggressively, etc.  The car companies feed all these data into an algorithm, crank the wheel, and out pops answers (accurate or not) about how smart you are, what abilities you have, and what interests you.  The vast majority of the car companies sell their data on you to other companies and some would be happy to pass it on to the government after nothing more formal than an informal request (i.e., they see no need to require a warrant before handing over the information they’ve got on you).  Meanwhile, only two of the brands surveyed (Renault and Dacia) give car owners the right to have their personal data deleted.  To make matters worse, it doesn’t even appear that the personal data the car companies hold about you from your car is stored securely.

That's a pretty bad present. But even before I got to the end of the Mozilla Foundation’s report, I got hit by a horribly dystopian vision of the future of self-driving cars as created by the car companies.  We won’t just hail a car, get in, buckle up, and off we go in peace, harmony, comfort, ease, and privacy.  Instead, the experience will be as ruined as the internet (itself also once a non–capitalistic utopian dream of a level playing field and the free flow of information between people).  We’ll have to lock ourselves into a subscription service that, thinking it knows everything about each of us, will bombard us with personalized advertisements repeatedly throughout our journeys.  It’s like what Amazon, Google, and the company formerly known as Twitter are also trying to do... be the behemoth that makes all the money because they’re the one stop shop we’re locked into for everything from banking to shopping to healthcare to entertainment.  That subscription service to the self–driving cars that behave like they know everything about each of us won’t just be about what make and model of self-driving car we have access to and which driving style mode/level of passenger safety we can deploy, but which music streaming and entertainment services we’ll be able to access and, in the worst case, which brick–and–mortar stores the self–driving car will be willing to drive us to.  Prices per mile will clearly vary, not just for where we are and where we want to go and when we want to get there, but also for which route we take (shorter and fast will definitely cost a premium), and for who we are as a person (if they can get away with that kind of discrimination) and how desperately we need to get there (the greater the need it has calculated for us, the higher the price the service can charge; supply and demand, after all).  And, oh, I don’t even want to think about how hard they could make it for some of us to get driven to—or leave!—a march or demonstration.

In other words, if we just sit idly by and let the self–driving car future happen to us exactly as the car companies are creating it now, we’ll end up living in a self-driving auto dystopia... instead of merely the privacy nightmare most of us don’t realize we’re already mired in.  Worse, once self–driving cars become enormously safer than people–driven cars and it becomes illegal for a person to drive a car, we will have little choice but to participate in this system stacked so strongly against our own interests. 

Unless, of course, there is plentiful useful public transportation and/or regulations preventing such monopoly power and abuse of our privacy by car (or any other) companies.

Maybe it’s not very solarpunk to be shouting about this self–driving auto dystopia.  Solarpunk is all about envisioning futures we’d like to live in and I would most certainly not like to live in a future like that one.  But solarpunk also shouldn’t stick its head in the sand.  We are traveling fast down the road toward the self–driving auto dystopia of my nightmares and its worth facing that fact... so that we can start working to prevent that outcome. 

Super easy step one would be to sign the petition at the bottom of the page on the Mozilla Foundation article. 

Step two could be to clamor for an expansion of your local public transportation network by showing up at local planning meetings and otherwise making your views clear to the local elected representatives who control how much of the budget flows toward buses, trains, streetcars, subways, light rail, and expanding those services. 

Step three would be to demand that our governments step up their protection of the privacy of citizens, like Europe is starting to do with things like GDPR.

Step four, I suppose, is running for actual office to work on all of these issues. 

Because it would be so much nicer to live in a world where the transportation we take isn’t spying on us so it can blast us with ads, lock us into subscription services, and, if we stray too far into the grey, turn us over to the police or give the government or hackers the information they need to blackmail us or entrap us.