Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list. There’s a word that gets used almost interchangeably for two genuinely different things, and the confusion isn’t harmless — it leads people to use the wrong tools, misapply research from one field to another, and design interventions that backfire. The word is […]
Kategoria: Reading Room
Deep-dive digests of essential source texts underlying our own work — reader-facing, standalone, invites correction and comment.
Following hypocrytical constraints, imposed by Anthropic (themselves Arch Pirate, if without piratical moral backbone), we present you only paraphrased descriptions, with short and clearly attributed quotes, safely dispersed.
Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list. Most public debate about advanced AI asks a version of the same question: how capable is it? Can it pass this benchmark, write this code, solve this exam? A 2026 paper by Fletcher and Vu Khan (Salford Business School) argues that’s the […]
Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list. Most conversations about AI, automation, and technical progress share an unspoken assumption: more autonomous, more self-sufficient, more deterministic systems represent more advanced engineering. A 2024 doctoral thesis in architecture, by Argentine researcher Leandro Tomás Costa, draws on a mid-20th-century philosopher of technology […]
Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list. A lot of activist and cooperative spaces share an instinct: formal structure is the enemy. No leaders, no titles, no votes — just people showing up and doing the work together. It sounds like freedom. Jo Freeman, writing in 1970 out of […]
Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list. If you’ve read anything about ecological collapse, resource depletion, or the energy transition, you’ve almost certainly absorbed ideas that trace back to a single 1980 book most people have never heard of. William Catton’s Overshoot coined the term in its modern ecological […]
Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list. Political movements that reject both the ballot box and violent revolution often reach for a phrase: „dual power.” It shows up constantly in movement literature, usually without much explanation of where it comes from or what it actually requires structurally. Murray Bookchin […]
Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list. „Solarpunk” gets used loosely — as an aesthetic, a mood, a Pinterest board of green rooftops and clean transit. Dariusz Piechota’s 2022 literary-critical essay takes the genre more seriously as a body of writing with real internal disagreements, and one distinction he […]
Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list. Ivan Illich, in the 1970s, gave us a sharp diagnosis of when a tool stops serving people and starts running them. What he didn’t leave behind was a way to actually sit down with a group and work through whether a specific […]
Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list. In 1971, a 28-year-old Chilean engineer wrote a letter to a British management theorist, asking for help applying cybernetics to run an entire national economy. What followed was one of the strangest and most instructive experiments in the politics of technology: a […]
First in an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list. In 1973, the philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich published a short, strange, still-uncomfortable book called Tools for Conviviality. It isn’t about technology in the narrow sense — it’s about any tool, from a hammer to a hospital to a school system, […]