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Education Reading Room Technology

A Twenty-Box Grid That Helps You Argue About Technology Without Picking a Winner

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 […]

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Governance Reading Room Technology

The Computer That Tried to Run a Socialist Economy in Real Time

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 […]

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Education Reading Room Technology

The Tools That Turn Against Their Own Purpose

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, […]

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Artificial Intelligence English Omnicrisis SolarPunk Technology

AI in Solarpunk Civilization – Opportunities and Threats

AI is not a homogeneous category to accept or reject wholesale. We separate three questions: about the concept itself, about today’s large-scale AI industry, and about the possibility of a decentralized model serving self-governance.