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protocols:smallweb:solarpunk

Solarpunk and the Small Web

What Is Solarpunk?

A speculative fiction genre and real-world political/aesthetic movement. Where cyberpunk imagines corporate dystopia and steampunk romanticizes industrialism, solarpunk imagines forward: decentralized communities, renewable energy, mutual aid, technology that serves life rather than exploiting it.

Symbol: a half-gear (technology compatible with nature) and a sun (infinite open potential).

The movement began in sci-fi and migrated into architecture, gardening, political organizing, and Internet culture.

Solarpunk Asks

  • Who benefits from this technology?
  • At what expense?
  • Does it serve communities or extract from them?
  • Does it distrust monocultures and scale for scale's sake?

These are the same questions the small web asks.

The Connections

  • Solderpunk — creator of Gemini — named themselves after the act of soldering: connection with heat and metal
  • Bombadillo — developed by sloum on tildegit, a fellow tildeverse resident
  • The tildeverse — shared Unix servers as a commons; home on the Internet without surrendering data or being the product
  • Botany — a terminal plant-growing game on tilde.town; a small shared ASCII garden
  • These protocols have no pipeline for data harvesting or intrusive advertising. They are structurally incapable of it.

The Math of the Small Web

Smol Pub charges $5 for a lifetime license. The attention economy's math is engagement, time-on-site, data extraction. The small web's math is different.

See Also

protocols/smallweb/solarpunk.txt · Last modified: by 127.0.0.1