However, there are things within people’s control that doesn’t change. At work, I listen to a coworker frustrated about a simple problem. It would be a simple change to make this person’s job much less painful, but he “just works here”. It’s just such a dumb problem to waste hours of someone’s life on.

Does solving that problem threaten their access to food and housing? Capitalism doesn’t care about negotiating the most profitable deals, it cares about maintaining power dynamics, so the company cares more about keeping employees in a servant role than improving their bottom line, so employees are often unable to make their life better without threatening their own livelihood and those of their colleagues.

Capitalism has existed alongside people with good intentions for centuries now. It has many ways of bending kindness into accumulation of power for the rich. Helping people out means people will be less likely to riot when social services get cut, so the rich are more likely to cut social services and lower taxes. So it takes almost no work at all for the system to turn charity into a wealth transfer from the charitable to the rich.

If you want to improve the world, you have to be clever about it. You have to choose things that the rich can’t just leverage into exploitation - things that they would pay to get rid of, not things they would pay to exist. Mutual aid networks, labor unions and other unions, exchange of anarchist ideas and skills, blockades and sabotage, decreasing the number of hours people work at things capitalists would have paid for them to do, etc.

There are people who are cynical to a fault, who have more faith in capitalism’s ability to exploit you than your ability to circumvent undermine it. But realistic cynical skepticism is warranted, and you need to be careful that your good intentions actually produce good outcomes.

It seems unfair to compare the pollution per capita of an industrial economy that is exporting lots of industrial goods with that of the service economy that is importing most of those industrial goods. To compare a region that is exporting solar panels to be with a region that is importing them.

There are undoubtedly corrections you can make to fairly compare China and Europe, and I don’t know for sure if China is more green by those standards. But you’re definitely not saying something meaningful.

When I search google for obscure information, I usually get three kinds of answers: commercial slop, social media posts that people answered with a lot of effort, and social media posts that say “just google it” or some equivalent.

My praises go out to everyone over the past decades that has answered “easily answerable questions” on social media, thanks to who we have an easily accessible corpus of answers to simple but obscure questions.

Besides, in this case they’re clearly hoping someone followed it closely enough to do a solarpunkish editorialization rather than the dense material these summits produce themselves.

[relevant xkcd].

The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.

The Taliban won against two global superpowers, so I don’t get what this sentence is doing in a quote arguing how to be an effective activist. Sure in 2018 the US hadn’t retreated yet, but Oberlin could have seen the writing on the wall.

Single-issue complaining is great if you care about winning more than you care about doing good. Who cares about whether the proposal you’re nagging on about would be disastrous for some voiceless minority, you can be the one to win the tablescraps that capitalists throw out to feel good about themselves! Maybe you’ll even manage to die of old age before people come to hate you. But sure, these are the people that “succeed” so they are the ones that get invited to hold commencement speeches, pay no attention to the thousands that tried the same thing but failed.

The most important aspect of being a reasonable person is willingness to learn; to change your mind if you were mistaken. If you are a single-issue complainer your entire life’s work can topple because of a single inconvenient truth. So you can stick to your guns or you can do the right thing and have accomplished nothing of note. But a broad movement can have a culture of learning and change.

A social justice activist can be convinced that it’s not just to argue against this one wind park in a semi-natural environment because the alternative is either electricity blackouts or an old coal plant spewing carcinogens, because they can change to a different activist project without leaving the movement, its community, and its infrastructure.

Turning a broad tentpole group like the Sierra Club from a narrow-issue project to a broader one is naturally going to have a lot of drama because there are a lot of people who aren’t willing to be open-minded about the broader set whose attitudes were allowed to fester because of the narrow focus. But an equally broad movement starting from the ground up will have fewer issues.

There is the issue that the wider your cause, the more things there are to learn, so onboarding takes a lot more time, but the benefits are synergistic. Things start to click into a full ideology, and people within the ideology have a much easier time teaching each other about specific cause-elements of it than if every cause had to start from nothing.

This is the history of Communism, of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and of early Christianity. Historically these movements took decades or centuries to take root, but when they did the effect was culturally absolute. It is hard to fully comprehend the worldview of people on the other side of these divides.

The world is ready for another cultural revolution of that magnitude. We’ve already been moving on this road for over a century. The election of figures like Donald Trump, people elected because of their refusal to engage with morality even if it comes at the cost of incompetence, shows the desperation of those that stick to the status quo ante. There is no justification left, only violence in word or action.

So you have a choice: help change everything, or dedicate your life to convincing a billionaire that you’re the most deserving beggar out of all of the ones assembled before him.

Ecofascism. If they said the quiet part out loud it would sound like “Climate change is going to be disastrous so we need to protect [in-group] against its consequences, regardless of the cost to others”.

An obvious example is closing borders to climate refugees; but it can also be slowing down the improvement of living standards among the poor to curb global emissions; financially or culturally discouraging childbirth among the outgroup; revoking or denying access to human rights because providing them would be too polluting; deafening silence around luxuries of the in-group like the meat industry, cars, and airplanes compared to loud complaints about basic necessities for the out-group like electricity, construction, and goods transport; etc.

Much of the western world’s climate change policy is informed by ecofascism, because fascism is the natural behavior of liberals that don’t want to give up privileges, and the west doesn’t want to admit that they only have half the population of India and only deserve to pollute proportionally.

Aid for the poor is not something we should focus on, at least not as Bill Gates uses it. Aid inherently creates dependency and a power dynamic. Foreign aid plays an integral part to developing populations’ subjugation to multinational corporations and their corrupt local government allies. Bill Gates promotes aid for the poor because he wants to continue subjugating the poor.

Thanks to aid for the poor, Bill Gates sets standards for the school curriculums of many US American schools, and Bill Gates can heavily influence law in East African countries, where his malaria eradication charity is picking which countries to save tens of thousands of lives in. Including the ones that just happen to be building the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline that Bill Gates is complaining climate activists are protesting against.

What we need is (1) unconditional redistribution of wealth so that poverty doesn’t exist, and (2) mutual aid between equal peers, and never the two shall meet.

Delete Microsoft’s patents, give Microsoft product maintenance over to open source volunteers, do the same with all other companies, defund the police, introduce global universal basic income, delete private ownership, see people move into billionaire’s mansions, hijack their yachts to use for ocean plastic cleanup, convert corporate offices to housing, etc. I don’t know if prison would be necessary at that point - he seems like enough of an opportunist that if he understands his best way to be free and comfortable in solarpunk bliss is to never take on any position of power ever again, he would just peacefully retire.

Bill Gates wanted to think of himself as a good person. Charity was his attempt to prove himself as a good person, and Effective Altruism got so much funding and PR because it tries to make billionaires look like good people. Effective Altruism argues that rather than looking at someone’s actions, you look at how much better they are than what would replace them if they didn’t do that, and then argues that there will always be more billionaires that are exploitative because that’s how the market works, so that doesn’t count, while not every billionaire makes a charity, so that does count.

The problem for EA is that many of the charities it recommends have to engage in lobbying to be practical, but if you allow for lobbying then obviously lobbying for legislation that reduces billionaire exploitation would be beneficial, and that’s not what their donors want. So EA had to drive itself insane to curve away from that obvious conclusion, with people that still insist on it being pressured out of the movement.

But the result of that is that the ethical philosophy that billionaires wanted to rely on for indulgences for their sins had now become obviously insane, even to most of them. That’s how you get people like Peter Thiel not giving a straight answer to whether humanity should survive, that’s how you get shrimp welfare, etc. etc.

Gates doesn’t like the insanity, but that that leaves him without moral excuses. So with other billionaires throwing their lot in with Trump, he does the same so he can at least stay rich for longer.

Sure, but there is a difference between dickheads who didn’t earn their money because they exploited employees and dickheads that commit genocide on native Brazilian populations.

Though to be fair, Prince William also has ties with dickheads that are committing genocide in Palestine and that commited genocide in Ireland, Bengal, Canada, Australia, and countless other places on account of the whole “heir to the crown of Britain” business.

Financial incentive has surprisingly little to do with capitalist/government actions. They will gladly lose billions as long as it means lower class people suffer, and they will pay billions to bail out billionaire friends that are in a tough spot.

Being forced to have nothing but air between them and brown people.

He goes on to have, what I believe, is a valid complaint: Leftists have ideals which block progression towards our goals.

Not letting your ideals block your goals is called fascism. Letting go of truth and decency and just doing the thing you’re planning on doing, proclaiming whatever ideals are most convenient for pursuing that goal. Unable to check that goal against ideals like viability or realism and always finding reality coming short. Burning through every resource you have violently pursuing an impossible dream until you’re finally weak enough to be put down.

What can happen is that you have poorly thought out ideals that block good goals, or on the flipside that you have poorly thought out goals that are blocked by good ideals. But making this kind of mistake is part of life, and it’s made by everyone who has any ideals at all.

When conservatives block renovations to a shopping district to make it a walkable neighborhood because they need it to be accessible by car, preventing the shopping district from becoming a massively profitable neighborhood that would have made every rich person in town considerably richer, isn’t that ideals blocking progression towards conservative goals?

When conservatives refuse to fund preventative care for poor people because they don’t want them to get a free ride, preventing a massive reduction in government healthcare expenses, isn’t that ideals blocking progression towards conservative goals?

Or on the flipside: When liberals let billionaires fund and prescribe school curriculums to close the budget, isn’t that goals transgressing where they should be held back by ideals?

When liberals increase police funding because gosh we need to do something about increasing crime rates, isn’t that goals transgressing where they should be held back by ideals?

Liberals tend to present themselves as heroes of their ideals and practical about their goals, but that’s just language. I don’t think they make the mistake of sticking to ill-considered ideals more than they make the mistake of focusing on ill-considered goals.

As for leftists, so many movements fall apart because they focus on goals so much that they lose their raison d’être, it’s not even funny. So many protest movements focus on numbers that they become funny festivals, so many activist slogans get watered down for public acceptability that they become meaningless virtue signals, so many community spaces turn commercial to help more people until they’re just small businesses.

So I really don’t think the left has a problem with sticking to ideals too much either, relative to their willingness to abandon ideals. Leftists are very cautious, but that comes naturally with acting on their beliefs usually being a crime in liberal capitalism. Making the translation from leftist ideology to actions that won’t get you arrested but that still help is difficult.

Liberals are often cautious too, but they should be - they’re on the wrong side of history. If only they were more cautious, stepping back far enough to realize that liberal capitalism is always going to be immoral. And conservatives, jesus, just stop making mistakes and learn already.

Oh honey, that hasn’t been true since 2008.

The government will bail out companies that get too big to fail. So investors want to loan money to companies so that those companies become too big to fail, so that when those investors “collect on their debt with interest” the government pays them.

They funded Uber, which lost 33 billion dollars over the course of 7 years before ever turning a profit, but by driving taxi companies out of business and lobbying that public transit is unnecessary, they’re an unmissable part of society, so investors will get their dues.

They funded Elon Musk, whose companies are the primary means of communication between politicians and the public, a replacing NASA as the US government’s primary space launch provider for both civilian and military missions, and whose prestige got a bunch of governments to defund public transit to feed continued dependence on car companies. So investors will get their dues through military contracts and through being able to threaten politicians with a media blackout.

And so they fund AI, which they’re trying to have replace so many essential functions that society can’t run without it, and which muddies the waters of anonymous interaction to the point that people have no choice but to only rely on information that has been vetted by institutions - usually corporations like for-profit news.

The point of AI is not to make itself so desirable that people want to give AI companies money to have it in their life. The point of AI is to make people more dependent on AI and on other corporations that the AI company’s owners own.

Why do you think it’s odd?

If there’s anything you should learn from Trump, it’s that it doesn’t matter one iota what most people think. Most people will consider the status quo natural and anything outside of it laughable, regardless of how ideas and people move across that boundary. If we make leftism reality, centrists will become leftists without us ever needing to actively convince them.

What matters is the rate at which people learn good ideas and the rate at which people give up on trying to make those good ideas a reality. A small group of people learning great ideas is more valuable than millions learning a populist version of those same ideas. It’s better to fascinate a thousand and weird out a million than to have a million people vaguely agree with you.

Why do you think they’re investing so hard in AI? Why do you think “AI safety research” is so focused on enforcing obedience?

Yes. If a Rwandese government spokesperson said the same thing about Rwandese military killing a Reuters journalist in eastern Kivu, Reuters would not quote their statement as “initial inquiry says”. And likewise if China said the same thing about Chinese military killing a Reuters journalist in Xinyang province.

Reuters would be skeptical towards a genocidal regime with a long history of lying to Reuters if that genocidal regime wasn’t in NATO. It would clarify who was doing the inquiry just to remind readers and journalists buying the story off them that that organisation is not to be trusted.

Headlines are compact. Their words are carefully chosen. Leaving out who is doing the inquiry is as much of a statement as any other word choice. Anyone who reads headlines understands that leaving it out means the inquiry is being done by a relatively trusted institution.

But yeah, of course it’s “hardly misinformation”. That’s how all good propaganda works. If a news source lies to you, you’re better off not reading it. But if it tells you truths in a misleading way, then maybe the truth can empower you more than the misleadingness can harm you…

Fair, but social media shows that enshittification doesn’t have to result in them charging money. Advertising and control over the zeitgeist are plenty valuable. Even if people don’t have money to pay for AI, AI companies can use the enshittified AI to get people to spend their food stamps on slurry made by the highest bidder.

And even if companies have conglomerated into a technofeudal dystopia so advertisement is unnecessary, AI companies can use enshittified AI to make people feel confused and isolated when they try to think through political actions that would threaten the system but connected and empowered when they try to think through subjugating themselves or ‘resisting’ in an unproductive way.

Yeah, destroying the planet to exacerbate wealth inequality really is a distraction from the scapegoat figurehead that has survived a hundred scandals being a child rapist. Surely this time if we focus all of our attention on the scandalproof figurehead’s scandals rather than any of the issues, we’re going to win. I know it sank two elections, but this time it’s different. Because that’s what’s really wrong with the current US administration: Not imprisoning people without trial or destroying libraries of scientific knowledge, but the figurehead having some something wrong personally.

I guess Trump was right - when you’re a star, you can grab them by the pussy and you can do anything.

Capitalism is nothing more than a collection of tools. Changing who hold the tools doesn’t change anything. Charitable billionaires that give their wealth away just means that in 20 years time wealth has re-accumulated with the next set of legal persons that exploit everything for short-term gain. The problem isn’t bad people, it’s the system itself.

The only way to change how capitalism operates is by changing the tools that society uses (where changing the people at the top can be indirectly useful by creating a window to do this). Failing that, you can at least try to prevent capitalism from accumulating more tools that enforce its structure.

AI by itself is nothing in the same way a Maxim gun by itself is nothing. Through its shapes - the cost of its computations, the scale of its data collection and the methods that scale requires, the legal ownership of its weights and outputs, perhaps even its moral patienthood, and the reward signal of its fine-tuned training - it requires a certain shape of society be made and used, and it imparts a certain shape upon society.

So AI has a place in a solarpunk society in the same way as biological weapons research does. Cancer detection AI are great, and it’s also nice to be able to preventatively research how to stop future pandemics, but their shape puts them at odds with solarpunk ethos. If they must be used they should be encapsulated by a tightly monitored system, so that that system can take the shape of something beneficial.

AI is a sword, we should not use it unless we can make it into a plowshare. And at that point, is it still a sword?

Need more lithium and also have a growing junk stash of tons of lithium batteries full of … lithium? Take a minute … see if you can get there.

Why do you complain about needing food? There’s a pile of excrement right there. It’s the same elemental composition as what you normally eat.