@Enso People are definitely talking about not living in cities. I think this piece expresses it nicely: http://www.appropedia.org/User:Vinay_Gupta/The_Unplugged

But, this cities vs rural thing is a definite wedge issue.

You may be quite correct that cities are more energy efficient on a per person basis, but right now, cities don't give me hope, because to really green cities you have to deal with all the politics that drives them.

I like the idea of carving out our own space in the countryside, setting things up differently, showing our ways work better. I would fully expect that, if successful, many ideas would flow back into the old cities.

hi @Enso, i don't think @dominic is saying everyone should move to a rural environment, i think he's saying the few who are interested should create small intentional solarpunk communities in the countryside. i don't think he's saying there will be no politics in the countryside, i think he's saying smaller communities will have less politics because there are less people and resources to coordinate.

similarly, i've realized the long-term direction i want for my life, i want to support the social movement towards solarpunk trailer parks: how do we use the best of solarpunk principles to create an ecosystem of affordable open source modular portable manufactured homes and village-sized community governance systems.

on the topics being discussed in this thread, i guess i can share some books i've read that helped give me language to my thoughts:

• Reinventing Organizations: why neither flat nor hierarchical structures are good for organizing, how to do a hybrid with the best of both
• The Timeless Way of Building: an introduction to design patterns
• A Pattern Language: a possible implementation of design patterns for fractal living spaces
• Ishmael: what society lost when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture, and why it matters today

oh and Walkaway is probably the best book for imagining a solarpunk revolution that doesn't try to directly change our default society, instead we walk away from (opt out of) our default society, and lead by example on how better alternatives are possible.

@Enso I'm not saying the solution is for everyone to move to the countryside! This isn't a thing we can solve all at once. In general dramatic social change just don't happen like that. New ways must be developed and rolled out. I guess I'm saying, my model is move to the country for experimentation, R&D, then back to the cities with new solutions, once you've demonstrated success.

The difference is between local and city politics. If you go found a small intentional community, most of what you'll have to deal with is just internal politics to that community. Massively more tractable than trying to change a whole city.

@bobhaugen yes I know, but it's possible. I recently visited a community that has existed since 1975 and is not only still going, but still felt lively, and even there were a couple of people in the second generation that still wanted to live there. On the other hand, just down the road there is another community dysfunctional enough to have a vice documentary about it

When you start peeling back the layers and changing things you discover hidden assumptions and problems that the old way was either solving or protecting you from, or at least creating bigger problems so you didn't notice these new smaller problems.
Most of these communities fail. That's actually a good thing, like how most businesses fail.
We want to have lots of little things with some of them failing safely, not one big thing that catastrophically fails. (i.e. global capitalism destroying the enviroment)

@Enso i don't think a solarpunk social movement is going to work at all unless we experiment with solutions, urban or rural. we don't need more people saying what won't work, we need more people experimenting with solutions that might work.

to paraphrase %4JT/+IT...

I mean I believe [we need] people working on hard problems... more than [we need] people confirming that [problems exist]

@Enso I'd love to support urban solarpunks exploring urban relevant things... I'm sure they are out there, but often I end up defending the idea of rural solarpunking in threads like this were an urbanist or two loudly proclaims "this is the wrong idea!" with out offering any concrete plans.

The term "solarpunk" started as an aesthetic. from this this tumblr post it's essentially a mood board to get you started imagining an optimistically ecofriendly future earth. At this stage I think the main thing is just getting people to see, yes there are things we can do and ideas we can try and there are things we can make better, and you can do something. The most important thing is to do something that also inspires others.

Back to the original post: you might be interested in checking out the #moinho-mesh project as this exact approach of point-to-point radio is already being trialled in places. I was also talking to Mike Cohen from Sensorica some time ago who has been working on some ultra minimal, low-power (5V IIRC), high range (several kilometers) radio transmitter tech. Bandwidth is naturally not very high but for systems like SSB it could indeed be a workable transport medium. I'll try to get some info from him and loop back here- could be invaluable for those interested in #mesh-networking.

This brings up an interesting debate as to whether a high-bandwidth, always-on digital lifestyle is something that people really need. On the one hand I really love the #solarpunk assertion that no, we don't, so long as we can connect to each other somehow then speed and availability does not matter.

But on the other, I've been to outback Australia and I know how much people there suffer for lack of connectivity. Education suffers, business owners suffer, emergency services suffer and many more to boot. Whether that suffrage is 'real' in an objective sense or just relative to the high-speed lifestyle we enjoy in cities and the penchant we seem to have for making all things 'smart' is another question.

Maybe fibre changes the equation. It costs nothing to put light down a piece of glass. The manufacturing process probably isn't that sustainable, but if we could find an ethical way to spin fibre then we might be able to have our cake and eat it too.

I've actually done the rounds on a complete solution to the ISP 'carrier enclosure' problem with someone who had a hand in building the majority of Australia's telecommunications infrastructure, and you can't solve the whole issue with radio. For one it doesn't have the bandwidth to connect large population centres at any decent speed once you subdivide the available bandwidth by the number of people at each end, and for another you can't cross continents with radio hops. Undersea cable is really the only option there- the bottom line is, if you want a globally interconnected system then at some point you're going to need fibre and someone is going to have to own it.

Interested to hear if anyone would challenge that assumption- could be a consequence of our team's background. Certainly our plan was always to provide best-in-class internet at less than half the cost of Big Telco, not to create minimally acceptable low-bandwidth connectivity.

So, here's how we planned to do it:

1. Get seed funding to buy some tier 1 routing equipment. These are expensive boxes, starting at around $250K. They live in datacentres in major cities and connect to the inter-continental fibre lines. If you own one of these machines and can get a lease on the fibre, you own the internet backhaul and can prevent things like net neutrality being undermined.

2. You set up the company that owns the backhaul as a cooperative, and make representatives from community ISPs the governing members. If you get a big enough group of them invested they could even provide the seed funding. This was in my Ethereum days, so we planned to do this using tokenised ownership models.

3. Now you need to start laying fibre out of the major cities into other localities. In urban areas, mesh networking using wifi and 5G is no problem. You could probably hop most of a city via repeaters connected to the datacentre that houses the backhaul fibre. Innovative crypto-based pay-on-demand services like AltheaMesh may also be useful for sharing your personal internet connections with strangers. But inter-city connectivity is a problem, especially in Australia. When Telstra (think AAPT or Comcast) was privatised we ended up with a situation where the carrier and the service provider were the same company. Unsurprisingly, they are hostile to anyone who wants access to that fibre. There is enough already laid in regional Queensland to connect the state 5 times over, but they won't let you touch it and they will straight out lie about its availability. So it's either do a deal with the devil or lay your own fibre. The deal may be doable (last mile connectivity out west costs them a fortune and yields little return, so really we'd be taking a liability off their hands), but it would be better to own the fibre ourselves. You achieve that by getting each community ISP to foot the bill for their section of the fibre line, and you do it in stages. First city along a line pays from the capital city to their junction. Second city pays for cable from the first city to theirs, not all the way from the capital. And so on.

4. Now you've got fibre connecting every locality and the final legs can be done with point-to-point microwave radio. With good placement you often don't need many transmitters to connect a town, and the Cambian kits are both good quality and affordable. The calculations we did ended up at about 80/80/80: if a rural village can get 80 people paying $80AUD a month for their internet on day one we can conservatively provide 80mbps up & down and cover our costs. $60USD a month for internet might seem expensive, but for Australia it's actually very cheap. People currently pay $75-90USD a month for guaranteed bandwidth of 1.4mbps. Yes, you read that right. From there, once you start getting more communities online you can begin to develop bulk buying power that makes leasing fibre cheaper. We think we could get the price down as low as $30AUD/mo for the same speed internet service.

5. The rest comes down to building the community ISPs: training them in how to do technical support and manage the network. In our model they were going to pay for backhaul using Ethereum tokens, which would have the effect of increasing the value of the backhaul company due to demand and thus increasing the value of the shares those ISPs own in it. But the best part is that the community ISPs get to own the profits and inject capital back into the local economy. Again with the tokens, but we thought having everyone paying their internet bill into a system that converts into an Ethereum token for each locality would have been amazing- then you could put a governance DAO around the cash pool and have the community vote on where the funds should be spent. But, y'know, you could do that in town hall meetings too.

At least, that's as best as my non-expert memory serves on the details. Any corrections or questions welcome (:

It's funny how @Enso and I have exact opposite opinions about urban/rural. My 10 cents on why I don't believe urbanization has a bright future can be summed up in a two words: centralization and massification. Both great strategies to control and generate a plague (that's us), but aren't very great for humyns and non-humyns who are being controlled and massified; and not so good for experimenting with truly sustainable ways of living, not apart from nature but within nature, as that is the only way for any being on this planet to live fully.

10 billion is a lot, but for the better or the worse, I think nature will take care of that. When a body is infested by cancerous cells there's no other solution, either the body dies or it succeeds in disabling the destructive cells. And I think we're a really weak type of cancer, and Gaia will easily cleanse itself. Sorry for the apocalyptic tone, but I think we're beyond going back, and we should start thinking of #the-great-cleansing as inevitable, nor good or bad. Like everything that's centralized, urbanities have central points of failure, and if even a few of those points fail, the whole structure can crumble over night. A great example being the truck-driver strikes that happened last year in Brasil, which gave a glimpse of how fragile centralization can be. Being more locally self-sufficient within my community, I was unaffected by it. So ruralities should find ways of organizing themselves better economically and politically as it has more space for experimentation and it's modularity permits easier organization, and urbanities should start decentralizing if it wants to survive.

Now going back to the original question, I think @pospi and @noffle pointed out great ways to achieve truly decentralized communications across the Globe. I don't think I've got anything else to add :) Mesh all the way!

One thing I've talked about with @befree and @nicoechaniz in person, is that education is key to expanding #communitynetworks, which is not only a means of achieving communication sovereignty, but also political and economical inter-dependence.