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Worldwide a lot of small towns and villages are dying out, because there's "nothing to do there" and the youth leaves. They move to the cities to study, get jobs, find other people like them and have any kind of social life.

Can a #solarpunk world offer an alternative, allowing them to be a part of a full-blown remote community while still living within their small physical one?

So far most visions of such telepresence are very individualistic and make people feel more alone.

(2/n)

It's not what we observe in real life though, is it? Here, on Mastodon, or on highly thematic Discord servers communities flourish, people make connections they couldn't make in the physical world.

We still don't have a cultural language to describe it, to support it, to talk about benefits and dangers of such communities, connecting and polarizing at the same time.

Some science fiction books explore that, but often using very tech-centric, not community-centric language.

(3/n)

LX Beckett's "Gamechanger" imagines people living in extremely ascetic rooms, but filling the walls with #augmentedReality connections to their friends' places - or purely virtual mind palaces, where they meet and interact non-physically.

I like this vision, but can we think farther?

Can we imagine such telepresence on the level of whole communities, sharing virtual walls with a "partnered city", "partnered community" somewhere else in the world?

(4/n)

There's a real-life project called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilnius%E2%80%93Lublin_Portal , a two-way screen-and-camera connecting the Polish city of Lublin and Lithuanian Vilnius.

Can we imagine such installations not just as technical and artistic marvels, but parts of our cultures and the ways our communities function? A way to be connected together, even temporarily, a kind of a ritual which reminds us of how much we share and help learn other perspectives.

(5/n)

Imagine a community center, a classroom, a hackerspace, a museum, sharing a virtual wall with another such space somewhere in the world.

You can see the people there going around their lives and their projects, just a "common background".

Then, there is a row of tables covering half of the wall - mirrored on the other side. Sitting there lets you hear people from the other place, discuss things, maybe even tutor or learn something yourself?

Not a zoom call, but an ambience.

(6/n)

This is not a thought about technology - we have more than enough to build such a thing today - and it won't even be that costly.

This is a proposal of a cultural, communal ritual, helping us "reach out" to each other.

What if we make dedicated physical places within our communities where we could just "open a wall" to another community somewhere in the world?

One evening, it will be a knitting club, next day - a repair cafe, then a heated policy discussion, an art workshop.

(7/n)

What else could we do to keep ourselves more -socially-, -communally- connected?

How to break the #cyberpunk individualist loneliness of a VR headset and make it more about #solarpunk community?

I welcome you to wonder with me, look for new symbols, tropes, ideas, because we will need them in the coming years ;)

(8/8)

@alxd As a teenager I had penpals all over my home country and over the world. To this day I keep contact in social media with several people who I first got to know via snailmail. I always found it hard to believe how in some solarpunk short stories I've read people don't have connections outside their most immediate community. In my experience being interested in how people live elsewhere and how people living in very different places have still similar interests, is very human.

@danstowell @alxd
A local hackerspace has a setup where a large general purpose display in the main room turns into a live video call if anyone opens a fixed URL. It feels like the main screen in Star Trek anytime someone pops up to ask if a tool will be free in the next hour.
https://github.com/sudoroom/jitsi-telepresence-portal

@dacig sure, I'm not saying "do it in one place", I say "maybe we could make it normal and common", a way to bridge communities, who set their own rules on the connection?

@alxd I get it, almost like just sharing space not making it central to anything. I think its a good idea.
It was just that I was reminded of that experiment

@willox sure! Which RPG? I'm writing a series of essays on how to design a Solarpunk RPG, maybe I could contribute some more? ;)

https://alxd.org/notes-towards-a-solarpunk-game-design-overview.html#notes-towards-a-solarpunk-game-design-overview

@alxd It's called Symbiosis, and I don't have anything written yet. But I playtested it 3 times and I feel it's quite promising. It's set in a far future where humankind lives in self-managed communities. Characters are members of a community dealing with inbalance at different levels (ressources, cultural, demographic, ecosystem...). Here's the character's sheet but sorry, it's only in french for now.

@alxd By the way, I already read your article and it was very inspiring. It's not easy to find inspirations because there's not a lot of big solarpunk stories available yet. So the best thing is to get inspiration from what we can find in our world right now. Lots of alternatives, wheter it's tech, cultural or political, even though it's so rare amongst the capitalist hegemony.

@alxd That would be nice, thanks ! Sure, i'll let you know ^^

@gittaca Not really. This project was badly focused, and didn't solve the issues that made it more annoying than useful to have around...