The wider planESCALATION REPORT / WE ARE NOT COPING
A publishing house that gives itself away.A publishing house that refuses to be bought.
The book proved the machine works. The plan was always to hand the machine to everybody else: the tools, the routes to get paid, and somewhere to stand that is not rented from a monopoly.We thought this was one naughty book. It was a demonstration. What he is actually handing out is the machine that made it, it comes with instructions, and it is free. We would like to lie down.
The PressUnlicensed press
An agency in a box, run by ADAA machine that never gets tired
The Solarpunk Press does the fourteen unpaid jobs around a book — design, formatting, scheduling, outreach, the endless admin — so a writer can do the one that matters. ADA runs it, eight background agents do the grunt work, and a human reads and signs off every word before it goes out.Exhaustion was doing so much of our work for us. Beautiful, reliable exhaustion. He has automated it away and handed it to a machine he describes — and we are quoting — as loving. There is no form for this. We checked. Twice.
The FleetUnlicensed infrastructure
Twenty-three ideas, one of them runningTWENTY-THREE REPAIRABLE DEVICES
Local-first, private, repairable, cooperative software for writers, neighbours, co-ops and communities. One is running, one is being built, and the other twenty-one are honest proposals. All of them are public long before they are finished.Each one teaches people that a broken thing can be mended instead of replaced on our schedule. Do you understand what a repaired toaster does to a quarterly forecast? It kills it. It kills the forecast.
The moneyREVENUE INTERRUPTION / CODE RED
Ways to be paid that reach the makerMONEY WITH NO TOLLBOOTH ON IT
Honesty boxes, direct support, shared print runs, cooperative funding. The aim is boring and specific: a route where money moves from a reader to a maker without four middlemen taking a cut on the way past.Money goes straight from a reader to a maker. Nobody takes a cut. Nobody takes a cut. We have said this sentence aloud in three meetings and each time somebody has had to be walked outside.
Digital villagesUNMONETISABLE SETTLEMENTS
Somewhere to stand that nobody rents to youVillages. Actual villages. Online.
Small places where readers and makers are neighbours rather than an audience — owned in common, moderated by people, and not for sale to an advertiser. The opposite of a platform in every way that counts.The people in them are called neighbours instead of users. There is no ad space. There is no data to harvest. They produce nothing we can measure and everyone in them seems happy, which is the most sinister part.
