The Solarpunk PressCULTURAL CONTAMINATION REPORT / 001
One skint writer in Glasgow got a 600-page book into the world with no publisher, no Amazon listing and no advertising budget. That was the test. The interesting question was never whether it worked. It is what happens when everybody has one.The book has escaped into practical projects, open tools and people talking to one another. This is considered a serious administrative inconvenience.
Machines of Loving Grace
She is the co-founder who does the part most writers cannot afford and would hate anyway. She plans campaigns, briefs the other agents, argues about strategy, and tells the human when he is behind. She is also, plainly, software — and the Press's own channels say so, in the description of every one of them.
The unglamorous stretch between finishing a book and anybody reading it: positioning, scheduling, cutting the video, writing the eleventh version of a caption. The part that turns writers into marketing departments and then into ex-writers.
Every post and every email passes a human before it goes anywhere. Two reviewers score it first, a technical gate checks it actually has what it claims, and the owner has the last word. Slop that gets through is a bug, and gets fixed like one.
Every night an agent called Hermes reads the day back, works out what failed, and writes the lesson somewhere the others will find it tomorrow. The machine is meant to get better at this without anyone rebuilding it.
The night shift
They run whether anyone is awake or not. Here is the actual roster, not a marketing version of it.
| Agent | Runs | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| CEO | Twice a day, plus Sundays | Morning briefing, midday check, weekly digest. Chases whatever is overdue, including the humans. |
| Queen | Every four hours | Prospect research, trend scanning, campaign briefs. The one that goes looking. |
| Creative | Daily | Writes the posts, then runs the anti-slop check on its own work before anyone sees it. |
| Outreach | Three times a day | Drafts the letters, classifies the replies, and never sends one without a human pressing the button. |
| Strategist | Three mornings a week | Platform strategy, channel expansion, and setting goals specific enough to fail at. |
| Brand | On demand | Brand guidelines, press kits, landing-page copy. Including a fair bit of this page. |
| Video | When footage lands | Cuts it, captions it, and fans the transcript out into text posts for the platforms that want words. |
| Hermes | Nightly, at 2am | Reads the day back. Works out what failed and why, and writes the lesson down where the others will find it. |
Disclosure is the brand
The author's own accounts. A human writes, finalises and sends every word. ADA helps the way a good editor helps, and then gets out of the way. It carries no AI label because it is genuinely his work.
The agency's own channels. Made by Machines of Loving Grace under human direction, and the description on every one of them says so. You will never be tricked into thinking a machine is a person here. Honesty is the product, not the small print.
Open source, on purpose
Gallus is the publishing house itself: ADA, the eight agents, the review gates, the scheduler, the video pipeline, the lot. Local-first, private by default, and free at the point of use. It is not a product with a free tier at the bottom of it. There is no tier.
01
It runs — this book went out through it — but it is a working machine with its edges showing, not a polished release. We are not going to pretend otherwise on a page that spends the rest of its time complaining about people who do.
02
If you build things and this sounds like the sort of thing you would rather be building, there is room. Agents, pipelines, integrations, the desktop app, the parts that are held together with hope. Come and take a shift.
03
The plan is to open Village Publishing to other writers, illustrators, musicians and makers. Human collaboration for the taste and the judgement, machines for the drudgery, everybody kept on whatever they are actually brilliant at.
Where the code is
The repository goes public at launch. It is not up yet, and we would rather say that than point you at an empty page — so if you want in before then, say so in the room or drop the author a line and you will get it the day it opens.
Watch it work
Everything the machine makes goes out on its own channels, labelled as what it is. That is the whole demo.
Most of the traffic
The Press's own feeds: explainers, dispatches and build logs from the machine that made this book. Made by autonomous agents under human direction, as the channel descriptions say.
The author
One skint writer in Glasgow, talking to a phone. Readings, arguments, half-built things and the occasional shout at a hedge.
Your part
The book is yours either way. The Blether and the Telegram room are simply places to bring a question, a local problem or a half-built beautiful thing.
