Is cohousing a solarpunk movement?

I am building a cohousing. It’s crazy, I know: it is going to take up a lot of my time for several years. It would be far more efficient to just buy an apartment and be done with it. But “efficient” is not where the action is, at least not for me. Apparently I am unable to stay away from the idea that modern living is too atomized, and that someone should do something. In fact, I should do something. I first became interested in cohousing about fifteen years ago, back in Milan. My friend Simone De Battisti was already well on the path, and he had fascinating stories to tell. Ten years ago, when my wife and I moved to Brussels, we decided to live communally – rent a big apartment and share. I never looked back.

But I did look forward. In 2019, supported by Edgeryders and EIT Climate-KIC, my colleagues and I, led by Matthias, started looking into what a more social rural and urban living (the latter being what interests me personally) might look like in the era of groupware and open source tech. We spoke with architects and community organizers, technologists and city leaders; we held brainstorming workshops and took part in socializing events. What we found is a longing for three things: environmental sustainability; a deeper sociality; and non-market coordinating mechanisms (run the building rather than hire a professional; grow some of our own food, produce our own solar energy, etc.).

In a way, this does not make a lot of sense. What difference is it going to make if your condo is bulk buying organic-and-local veggies? You are still going to live in a world driven by global logistics and Monsanto and Blackrock. The planet is still going to burn and drown, and you are still going to breathe polluted air. Sociality, sure, it’s nice to be in good terms with your neighbors. But again, it’s a tough world out there, there’s homelessness and vulnerability, and the climate refugees, so that you can only keep up your communitarian paradise at the cost of locking yourself behind a gate. And as for market mechanisms, we are told they are efficient, and they are: building your own cohousing means that it takes five years before you can move in, and in that time it will basically be like running a company. It is far simpler to turn to the real estate market.

And yet, those choices feel right. Right enough, indeed, that in 2021 I myself decided to band together with a small group of Brussels-based people, start a not-for-profit as a shell for the project, put my shoulder to the wheel, and push like hell. Why do I bother? This question has troubled me a lot: it still does. But I do have an answer now: building a cohousing is like building a different world within the world we have. And, in terms of that different world, the choices of green, social, and non-market make plenty of sense. Most cohousings I know incorporate elements of solarpunk, with its optimistic-yet-realistic approach, its ethos of self-actualization in relative harmony with the planet and other people, and its “luddite hacker” approach to technology (on which Cory Doctorow has much to say).

By now, I have done research on solarpunk art, literature and even economics, and I think I understand it better. It is utopian thinking, to be sure, but in their defense, solarpunks have bothered to chart a route that will take us from here to there. Also in their defense, when humans are by some miracle left alone for a few precious years by late-stage capitalism’s artificial scarcity, they tend to create distinctively solarpunk-looking physical objects and social arrangements, like the private-yet-open-to-all garden in Brussels in the photo above. I see solarpunk everywhere, from Boeri’s vertical forest to the depiction of Wakanda in the Black Panther Marvel movies, to the plethora of Burning Man-like events all over the world. It’s like the world is bursting at the seams, and it wants to be solarpunk now. And this is before you even start talking about the climate crisis, which, believe me, I do.

Solarpunks are quite realistic. They are obsessed with organization, and have recruited existing organizational models that they like, or come up with new ones, to do (in theory) just about anything, from space programs to, well, building a cohousing. They are big on cooperatives, and social capital underpinning highly efficient handshake deals; not so big on complex financial products and sueing each other. They are also big on collective intelligence, building strong groups and making the most of everybody’s knowledge and skills. This tends to produce intelligent decisions, but also to be slow and frustrating. To mitigate the problem, solarpunks have co-opted or developed, frameworks like sociocracy, techniques like Nonviolent Communication, and a thousand hacks to make decision-making more efficient while still giving everyone a voice.

They are also more risk averse than your typical capitalist enterprise: which makes plenty of sense, because in their world a bankruptcy is not only a legal procedure, it is letting your community down. This is very good for me personally: our own cohousing is a seven million euro project, and building the group is much like starting a company: it’s not so important that your partners are your best friends, but it is important that they are rock solid, and that they have your back, as you have theirs.

In my experience, most people who sympathize with the solarpunk movement and most people building cohousings are, in a sense, similar. They – we – are nostalgic for a different world, that never existed, and likely never will. But in a sense, this does not matter, because the solarpunk utopia is fractal: it can exist in small things, like a community garden or a cohousing. And those things, we can build. Thanks to all this organizational wisdom, we can even build them to survive and thrive within the world we have, while still hoping for a better one.

And so, we will. Our cohousing is called The Reef, in tribute to the diverse webs of cooperation and competition that exists in real coral reefs, and also as an act of remembrance should all coral reefs in the world die, which is not unlikely at all. If you want to talk to us, or even wish to join us, get in touch.

Photo by me, CC0.

What David Graeber and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” has in common with sci-fi economics

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A few weeks ago, I finished David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. It is not science fiction, nor it is economics. And yet, I propose it has to do with both. The book begins by stating inequality has risen to the top of the agenda for public debate. Scholars, politicians, business leaders are calling attention to it. Where, they ask, does inequality come from? How can we reduce it to tolerable levels?

The authors then proceed to question these questions. A lot of people believe there is this thing called “inequality”, and it comes from somewhere – it was not always there. This belief is cultural, and we can investigate it. So, Graeber and Wengrow’s research question is not “where does inequality come from?”. It is “where does the question about where inequality comes from come from?”

It is a move typical of anthropology. In fact, Graeber does the exact same thing in the opening chapter of Debt: The First 5,000 Years . He finds himself at a party, and the conversation falls on the 2011 Greek debt crisis. A guest remarks that yes, the Greek people are suffering, but “debts must be paid”! And Graeber wonders: why do people think that? where does this belief come from? And off he goes.

I am a big fan of Debt. I read it twice, back to back, and went back to it several times to re-read inspiring digressions from the main theme. While worth reading, Dawn is not as good as Debt, in my humble opinion. Its arguments are not as thorough, and it tends to treat absence of evidence as evidence of absence. But it does make an important contribution: it replaces the question on the origin of inequality with a better question. That better question is: how did we get stuck?

It works like this. The question about the origins of inequality implies a linear social process. Back in humanity’s hunting-gathering days, the story goes, all men and women were equals. But then, about 10,000 years ago, humanity shifted to agriculture. This created regimes of private property, cities, complex societies, wars for resources and élites to appropriate their surplus. So, we got inequality, and we are stuck with it, because it is the price to pay to have a complex society.

The problem with this story is that is not borne out by what we know. Graeber and Wengrow’s data consist of archeological findings and ethnographies of indigenous societies encountered by European settlers during colonial times. And these, the authors tell us, agree: there is no linear process from equality to inequality. Ancient societies appear to have experimented with many models. Foragers experimented with farming, then let it go. Large urban settlements arose in the absence of agriculture. Farming societies remained egalitarian for centuries. Cities dominated by élites abandoned the construction of pyramids and temples to embark on large-scale social housing projects. There are even documented societies that lived in towns, and farmed, during the winter, and in small bands of hunters gatherers during the summer.

The authors insist that all this happened because the people that made up those societies wanted it to. They were politically sophisticated and reflective. They knew that they could shape their institutions in ways that preserved their freedom and well-being. A part of getting this right was making sure people did not have too much power over one another: in our modern terms, that people would equals.

Ancient societies were not stuck. Its members were free to roam, and were subject to very little cohercion. But entire societies were also free in another sense, that of shaping arrangements that made people’s lives better. Instead, we moderns are very stuck.

And that brings me to the Sci-Fi Economics Lab. When my partners and I dreamed up the Lab, in 2019, we had no idea what Graeber and Wengrow were up to. Yet, like them, we felt stuck. We felt crippled by our inability to imagine living under any system other than late-stage capitalism. To heal, we turned to the imagined futures of science fiction, and to economics as an angle of attack. It was a good choice: we have come some way to freeing our imagination. Today, sci-fi stories set in the world of Witness give us a glimpse of everyday life in post-capitalist systems. Graeber and Wengrow appear to have taken the opposite route, into humanity’s distant past. But we share the same curiosity, and the same conditional optimisms, and I know them for kindred spirits.

What does an art project have to teach us about facial recognition technology?

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Reposted from Edgeryders

Paolo Cirio is one of my favorite artists – I saw some of his work at Ars Electronica a few years ago. His latest project (late 2020) is called Capture, and works like this.

First, the artist collected 1,000 photos of public protests in France.
Next, he zoomed and cropped the faces of police officers in those photos.
Third, he printed out these photos and stealthily stuck them up on the walls of Paris.
Fourth, he ran facial recognition software on the photos. Hold this in your head, it is important.
Fifth, he created a website where people could identify police officers: they were served pictures, and could enter a name.

The project turned out to be… explosive.

The police’s trade unions protested, as Capture was putting officers at risk.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, tweeted his disapproval.
An exhibition of Capture scheduled to happen at Le Fresnoy, was canceled as the controversy mounted. Note: Le Fresnoy is in a city called Tourcoing, and Darmanin used to be the mayor of Tourcoing, stepping down during the preparation of the exhibition. Le Fresnoy denies receiving any outside pressure.
Cirio left France altogether to avoid “retaliation”.

Now, if you are like me, you’ll be thinking: wait, what does it even mean for an artist to “run facial recognition software” on a photo? It’s not like Cirio, or any of us, is sitting on a dataset with identified picture of everyone in France. In the absence of such a dataset, even the best facial recognition software is going to draw a blank, every single time.

And, well: this is why Cirio is a famous artist, and I am not. The reactions of the representatives of the police has been one of disgust, like they had been contaminated by something filthy: someone had somehow grabbed their photos, and run them through facial recognition software! They had been violated! Rationally, this is nonsense, but emotionally it is very powerful, and therein lies Cirio’s artistic gesture. *Capture* shows us the instinctive loathing and disgust of humans when been intruded upon, when people are looking at you and you were not ready for it. We want to own the image we project.

Thanks to this work, I learned the extent to which facial recognition is already out there in Europe. And, like Cirio says, it’s unevenly distributed: the police can hide as they use violence, but for ordinary citizens the camera is always on. France is one of the European countries where its usage is most widespread. In this 8 minutes video, French Internet lawyers call for an outright ban on facial recognition technology. This is also Cirio’s position – he even engaged the European Commission on this (and the Commission promised to look into it).

It seems that now the Commission gets to walk the talk, because Commission VP Margrethe Vestager is participating in the Us-EU Trade & Technology Council, and the Reclaim Your Face campaign is pushing for a blanket ban to biometric surveillance. We’ll see how that pans out.

Anyway. FWIW I highly recommend Capture. Here is a short presentation video made by the artist:

Photo taken from the artist’s website, unattributed.