Thursday, January 26, 2023

re-decentralization - the power struggle

 there are some great scalable decentralised systems now showing real deployment, like mastodon's decentralised open source social network and matrix open secure messaging platform (just my fave, add yours!!),  But they still depend on electricity and internet access. 

we have some community internet services such as Guifi open community mesh net- again, just my fave, but there are many,  They all illustrate the care needed with governance models...

so what about that power struggle? well I just put solar on my roof, but that only gets me half the year (actually I sell to the grid for 6 months, but we're too far north and cloudy to really run in the depths of winter) - but there are community projects to put up larger scale locally owned solar (and wind) and also in the fairly near term too, ground source heat pumps, run/owned collectively (otherwise capital cost is a bit of a hill to climb) - this project I just invested in, in my local area, is an interesting example

power up north london sidesteps the need for central generation, and government or private sector, except that we still need (albeit a re-tweaked) grid distribution of power...that can come next..

Arguments for this are a) it can scale up fast b) it provides resilience (against variation in weather, geo-politics, price, you name it) and is sustainable.

Arguments against this are not a lot as far as I can see - by vesting in community ownership, you commit people to the maintenance of the system, which in any case is far less onerous than a) current central service bills and b) the capital cost of deploying these systems in the first phase. Like collectively owned barns in the past, and cooperative savings&loans not-for-profits, we can structure many of modern worlds infrastructures in new (but actually old) ways...

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misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home