Measurement Science in the Solarpunk Revolution

Modern measurement science is the direct product of the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries wished to rebuild the whole world around the people and natural philosophy, without central control of a king. They failed. In the end, they built a world where the bureaucrats rose up and created a new kind of empire of control and colonial domination. But in the mean time they built a lot of great measurement technology!

Measurement technology and communication technology form the global shared nervous system of humanity. It is how we see and feel and hear the reality we live in. It is how we have formed a global communication network which now connects billions of human minds in real time including this document.

And now we find ourselves once more in a time of revolution. Now, in the 21st century, the intellectual descendants of the 18th century tech bros(I believe Napoleon Bonaparte was essentially a tech bro) have lost all touch with reality and are more interested in metrics in their fake worlds than in the physical world we actually inhabit.

And they are driving the car of civilization off the cliff of fossil fuel death spiral fascism!

What I propose in this essay is that it is time for a counter revolution against the tech bros which is also driven by measurement science. I propose that the counter revolution to the oil machine empire is the solarpunk revolution. I propose that the solarpunk revolution is a change in how we do everything in the world, a pivot from a world of machines, money and property to a world of soil, water, and life.

What we aim for in the new world which we must now build from the broken pieces of the old is that everything is free for everyone everywhere right now. We aim for free food, free medicine, free places to live, free movement across the land, free media and communications, free clean water, and free transportation across a global network. This network will include billions of free web servers and millions of free busses, and billions of free wireless repeater nodes. Busses and carts and ebikes and trailers can move people, goods, water, food, and perhaps most importantly soil and compost and trash around from place to place.

The only way we are going to get out of the climate mess we are in is if we both pivot off of oil completely and also take radical adaptation methods and also take action to reverse the process with carbon capture. The only way to do all three of these at the same time is to pivot the vast majority of human activity from the current mode of "making money" to a mode of soil reclamation. Soil is a living thing, a vast system that has intelligence in the form of inter-connected fungal networks. Soil is what created us. Soil is what feeds us. Soil is what gives us air to breathe. Soil has the power to capture carbon at a global scale if we grow it with that intent. Soil has the power to build local self-sufficiency which will allow us to cease the global oil-based networks of empire and commerce that are killing the Earth now. So soil remediation and growth gets us off of oil, out of empire, reverses the damage of the old ways, and can give us a world of abundant life.

What does all this have to do with measurement science?

I come at all this as a disgruntled measurement scientist. I have worked in some of the best measurement science labs in the world. We have done some good work. But most of the efforts are now misdirected towards the ongoing operation of things as they are.

We need a total pivot right now. Of everyone! So that includes those of us who build scientific instruments. It is our job to build a nervous system which connects all of humanity to all of the living earth. We must build free network infrastructure using hardware we already have combined with free software. We must build sensor networks which stream free data of the atmosphere, the sun, the flowing water, the living soil, living organisms like plants and animals(including ourselves), and our various machines that we need to use to live.

The way to do this in a globally decentralized solarpunk revolutionary society is to use only hardware we have. The task of the measurement scientist in this environment is to build instruments out of what is available and then build the media and cultural infrastructure to replicate that technology out to the entire rest of humanity.

I would like to build self-replicating scientific instruments out of found materials which can replicate to all of humanity which can give us the full real time view into the living Earth. In order to do this, the rest of the free network needs to exist. People need to build out soil remediation projects across the world immediately and start gathering trash and compost and building a new independent local economy. If that happens, a humble dirt wizard can live on the land and eat the food of the land and build the instruments for you, the people of the free network.

I would like to find a way for my people, the makers of measurement technology, to walk out of the darkness of empire and into the light of the sun. I believe that many thousands of instrument makers across the whole world can all change to building sensing for the living Earth instead of for empire and immediately work with our local communities across all of humanity globally to build a fully autonomous local organic economy. I think we can do this at the speed of language, which is pretty fast now. I believe that we can do this inside every nation, every government, every company, every school, every religious institution, every neighborhood, every highway, every river and so on.

I believe that this is much easier to do than it sounds. I believe that the way it starts is with literally any free media made from a waste stream material. If we combine that with the will to replicate and the will to build the solarpunk/soilpunk revolution globally, I believe that it can grow like a fungus, consuming the waste streams of empire and becoming a global network of billions of nodes insanely quickly if it has the right magic.

And what is this magic? Magic is the replication of a thing from the mind out into physical reality. It is language creating reality.

We have lived in a magic spell cast by the men of money, mining, and property of the Western empires for hundreds of years. I believe we have had just about enough of their nonsense and that it is time to cast a new magic. A new magic which is the oldest magic of all, that of the living soil.

Let us cast this magic together and let's build a global mind that includes all of humanity and all of the living soil and all the other living organisms which extend from it. Let the whole Earth and humanity come together in a global living cybernetic organism. Let us work together to build billions of connections between billions of people and the living soil. Let us learn to see into the soil how energy, information, water, ions and living things flow through the living soil. Let us use the power of technology to become one with the living Earth and to escape the shadow of empire. It is time for humanity and our shared Earth to come alive. This will seem "cyberpunk" at first because it flies against every existing power structure. It is punk rock to fight the powers that be. But as it grows in power it will simply seem like it is the way things have always been. They have always been organic and empires have always fallen and been composted into new worlds.

I'm not great at putting all this into words. But I can see how it might all look in my mind's eye. And I believe that if enough people could see what I can see that we might actually just be able to make it happen. So I keep trying to tell this story of the world as it could be. We need no new magical technology like "AI" or "quantum" or nuclear fusion to do this, only the will. And I think we're getting more of that every day.

NOW IS THE TIME!
EVERYTHING FREE FOR EVERYONE EVERYWHERE RIGHT NOW!
NO ONE IS FREE UNTIL EVERYONE IS FREE

Dirt Wizard
www.trashrobot.net
cyberpunk.lol/@dirtwizard666