Lysander Spooner was an early anarchist who sought to make mail accessible to everyone, and started the American Letter Mail Company to challenge the government. He was wildly successful, and though the government drove him into the ground in court, his legacy is the now common public expectation that stamps should be affordable for everyone.

His system included free local delivery, but otherwise, our current postal system could operate with little adaptation to a solarpunk world. Mail is machine sorted, high-tech logistical systems save fuel and time while maximizing the amount of mail transported. Postal workers are all organized. Sending mail is available to everyone, not just an exclusive class.

I guess the biggest change would be workplace democracy, so that postal workers could elect their managers, and a situation where someone like Louis DeJoy being in charge would be impossible.

What is the problem with a postal system both small scale and large scale? It works today, why wouldn’t it in a solarpunk world? I guess with more electric and automated vehicles?

Even if you go the anarchist way with labor provided by volunteers, there are people who like driving. I fail to see where the problem is?

Pneumatic tubes

So for the cities and really rural areas I imagine it’d stay much the same. The cities and denser towns would probably still have humans walking a physical route through their neighborhoods, but between towns they’d hopefully transition from long haul trucks and airplanes to high speed trains. In places like rural Alaska and northern Canada, where post is currently delivered by fairly casual networks of pilots who just kick the thing out the door tied to a parachute, I imagine that’s going to stay more or less the same too.

Everywhere else, where they’re using jeeps and postal trucks for the last few miles from postoffice to house, a more solarpunk society would probably allocate electric or biodiesel vehicles to the job. I think a more solarpunk rural town might have denser communities and more conserved wild land, which might make some of their routes a little shorter (perhaps even short enough for train -> bicycle), but there are always going to be farmers, millers, sawyers, homesteaders, and other people who need/want to be out on their own, in addition to industries that are rural and transient enough not to justify establishing public transit, like lumber camps. For those places, small vehicles are going to remain practical. The postal service would hopefully still get close using trains etc, and perhaps the average driver might have a few options open so they can choose between say a truck and a motorcycle depending on the route and the load that day, but someone is going to have to drive it the rest of the way there.

I often look back at older ways of doing things, and I often find the more adhoc, human networks people relies on to be admirable. But in this case the postal service is something I hope would stay largely the same, as it does a great job despite a lot of polititians’ attempts to break it, slashed budgets, and our society needing ever more rapid delivery. I hope something much like the USPS exists in a solarpunk future.

Interesting question, usually when people ask how a communist-adjacent world would work, it’s always ‘but what about prisons?’

On a small scale, I see people that want to take care of their community organize into groups to do all kinds of tasks, from cleaning the streets to delivering letters. With enough people and organization this system can be made efficient and flexible.

For longer distances, even in a solarpunk world there would be a need to move goods around the world, postal organizations might entrust their parcels to trains/ships going in the right direction.

Bicycles and trains

Point express or carrier pigeon

My solarpunk dream is to stop receiving junk mail made of plasticized paper.

Hot take:

Packages though? Just have a Pickup store. Its part warehouse, part store, and you can get help finding and grabbing your boxes, or do it yourself. Is it a bit like a grocery store? I think so.

Problems to solve:

I hope one day we can get brick and mortar stores that sell products people want. I walked into a hardware store recently that had on their website multiple versions of the item I wanted, in stock at this store. Get there and they do not have what I’m looking for. 😮‍💨

Also ordered two items from a big box and delivery defaults to sending it to the store. So I have one item, but not the other. The item at the store cost $3, so I don’t care? It’s theirs now.

My proposed solution:

What if, in an anarchist way, we had an open source service that keeps track of what is in stock in a store? You just scan items as you go and they are kept track of.

timedoors with tempads like from the Loki TVA

EDIT: I MISREAD THIS AS PORTAL SYSTEM

I am rather surprised no one mentioned delivery drones yet 😅

I don’t think they are necessarily the best solution, but I agree with others that the last mile delivery is probably the main problem and also where the most worker abuse happens (although the Amazon parcel sorting centers are also bad).

Co-utilizing overland busses and trains is common around the world and is probably more resource efficient to transport letters and smaller parcels.

But at a core I think the real question is: how will online market places adapt in a Solarpunk world? Hardly anyone sends paper letters anymore (other that bills and letters from government 😑), but online shops and the parcel delivery services are in a symbiotic relationship and you can’t have one without the other.

I think online shops for niche products will likely continue to exist and have demand for, but the overall volume of parcel deliveries will probably go down.

Having higher density housing would make centralized pick up locations more feasible in cities, which would drastically cut down on the energy requirements. Something like a university mail pickup. Rural would probably need to stay the same, though maybe the delivery trucks could be electric and autonomous?