Hi! Fabber here with a love for DIY and open hardware and who wants to free the world of proprietary techs.

First thing to realize is that the process to produce these things is not magic. They are known, available and free to use. You can create (vastly inefficient and oversized) transistors, solar cells, batteries or motors in your garage. It is actually kind of a sport in the hackerspace community to show how far you can go in building your own stuff.

In order to get better quality, you will need to automate these manual processes and build the machines that create the components. Turns out people are on it too. The 3d printing movement did not deliver its promises (yet) but it did deliver a set of sturdy and cheap open frameworks to build small scale machines.

From there you have people going in both direction: making tools to create more complex components and also exploring how to create the simpler ingredients (like copper wire for the motor windings).

Economy of scale will also make sense in an anarchist society so I do think we would still settle on one big machines for one component that feeds a whole area, but it being open, it being easily duplicable, would make a lot of experiments possible, would allow people to tune the production for their specific needs and who knows, at one point we may reach the point where it makes sense to have modular factories (able to produce a lot of different things, at a lower pace) spread over the world rather than mass-producing factories (produces very fast but only one type of item) feeding the whole world market.

I am pushing for tinkerers to get more interested in machines design, in automation design. We need open source factories that can produce the components of open source factories. That’s the seed I am working towards.

There is nothing inherently incompatible between a Solarpunk society and advanced electrical component production.

Sure, production with planned obsolescence (and thus fast innovation) will probably go down and people will make do with their 10 year old phone or so. And in general there will probably just not be so much demand for it.

There is also nearly always more environmentally safe and sustainable production methods, they are just somewhat less cost effective or in other ways not competitive enough on a global capitalist market.

i think manufacturing would remain centralised, since the infrastructure is already established & shouldn’t be wasted. demand would shrink due to reuse and recycling so supply could be slowed down massively, meaning distribution could happen slower and in more sustainable ways. assembly however could easily be done locally if we can establish strong universal standards. i think 3D printing (with recycled plastic, at least, if not something plant derived) & FOSS designs would help facilitate this.

Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017) offered one possibility

• scavengers collecting wasted and disposed products
• which are fed into some form of disassembler (fibers unwoven, metals reclaimed)
• which stock up material banks
• to be fed into the next generation of 3D printers (print clothing, furniture, electronics)

Let’s start with the easy:

• motors: the simplest electrical motor (a brushed linear motor) can be made of coiled wire and a battery (a battery will “ride” like a tiny train when placed inside a conductive coil and supplied contacts to it)

I mean to say that motors are simple. It only gets hard when they get very big or very special (or when power density gets high). Some people recycle some metal (or mine new metal if they really need to). Some metals are drawn into wire (copper), others supplied in blocks and sheets (steel, aluminum), some place has a CNC lathe, some place has a ball bearing factory, and thus it goes. If it’s a permanent magnet motor, someone needs to make magnets too.

Obviously, trade and industry must exist - some place has raw materials, some place has favourable locations for energy production and storage, some place is preferred by people for living.

• solar panels: intermediate hardness, more precision is needed, but the manufacturing process is not impossibly heavy on machinery and knowledge… you need to cast silicon ingots, cut them into thin wafers, dope the wafers with other substances, deposit wires on them, assemble the cells into arrays with more wires, and seal them between glass or other transparent material, optionally adding a frame of aluminum or something else

…and if one doesn’t have access to the tech to make solar cells, one can make solar concentrators and use solar power with heat engines. :)

• microchips (not your old-school transistor but memory and processors): level 9000 hard, a complicated supply chain is needed, the first questions of an anarchist might be “what level of hierarchy does this supply chain impose upon us?” and “what tech level can I climb onto without appreciable hierarchy?”

The machines to make microchips require extreme precision, lots of complicated engineering and cost a fortune. Nobody will ever let a J Random Hacker tinker with them (risk of damage to the machine), but a great number of random hackers insisting on independence from the Great Chip Collective - they could build their own chip-making ecosystem. Maybe it won’t make fast or tiny chips, but it will make some kind of chips - maybe not enough to model the planet’s climate or predict protein folding - but enough to run most industrial machines.

I think the best text that briefly discusses the role of technology in a solarpunk way is Post-civ!.

But if you ask me personally, I think that a post-capitalist society would organize and manage production in a totally different sort of way that does away with mass production and work as a separate field of human activity. That means these electronics would be produced only when they’re needed to with recycled or slowly extracted materials (see bio mining). I’d think we’d still see vast networks of collaboration similar to our current society, but without massive logistical chains that are deeply detrimental to the environment.

There’s also room to reconsider what we prioritize in a design. Should simplicity and ease of repair be given a higher priority? Does a blender need a touchscreen interface and multi-layer circuit boards? Or would buttons and straight-through soldering be easier to fix, saving the touchscreen for something that needs it?

Our societies have made have incredible advances in technology, packing processing power (and everything else) into ever-smaller and cheaper packages, and as a result, we’ve put it into everything. I think a more solarpunk world might allocate those resources more carefully. Maybe a phone needs to be dense and small because you carry it around, but the board in a microwave or radio doesn’t need to be.

I sound a bit like my older relatives talking about cars here, but electronics from thirty or fourty years ago I can fix with some googling, a soldering iron, and a new capacitor bought off eBay. To me, that’s more solarpunk.

University and big industrial corporates pool their databases and money together to produce federated access to 3d design and software systems, meanwhile public standards, hard materials, tools and relevant certifications etc become more accessible to the majority.

Meanwhile further upstream we could perhaps see something similar to the OSI model for the internet?

Dunno

The less realistic version I might put in a story rather than propose as a legitimate plan for society would be the reclamation of components from ewaste. Our society has produced and discarded vast quantities of electronics. In a setting where production has been pared back, either by collapse (environmental or societal) or societal will, I could see masses of ewaste becoming almost a resource to be harvested, future generations hopefully putting the surviving parts to a more careful, long-lasting use.

The capability (skillets, industrial knowhow, manufacturing capabilities) would need to be maintained, but production could be slowed (and probably would if, as poVoq said, more environmentally-sane production methods were implemented). There’s a balance to walk there, between a society living off its stored fat, forgetting how to make the things it relies on, and our current model of unsustainable infinite growth.

The sourcing of those reclaimed components is also ripe for exploitation and wasteful/environmentally-destructive industry - it’s easy to picture it looking more like the sweatshop from the second blade runner movie than the kind of careful, deliberate co-ops a solarpunk society would hopefully emphasize.

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