Last month gave my "Technological Narratives: Solarpunk, Cyberpunk, Popculture" talk at HOPE2020 conference. It's finally available in video form! You can watch it at this link!

HOPE stands for Hackers On Planet Earth, a US hacker conference organized by 2600 magazine, The Hacker Quarterly. Normally it happens in the New York, but due to the pandemic situation this year it was moved online. The conference featured dozens of great talks and workshops across 9 days, including speakers such as Cory Doctorow or Idalin Bobé from TechActivist.Org.

Feel free to browse all the talks here or watch them on The Internet Archive!

I've just finished working on an app - The Story Engine Card Creator based on The Story Engine by Peter Chiykowski, with its source available on Github on aGPLv3!

The Story

A few months ago a friend sent me an interesting Kickstarter campaign - The Story Engine, a card game of writing prompts, helping people generate new stories or challenge themselves to write short fiction about whatever they draw. It offered five kinds of cards, each presenting you with a few options to choose, even after the initial random drawing happened.

An Agent card (An Artist / A Dancer / A Writer / A Musician), an Engine card (Wants To Finally Tell The Truth About/Is Trying To Spread A Lie About), an Anchor card (A Shrine / A Simulation / A Drug / A Dream), a Conflict card (But Their Family Stands In The Way / But It Will Cost Them The Only Family They Ever Known) and finally, an Aspect (Blighted / Thoughtful / Icy / Brilliant). Drawn those from their separate decks, I can tell a story about

An Brilliant Artist, Who Wants To …

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Sustainable Cities by James McKay

Wstęp od tłumaczy

Solarpunk jest gatunkiem usiłującym zredefiniować nasze opowieści, wyjść poza ograniczenia poznawcze i językowe znacznej większości fikcji drugiej połowy XX i XXI wieku. Bardzo mocno bazuje na koncepcie sustainability, które niestety nie ma bezpośredniego odpowiednika w języku polskim. W słowniku możemy znaleźć termin „zrównoważony rozwój” pochodzący raczej z narracji korporacyjnych i kapitalistycznych; samo sustainability żadnego rozwoju w sobie nie zawiera. Jest w nim równowaga, harmonia, jest możliwość długotrwałego, samodzielnego podtrzymania swojego stanu: samopodtrzymywalność czy samoutrzymywalność. Jest w nim coś z żywej homeostazy i ekologii bardziej niż ekonomii czy cybernetyki.

Po dłuższym zastanowieniu proponujemy więc nowe tłumaczenie: trwalny.

Aktualizacja 08.11.20: Po kilku miesiącach dalszych dyskusji zdaliśmy sobie sprawę, że określenie trwalny jest nieco zbyt statyczne dla dynamicznej równowagi ekologicznej. Znacznie lepsza może być odżywalność, za chorwackim terminem održivost i rosyjskim ustoychivost'.

Solarpunk

W ciągu ostatniej dekady wiele osób pisało o Solarpunku – głównie po roku 2014.

Jako gatunek jest on jeszcze bardzo słabo zdefiniowany.

Poniższy Manifest Solarpunka jest kreatywną re-adaptacją pomysłów i postulatów wielu autorów. Część z nich …

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This blogpost is a written version of a talk I originally was to give at re:publica 2019 in Berlin. Sadly, I couldn't attend the conference due to some health problems.

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EDIT: Thanks to Artes Mobiles I had an opportunity to give this talk at 36th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, Germany, in December 2019. You can find the slides at slides.com.

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Several years ago I visited a hackerspace for the first time. At the time I was a Computational Neuroscience student, wanting to learn so much, but being constantly told I need to "wait out" my first few years of theoretical studies before I can lay my hands on any EEG equipment. I heard that hackers learn everything hands-on and are not limiting their curiosity. That proved true.

Hackerspace CC-BY-SA Mike Liuzzi

I immediately fell in love with what I saw: people exploring technology not waiting for anyone's permission. If they - or their friends - had a problem, they just started looking for a way to solve it. They were able to fully dedicate …

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This is the second blogpost from my "technological narratives" series. The first was How Elon Musk takes Wikipedia's place.

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Cory Doctorow CC-BY-SA Gregory Katsoulis / Pixabay Anonymous

What might come to a surprise to a lot of people, the hacker movement exists outside of the Hollywood movies and computer games with a "hacking" skill. It's a full-fledged culture with its own set of values - like technological ownership and independence, a right to privacy, knowledge and cultural participation without limits.

Hackers are much more than black-hat cybercriminals and edgy teenagers breaking into school networks. How come we don't hear about hacker-inventors, creators of the infrastructure we all rely on - or activists pointing out the problems in the corporate systems all around us? Why have they become a cliche molotov-throwing anarchists while we completely omit squats and co-op culture?

Simply put, hacking culture does a very bad job at communicating its values and achievements to the mainstream. With very few dedicated advocates or storytellers understanding them, it's easy for a writer to use hacking as an aesthetic for …

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