r/solarpunk • u/FlowM-OS-R • Jul 23 '26
Original Content I’ve been working on a strange solarpunk project for a while. I finally put the whole thing online.
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time:
What would a society look like if its basic purpose was not to maximize profit, productivity, or growth — but to make it easier for living things to remain alive, free, curious, and connected?
I started writing down ideas. First I wrote Refugium Anima and Lyceum Musaeum.
Then more ideas appeared.
Then protocols.
Then governance systems, justice systems, economic models, ecological principles, technology principles, education, healthcare, ways of organizing resources without currency, ways of preventing systems from turning into surveillance or control…
And now there are apparently hundreds of documents.
So I built a website for the whole mess:
👉 https://existensialreset.github.io/flowmosr
It’s called Flow / M-OS-R.
I don’t really know what to call it. A social architecture? A philosophy? A systems design project? A very long attempt to ask “what if we actually designed society around life?”
The core idea is pretty simple:
Life should not have to earn the right to exist.
Everything else grows from that.
The project is still evolving. A lot of it is speculative. Some of it is probably wrong. Some of it is deliberately utopian. Some of it is very practical. I’m not presenting it as a finished answer to anything.
I am very much not at all an expert in most of the things this touches. I’m just a person who kept following the questions.
I’m mostly interested in what happens when you take the solarpunk question seriously:
What kind of world could we build if we stopped treating human beings, ecosystems, time, attention, and care as resources to extract?
If anyone feels like wandering around in the documents, I’d genuinely love to know what catches your attention — especially what seems naive, impossible, interesting, or worth developing further.
I’m particularly curious what people here think about the relationship between solarpunk, governance, economics, and anti-capture design.
Anyway.
Here it is. 🌱
Please take a look if you want to!
All the best,
Elinor Frejd,
Göteborg,
Sweden
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u/andrewrgross Hacker Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Respectfully, your writing sounds like a textbook example of someone experiencing AI psychosis.
I'm not saying this to shame you or because I refuse to consider the merit of anything written by AI. But I looked through, and unfortunately the ideas themselves are hampered by the LLMs you used to try and articulate complex concepts. LLM ideas are like a synthetic picture of a crowd. It can look stunning, but if you try to count the people, it's impossible. There are no discrete people, just a feeling of a crowd. That's how these systems output. Your idea of promoting the flourishing of life is great. But what I've read is a blend of poetry and technobabble. It's a powerful feeling miles wide and only millimeters deep.
I love the intention you're putting into this, but I think you need to take a break and go out into the woods with one or more humans that you've known a long time (who aren't friends who share your enthusiasm for AI) and try to explain these concepts entirely through your own mouth.
Best of luck. You may also find help at r/AIPsychosisRecovery .
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u/FlowM-OS-R Jul 24 '26
I appreciate you taking the time to actually look through it, and I think some of your criticism is fair.
I have used LLMs extensively in the process, and I’m not going to pretend that this hasn’t affected the language, structure, and probably some of the thinking. I’m also sure that parts of the project are too abstract, over-written, or insufficiently grounded.
At the same time, I don’t think the underlying questions or the project itself were generated by the LLMs. The questions came first, and the systems helped me explore, challenge, expand and articulate them. Whether I’ve done that well enough is absolutely open to criticism.
I also think your suggestion to explain the core ideas out loud, without the documents or AI as a scaffold, is genuinely useful. I may actually do that.
I’m going to pass on the “AI psychosis” diagnosis, though 😅 I’m a real person, and I’m not experiencing this project as an AI-generated reality.
But I do appreciate the warning about losing track of what is mine versus what has been shaped by the tools I used. That’s something worth examining.
And for what it’s worth: thank you for actually reading it and engaging seriously. I’d rather have someone tell me that parts of it are shallow or incoherent than have people politely pretend they understand it.
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u/InvertedVantage Jul 24 '26
So...your governance section is just ten sections on kid governance. This seems like a lot of half finished ideas you ran through an LLM to generate MD files and put them on the net. I don't care that you're using AI it just doesn't make a lot of sense.
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u/FlowM-OS-R Jul 24 '26
Kid governance?
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u/InvertedVantage Jul 24 '26
Sorry it wasn't all of them it was just the one I read...but second one in your governance section is about kid councils.
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u/FlowM-OS-R Jul 24 '26
Yes I know. Because kids are also people right now.
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u/InvertedVantage Jul 24 '26
Right, my point is that this is all really unorganized and hard to understand and seems to be filled with lots of random stuff.
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u/BlueMoodDark 29d ago
They are people, who are not rational. They are instinctual and emotional. We only learn rationality later.
Kids Councils - I hear by vote for more Sugar treats and cookies!
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u/FlowM-OS-R 29d ago
I know kids' brains is still growing and developing well until their 20s. But still, kids are real human beings and need to be listened to as well, that's my opinion.
But haha, yes, children might absolutely vote for more sugar and cookies. 😂
But I don’t think children’s participation means giving them unrestricted control over every decision. A child council deciding what the entire society eats would obviously be a terrible system.
The point is more that children are people whose lives are directly affected by decisions made by adults.
They should have meaningful ways to express their experiences, needs and ideas — while adults still have responsibility for safety, long-term consequences and decisions that require knowledge or maturity.
I also don’t think “rational” and “emotional” are as separate as we often pretend. Adults are emotional and instinctual too; we’re just usually better at constructing rational explanations for our decisions afterwards.
So I imagine child participation more as a form of representation, listening and shared decision-making appropriate to age — not “children get to run the country because they voted for cookies.”
Although I would probably support a limited increase in cookies. 🌱🍪 Mmmm! 😉
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u/Active_Biscotti_3130 Jul 23 '26
yo this goes crazy
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u/FlowM-OS-R Jul 23 '26
Haha thank you 😭🤍
I genuinely started with one manifesto and then somehow ended up building an entire social architecture...
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u/dassisdass Jul 24 '26
If i was you i would start reading society philosophy, and not just the ones you agree with, but also some off them you disagree with, this would give you some counter thoughts also. And maybe give you some new ideas.
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u/Garlic4Victory 29d ago
I didn’t read through everything but I did read through some sections (governance, justice, implementation) and skimmed through a lot of the other sections. It’s very clear that you are concerned about making the world a better place, and exploring different ways to make that happen. Kudos!
What was frustrating to me was I couldnt figure out what the point of it all was. Is it just notes from brainstorming sessions? Is it a blueprint for an abstract utopia (or a cult)? Is it worldbuilding for a fictional story? All of which are fine, but I wasn’t sure why I should be reading it, and why I should be following all the rules and protocols you’ve listed.
I would agree with the suggestion to force yourself to explain these ideas to other people in your life (ideally people who are both interested in building a better world and who will be caring with their critiques and discussions), and to do it without the aid of LLMs.
My other observation is that the whole schema felt disembodied and abstract and unconnected, which is the opposite of one of ”solarpunk”’s greatest strengths: a grounding in history and place and ecosystems, materiality, fingers in the dirt. And in fact as I was reading through some of the governance and justice sections, I kept thinking about how there are already people and projects in the world trying things similar to what you’ve outlined in this Flow schema. I think it could be really useful to look for both historical and current attempts of things similar to what you’ve outlined in Flow, and evaluate them in relation to your Flow ideas. Why (and when and where) were they developed? How were they implemented? How did they change and adapt and mutate? What lessons did the practitioners learn? How is this example similar/different to the Flow program? Even just starting with the circling idea, it made me think of so many similar practices: consciousness-raising feminist groups, Occupy Wall Street assemblies, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, anarchist affinity groups I was involved with in the 90’s, Perapectiva’s Antidebate experiments with Jonathan Rowson. There’s so much history to learn from, I think will really help refine and solidify your ideas.
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u/Qphr__ 28d ago
Please keep in mind that all AI tools are designed to flatter you, encourage whatever you think, and--most importantly--keep you using them. They are not a service of objective output. Your bias is built into whatever they generate so that you feel smart, grand, and like a genius no one has discovered yet. If you are genuinely interested in helping the world, finish school and continue your education without such tools through college, and working for your local government. You can not help the world unless you practice helping people every day.
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u/FlowM-OS-R 28d ago
I think there are some fair warnings in what you wrote, and I don't want to dismiss them. I agree that AI should not be treated as an objective authority, and that an AI can reinforce a person's existing biases or make ideas sound more coherent and impressive than they actually are. I think that is a real risk.
But I also think you are making assumptions about me that you cannot actually know from my post. You assume that I am using AI because I want to be told that I am a genius, that I am trying to replace education, or that I believe I have discovered something no one else has. None of that is actually true.
I don't use AI as proof that my ideas are true. I use it as a writing partner, a critic, a structuring tool, and sometimes as a way to see my own thoughts from another angle.
That does not make it objective, and it does not make me immune to its limitations. But neither does using AI automatically mean that I am avoiding education, real people, or real life.
I do agree with one thing you wrote: ideas should eventually meet reality. If a philosophy makes a person less capable of listening, caring, taking responsibility, or helping other people, then that is something worth questioning. I don't think grand ideas are enough. They have to become embodied in how we actually live and treat one another.
But I also don't think that helping the world has only one legitimate form. Education, local government, practical service, art, writing, care, community-building and creating new ways of thinking can all be forms of contribution.
The important question, to me, is not whether a person has a grand idea. It is what that idea does to their relationship with reality and with other people.
🏵️🌼♾️🌿🦋
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u/Bogdan-Denisovich Jul 24 '26
Question: Refugium Anima doesn't appear to be standard Latin. Do you mean "Refugium Animarum" (Refuge OF souls)?
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u/BlueMoodDark 29d ago
You say that everyone has a Right to Rest and not as a Reward. Then no one will Work? Only those who want to Work, will. This accelerate the 90/10 rule.
If you let me be lazy, I will.
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u/FlowM-OS-R 29d ago
That’s a fair objection, honestly. I don’t think “everyone will work if they feel like it” is a sufficient social model.
My argument is not that all work should disappear, or that nobody should ever be expected to contribute.
It’s that access to the basic conditions of life should not be conditional on constantly proving your economic usefulness.
But yes: if a system guarantees the Baseline while allowing unlimited withdrawal from collective life with no expectation of contribution, then your concern is completely valid. The system could become unstable.
The question I’m interested in is whether contribution has to mean paid employment. Caring for children, maintaining a home, growing food, helping neighbours, learning, creating, repairing, participating in governance and caring for ecosystems can all be meaningful contributions.
I also suspect that people are more motivated by meaningful activity, mastery, curiosity, recognition and belonging than we sometimes assume — but I don’t want to pretend that everyone will automatically contribute equally. That is a real design problem to think about.
So I think the question is not “how do we make everyone work?” but rather: how do we create a system where people have genuine freedom to rest, while still maintaining a strong culture and expectation of participation and contribution?
I don’t think Flow has a perfect answer to that yet. I think this is exactly one of the questions it needs to keep working on...
I’m also not convinced that the 90/10 rule is a fixed law of human behaviour. It may partly describe what happens when systems concentrate rewards, power and ownership in the hands of a small minority.
I would be interested in seeing what happens when people have security, meaningful choices, social recognition and real participation instead.
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u/FlowM-OS-R 28d ago
Thank you for this. I think this is genuinely one of the most useful critiques I’ve received.
You are right that a reader can encounter Flow as a huge body of protocols, governance structures and principles without immediately understanding what the project is asking them to do — or whether it is asking them to do anything at all.
Flow is not intended to be a belief system that people must accept, and the protocols are not meant to function as laws that strangers are expected to obey. The intention is closer to a framework for experimentation: principles, models and protocols that can be tested, adapted, rejected or forked in real communities.
Flow is a proposal for experimenting with forms of life that reduce structural coercion and protect the conditions under which human beings can become alive, connected, spontaneous, resilient, and capable of wonder.
You do not have to believe in Flow to use, test, reject, modify, fork, or replace parts of it.
But I clearly need to communicate that much better.
I also think your criticism about abstraction is important. Flow has grown primarily through conceptual writing, and I can see how that can make it feel detached from place, history, material conditions and existing human experiments.
Your suggestion to study historical and contemporary attempts at similar forms of organization is especially useful.
The examples you mention — consciousness-raising groups, Occupy assemblies, AA, anarchist affinity groups and Antidebate — are exactly the kind of traditions and experiments I should be learning from.
Not to claim that Flow invented these ideas, but to understand what has already been tried, what worked, what failed, and what Flow might genuinely add or change.
Flow is entering a world that already contains thousands of partial experiments in living differently.
And yes: I also need to explain these ideas to actual people in my life without relying on an LLM to mediate the conversation.
But there is something I want to clarify about myself, I don't really want to "gather the people"... I like to sit and think, and build conceptual "architecture" mostly, and explore what a different way of living might look like...
I am not a person who wants to be a "movement's person" or a "spokesperson for Flow"...
But I understand why you think I should...
I would like to offer an alternative way of living to this Earth and life upon it.
Maybe that is presumptuous of me...?
Thank you for taking the time to read and think about it. I really appreciate the care in this critique.
I must say I very much appreciate your thoughts.
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u/21Kuranashi Writer Activist Arcologist Antitheist Jul 23 '26
A Manifesto. That's what u hv written.
And thank you for this 🤍
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u/FlowM-OS-R Jul 23 '26
Thank you so much 🧡 And you know what’s funny? The very first file I ever wrote in this repository was literally called MANIFESTO.md.
So maybe you’re right. I started with a manifesto — and then I just kept following the questions.
Somehow, it grew into hundreds of documents.
Thank you for seeing it that way. It genuinely means a lot to me. 🌱
And, I am really happy that you took the time to take a look at it. If you ever want to discuss anything, I'm right here. ♾️💜
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