I hope that readers of this list are making or are willing to make an effort to grapple with the recent IPPC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5° (aka IPCC SR-15).
Probably not a few readers - I would guess fewer in the U.S. - are aware of the growing School Strike movement, the Extinction Rebellion, and so forth. There being an immediate need for radical change in social relations, particularly those of production and distribution, the people of the planet are jeopardized by the threat of centralized control of the most basic communications infrastructure on the Net (the so-called social-media). Readers are also aware that the Free (Libre) Software Movement has, de facto, prepared for decades to step up with tried, true tested, available substitutes -- substitutes with many superior attributes -- ranging from basic email, netnews, and chat programs to basic office software, distributed social software and so on. We have not, like the corporations, spent two decades trying to learn how to manipulate people's behavior on and offline. We have built some rough and ready infrastructure parts for helping people be part of a global society populated by autonomous individuals and structured by cooperative association. Because the world needs such extreme motions as 15%+ reductions in emissions in developed countries **IN ONE YEAR** then **THE SAME AGAIN FOR SEVERAL YEARS TO COME** it is, it seems to me, probable that the road that avoids hell nevertheless requires immediate, mass deployment of basic libre communications and networking tools -- we can do quite a bit with micro-machines like PIs, freedomboxes, whatever. A chaos is rapidly coming. We can help the passage of the people through that period. Now is not a time that calls for further refining of the software. I am not suggesting new development projects, though of course some small ones may be helpful on the margins. Rather: Now is a time that calls for mass, global deployment and adoption at the grass roots - as part of a mass response to the immediate demands of environmental damage mitigation and adaptation. Now is the time to much more widely deploy what we already have among ourselves. How do we begin to carry out such an action, across the whole of the libre movement? -t _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
