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?
I did not ready OPs question in the way that they have big problems with the current postal system, but more as a prompt for an interesting thought experiment. But I would like to point out some problems I currently see:
- highly centralized system, usually on a national scale. This makes it really hard to actually manage regional differences in environment and need. also top down decision making
- profit driven companies are the backbone of the postal system in many parts of the world. the current setup might be more incentivized by the profit motive and national laws and not by the needs of the people working there or those using the postal services.
- usage of time as (one of) the most important metric for a postal service, resulting in multiple tiers of service based on how much you spend. also resulting in the usage of planes to send stuff, sometimes even when sending stuff nationally
- a solar punk society would still have to figure out how to cooperate with postal systems of different continents / societies. Imagine having a solar punk society trying to make a deal with current USA on how their postal systems should cooperate.
Fair enough. I did not see it as a prompt.
I guess that problem becomes really much simpler once you have a fleet of autonomous electric vehicles and decarbonized grid. From heavy trucks down to individual light-weight drones dropping things on rooftops/balconies/urban dropsites I think the problem will pretty much solve itself, whatever economic system is behind.
Yes, you will likely need some central nexuses depending on how your transportation network is organized.
a solar punk society would still have to figure out how to cooperate with postal systems of different continents / societies. Imagine having a solar punk society trying to make a deal with current USA on how their postal systems should cooperate.
Postal services were one of the first thing to organize internationally. The UPU was founded in the 19th century. The problem in itself is simple:
- Agree on how to state which country to send it to.
- Write an address in a way that locals understand it
- Pay the local post the fee they consider fair to distribute it.
I consider this problem solved and I don’t see why we should assume it becomes more complicated than that? If you live in a place with free deliveries, then you may still have to pay a fee to deliver to another country. And from another country you will at least pay the fee to get your stuff to the border.
My country tried to privatize mail. It failed. Why: it’s very hard to operate profitably.
Postal service is privatized in Germany and highly profitable.
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.
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.
Probably it might take a little longer, because less use of planes and less pressure because no economic incentives and better work conditions. Also here are some ideas for a more solar punk postal system:
I think there might a less individualized approach to receiving letters… In my building we have 40 living units and everyone has their own letterbox. In a more community based approach to this there might be just one letter box to save resources(material and time to find the right letter box) or there might be rotating responsibility to get the letters from the local post office.
Changing the responsibility of the last mile transport from a specialized worker to some kind of community task seems pretty fun to me, like communities could decide how often / which time of the day / how to transport and hand out the letters. Also the post office would become a kind of hub where every group of people living in the area would meet each other regularly and maybe that would also lead to interesting things.
Not sure I want my neighbor pawing through my mail, or “accidentally” losing my ballot, or borrowing” my packages.
Privacy and security in the mail is crucial.
People are people. Human nature isn’t going to change just because the culture shifts to solarpunk.
To me trusting the unknown mail person more than your neighboor is an unexpected perspective.
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.
Marketplaces/parcels are a good catch. I could see a society with more emphasis on reuse, DIY, and maintenance having an even bigger reliance on something adjacent to eBay, where you can buy (or trade in the future) component parts scavenged from old world technology. Like, if you have an old appliance or vehicle that you’re limping along, and a part breaks, there may not be a major manufacturer cranking them out anymore - your options may be to commission one at a local machine co-op, or to get online and find one pulled from a compatible system. IRL I use eBay a lot for this while fixing computers. Need a back plate for a specific model of dell laptop they only made for a year? Someone is selling them for some reason. The future version might be more akin to asking around on forums and just trading favors, or there might be a dozen online flea markets and junkyards you can rely on for parts etc. Who knows
So yeah, I could see online marketplaces being really important, even in a culture with way more emphasis on scavenging and making do.
Drones are an interesting option - maybe good for taking shortcuts across terrain humans don’t normally cross, like canyons nobody’s built a bridge over? But if they’re reliable enough I could see unmanned ones playing a role in rural postal services.
I dont agree with takes, that mainly focus on technological solutions that want to introduce massive amounts of new machinery. Those need materials(lithum for batterys, rare earths in general, metal for wiring and construction, etc) just to build and maintain, but also to actually function and navigate in really complex environments like cities(like lots of 5G antennas or markers and landing/drop off pads).
The materials needed for those technological solutions are currently extracted from the earth with very high costs for all of nature including humans. Those factors are currently not really considered when profit driven corps extract the ressources. Extracting ressources from the earth in a solar punk way(non destructive, good conditions for those doing the task) is probably way harder and I honestly doubt that it would be worth the effort.
Yeah, a lot of people are really still very excited about electric vehicles without remembering that all we do is adding more vehicles and more transfer (and therefore loss) of the energy needed to run them, and that no amount of renewables can really keep pace with our idiotic obsession of traveling thousands of kilometers, often to get away from places that are ugly because we filled them with roads and traffic.
In a solarpunk future we might first want to figure out which comforts we can easily create at home with renewable resources. That squishy pillow you ordered from China and want to have delivered by Solar High Speed Rail in some utopian future? Did you know there’s probably at least 10 plant species growing in your region (possible considered weeds and/or invasives) that would make excellent pillow material? So bring back crafts, because things should be beautiful and long-lasting, not cheap and convenient. A solar- or wind- or water-powered machine to run the mill that makes local fluffy textiles? Of course, to do all the work that’s dangerous or tedious, why not?
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.