Sam Butler

The Internet Can Run Without Data Centers 🔊

Any people on the East Coast want to set-up a Garage cluster and start serving pages? Get in touch, for real! (Mainly looking for people in Virginia for now!)

Garage: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

Togepage: https://tog.page

Community Media: https://communitymedia.video (@ajroach42@retro.social)

Undeniable: https://undeniablenetwork.com

#DataCenters #Energy #Permacomputing #Network #Tech #Online #Internet #Server #DataCenter #Water #Climate #Environment #Pollution #Degrowth #Alternative #Drought #Pollution #ClimateChange

One of the single most impactful climate emergency changes: Allowing front-yard and driveway businesses.

This would make neighborhoods walkable over night. New jobs in local places. Cafes, grocery shops, repair clinics, tool libraries, arcades, and beyond - right on your street.

Destroying oil demand, commutes, and car dependency over night.

This policy change can happen in as little as 3 sentences, according to Hazel Borys and Strong Towns. pHow can we make this happen everywhere?

Check out the full video, "Why Did We Make Front Yard Businesses Illegal?", which shows some awesome examples and gets into what we can do today — from About Here, Urbanarium, and Uytae Lee.

And share and boost to get people talking about this. This is one of the first and most important changes we can make, for climate emergency transitions. From a path dependency standpoint, it needs to happen first too -- making what we can walkable and low energy to start, and then seeing what we need.

#WalkableCommunities #FuckCars #Zoning #ClimateEmergency #ClimateChange #Climate #Reform #Policy #Local #Transit #Jobs #Community #Suburbia #Environment #Infrastructure #Services #Producers #SmallBusiness #Community #Society #JustTransition #Urbanism #GlobalWarming #Degrowth #PostGrowth #Transition

As the grid loses power in heatwaves, and communities & landscapes face mounting extraction for battery supply chains, this video shows how we can make environmentally just transitions to solar at scale — cooking, heating, refrigerating food, and living our daily lives.

This is especially important in the context of mining, and furthers the vision of the newly announced Indigenous Peoples Principles and Protocols for Just Transition.

We're looking to support this vision in urban and residential areas through new housing projects, resilience hubs, and retrofits/conversions to existing buildings. If you're interested, we're very up to collaborate and connect with new partners on that!

Finally, please watch and share! We're hoping for a lot of people to see this, and watching till the end helps algorithms recommend it to more people. Hoping to bring a lot more of the conversation to this direction.

https://pss.pm/solar

#JustTransition #GreenNewDeal #Solar #Resilience #RenewableEnergy #Renewables #Community #Lithium #Mining #Extraction #Indigenous #Environment #EnvironmentalJustice #EJ #Postgrowth #Transitions #Solidarity #RareEarthMetals #Batteries #Storage #Sustainability #Sustainable #Grid #Electricity #Heat #Degrowth #Autonomy #Municipalism #LowTech #Hardware #Engineering #Invention #Inventor

In response to news about UAW (United Auto Workers) securing battery production under the UAW master contract:

Now let's get those batteries into bikes, minerals under the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, and production into the hands of @UAW unions workers. ✅✅✅

(Post on twitter if you want to boost: https://twitter.com/sambutlerUS/status/1710413981788070088)

#CarFree #Indigenous #JustTransition #Bicycle #Bikes #Transit #Walkable #StrongTowns #FuckCars #Lithium #Mining #Extraction #Unions #HotLaborSummer #SupportTheStrikes #Strike #Labor #Workers #AutoWorkers #Batteries #EV #Climate #ClimateCrisis #ClimateCollapse #RareEarth #Sovereignty #Treaty #Decolonize #Solidarity

💨 When you sell a car (even for an EV), your gas car gets re-sold and keeps on polluting and emitting.

🛞 Tires are the worst form of car pollution. They shed microplastics and toxins every day — which kill everything.

The only way to end the problems of cars, is to end cars.

Boost on Twitter too, so people know:

https://twitter.com/sambutlerUS/status/1696560829586461143

#Depave #WarOnCars #CarFree #TacticalUrbanism #Urbanism #Bikes #Transit #Housing #Plastic #Microplastics #Pollution #FuckCars #StrongTowns #Planning #UrbanDesign #Policy #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #Climate

@ajroach42@retro.social This is amazing. The compression / lo-fi feel of the floppycast fits perfectly with the content itself. It adds to the experiences, makes it feel more real — is it real? was this a radio broadcast? that's what's going through my head ...

@silverspookgames@mastodon.social this looks so good

Cars are not a climate solution.

@asharas@piaille.fr Solar panels? There are a lot of people who run and host things on the Internet, without fossil fuels or extracting river water to cool data center racks. See LowTech magazine, the solar server network, many more examples.

@kevpluck@mastodon.nz Also the excess CO2 in the atmosphere (relative to sunlight) literally oversaturates plants with CO2, causing them to produce less nutrients and more sugars ... also proposed as an explanation for bee decline, because pollinators can't get enough nutrients from plants that they used to be able to.

@jake4480@c.im Thank you so much for reading and sharing the note! And apologies for the typos. Seriously appreciate the feedback, I haven't posted writing like this in a long time (ever?) I'm really touched that you read, followed the note, and left this.

@clayton@social.coop I am SO glad to hear that! And thank you for sharing!!! It really made my day, and that's exactly the reason I want to make a meme or graphic or something like that with this -- to help it reach more people.

@wagesj45@mastodon.jordanwages.com Where are the places you think it does belong? Cory Doctorow recently wrote a good piece on it in "The AI we'll have after AI" (https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/)

"The open source models are a big deal. They're already capable of doing really impressive things, like transcription, image generation, and natural language-based data transformation, running on commodity hardware."

@wagesj45@mastodon.jordanwages.com Would love to find a decent OSS alternative to Discord. https://github.com/openconstruct/Peersuite is the one with the most potential I've found, but not in active development seemingly

@asharas@piaille.fr The @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org data centers are depicted in the video to communicate this.

This video is more concerned with the industrial data centers being built right now — which are using immense amounts of land and nature (50 million square feet in US-EAST-1 area, set to double by 2028), threatening water supplies, and even re-activating fossil fuel plants for power in some cases. I think people are more familiar with these extractive data centers than designs like the Internet Archive — which gets to the point of the video: to show that different "𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴, 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘶𝘵𝘦 𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘢" exist!

In the meantime, I guess we have to deal with the ambiguity that "data center" can refer to an Internet Archive-like design or an extremely extractive design. It's good to keep in mind, that when we talk about "data centers", we can be talking about entirely different types of facilities.

@scottjenson@social.coop Hey Scott, this might be relevant — would love to find some retirees who are interested in projects like this!

https://kolektiva.social/@sambutlerUS/112690426417281792

@AtotheJ@kolektiva.social Oh to be clear, this is for House or Senate ballots — not presidential. Also to get on the primaries. It's different if you will not be running on a party ticket (sometimes cheaper / less signatures, sometimes more expensive / more signatures). I'll clarify all that in an edit.

Writing a story about the counterfactual to the bunker escape hatch idea.

Here is a link to the draft, and more details about it below.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WyUABsIRJasQKQiFoS-O07veSYXR02knTl1o4ezh2kQ/edit?usp=sharing

What would happen, if a billionaire — grounded in reality, without ego — decided to put all of their wealth towards mitigating and adapting to global warming?

The story becomes a way to talk about the projects we should be taking on, along with an impetus for wealthy people to do it. The counterfactual of their bunker plan. (See below for explanation)

Anybody up for sharing input / feedback?

I cut a fair amount out to get to the point. And yet, the narrative has to be effective in pulling a person along for the journey, a rich person or a billionaire, to help them get to the point of realizing it and asking: "oh shit — what do we need to be doing today?" These are some of the things I'm trying to reconcile.

P.S. I know appealing to wealth isn't a generative strategy. And yet, I also know of wealthy people who are making a big difference — people giving to the Climate Emergency Fund like Abigail Disney, Jeremy Strong, Adam McKay. Fergie Chambers. Mackenzie Scott. Marlene Engelhorn, giving all of her $25M euro inheritance to a citizens council in Switzerland.

And I started thinking, given the urgency of where we're at and the need for larger mitigation and adaptation projects, the benefit to the future of more people starting to give their wealth today — recognizing, as so many of us others have, that there's nothing else to do. The thought is, this story could be a tool to support that. Help shift the paradigm, and give a positive orientation of where actions can go.

@Rushkoff@social.coop @ghostpanther@mastodon.social @abigaildisney@universeodon.com

@zachwhalen@assemblag.es Can you share more about what it's about? Feel free to DM, not sure if I could grok it or not.

@deadbeefmonster@infosec.exchange @bughuntercat@infosec.exchange @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Why assume an old hermit in the middle of the woods talking to birds is barking nonsense? A bit tongue in cheek, just sticking up for inter-species relations and relationality and more grounded connections / languages.