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by goodpoint 1468 days ago
> they are being used a pawns to shift over the control of energy to the government

...by pushing for domestic solar panels? And improved isolation, heat pumps, passive houses?

Sounds like the very opposite of centralizing energy production.

So maybe we need a bit more evidence for your conspiracy theory.

1 comments

I like the possibilities of solar energy. I like the possibilities of decentralized energy. I am a conspiracy theory type of guy. Here's what I really think about all the state and corporate SDG campaign sloganing I see on the streets every damn day:

The reasonably accessible domestic solar panels that do come out will most likely be IoT devices. It will be energy as a service. They will gather information in a way you might not be happy about, and have an off-switch listening for a signal from a remote, centralized hub. The solar panel's use will be governed by a TOS about what you use the electricity for. An automated system will sometimes cause random power outages for any kind of citizen, but it will also get disproportionately used against political enemies, as requested (perhaps sometimes with plausible deniability) by admins that we will never get to see, and never get to reach. It will be a corporate system, ergo the noble platitude of "electricity as a human right" will be sidestepped or shouted down, along with other things. To "manage carbon", alternative generators will be kept out of the hands of the people. Victims will either need to steal electricity or covertly depend on jury-rigged, borderline medieval sources of power to get by.

It will be an exacerbation of the status quo where service access is hydraulic state/corporate despotism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire

As far as I can tell, the despots hate us because they know we desperately want this system to not get further created and we speak as able against the segments of it that exist. These people as a political unit behave sort of like Roko's Basilisk that way - a hyper powerful technological system that punishes you for trying to prevent its creation.

To gain the trust of people like us and help work together on this energy crisis, I recommend you and others campaign as hard as you can against a political system that allows this kind of abuse in energy policy management - and indeed in any place you can agree it is wrong. An alternative is to decide we are so stupid, paranoid and useless that a system like this should be created and should lock us out, because we are a doomed strain of ideological mutants holding the human team back, and our co-operation on energy would be a net detriment anyways. The final, safest, most comfortable alternative is to flatly deny such a system will exist, when stuff like it already happens in other parts of our lives and the means and motive are clearly present. The alternatives will keep dragging humanity into a sterile, upside-down world that feels less and less worth living in, no matter how many gigawatts of whatever kind of power we seem to benefit from.

This was the most deranged and illogical conspiracy theory that I heard in a while.
You know what?

I got angry at your mean dismissal, but I'm trying to move past it. I can live with being reviled, or seen as crazy. Even if you think my ideas are absolutely ridiculous, just promise me you'll do what you can to keep exploitative energy tech like what I described from being created, deployed, adopted if you ever do see it happening. It's enough for me if you do not go on one day to make or believe arguments that try to justify having such a TOS on services that provide ordinary people with their basic needs.