Introduction

SolarNET.HuB (SNH) is a project and a sustainable multilayer tool-artifact that allows self-sufficiency in the network. Through the use of sustainable energy and the power of free and cryptographic tools, the project proposes a new paradigm of accessibility, legacy and connectivity to the Internet, as we know it today.

The project is based on several principles related to the carbon footprint and the current climate urgency derived from the endless CO2 emissions to the atmosphere and the imbalance of existing regulatory mechanisms. It focuses on highlighting the considerable increase that occurs in this footprint through the intrinsic characteristics of the network itself, such as its constant and latent character and its physicality for having the ability to serve information at any time and from anywhere, which makes it precisely a focus of environmental alteration that must be reviewed.

In addition to this, we have a population with severe educational deficiencies in digital tools and exposed to involuntary campaigns to attract attention, undercover marketing, and political and social manipulation, and an inequality in the quality and access to a fundamental tool in our lives as it is the Internet, which consequently entails a social cost and gap.

The tool integrates the use of sustainable energies to connect to the Internet, while visualizing through data their energy contribution to it, to operate as a global network of citizen science knowledge.

The project aims to reduce significantly the gap and cost at the social and environmental level through the use of new techniques, protocols, connection methods and renewable energy, while providing pedagogical tools and an alternative to those who connect to the Internet.

SolarNET.HuB (SNH) is an individual liberation project through the community while accessing the Internet. Since it is a project aimed at self-sufficiency both the group and each individual will benefit from it, as it provides sovereignty to inhabit the Internet.

The main purpose by deploying a physical and software artifact to connect to the network is to give to each individual and collective the possibility to keep the sovereignty on their information, and to experience new forms of connectivity. It will also generate a living and constantly evolving social fabric to carry out social policies in the places where they are more required, creating virtual and local networks, and direct contact with those most experienced to share and built knowledge, experiences and possibilities in relation to the problems detected in different places and communities.

Moreover, the kit can bring to the most remote places a more efficient and ecological connection, to cover certain needs for which there is no solution yet. Also, with its correct deployment, it will allow to open new exploration routes in various fields, such as economic, artistic, cultural, educational, etc., since it proposes to create collaboration and development networks, directly connected, through a protocol of its own communication and sustainable. Its potential lies in the fact that it is the civil society, instead of corporations or governments, that feeds the project and vice versa, thus creating a productive and cognitive symbiosis intertwined, which will undoubtedly emerge new ways of doing things and in many different fields, including academics or pedagogical.

We work for a technical alternative, building an inclusive device that allows a greater number of people to distribute, agency and hold each individual responsible for the environmental cost derived from their intervention in the digital space, and to protect the privacy and integrity of those who visit the Internet.

• Makes visible the deficiencies both in terms of hardware, software and content, of the current Internet
• Builds a physical device that allows you to connect to the Internet in alternative ways
• Generates an ecosystem of free software suitable for surfing the Internet, as well as for uploading content
• Offers an environment for viewing and distributing content based on free tools
• Proposes a new methodology for the collective storage of the digital legacy
• Collaborates transdisciplinary between digital and physical, techno-scientific and social territories
• Distributes tools and documentation with free licenses and strengthen their communities
• Reduces the existing ecological footprint
• Increases the possibilities of connection in more vulnerable communities
• Introduces cryptography transparently into the realm of everyday life
• Develops a technical-scientific knowledge about digital architecture, its beginnings and its evolution
• Provides a useful tool to already established communities to collaborate and work in the Internet

“This #solarpunk device is designed to work in a scenario where the centralized Internet and the power grid fall; allowing you to continue using the Internet and never find yourself isolated…”