Personal devices
Recently, I wrote "Peace and Violence[1]," a story set in a solarpunk future. I surprised myself with what the plot ended up being, I'm still not satisfied with how I portrayed Eirlys, and Conleth was far too obvious. Besides the themes that ended up in the story which I never planned on adding in, some intentional choices were made in it, particularly in how she interacts with her friends, the technology she uses, and the world she lives in.
1: "Peace and Violence", A short story
Welcome to Futurism, the gemlog which inspired the setting of that tragic story. If you're new here, I've been writing here with surprising regularity about a prospective future, built on solarpunk and anarchist-adjacent ideology, with human-centered technology, people-centered geopolity, and explorations of other solarpunk-related things.
I'll talk more about Peace and Violence another time. Today, I want to talk about the technology used in the story, because technology is one of the core parts of solarpunk.
One thing I've thought about doing someday is replacing my phone with a GSM smartwatch and an e-paper tablet of some kind. I reflected how these might be used in Peace and Violence: the tablet ("reader") used as a video-calling screen, a newspaper, and a drawing canvas, and the watch ("comm") used as an on-the-go device for texting, which is actually how I use my smartwatch now.
At work, I'm expected to tell my parents when I get off, and I use my watch to do that so that I don't have to pull out my phone. It also helps anywhere I am to be able to see whether a message is worth responding to right now at a glance: is it my parents asking when I'll be off, or is it my brother sending me another video? Is my best friend in an active shooter situation at school again (more or less, yes, that happened)?
I didn't expand on this use in the story, but the watch would probably also be used for audio calling, optionally paired with wireless headphones of some kind. Also, I didn't mention that the tablet would also be able to handle communications where the watch wouldn't be enough.
E-paper tablet ("Reader")
Eirlys's reader is an e-paper tablet with an embedded OLED screen. Usually, the OLED screen is completely powered off and hidden or transparent. This may be called "natural mode," because the light is reflected, the e-paper screen is used, and it feels more "natural" to use. The name may not appear, though, and it may be in the form of "emissive mode" being off, much like "airplane mode" today.
When the OLED screen is in use, the reader is in "emissive mode," a more complicated name for an off-by-default screen mode that emits light. This gives faster refresh rates, makes ghosting disappear, and allows for better, more vibrant colors, but it comes at the cost of your eyes and its power consumption and battery life. Generally, emissive mode is only used when it's necessary, such as for watching videos, making video calls, or using the camera.
It might be possible to have such a two-mode screen by applying an OLED or LCD display film overtop of or behind the e-paper display film. If the OLED is in front, the e-paper display would fill with black at its slowest refresh setting (and/or "full refresh") as the OLED screen powers on. This may provide an interesting visual effect. If the OLED is behind the e-paper display assembly, the white backing film would need to turn completely transparent when emissive mode is enabled. It may have a visual effect too.
The OLED-behind-e-paper method might not work, because of the way e-paper displays work. At least for e-ink displays, to my understanding, the black capsules that are "off" are stored behind the white backing film. It may not be possible to move the "off" capsules behind the OLED display, or make them totally transparent. If it were possible to move them, the display might instead take longer to refresh due to the travel time. (Maybe that could be solved by having them move behind the OLED display only when emissive mode is used.)
Maybe transparent TV technology could be leveraged to build this. Or, some kind of super-thin projector and a super-stretched projection?
The operating system and apps are a lot more humanely made, too, without the idea of profit or exploitation to drive the developers' decisions: only what is best for the device's users. Maybe we could build it on top of Linux, with Waydroid for backwards compatibility?
I wonder if it would be possible or practical to have a laptop-style replaceable SSD in it? Maybe it wouldn't hold the OS, maybe it would, but it would definitely hold the user's data, so you can switch devices or mainboards easily.
Maybe it would also have, say, three Qi 2 two-way chargers on the back, so it can be mounted to a keyboard to connect it (and maybe interface or pair via NFC?), as well as other MagSafe/Qi2 mounts and utilities. A special tablet mount could be created that automatically adapts (by magnetism) to the spacing of the Qi2 ports on a reader with a three-in-a-row configuration. Or a standard spacing for 2-port and 3-port devices. A 3-Qi-2 connected keyboard could maybe directly interface over NFC or, more likely, pair with Bluetooth or something.
Smartwatch ("Comm")
In the story, Eirlys has a device called a "comm." I mentioned it was on her wrist so you might understand that it's a smartwatch. The technology is mostly unchanged from modern smartwatches -- they're nearly perfect as is. The name was changed to reflect their changed purpose, and because communicators are often called comms or com-links in sci-fi.
It's essentially a Wear OS smartwatch with mobile data. It connects to its network and receives messages and push notifications. It's pretty simple.
My ideal smartwatch would basically be a recent Galaxy Watch, but with a freer OS, more optimized software (so it's smoother), a knob (maybe even a button-knob!), and maybe an NPU for handling speech-to-text and text-to-speech completely on device. And probably repairable like how Fairphones and Fairbuds are. The watch should also work completely independently, too: no phone (or tablet) required to set it up.
We already live in the future.
Networking
The smartwatches and e-paper tablets of the future might end up going back to XMPP, or more likely, a significantly refined version of it. Much like the current Fediverse movement, which is unambiguously led by the ActivityPub standard, I'm hoping and, to a lesser degree, expecting a similar movement towards federated chat in the near future.
I think the protocol to use for this would be XMPP. But it definitely needs some modernizations and upgrades:
- OMEMO and/or MLS should be standardized as a core part of XMPP (via an RFC).
- Several of the most common XEPs, like XEP-0030 and BOSH, should also become core, official XMPP.
- XMPP Pub-Sub should be part of XMPP as its own RFC.
- An open binary version of XML that's built for XMPP should be specified and allowed for use in core XMPP.
- We need more XMPP libraries/SDKs.
- An XEP should be specified to allow compatible apps to treat multiple JIDs (at different servers, even) as the same user, allowing them to use any of those accounts to send and receive messages. One of these accounts will probably be the "canonical" account, which all the other accounts point to. You will need to access the "canonical" account to add such a user to your roster. The point of this is to allow redundancy, so you can continue to chat even if your main server is down. (You should even be able to switch your "canonical" account to one of your other accounts, just by changing the pointers.) There could be client and server implementations of this; a server implementation would make it completely transparent to clients, so it works even if they don't support it.
XMPP is device-centered, which seems like it might be helpful in this situation.
Intellectual property rights
In the story, Eirlys's dad used his smart TV to find an "archive" of the game. More or less, that's how it's stored in this future. Potentially, the stadium staff facilitates the livestream and live-records it. That recording is then sent to the local library, maybe after some time, where it's put in an archival server to be viewed later.
This is only possible either with extensive legal work, or the abolition of copyright.
Other technologies
In the story, I mentioned that Conleth had a PC in a room in the house he was in. The memorabilia in there kinda hints that that's where he was radicalized. But it was dusty and left unused. He hadn't been able to use it in so long, and maybe it's because the house was running on a LNG generator (I didn't really know how to put that in the story) and he needed to conserve fuel; it ate a lot of power, and therefore a lot of fuel he needed to use for cooking and stuff. So, for most people, they won't use computers as much.
I also think we should have a "Wi-Fi frequency reimplementation of Bluetooth," or alternatively, an improved wireless peripheral communication standard protocol stack. With encryption. There are so many devices that use 2.4GHz and sometimes also 5GHz Wi-Fi frequencies, from computer mice and keyboards to video game controllers, but they need special dongles and don't have pairing so odd behaviors can happen in denser areas. And Bluetooth is pretty much entirely unencrypted, so. Yeah. We're in great need for something better.
I think I want to talk about transit another time, since I'd want to talk about different types of transit and hypothesize the lines and systems for them. VR will probably still be a thing for a long, long time, as will AR, no matter what their role ends up being, but we'll definitely need to look into making them more carbon efficient.
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