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.
Pneumatic tubes
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.
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.
