Hey @alberto and thank you!
The point of my review is not to argue that the book needs to be “perfect”, but that without an appropriate warning label / foreword, “The Ministry…” is misleading and more harmful than helpful to the debate.
Let me focus my criticism on just one point:
KSR has never apologized for using Blockchain (as a magical technology) in the “Ministry…”. Thanks to you I was able to find his exact wording:
In the list of mistakes I’ve become aware of making in Ministry, using the word blockchain is prominent. I should have said “encrypted digital money,” or even just “digital encryption.” The computing experts I’ve spoken to, a pretty big group at this point, have often assured me that blockchain as such doesn’t require the huge “proof of work” action demanded by the designers of bitcoin. Nor, they told me, is it a particularly great form of encryption; they judge it as code to be (perhaps deliberately) awkward, and very likely to be superseded in years to come.
KSR apologized for using the name of this version of encrypted digital money, but is absolutely okay with its notion in itself. For me this is the problematic part, because I see no difference between a “fix-all digital money” and “fix-all geoengineering quantum-nanorobots”. The deus ex machina just allowed him to swipe a lot of problems under the rug.
You could write a really good climate economy book on digital money, but it would need to describe a lot of processes which were completely ignored in “The Ministry…”. What is its environmental footprint? Which agency safeguards it? How are people / corporations trying to game it, and how can it be defended from that? Without those questions, all we get is technosolutionism.
I do appreciate the value of the “The Ministry…” as a book which tries tackling economy, which a lot of Solarpunk and climate books are not attempting. At the same time I believe we should preface every reading of “The Ministry…” with a warning that it does handwave a lot of crucial details.
I believe that our job of creating better future visions is to learn from “The Ministry…” and do better, without blindly hating on it, but also without internalizing its mistakes and allowing others to take them as scientific and true.
Actually, this is an idea. Would it be worthwhile to make a crowd-sourced list of actual proposed solutions and problems found in different Solarpunk / climate books?
I believe my review was pretty exhaustive for “The Ministry…”.
For “A Half-Built Garden” we could go with the criticism of “foregoing to describe the transformation”, “naive economic outlook on trade with the corporate aislands”, but at the same time praise “the emphasis on the role of communication algorithms within the society / communities”.
Maybe a wiki would make sense?
P. S.
I’m actually preparing a Solarpunk Prompt on the notion of Digital Money and economic problem solving in a climate-focused world. The current version reads:
A small team of researchers is woken up by their notification inboxes exploding: their mundane and unexciting report might have just stared an economic war between multiple regions and communities. In a world with tightly-controlled carbon budgets, the production, use and recycling of every product is a subject of LCA, or a LifeCycle Assessment. A bad result might change the design, or move the production to another region, with potential political consequences. How will the researchers deal with their newly acquired (in)fame? Will they trust their analysis, buckle under pressure, or decide to play politics?