The power of the state
And how to take (some of) it away. Right now.
Recently, my brain had been hijacked and forced into definitely-on-the-spectrum-hyperfocus-mode by something that sounds really boring on paper: “community energy projects.” Solar on school roofs. Panels on sports halls. Tiny co-ops. And similar/adjacent futuristic Solarpunk-esque dreamery.
But the deeper I went, the less it looked like “local sustainability hippy shit” and the more it felt like a very quiet, very little revolt. Not flags and barricades but more like millions of tiny scratches on the polished surface of centralised power.
This is an essay about power in the literal sense—volts, kilowatts, cables, strange humming beneath The Pavement—but also in the political sense: who decides how dependent we are, how much we pay, how helpless we feel when a bill arrives (as it inevitably, always, until death and beyond, does).
For the first time in a long time, ordinary people (so unlike you and me) are prying a few fingers off that throttle.
With glass and silicon. Truly, materials of the future.
Let me introduce you to my latest little obsession. This will be a tiny bit more factual than usual.
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Big, big government; big, big energy
For most of modern history, energy has been the perfect excuse for centralisation.
We built shrines to combustion and concrete: coal plants, gas terminals, nuclear stations, dams that drowned valleys. Wrapped them in the language of “national security” and “strategic interest.” Hid them inside state-owned utilities and regulated monopolies.
Then the system turned to the public and said:
This is too complex for you. Just pay your bill. Trust us.
For a long time, that was hard to argue with. Big machines were efficient. Grids were insanely complex. The idea of neighbourhood power plants sounded like hippie fiction. Centralisation felt like physics, not ideology.
But the architecture came with a quiet hostage clause. When prices jumped, you didn’t negotiate. When some geopolitical mess erupted a continent away (or closer), it arrived in your kitchen as a higher bill. (Here in fucking Austria everything went to shit when Russia invaded Ukraine cause we never thought, note even for a moment, “Hey, wait. Maybe it’s not so smart to get all our gas from the Russians.”)
And when the grid failed, life froze of course.
We built a civilisation where light, heat, data, logistics, food chains, all of it, hung from a handful of chokepoints controlled by states and their favourite corporations. Great for stability. Also great if you want a population that is entirely dependent.
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Who cares about the climate?
Then the hardware defected.
Solar crashed in price. (Thanks, China. Very cool.) Wind followed. Batteries got cheaper. Smart meters and control systems shrank from industrial bunkers into plastic boxes on hallway walls. Centralisation stopped being obviously superior. The trade-offs shifted.
Officially, this stayed a climate story. Renewables are cheaper now. Good for emissions. Here’s your subsidy. Put panels on grandma’s roof and feel cleansed. Unofficially, no one really cares about the climate but about power and costs.
When a town puts a solar array on a school, wires it into dozens of homes and runs it through a cooperative, the electrons redraw a power map.
Those people stop being pure consumers and become co-owners of the means of production in the most literal way. Decisions sneak a few layers down: from ministries and regulators to village halls and group chats where actual people fight and vote and generally behave in insufferable ways for they are humans.
The bill still costs money, but part of it starts to say: this is ours. This is what we built. This is how we chose to share it.
On the surface, it’s infrastructure. Underneath, it’s a transfer of agency from abstract institutions back to the people who live under those roofs. A little bit, at least.
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The eternal state
Let’s be clear: this will not erase the big plants, the dams, the gigantomanic turbines. Not in ten years. Not in fifty. Perhaps never.
Winter nights exist. Week-long wind droughts exist. Cities with millions of people exist. Heavy industry exists and does not care about neighbourly vibes.
We will still need large hydro, grid-scale storage, big flexible plants, cross-border interconnectors. We will still have system operators and national energy strategies written in bureaucratic Esperanto.
The future is not a grid made of cabins and communes. That’s an aesthetic, not a plan. Solarpunk remains an unfulfillable dream.
The plausible future is hybrid: a backbone of large infrastructure holding the system together, surrounded by millions of small, locally owned generators—rooftops, village co-ops, municipal projects. The spine remains, but the body around it changes shape.
The state doesn’t disappear. Its monopoly just stops being so absolute. And that is a good thing.
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Erosion
The moment people can generate and share their own electricity, one thing happens immediately: some levers move out of reach.
States still grip the biggest ones. They set grid rules: who connects, how painful the paperwork is, how long you’re supposed to wait. They tweak tariffs, taxes, fixed charges. Political decisions disguised as technical constraints. In a crisis they can cap prices, ration power, rearrange priorities with a stroke of a pen.
They will not voluntarily hand over control.
What’s happening instead is slower and stranger. Citizens are building a parallel layer on top of the old system. Not storming it but routing around it. They plug in community solar, form co-ops, negotiate with neighbours instead of ministries. Suddenly, governments live in a world where citizens are not just passive bill-payers but producers and counterparties. Crazy, right?
Every new rooftop array is a tiny constitutional amendment:
We acknowledge the state. We just refuse to leave everything in its hands.
Not revolution by any means. Erosion. A long, low, grinding erosion of the assumption that power can only flow from the centre outward.
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Give it back!!!
If you threaten power, it pushes back. States do that with nice Kafkaesque letterheads.
So we get tariff games: fixed grid charges yelling for “fairness.” Subsidies that appear, vanish, come back in worse form. Support schemes “temporarily paused” into oblivion. That’s what’s happening right now here in Austria and the EU in general. Those big-wigs don’t know what they started and they are slightly scared.
The bureaucracy thickens. Forms get longer, approval times stretch, technical rules multiply in the name of “stability” and “safety.” Each measure in isolation looks harmless. Together, they form friction. Delay. Fucking sabotage.
Centralised systems defend themselves by wasting your time until you give up. Have you read Kafka’s The Castle? Great book.
The Chinese are evil. Their super-cheap solar panels are evil. EVIL! What about our ultra-bureaucratic-trapped-eternally-in-the-early-20th-century-with-no-willingess-to-modernize-but-somehow-still-super-expensive-local-producers???
What’s different now is that people aren’t only begging the system to behave. They’re building alternatives beneath it. They’re not just petitioners. No! They’re increasingly participants, quietly wiring their worlds in ways that don’t require permission. That is harder to shut down because you can’t outlaw the idea that people might want even a sliver of control.
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A realistic futurism
I’ve been drifting toward positive futurism recently—AI, automation, space, physics breakthroughs, uploading minds, all my teenage obsessions. And there, the stories tend to collapse into two very lazy genres.
One: techno-utopia. Everything decentralised, open, permissionless. Technology as automatic liberation.
Two: techno-dystopia. Total government, total corporation, total capture. We eat processed insects under cheerful biometric surveillance.
Both are seductive because they treat us as spectators. Either the tech saves us or it damns us. Our role is to comment and complain.
Community energy doesn’t fit neatly. It’s messy, local, mostly unglamorous. Cheap solar and storage could have been swallowed whole by mega-utilities. In many places they are. But some of that potential is leaking sideways.
This is decentralisation with dirt under its fingernails. Panels screwed into real roofs by people who argue about shading angles, loans, who gets what share in August. Not a white paper. Not a token. A material renegotiation of who sits closest to the off-switch.
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Energy is everything. EVERYTHING.
All our favourite abstractions—free speech, privacy, democracy, basic income, “the future of work”—sit on one blunt substrate: access to the mysterious energy.
Every server, protest, hospital, farm, and AI cluster chewing through teraflops at three in the morning depends on the ability to move electrons on demand. Someone controls the socket. Someone sets the price. Someone decides whose lights go out first.
If that “someone” is always a distant state entangled with a few giants, every freedom you have is conditional.
What’s happening now, slowly and unevenly, is that a sliver of that base layer is sliding into the hands of regular people. Not full independence—you’re still on the grid, still in the system—but a little less dependency, better leverage.
If you care about any real autonomy in a world of automated, planetary-scale systems, you should care obsessively about where energy sits on the centralised–decentralised spectrum. Right now, millimetre by centimetre, it’s drifting.
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It’s the little things
This is not a call to vanish into the woods and LARP off-grid purity. Most of us won’t. Most of us don’t want to. It fucking sucks and it’s lonely and boring.
It is a little call to notice the (very) quiet energy revolt and to join where you can. To treat energy less as a service the state benevolently provides—all hail the eternal State—and more as a commons we have a right to co-own.
Governments will not wake up one day and decide to shrink themselves. But technical reality and citizen initiative can corner them. Little by little, carve away at the old Boomer monopolies.
It feels real and realistic and grounded and slow and boring because it is. But it is very cool.
Thank you for reading guys. Go buy cheap Chinese solar panels!
— Antonio Melonio / The Pavement
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