My megaproject ideas are mostly pretty standard. I’d build a high speed rail network across North America, and build and expand metro and regional rail systems in and around every city. I’d turn all cities and suburbs into fifteen-minute cities. I’d decommodify housing, and build ten million units of public/social/non-market housing, mostly three bedroom units. I’d link those last three policies together by building TODs around the new Metro and rail stops. And I’d build bicycle networks in every town and city and connect them to the TODs. I’d build bridges and walkways across skyscrapers. I’d put a bidet in every American toilet (uses less water than toilet paper apart from being more comfortable). Fiber internet in every home. A heat pump in every home. An induction stove in every kitchen. Phase out fossil fuels and power everything with Pumped Storage Hydropower and Geothermal. I’d make the US go Metric.
But my truly crazy, obsessive idea would be to bring back the French Revolutionary calendar. Or I’d purge all French influences from English.
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Train racing. No I will not elaborate.
with multi-track drifting of course
I’m listening
Community cafeterias. 1 caf per x (tbd) population.
- informed by national-level dietary guidelines
- very receptive to local neighborhood dietary preferences and encouraged to develop specialties
- worker controlled
- kitchen teams could swap/guest in other neighborhoods to mix things up
- you can go to cafs in other neighborhoods but there would probably be some system to anticipate demand to avoid over/under prepping (like you have a home caf but you can make reservation at another one?)
You can eat there or get take out.
Benefits:
- less food waste
- don’t have to waste time shopping, chopping, cooking and cleaning when you don’t want to
- will not have insane “chef” centered kitchen cultures, unless everyone working there votes in favour of this for some reason
High speed rail running the ‘spine’ of the americas - people should be able to go from Alaska to the far end of Chille and not need to transfer (although one imagines a number of stops along the way)
obviously, this would also be paired with a lot more freight rail, with the goal of eliminating as much intra-americas cargo voyages as possible. Really, that would be the true aim of the project, but the high-speed passenger line would be the forward face of it.
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Create a large network of state and/or cooperatively owned cannabis farms to mass-produce hemp for industrial purposes, and every strain of quality marijuana known to man. You think the weed’s too strong these days? That’s ok, the state will devote its resources to developing 10% THC strains that taste like a gourmet meal. You want to be sent to the moon? Why yes, there will be 99.9% pure concentrate oils widely available.
Just as the USSR had an alcohol ration, there will be a mids ration available for all. Any unclaimed rations will be distributed to the gulags to forcibly pacify political prisoners. While high and marginally more open-minded, they will be made to play video games where every character is a black lesbian and all the messaging is based on post-colonial theory. Only after their daily shift constructing and tending the farms is finished, of course.
Any questions?
Also linen! Massive state linen and wool production so no one ever has to wear cotton, the shittiest fiber, again!
- Mandatory enforced veganism
- Billionaire gladiatorial fights
- Ban smoking (vapes will be allowed for a 5 year transitional period)
I would build a giant space station that’s basically entirely solar panels with some kind of magnetic dust shield that would be permanently in sunlight, then it would beam electricity down to earth or something.
China is working on this: https://spacenews.com/china-aims-for-space-based-solar-power-test-in-leo-in-2028-geo-in-2030/
Oh my god, I remember reading this last year! I, robot is wild that’s for sure.
- An eco-corps jobs program tasked with removal of invasive species and restoration of degraded habitats.
- The best elements of scouting would be folded into the education system and become the core of its new outdoor skills portion. Everyone would learn how to safely & responsibly conduct themselves while enjoying the outdoors.
Ban lawns. Like, completely. No more lawns. Having one is a punishable offense. I want children to report their parents on this matter. Merciless enforcement. EVERYONE with ground space MUST have a garden.
One of my not-crank i will actually do this if you fools let me wield power projects is evacuating the suburbs in to high density city cores, mining the burbs for useful materials, the bulldozing them for use as crop lands, light industry, and whatever else is acceptable to have near cities.
Sponge Cities!
Hobby centers where all of the gear you would need to get started on various hobbies are available for anyone to use on site. Like a library loaded with tools, CNC machines, stuff for knitting, high end computers, art supplies, musical instruments and recording gear, etc. I would limit the ability to take things off-site only to people who cannot visit in person for medical reasons.
The goal is building community and encouraging creating things for fun. It would also promote innovation, art and music, etc, but that would never be the goal, just a nice side effect.
These are already a thing in some places at a small scale. Libraries in some areas lend tools, and there are some community tool libraries that either lend tools or lend tools and have workspaces!
Mine was pretty hostile to anyone noticeably alt :(
Create an artificial language with no exceptions to its rules, then teach it in every school in the world, so that the whole humanity spoke one language.
Also ban smoking
I used to be for this, but then I started finding out about all that is lost when a language is, and now it makes me sad to think of losing any more than we already have. But also, pragmatically, it’d be awesome to not have language barriers. Need sci-fi style universal translators.
Need sci-fi style universal translators.
We’re honestly pretty fucking close right now
i would make every US state square shaped, including hawaii but excepting the then independent republics of florida and alaska
forced bimbofication + everyone’s gay now
taking no questions
Two words: Climate Stalin.
The entire economy will be mobilized to solving the climate crisis, to the point where even finding a job will be a total non-issue. The pigs that are polluting nature to death will pay for all this with every penny they got, they have stolen more value than they can ever stuff down their throats. Oil oligarchs and media talking heads will all be tried at the Hague for crimes against humanity. Many useless treats are going to be banned, and yes, we’re coming for your Funko Pops, white boy.
One very important detail and job would be hiring a bunch of artists, architects, designers, etc. I want to ensure that my regime looks aesthetic yet villainous, so whether or not I fail as Climate Stalin, 13 year old boys in the future will look to me and not Prince Nick Fuentes II as the badass supervillain to idolize, and eventually support. Also, the people deserve a much more beautiful world than the one I had to endure.
Oh wait, idiots like Nick Fuentes would be seen as scum because I did a cultural revolution where I beat in that delinquency isn’t cool.
idk if you’ll be able to stick the villain part, chinese people had flood stalin all those years back and to this day he’s credited with being the hero founder of the first dynasty
like yeah they say everyone got together in harmony under his leadership to build all the infrastructure to fix the floods but come on, it was like 2000 bce, you know that shit was done with slave labor
This is conpletely serious but definitely a crank answer:
Create a network of Greenways on the scale of our railroads and interstates, carving out huge swaths of cities and connecting every state and national forest and park.
Then maintain the ecological integrity of these Greenways by making practical indigenous land management and foraging mandatory topics in schools.
I will also maintain a small army of engineers to run clean, running water through the greenways (for handwashing) as well as an army of pilots and EMTs to make sure the Greenway dwellers have access to modern medical infrastructure.
Again, I am completely serious.
Use elevated monorails for your mass transit solution so you can run transit over the greenways with minimal impact at the ground level!
I love it! Isn’t regular rail more efficient though? Both can be elevated. Or are we talking monorail just for thr retro future vibes?
Then maintain the ecological integrity of these Greenways by making practical indigenous land management and foraging mandatory topics in schools
seems like it would be more practical to just have civil service jobs to maintain them and teach how to maintain them to people that take the job
Part of the point of this project is to allow people to opt out of “having a job.” The dichotomy between work and leisure is underexamined and imo leads a lot of people towards unhealthy self denial and compartmentalization.
Additionally, the division of labor where each person is not a human who sometimes does ecological restoration, but an ecologist is foundational to class division (at least in Marx). By attacking those divisions and allowing people to heard sheep in the morning and write criticism by night, without ever becoming a heardsman ot a critic, we can attack the very foundations of class society.
Finally, by training everyone to be in relationship with ecological systems, we create a system where everyone has a stake in preventing ecocide. It would be a thorough preventative against the kind of ecological crisis we’re in now
I see that point but also people do need to learn how to do certain jobs. I can’t just go be a brain surgeon one morning. Or a herdsman if one morning no one decides to be a herdsman guess what we just lost all the sheep they wandered off. Ecology is also a complicated thing that might require specialised training, some form of regulation to make sure people don’t abuse natural resources corruptly etc. Also if there is ecocide then we all die there is already a stake it’s just that capitalism doesn’t work with those kinds of concerns
and also I’m not convinced that do it whenever you feel like it is a very good way of making sure necessary things get done. The thing about work is that it takes labour to ensure that food is grown and delivered, water is extracted etc and therefore society needs to allocate that work granted a lot of work now is unecessary but the necessary work will always need to be alloted ideally in ways that are fair and maybe automation could cut down on the amount needed
I think you’re confusing a bunch of distinct concepts.
Like, a job has so much that goes into it: a wage, time boundaries, a management structure, etc.
There’s also other parts of a job that can be done without those things: the actual (re)productive activity, the skills associated with it. Like, you can be a landscaper as a job, or you can keep a garden.
You don’t clock in to gardening, you don’t report your progress to a boss, you don’t get paid for it.
There’s also multiple avenues for learning things. Many people learn cooking and auto maintenance in their families. People go to language learning clubs. People pick up skills on the job. People go to school. There’s nothing that says that skilling needs to be in service to a job.
“Jobs” and markets are the current ways of organizing (re)productive activity in our society, but that’s historically contingent.
In Marx, neither Jobs nor markets appear in his descriptions of communism. Indigenous people have and still use ritual do do certain productive activities such as controlled burns or salmon harvests. Many anarchist projects run on a volunteer basis. On the darker side, serfdom and slavery have appeared as alternatives to jobs
Insisting on the persistence of Jobs is to insist on an incomplete break with capitalism.
