Castle Street Flat, Dunedin

 Here is an idea for renovating and retrofitting the front lounge of a student flat in Dunedin. It is a part of my skunkworks. The flat I am using as an example is on north castle street.

All you do is retrofit the lounge. What you do is you put a bunch of cubes of crushed aluminium cans up against the walls. You stack them. I don’t know how deep. But maybe 50cm deep (40cm to 80cm deep). You stack them floor to ceiling. You put them against three of the walls.

And then you put up plywood on the front of the walls of cans, to create a nice tidy surface. You can use recycled cans or freshly made and crushed cans. It might be expensive. If you use recycled cans, then the cans might have sugar residue and attract ants. So be aware of this. You could also put up proper 2 by 4 wood framing, with planks and/or drywall. Or even brick the cans in. Build a brick wall in front of the cans. Whatever works. Just make it nice.

You can do it just for fun. And you can use it as a refuge. Or just as a place to chill out. Oh, you’d have to own the place to do this! It is a renovation.

Next idea: you shield a bedroom too. And you have two rooms which become “dead zones”. By the way, you’re creating “dead zones”, not shielding locations. You need dead zones in which the “radio waves on the electromagnetic spectrum” cannot triangulate your neurones and nerve tissue properly, to get good readings on you. And as far as I can tell, they mostly use “slow deep” radio waves as the building blocks of this (sort of, but I think it gets a bit quantum 🫠🤪).

Once it works, it could be used as a model for creating a decentralised, distributed system or network of refugee camps for those harmed by this system of mental interference. Perhaps those who are being harmed by the mental interference don’t like the implicit Buddhist psychology that encourages the smothering of thoughts, and could be considered religious refugees. Or perhaps they don’t like the anti intellectual bent of these people, and so could be considered intellectual or academic refugees. I think that this model of retrofitting houses, and many other similar ideas, could be highly scalable using the tools of financial capitalism.

There could be an element of “social entrepreneurship” where people try to scale this up in a massive way. It might be a highly disruptive, massively innovative product solution (once developed, and we have clean crushed cans as a readily available building product). We might have interest free loans to help landlords retrofit buildings, and construction companies cropping up all over the world. 

Perhaps we might rapidly shelter as many refugees as possible, in an indiscriminate manner. Meet the needs that exist, without engaging in consequentialist or utilitarian philosophical arguments. As for morality, just don’t be evil. As for the horrific refugee crisis that exists in the world, use Zuckerberg’s slogan “move fast and break things”. Let us innovate our way out of the current refugee crisis by creating places of refuge and sanctuary. Innovate fast and hard, and try out multiple versions quickly. Test out multiple prototypes, iterate fast, and get things solved. We don’t know what will work best. Just create good product solutions and fast, and figure out not just what works in terms of engineering, but what works for the end consumer, the “electromagnetic refugee”.

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A couple more ideas here:

The yellow is just putting a layer of cans 50 cm deep all over the floor of the upper bedroom. It’s over top of the bathroom. I skipped a few details in the second picture. It’s hard to do image editing on a phone and I am tired.

You could have a whole house as a dead zone. It might be epic. Whole houses could go dark. And imagine if you do plenty of houses in the same street. Whole streets might start to go dark. Even the footpaths.

Action points: a brain storm

test it out just with plain old cubes of crushed cans, no drywall or plywood etc

Try to create good building blocks in the form of clean, unused or otherwise sanitised cubes of crushed aluminium cans.

Create prototypes with a high level of finish. Multiple types.

Create supply chains of materials

Share blueprints and success stories