CJ Trowbridge
The world is very complicated and broken. Let's try to understand together.
Please Support My Work
You can directly support my work in the following ways, or by emailing me at cj@cjtrowbridge.com.
Ethereum Wallet: 0xf9988ed19214B0Fff5aE539C080E83e3f3846dca
Back To School!
I am excited about building a better future based on a deep understanding many of the problems we face and many of the solutions that have been attempted.
- Associates Degrees @ Sierra College:
- ✔ Computer Science
- ✔ Sociology
- ✔ Social Justice Studies
- ✔ Women's Studies
- ✔ Behavioral Science
- ✔ Natural Science (Astronomy + Physics + Chemistry)
- ✔ LGBT Studies and Queer Studies
- Bachelors @ SFSU:
- Masters @ SFSU:
- ⌛ MBA
- Graduate Certificates:
Current Projects
What Am I Working On?
I am excited to have just finished filming a new tv show about how to build off-grid intentional communities. It will be on the air later this year! I have spent most of my free time in the last several years working with a team to crowdfund and buy lands all over the country. We have put these into non-profit land-trust ownership as free communities for people to be able to live and grow food and build more communities for free forever. We also host free permaculture conferences at these lands to help people learn the skills they need to build communities there. I personally specialize in sustainable off-grid infrastructure and shared ownership models.
Sustainable Community Development is my main focus; my most recent undergraduate degree is in Urban Studies and Planning. I also have eight others. I am currently working on an MBA as well as a second simultaneous degree in Ethical Artificial Intelligence. My plan after school is to build an institute focused on research, development, and education around community resilience and sustainable development. I also want to invest in funding similar projects all over the country. My investment thesis is that we should be betting on the sustainable incumbents of the future and against today's unsustainable incumbents.
Radical Racoons
I have participated in the construction of six off-grid intentional communities. One of the key insights that came out of filming the recent television show about how to build off-grid intentional communities is the fact that the art and skill of creating these communities is essentially completely non-overlapping with the art and skill of living at one once it's built. This led to a group discussion at the new land about creating a clearer division between the two types of projects and programs; building communities versus living at them.
Radical Racoons was born! We have all created a lot of content about how to do all the things we do, but searching through social media posts and videos to find what you are looking for is a frustrating and often impossible process. We decided to create an index of all the high-level topics organized for consumption by people trying to do what we do, or for future reference for new people who join us in doing what we do. This will allow us to disseminate the critical lesssons we are learning to a wider audience and give these skills to others who would follow in our footsteps.
As always, everything we do it free, but please feel free to support us using our individual support links!
RadicalRacoons.orgCritique.AI
I am begining to do a lot of creative work with AI in order to explore what's possible and how to leverage the state of the art tools to create long-form text as well as photos.
I am posting a lot about the exciting ways AI can help create positive and helpful content. The takeaway is that it can just as easily be used for evil.
"Write me an illustrated story about gardening," could just as easily be, "write me ten-thousand conspiracy theories designed to convince people to be fascists." My goal with this project is to show how easy this creative process is and to help people develop a healthy skepticism of the motivations behind the content they are consuming online.
In addition to pointing our problematic uses of AI like mass manipulation and digital advertising networks, I am highlighting ethical uses in order to help inspire people to explore applications outisde of capitalism.
One example is creating fascinating short stories or having it write posthumous letters or essays based on the work of particular historical figures or philosophers.
AI is also really good at finding interesting connections between different philosophical and literary genres or at comparing and contrasting complex concepts.
Check Out Critique.AIMeme Library
For years I have saved all the best memes I've seen and categorized them by topic. Recently I decided to make this archive publicly available. Check it out, I'm sure you will find something you enjoy.
Check Out MemesAI Art
(CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
I am also leveraging AI to generate a lot of fascinating digital art, mostly for the purpose of illustrating long-form text on Critique.AI. You can see all the AI Art I'm working on here...
Check Out My AI ArtKayaks Are Queer
During the Coronavirus pandemic, I found that a lot of people are suffering from the lethal threat of isolation. I have been kayaking for over twenty years, and generally go about once a week. I recently bought a new kayak and so I have an extra. This led me to invite others to kayak with me since kayaking is naturally a socially distant activity.
When I posted pictures and video, many people asked to be invited. This inspired me to create a facebook group whith regular weekly events for people to attend.
Note: Unfortunately while these outdoor gatherings are safe amid coronavirus, they are not safe with smoke. Also many of the destinations are on fire. The fires put this project on hiatus and then winter came. I will work to revive this project come spring.
Update: Unfortunately the rivers we usually run are too low this spring to float down. We are looking for other options, stay tuned!
Burners Without Borders SF
I cofounded the first ever SF Bay Area chapter of Burners Without Borders! Ironically though the international network is headquartered here, they have not yet had an active chapter here.
The era of covid has been a struggle. Initially we launched three projects and held public meetings to get them started, but because of the many overlapping disasters, we have been forced to refactor.
I've been everywhere, man.
Past Projects
GRID Alternatives Summer Internship
Working at ClipperCreek, I learned about GRID Alternatives. GRID is a nonprofit providing solar power, electric vehicles, and charging infrastructure to people in marginalized groups. I was able to get an internship with GRID where I learned all about the state of the home solar power industry.
Critically, I also learned about all the funding sources GRID uses to be able to provide all their infrastructure projects at little to no cost for people who need them.
ClipperCreek Summer Job
I took a summer job at ClipperCreek between semesters. They design, build, and sell chargers for electric vehicles. They do all of this in one main building in California. This was an amazing opportunity to learn all about electric vehicle infrastructure, the state of the industry, and its place in the broader sociopolitical landscape.
Working at ClipperCreek is also how I learned about GRID Alternatives, which is a nonprofit providing solar power, electric vehicles, and charging infrastructure to people in marginalized groups.
Moving Cabin: All The National Parks In A Year
I planned to travel to all the national parks this year! I built a custom self-sufficient camper to do it. Check out my adventures at MovingCabin.com.
I made it to 35 national parks in 28 states before disasters and changing school policies drew me back home for now.
The Garden AKA Treeisalive
As part of my tour of all the national parks, I visited experimental communities around the country to document radically sustainable solutions to their infrastructure needs.
I spent several days at the now infamous commune that went viral on TikTok. It's often wrongly called a cult. I can attest that it's just a normal permaculture farm. They are doing a really great job with radical sustainability and it was a joy to get to know them and ask lots of questions about their infrastructure solutions.
Check It All Out HereSociology Internship
I had asked several professors about which populations are the most impacted at Sierra College or which groups have the lowest success metrics compared to the average. I was surprised to learn that no one knew the answer so I decided to create a list of all populations which could be filtered and sorted by success.
Check It OutChemistry Honors Project: Cooling Your Tent In The Sun
I studied the effect of various techniques and materials on prolonging that magical sleeping time in the morning before the temperature inside the tent gets too high to keep sleeping. I also compared expensive Shiftpods to cheap alternatives.
Check It OutAstronomy Honors Project: Radio Interferometry and Gravity Waves
I wrote an honors project proposal in Spring of 2020 for a project that would use radio interferometry to listen to things like pulsars and quasars in order to triangulate their positions relative to the antenna array. This would basically work like a super high-precision GPS that would work anywhere in the universe without relying on GPS satellites.
I also proposed to use the data to detect the propagation of gravity waves across the line of sight from the stars the array was listening to. This might be a much better way of detecting gravity waves than our current detector technology since it relies on observing a known stable transmission as it propagates across the interstellar medium.
The project was shot down by the department because it was too complicated but NASA has since duplicated part of the work I proposed. They completed a pulsar-based GPS system, but have not yet published any research on using it to detect gravity waves.
I later wrote at length about my proposal and the future potential of radio interferometry. It's a topic I'm still very interested in and actively researching when I have time.
There has been a lot of recent interest in phased antenna arrays since Elon Musk announced his Starlink internet service would use them in the residential reciever arrays.
Far-Right Tracker
At least three white-nationalist neo-Nazi groups were active at Sierra College in 2019. They posted propaganda and recruitment flyers around campus on at least a dozen occasions. I worked on putting together a coalition between many student groups and outside groups to track and document this activity. I also built a blog for the strategic partnership to use as a central place to document and chronicle all the activity.
Check It OutOnebagging Europe
I onebagged a whirlwind tour of Europe!
Check out my evolving onebag gear list for international travel.
**Do I really need anything else?**
Indoor Air Quality
I conducted an experiment to measure the effectiveness of simple diy methods for improving indoor air quality. This new project builds on earlier work done to measure the effectiveness of expensive Shiftpod tents versus cheap alternatives.
As someone with severe asthma during a respiratory pandemic which overlaps with wildfire season, this is a particularly salient issue for me personally. I did some personal experiments with filtration methods last year which I built on with this new work. Check out my results!
