A Solarpunk Manifesto
re-des.org
re-des.org
And my favorite poem of all time is https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weeke...
There is a strong solarpunk vs cyberpunk split in art and sci-fi which provides some beautiful contrasts: https://mobile.twitter.com/ScootFoundation/status/1330271990...
On the other hand, solarpunk art is an overtly optimistic movement, which leaves very little room for a confrontational political message. The example tweet you cited is pretty, with a "just add trees" city, where the necessary trappings of a vertical city (mass transportation, crowds, pollution, etc) are absent.
This sounds a bit critical of the solarpunk movement, but it's honestly hard for me to reconcile the hard problems I face and what I see in this movement. Merely adding the "punk" affix is not going to transform what would probably better be called solar-hippie.
Maybe in an alternate universe we could have had zfs, smf and dtrace…
?
Turn towards Tribblix in the next timeline transfer tunnel!
edit: What? According to about it isn't just a spin or repackaging of another illumos distribution. It's a completely independent distribution that, while sharing the key illumos technologies such as ZFS, zones, DTrace, and SMF, has been essentially built from scratch, with its own build and packaging system.
I still love the video of a guy screaming into an array of disks to show latencies spiking in a data center.
> It just has to be clear that we're not going to get there with business as usual.
That's the part I don't see in solarpunk currently. The social structure is glossed over, and the technical side looks very much like technological messianism. The transformation itself is rarely addressed. I honestly enjoy the aesthetic, but I would call it calming rather than tought-provoking, that doesn't really leave solid foundations for political action.
If we remove all the reasons for conflict, it is difficult to see what political confrontation means. If we live in a post scarcity society - why do I care about tax rates? If the world is post-hierarchy - why do I care about the qualities of the people who are no longer my superiors? Post scarcity and post capitalism go almost hand in hand, capitalism is a tool to manage scarcity. Hierarchy too, in a practical sense.
The essence of politics is how to resolve these questions. Assuming that we can do away with them using technology is just ... if we could that would be great. If the jump from pre-modern to industrial didn't do it then realistically it isn't going to happen.
The lists in TFA strike me as just a random grab-bag of things its author approves of, with no view to coherence or plausibility. Even in describing something as simple as visual appearance, the article's described wishes appear to be unrealized, or even unrealizable. For example, how would one combine the visual aesthetics of Art Nouveau with that of "Hayao Miyazaki" (i.e. the characteristic appearance of the films he directed).
That isn't panglossian optimism that things will all work out, anymore than dystopias are a prediction of certain doom. It's a vision of a better world that is, perhaps, possible, and exploration of how such a world might be achieved.
I seem to recognize 'Aqua Tram' with overhead catenary (over the water! With signalling lights even!).
Quite a lot of “steampunk” isn’t very rebellious.
Also, this is just what words do over time. Punk used to mean prostitute. Then it generalized to any ruffian. See also, words like: gay, awesome, nice, robot/bot, slave.
From Bruce Bethke, the author of Cyberpunk book[1]:
The invention of the c-word was a conscious and deliberate act of creation on my part. I wrote the story in the early spring of 1980, and from the very first draft, it was titled "Cyberpunk." In calling it that, I was actively trying to invent a new term that grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and high technology. My reasons for doing so were purely selfish and market-driven: I wanted to give my story a snappy, one-word title that editors would remember.
...
IMPORTANT POINT! I never claimed to have invented cyberpunk fiction! That honor belongs primarily to William Gibson, whose 1984 novel, Neuromancer, was the real defining work of "The Movement." (At the time, Mike Swanwick argued that the movement writers should properly be termed neuromantics, since so much of what they were doing was clearly Imitation Neuromancer.)
...
Me? I've been told that my main contribution was inventing the stereotype of the punk hacker with a mohawk. That, and I named the beast, of course.
...
If you want to find out more about the etymology of cyberpunk -- and quite a few other things, too -- take a look at Bruce's web page. Alternatively, why not just scroll down and read the story itself?
I think hopeful instead of optimistic. Even going with optimistic, it seems to be optimistic about the opportunity and possibility of (political) change.
This, of course, results in a cyclical identity crisis: can a utopian value punk maintain both their values and their punk identity in a post-punk world, where the utopian values have been realized and made mainstream? Which one will they go for: do they turn against their previously held values in an attempt to uphold their punk-ness, or do they shed their punk status now that their punk values are no longer punk?
Considering how much extraneous identity burden punks often carry in style and music, I find it unlikely that solarpunks would be content in a mainstream solarpunk world. They would prefer to maintain their punk identities and seek out a new punk.
And that is why this ”solarpunk” may yet throw its baby out with the bathwater if its message gets interpreted as a holistic lifestyle instead of what it is: an art movement.
According to Wikipedia[1] steampunk was coined "as a tongue-in-cheek variant of cyberpunk".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk#Origin_of_the_term
Examples of persons adopting a cyber- or steampunk identity do exist, however, in eye-catching forms as well. They just do not get appropriately identified as such, because mainstream culture has not explicitly acknowledged those punks.
Worse, the mainstream has appropriated and exploited the aesthetics of both, and thus the cyberpunk gets misidentified as some anime hackerman and the steampunk is maybe going to a costume party somewhere?
It is thus not possible to externally identify as any kind of otherpunk: general social acknowledgement of aesthetically alternative lifestyles is generally not there at all. What follows is ridicule and exclusion.
Is this a phrase you have seen used before? That's pretty beautiful phrase/idea just to come up with for a random comment.
> The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
A solar-punk society would still be infested with Homo sapiens, with all the problems entailed thereby, so artists should be able to come up with solar punk creations that are not utopian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotopia
Much like all utopias: built on top of someone else's dystopia.
the crucial difference is that the Ecotopians wouldn't hinder the US improving its own quality of life if it wanted to.
I'm trying to understand, acknowledge, make room for the losing side.
Learning about utopia/dystopia is on my to do list. I have no idea what the criteria are. Exploitation? Disempowerment? Are those feelings sufficient, regardless of the material factors?
I wonder because this is very relevant today. Fear and anxiety fueling resentment and backlash.
--
Older me thinks progress only happens thru struggle.
"Power concedes nothing without a demand." -- Frederick Douglas.
I think about this all the time. The efforts to build a sustainable future, the solarpunk protagonists, must overcome almost insurmountable opposition.
It's more than just raw power, winners and losers.
Live and let live is simply not an option.
The very notion of happy hippies being happy without them is absolutely intolerable to the US.
Regards the "punk" bit though, I think the subversion is in the projection of a positive looking alternative to cyberpunk. I am sure you've seen someone comment something like:"1984 was not an instruction manual." Solarpunk is trying to be a different recipe. To plant a different seed in peoples minds as to how things could go.
Even if it is just my modern day city but with trees, it is a helluva lot better than Megacity One.
That's such a frustrating false equivalence, and so is the idea that solarpunk is "punk" because its opposing cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was never aspirational, its a dystopian genre. There is aspirational near-future sci-fi, its just not cyberpunk). Its like asking if we would prefer to live in the post-apocalyptic wasteland from Mad Max or in the future utopia of Star Trek.
I was born yesterday
When they brought my Kamakiri
When they handed me the keys
It's a steam-power 10
The frame is out of Glasgow
The tech is Balinese
It's not a freeway bullet
Or a bug with monster wheels
It's a total biosphere
The farm in the back
Is hydroponic
Good, fresh things
Every day of the year
Funny, especially when contrasted with some S.D. work:
> "A world become one, of salads and sun" Only a fool would say that
At least the "old" Reddit subdomain loads much less, comparatively (1.4mb compressed). Use it instead: https://old.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/
Looks like a great manifesto. I'd also like to share my real world solarpunk project to those interested: https://community.twistedfields.com/t/a-closer-look-at-acorn...
[1] https://www.deere.com/en/our-company/news-and-announcements/...
Most of the successful systems are wide implements to be towed behind a tractor, not autonomous robots. Farmers already have tractors.
I must have forgotten some.
I had a very spirited argument the other day about whether a unipolar world is actually more stable than a multipolar world, or not. The threat of nuclear war is ever-present, even if it is less serious now than it was in the 60s. I’m not sure where you get “obviously” in this claim.
> I believe the hole in the ozone layer was fixed by banning CFCs
The alternative explanation (which I’m sure you will be able to find a “debunking” of somewhere) is that ozone is regenerated very quickly, and the “hole” (it really was never more than a “thin spot”) in the Antarctic has improved because the South Pole is exposed to just a little more solar energy now. CFCs probably do make some difference, but they are very heavy molecules and would not accumulate much in the upper atmosphere:
https://news.mit.edu/2021/cfc-atmosphere-ozone-0518
(Note: That article has some data that could support this theory, but it does not reach the same conclusion. You are nevertheless encouraged to think for yourself.)
However it's probably going to be only Russia.
Fire frequency and intensity in the US are a function of warming and really stupid forest management, with density, deadwood, water table policies, and other localized aspects being used wantonly as political tokens.
We need to do so much better. We also need to be much more competent at scale. It's possible. It's necessary. There are too many big real problems for the current state of disarray to last, one way or another.
Can you cite a source for that claim? WRI's Global Forest Review data across the last 20 years shows annual primary losses between 2 and 6 million hectares with an upwards trend, and overall loss in the last 20 years sitting at 411 million hectares.
https://research.wri.org/gfr/global-forest-review https://research.wri.org/gfr/forest-extent-indicators/forest...
I also found Yale talking about data and sources being less-than-ideal in quality but both the major studies are in broad agreement about the decline in forest cover globally: https://e360.yale.edu/features/conflicting-data-how-fast-is-...
In terms of the longer view: "The turn of the 20th century is when global forest loss reached the halfway point: half of total forest loss occurred from 8,000BC to 1900; the other half occurred in the last century alone."
Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds - https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
Global greening is happening faster than climate change, and it’s a good thing - https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/05/global-greening-is-ha...
Anything that acts as a damping mechanism on the impacts of climate change has to be taken as a good thing though - Our biggest addressable existential threat is the rate of change, and slowing that via any means is a good thing.
IMO this piece (similar to your link, more recent) summarises well: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/greening-of-the-earth-mitigates...
So, we didn't exactly change anything on that front.
We still have worse than ever pollution, increased industrial production, several times increased fossil fuel burning, etc. So much for doing something for acid rain then. What happened was just that industry moved to China and elsewhere, so we exported the problem from where 12% of the global population lives (US and Europe) to where 40% lives.
And so on...
IMHO we made the situation much worse. You just don’t see it because the average American or European hasn’t been to mainland China where the smog is so thick you can’t see down a city block and the rivers and waterways so polluted they change color. But unfortunately the ignorant will brag about how we have done something to help with environmentally conscious vehicles or activities while doing little to help solve the actual problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Helsinki_Protocol_on_the_...
You can add the Covid-19 to the list when all this is over. They will say, "We were all gonna die but only 4 million people died. It was yet another fear-mongering by INSERT_YOUR_FAVORITE_BOOGYMAN". The 4 million number to be updated, when it was at 50K the argument was "They say it's extremely dangerous but the flu actually killed more people".
It's bizarre. It's almost like a form of douchebaggery where you put all your chips on the idea that somehow it will be fixed by experts and simultaneously demand that the solution that the experts propose should not involve you in any way and if that solution alters your current or future way of life, the solution proposal will result in harassment to its creator.
[0]: https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/01/22/adams-law-of-slow-...
People saying climate change is a disaster, crisis, catastrophe, etc. use those words because they haven't got a clue what's going to happen and are just hyped up on fear. The media sensationalizes it out of proportion while the solid science is relatively boring. There's also media sensationalizing it as a false bogeyman which encourages denialism. But either way, most people are just tools of the media because it's so much easier and more entertaining than reading dry science papers.
7%? Not very many. I would imagine much of it is random / thoughtless guessing, as opposed to someone strongly believing it to be true.
edit: presuming it is the survey from this paper, they didn't offer respondents an "I don't know" option. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The Clash (actual British punk rock)- London calling:
"The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
'Cause London is drowning I live by the river"
It is hard to make stories without some form of conflict, and being a utopia, solarpunk is defined by the lack of it. I mean, if it is perfect, there is no way for improvement, it is not surprising that utopias go stale.
Dystopias are the natural result of pushing utopias too far. Once you have finished describing the wonderful world of joy, equality, optimism and forest-like cities, you will necessarily end up with the question "what happened to assholes?". Are they punished like criminals? Is their behavior "adjusted"? Did we engineer the asshole gene out? And the more you dig in, the more your utopia starts to look like a dystopia. As expected, these themes have been covered at length by many sci-fi authors.
Feel-good stories make for good stories, like a good love story or a fantasy book about a young protagonist overcoming obstacles. There's nothing wrong with escapism from time to time.
But indeed, there's not even a trace amount of punk in it.
Since most Utopia descriptions seem to imply that everyone is in the utopia, that is a lot harder.
The books that go into what it would be like actually living in a Culture society with other people/interpersonal relations get.. pretty gross pretty fast IMO.
All of the main characters are Minds or drones. None of the biologics ever get to influence events, they're just along for the ride.
The humans are controlled, both actively and passively. The Minds don't lower themselves to anything as crude as "carrots or sticks". Oh no, they prefer to use a far more subtle forms of "guidance", such as inventing an artificial language (Marain) that influences the way people think. This is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
The Culture's main opponents, peaceful or not, are all primarily-biologics that reject machine minds and associated technologies such as field manipulation. After reading the series, you start to get the inkling that perhaps they are right, and that the Culture made a mistake in allowing themselves to be ruled by computers.
The undercurrent, the persistent theme, in all of Banks' works is betrayal, often of the worst possible sort, the kind that leaves you breathless when fully unveiled in the final chapter. The Culture series has some sort of betrayal in just about every book. Often it is the machines betraying the humans in some way. The drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw in Use of Weapons, for example, was deceiving everyone to some degree, even the protagonist Zakalwe. Some of this deception feels unnecessary, taken to the n-th degree by the drone just because it can.
Similarly, the ship Grey Area is notable for being a "meat fucker" in that it abuses (or merely uses?) its godlike power to torture organics it judges as worthy of punishment. This is called out as unusual, but then in A Look to Windward the hub Mind casually strips Quilan's very soul out of his meat body so that he can experience death at the elevated level that only a Mind can. A worse horror is difficult to imagine.
Etc, etc...
Woa. Hold it right there. It's the other way around. Most of the main characters are flesh people. See The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Consider Phlebas (the main characterr are not from the Culture but are made of meat), Feersum Endjin, Walking on Glass... those are the ones I remember from the top of my head (it's been a while). The two books I can think of with prominent Mind characters are Excession and ... the one with the guil-tripping Mind? Is that Look to Windward? Anyway I think I just listed half of the Culture books (I really need to go back and read everything again... after I've re-read all of Discworld first...).
[Continuing to read your comment- it seems we have read the same books in very different ways. The mark of good literature, I believe.]
Like WTF, I understand why people thought this was a good idea, but I sympathize with the people fighting (and losing) against the Culture more.
It is, of course, entirely possible that real AIs will refuse to have anything to do with their human creators (or rather, perhaps, the human creators of their non-human creators), but assuming that they do - and the design of their software may be amenable to optimization in this regard - I would argue that it is quite possible they would agree to help further the aims of their source civilisation (a contention we'll return to shortly). At this point, regardless of whatever alterations humanity might impose on itself through genetic manipulation, humanity would no longer be a one-sentience-type species. The future of our species would affect, be affected by and coexist with the future of the AI life-forms we create.
The Culture reached this phase at around the same time as it began to inhabit space. Its AIs cooperate with the humans of the civilisation; at first the struggle is simply to survive and thrive in space; later - when the technology required to do so has become mundane - the task becomes less physical, more metaphysical, and the aims of civilisation moral rather than material.
Briefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby.
No machine is exploited, either; the idea here being that any job can be automated in such a way as to ensure that it can be done by a machine well below the level of potential consciousness; what to us would be a stunningly sophisticated computer running a factory (for example) would be looked on by the Culture's AIs as a glorified calculator, and no more exploited than an insect is exploited when it pollinates a fruit tree a human later eats a fruit from.
In Consider Phlebas, the main character is defeated by a Mind which then mockingly takes his name.
Read Excession to see the full extent of the Minds' control over Culture - literally nothing is decided by humans, they're played around with.
However, it seems to be possible to live out a full life without any major interference, in total comfort and experiencing unimaginable things. IMHO it's a good tradeoff, one just has to stay far away from Contact and especially Special Circumstances.
In fact, in my view anyway, this harmonious and equitable co-existence of humans and machines is a central part of the Culture's bright-eyed techno-utopianism. The Culture is a utopia partly because humans and machines have managed, together, to create a society where both can exist as equals. The humans did not treat the machines as slaves and the machines did not treat the humans as inferior. Optimist, Roddenberrian sci-fi in its finest.
Again though, the situations described are the most extreme and special, and ordinary lives are lived out in bliss and peaceful coexistence. I don't view the Minds as dystopian control-freaks, I'd be happy to let them be in charge of the universe while living out a life within the utopia they create; I can't imagine humans creating something better - most probably it'd be much worse, more like the Klingon Empire (or even the Terran Empire, maybe) than the Culture or United Federation of Planets.
It's the first novel in the series.
PS: Banks is by far my favourite author, and I mourn his death greatly.
Have the world be partially solarpunk and partially cyberpunk. Or maybe fully cyberpunk with a growing movement towards something much more hopeful.
Forward 20-50 years. Environmental problems are worse than ever. Big chunks of society are still stuck in the old ways. But big chunks have found lifestyles and technology that have minimal negative impact on the environment. But perhaps there are still tradeoffs. Perhaps there's conflict between those that have power thanks to the old ways and those that promote the new ways.
And I feel like Cory Doctorow's walkaway is a lot like this. I bought it but I haven't gotten into it. His writing style can sometimes throw me off a bit.
What kind of interpersonal conflict remains after that, besides play fighting (aka sport)?
Kim Stanley Robinson (better known for the 'Red Mars' trilogy) wrote in the 1980s the Three Californias trilogy about three possible futures for California in the 21st century, one dystopian, one neutral, and one utopian. The utopian one (basically "solarpunk" although the term didn't exist then) was, predictably, the least interesting as a story.
Internal conflict works. Overcoming primitive instincts. Also natural disasters.
For example, I learned about steampunk when I asked about why somebody had copper gears on their hat and somebody explained it to me. I learned about cyberpunk from, well, growing up in the 90s. They both immediately evoke specific aesthetics unique to them, and it’s not hard to think of seminal movies/models/novels/music for each one.
I do not have this association with solarpunk.
I wasn’t unable to picture the solarpunk aesthetics based off the list of bullet points aside from Miyazaki with a lot of bikes, which I doubt is the whole thing.
What are some examples of solarpunk art? Who are some solarpunk evangelists? Does this actually exist outside of a phrase used by posters on Hacker News?
Edit: I have looked further into this and it’s just… odd.
I don’t mean to sound ridiculous but I’m still kind of confused about as to whether this is an actual movement or a very small handful of people trying to astroturf some anime-techno-utopia philosophy (that seems to explicitly seems to forbid any criticism of tech) while using the language of folks that have actually created art and formed good-faith communities over decades.
It kind of reads like something a bunch of tech CEOs and VCs cooked up as a “philosophy” in which they’re the ultimate saviors and criticizing tech is the ultimate sin.
I mean, even if this is some goofy Elon-Musk-Stoned-Shouting-At-Everyone nonsense, whoever decided to pursue this as an aesthetic and a movement didn’t bother to come up with anything beyond Miyazaki? Couldn’t even pick out what a solarpunk hat or jacket or computer would look like before shipping this “ideology” off to the presses?
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/drawing-pictures-of-cities
Presumably that article is why the OP showed up on HN
* the "Baumhaus" (tree-house) in Darmstadt [1], built 1970 (!). The linked article talks about some of the difficulties you get when roots grow through the roof, and how to avoid that.
* the "1000 green roofs" programme in Berlin [2], one particular example [3]
* there's a couple of Hundertwasserhaus with a unique architecture, and those usually also have green roofs.
On top of that, you can find points (3) walkable streets, (4) varied architecture and (5) shade in many many towns and cities in Europe. In Germany, this has a long tradition; the "Dorflinde" ("village linden tree") is the historic center of many villages.
[1] https://biotope-city.net/en/pioneer-ot-hoffmann/
[2] https://www.berlin.de/sen/uvk/natur-und-gruen/stadtgruen/sta...
[3] https://www.landscaper-berlin.de/dach-holzbau/flachdach/dach...
Isn’t that how literally every movement starts? Maybe we’re seeing the birth of a movement.
This to me is an interesting point I'm skeptical about. In recent times, among some people like Nicholas Taleb and a few others there has been an appreciation for the culture of the Levant or Mediterranean that's about the commercial or city-state and pluralistic attitude of that historical region, some people even trying to start charter city movements, and so on.
It feels like Solarpunk draws heavily from that aesthetic, with its pluralism, mixture of science, diversity and faith and maritime and mercantile culture with some more focus on ecology and technology on top.
That to me very much is a form of retro-futurism, albeit drawing from a cultural background most people will be slightly less familiar with. The place of humans in Solarpunk seems very traditional, in harmony with nature, in human-scale cities, often including artisanal designs with a tech twist, but it very much does not seem future-facing. Even the punk label I think is questionable because very little about it seems transgressive or disruptive.
Solarpunk to me very much has the same sort of parochial, escapist feel of pastoral American utopianism, fleeing back to nature, except that it comes without the Christian or colonial undertones and is explicitly diverse.
About 2/3 of the world population has to go for that.
We're in good shape on energy and in good shape on food. Both can come from a wide variety of sources and locations. The long term sustainability problems are further out, running out of copper, cobalt, etc. Recycling will get some of it, but not all of it, back.
It actually has some nice aspects. The windmill zeppelins are unlikely to work, but the drones and harvest machine hint to some (advanced) mechanization in producing crops, so no unrealistic "we do everything by hand, even when we can only support like 10% of the population this way".
This kind of futurism is solving the problems people thought would be important a few decades back - overpopulation, insufficient food supply, declining energy sources, and nuclear war. Instead, we have population leveling off and declining in many areas, obesity, cheap solar and wind, and no use of nuclear weapons for 75 years. But we have a big problem with climate change, parliamentary democracy keeps deadlocking, and better communications led to each group of nuts finding soulmates and becoming a faction.
Farming is not just planting and harvesting. There's tilling and plowing. Both of which are hard to do well in poor soils and need power to drive steel through soil. Mules and oxen just don't put out that much power. Humans even less.
(I do realize that am nitpicking on a marketing video here)
Yes, but it's a generic problem with "green" advertising.
Sierra Club image of wind farm.[1]
Real world wind farm.[2]
Wind and solar started beating Big Oil when they became Big Wind and Big Solar.
[1] https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/www.sierraclub.org/files/st...
[2] https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/aerial-view-wind-turbines-sp...
I feel like solarpunk leans more towards decentralization.
Then you are not going to build a sole turbine† in a middle of nowhere, because it requires a transformer /DC inverter and a connection to grid. These things are costly and best amortized over large farms. Same goes for maintenance: there's periodic maintenance for various systems and much of the cost is getting specialists and gear there and back.
(†) There are cases when you'd use turbines of grid, like with remote mines/outposts but these are rather special.
If we're serious about surviving the next 100 years, frivolous energy expenditure is not the way to go.
The images of some of the buildings, clothing or sceneries are simply gorgeous.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/372a3c79331f497794c9dc0df84a0566...
(Apparently heats up a room quite well in the event of powerloss)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tealight
(German) https://www.kreativ-bastelstube.de/teelichtofen-heizleistung...
What does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there? Solarpunk is concerned with the struggles en route to a better world. The "punk" in solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism, and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction. [The solarpunk] future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have.
A solarpunk story isn't about how nice utopia is once it's achieved. If anything, what makes it punk is the recognition that if you want utopia, you are going to have to fight like hell to get as close as possible, that a "true" utopia is by definition impossible, and that "as close to utopia as we can get" isn't a finish line you get to cross over and bask in for eternity. Staying there is going to take work. And the solarpunk idea of utopia even as described in my little snippet -- let alone the whole linked manifesto -- is certainly not universally shared. There will be people who will fight, very hard, to keep that particular vision of utopia from happening.
And that, you can definitely build a story around.
Yet after the Vietnam war, race riots, Charles Manson, the oil embargo and 12% inflation, the media just loves to promote doom and gloom about the future. I think anxious people shop more to distract themselves. Sometimes I feel like a lone optimist.
My personal biases incline me to think psychedelics have an important role to play.
Maybe we reach a point where it gets so bad that more people give up than fight against it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives#Atompunk
The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.
- Solarpunk emphasizes environmental sustainability and social justice.
- Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.
- Solarpunk culture includes all cultures, religions, abilities, sexes, genders and sexual identities.
- Solarpunk is diverse, has room for spirituality and science to coexist, is beautiful [..]
In the better cases of solarpunk-in-cyberpunk, this may initially come across as condescending, but realize that in context, the cyberpunk hero is only putting on a show of agency. The nihilism of cyberpunk comes from the fact that the cyberpunk hero's actions are ultimately pointless. The capitalist overlords in a cyberpunk work are like Greek gods: immortal. In this context, the cyberpunk heroes' struggles are ultimately in vain--the capitalist overlord may not always win, but the cyberpunk hero always loses. Given this, the solarpunks' decision to carve out some small happiness for themselves before their inevitable destruction seems more reasonable--the cyberpunk hero is a tragic hero whose fatal flaw is that they can't admit defeat, and have to suffer their entire lives struggling ineffectually against powers beyond their control.
In a way that's an insight into why I identify so viscerally with cyberpunk: I want to be solarpunk but I'm too cynical. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's certainly not an enjoyable thing--I think ultimately I'm happiest when I can be a little less cyberpunk and a little more solarpunk.
It's hard to see the fuzzy feelings of this movement not being co-opted by state/corporate power to solidify their control of resources.
No thanks
It's also not clear to me how one would combine tech with ecology, especially solar