#then solarpunk is a manifesto

[sugareimon]

might i ask what solarpunk is? it's sounds sick /pos

Hehe, solarpunk is one of the many -punk aesthetic movements!

You definitely know cyberpunk (and steampunk too), which are aesthetic movements consisted of art and literature. They carry important themes and genre trappings, but for the sake of my explanation, we’ll look at cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk arose during the lead up to the 21st century, where anxieties about technology and corporate greed became widespread. Cyberpunk media portrays a narrative of dystopia, where corporations rule everything and humanity has become a slave to the machine. The world is bleak and hopeless, but at least the neon lights are pretty!

It describes a problem, and it’s inherently political (cyber, and punk)—

Solarpunk describes a solution.

It’s a utopian imagining of society, one in which equity for every living thing is achieved! Nature is lush, cities are livable, energy is clean. Bigotry and oppression have been eliminated, and no one suffers alone. Technology serves our quality of life.

To be solarpunk is to believe that future is one worth fighting for, and to work to create it in the everyday.

It’s a response to cyberpunk’s vision of fear— it’s a vision of love. A roadmap for humanity, if you will! To be a solarpunk is to have hope and be willing to fight to keep it. To look at a world in crisis and choose to meet it, day-by-day, person-by-person.

It’s really inspiring!

[southernsolarpunk]

I am once again posting the solarpunk manifesto because I keep seeing people saying that solarpunk is just an aesthetic

Inspired by Solarpunk: A Reference Guide and Solarpunk: Notes Towards a Manifesto

A Solarpunk Manifesto

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.

Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world ,  but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.

Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.

Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.

We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.

We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.

At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.

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 is a movement as much as it is a genre: it is not just about the stories, it is also about how we can get there.

Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk. Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution.

Solarpunk provides a valuable new perspective, a paradigm and a vocabulary through which to describe one possible future. Instead of embracing retrofuturism, solarpunk looks completely to the future. Not an alternative future, but a possible future.

Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.

Solarpunk emphasizes environmental sustainability and social justice.

Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and also for the generations that follow us.

Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have. Imagine “smart cities” being junked in favor of smart citizenry.

Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.

Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.

Solarpunk wants to counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Not in hundreds of years, but within reach.

Solarpunk is about youth maker culture, local solutions, local energy grids, ways of creating autonomous functioning systems. It is about loving the world.

Solarpunk culture includes all cultures, religions, abilities, sexes, genders and sexual identities.

Solarpunk is the idea of humanity achieving a social evolution that embraces not just mere tolerance, but a more expansive compassion and acceptance.

The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following:

1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)

Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)

Appropriate technology

Art Nouveau

Hayao Miyazaki

Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world

High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs

Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.

Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.

In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.

Solarpunk:

is diverse

has room for spirituality and science to coexist

is beautiful

can happen. Now

-The Solarpunk Community

[alpaca-clouds]

Cyberpunk and Solarpunk

Someone wrote a comment in a retweet under my last post about solarpunk. About how maybe Cyberpunk is more suited to motivate us to work for a better future, than Solarpunk is. Because Cyberpunk can show us, how bad it can get, it can be a warning.

My issue is, that for the most part it isn't.

Now, don't get me wrong. I adore Cyberpunk. I basically grew up in Japanese Cyberpunk especially (which I like a lot more than Western Cyberpunk - but the reasons are to complex to discuss here). But I think for a plethora of reasons it does not work as a "warning".

Part of the reason is, that the dystopia of Cyberpunk is not that far away from reality anymore these days. Even in effective Cyberpunk, that really goes into the Late Stage Capitalism... It shows a stark divide between rich and poor, state violence, rule of coorporations, end of ecosystems. Yes, it is more heightened than our reality, but it is all that we see in our reality right now and... we are kinda getting used to it. We are getting used to all the horrible things happening right now, because we feel powerless and our minds do not know how else to deal with it. So they will just chuck it of as "normal".

The other reason, why I think, Cyberpunk fails, is, that it is objectively cool. And a lot of people, who consume Cyberpunk media, do not engage with the dystopia, but just with the power fantasy of being a cool street sam with a lot of awesome augmentations. They want Cyberpunk to be real, not to prevent it. Because to them, it is mostly a really darn cool aesthetic.

And a last reason is, that in the end Cyberpunk does not offer solutions. Half the point of the genre is a sort of hopelessness. In most Cyberpunk there is no big happy ending. The happy end is, that the characters get to survive. Maybe, just maybe, the characters manage to bring down one coorporation or at least one corrupt CEO. But the most the characters get, is, to survive and maybe kiss a love interest. The point of Cyberpunk is the hopelessness.

But you cannot build a better world from hopelessness.

Which is, why I see Solarpunk as so promising - and am at the same time afraid of it turning too much into an "aesthetics only" movement. Because Solarpunk at its core is about reclaiming optimism for the future. It is not (only) an art movement, but first and foremost a genre of both fiction and activism.

If you look into the Solarpunk Manifesto, you will find that, it is about optimism and rebellion against the current system. About the things, that we so desperately need right now.

It is supposed to offer those solutions, that Cyberpunk does not want to offer - or rather that Cyberpunk thinks are out of reach.

Because here is the thing about Solarpunk: Yes, it is Science Fiction, but a lot of the Science it presents is available today. If states were actually to invest in it, we could have clean energy by 2035. That is not unrealistic. Because the technology is here, we just need to use it.

Degrowth, which is another core tennent of Solarpunk, is also possible. And it does not need to mean "live bad", as so many publications try to make it out.

Building local communities, too, is possible. The reasons we lost local communities, is, that the current system we live under, does not want us to have those communities - because communities allow us to organize and retake our power.

Those tennents have been there in Solarpunk from the very beginning. And it is quite frankly frightening to see, how the movement gets kinda taken over by people, only being there for green aesthetics.

This is not meant to be escapism. At least not just that. It is supposed to be a root of activism.

[avalina-music]

I really grieve that I'll never be able to live a normal blissfully ignorant life like I thought I would. Things are so dire and I am called to do whatever I can to help, I can't not, because I for one will never give up hope, never, till my dying breath I'll never give up hope for a better world

[bumblebeeappletree]

Let's make the world a greener, happier and more creative place. Brenda will present a 16-point action plan to support The Guerrilla Garden Manifesto of inspiring garden rebels everywhere to make the world a greener, happier and more creative place both for themselves, for other people and for the community at large.

TEDxChilliwack 2018 took place on April 14, 2018 at G. W. Graham Theatre in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada. The theme of the event was "Time to Reboot". Learn more at http://tedxchilliwack.com. Brenda Dyck is a self-styled guerrilla gardener who hopes that her wit, sense of humor and passion will inspire you to make the world a greener, happier and more creative place. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

This video was originally posted on YouTube on May 4th, 2018

[ilsimizi]

A lunarpunk book recommendation:

The Darkness Manifesto: On Artificial Light and the Threat to Our Ancient Rhythm by Johan Eklöf. It's a nonfiction book regarding all the ways artificial light disturbs animals and human beings. Johan himself studies bats in Sweden and I think people who want to take a more activist approach to lunarpunk would love this book! ^^

[13thpythagoras]

doomscrolling: passe, dreary, indicative of privilege and seeking the novelty of trauma

hopescrolling: based, woke, indicative of humility and seeking escape from trauma

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Season One: Must Solarpunk Should?

Season one is here! Or, well, it's uploaded to the feeds we own now, so listeners can find it much more easily. We're testing out backdating our season one episodes, so stay tuned! Here's the original description:

"In this soft-launch of Solarpunk Presents, the companion podcast to Solarpunk Futures, hosts and Solarpunk Magazine nonfiction editors @arielkroon and @xtinadlr tackle the question of “Must Solarpunk Should”? This is a dilemma that unconsciously or consciously comes through in a lot of the nonfiction submissions that we receive in our slush pile, and we have Thoughts about it. So many…

[13thpythagoras]

class struggle manifests even in the solar energy space - billionaires like Bill Gates want to consolidate power, and they only advocate huge solar farms that destroy ecosystems, and yes Bill Gates is an open and loud critic of rooftop solar.

]The working class benefits from power to the people by distributing the energy amongst the masses. Rooftop solar doesn't affect birds and is literally power to the people, while huge solar farms do kill wildlife and birds, and represent power consolidation for billionaires.

I was talking to my dad about renewable energy and he was like “the only problem with solar farms is they take up so much space.”

And it made me think about a city and how much sun exposure all the rooftops in a city get and…why not just make the city it’s own solar farm by putting solar panels on every rooftop?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Monopoly is capitalism's gerrymander

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

You don't have to accept the arguments of capitalism's defenders to take those arguments seriously. When Adam Smith railed against rentiers and elevated the profit motive to a means of converting the intrinsic selfishness of the wealthy into an engine of production, he had a point:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Smith – like Marx and Engels in Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto – saw competition as a catalyst that could convert selfishness to the public good: a rich person who craves more riches still will treat their customers, suppliers and workers well, not out of the goodness of their heart, but out of fear of their defection to a rival:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

This starting point is imperfect, but it's not wrong. The pre-enshittified internet was run by the same people who later came to enshittify it. They didn't have a change of heart that caused them to wreck the thing they'd worked so hard to build: rather, as they became isolated from the consequences of their enshittificatory impulses, it was easier to yield to them.

Once Google captured its market, its regulators and its workforce, it no longer had to worry about being a good search-engine – it could sacrifice quality for profits, without consequence:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

It could focus on shifting value from its suppliers, its customers and its users to its shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/#ai-search

The thing is, all of this is well understood and predicted by traditional capitalist orthodoxy. It was only after a gnostic cult of conspiratorialists hijacked the practice of antitrust law that capitalists started to view monopolies as compatible with capitalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The argument goes like this: companies that attain monopolies might be cheating, but because markets are actually pretty excellent arbiters of quality, it's far more likely that if we discover that everyone is buying the same product from the same store, that this is the best store, selling the best products. How perverse would it be to shut down the very best stores and halt the sale of the very best products merely to satisfy some doctrinal reflex against big business!

To understand the problem with this argument, we should consider another doctrinal reflex: conservatives' insistence that governments just can't do anything well or efficiently. There's a low-information version of this that goes, "Governments are where stupid people who can't get private sector jobs go. They're lazy and entitled." (There's a racial dimension to this, since the federal government has historically led the private sector in hiring and promoting Black workers and workers of color more broadly.)

But beyond that racially tinged caricature, there's a more rigorous version of the argument: government officials are unlikely to face consequences for failure. Appointees and government employees – especially in the unionized federal workforce – are insulated from such consequences by overlapping layers of labor protection and deflection of blame.

Elected officials can in theory be fired in the next election, but if they keep their cheating or incompetence below a certain threshold, most of us won't punish them at the polls. Elected officials can further improve their odds of re-election by cheating some of us and sharing the loot with others, through handouts and programs. Elections themselves have a strong incumbency bias, meaning that once a cheater gets elected, they will likely get re-elected, even if their cheating becomes well-known:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/gold-bars-featured-bob-menendez-bribery-case-linked-2013-robbery-recor-rcna128006

What's more, electoral redistricting opens the doors to gerrymandering – designing districts to create safe seats where one party always wins. That way, the real election consists of the official choosing the voters, not the voters choosing the official:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

Inter-party elections – primaries and other nomination processes – have fundamental weaknesses that mean they're no substitute for well-run, democratic elections:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Contrast this with the theory of competitive markets. For capitalism's "moral philosophers," the physics by which greedy desires led to altruistic outcomes was to be found in the swift retribution of markets. A capitalist, exposed to the possibility of worker and customers defecting to their rival, knows that their greed is best served by playing fair.

But just as importantly, capitalists who don't internalize this lesson are put out of business and superceded by better capitalists. The market's invisible hand can pat you on the head – but it can also choke you to death.

This is where monopoly comes in. Even if you accept the consumer welfare theory that says that monopolies are most often the result of excellence, we should still break up monopolies. Even if someone secures an advantage by being great, that greatness will soon regress to the mean. But if the monopolist can extinguish the possibility of competition, they can maintain their power even after they cease deserving it.

In other words, the monopolist is like a politician who wins power – whether through greatness or by deceit – and then gerrymanders their district so that they can do anything and gain re-election. Even the noblest politician, shorn of accountability, will be hard pressed to avoid yielding to temptation.

Capitalism's theory proceeds from the idea that we are driven by our self-interest, and that competition turns self-interest into communal sentiment. Take away the competition, and all that's left is the self-interest.

I think this is broadly true, even though it's not the main reason I oppose monopolies (I oppose monopolies because they corrupt our democracy and pauperize workers). But even if capitalism's ability to turn greed into public benefit isn't the principle that's uppermost in my mind, it's what capitalists claim to believe – and treasure.

I think that most of the right's defense of monopolies stems from cynical, bad-faith rationalizations – but there are people who've absorbed these rationalizations and find them superficially plausible. It's worth developing these critiques, for their sake.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/18/market-discipline/#too-big-to-care

[13thpythagoras]

flooding a free market with cheap supplies will drive down price, like how gravity pulls down a ball, it's not "a problem with capitalism" it's a reality to work with. If a market is saturated with supply, clean energy is wing-clipped by petrofascism in not being able to store our clean energy and sell it later when electricity prices go up and supplies are scarce.

We need to be able to store energy in something other than the form of unburnt fuel, the petrofascist has this monopoly on energy storage and protects it at gunpoint, using words like "capitalism" are like complaining about gravity though, and distract from how the petrofascists have taken over and are handcuffing us to a sinking ship.

We skipped right past land-back and reparations and went straight to "death to capitalists like the people who run the local bookstore and coffee shop" meanwhile, communism means an erasure of indigenous religions, local book store and coffee shop owners hitting the guillotine, and petrofascists likely bribing the people in charge and maintaining the status quo. This is why I have to speak out when people get confused and bark up the "capitalism" tree because it represents a fundamental departure of how we can defeat petrofascism and fossil fuel.

To be honest I see a ton of students protesting at colleges, when headquarters and executive residences for oil and gas as well as weapons contractors are like, right there. Our universities are just trying to invest their endowment while upsetting the least number of people; students today need to ask to proverbially speak to the manager, going to raise hell at the Chevron HQ, at the oil and gas tar sands manufacturing sites, and whoever makes the phosphorous bombs and similar, I know there are protests happening there we don't hear about as much, but I'm a firm believer that it's the easy choice to protest where you go to school or work, it's the hard choice to figure out where Warren Buffet, the single largest investor in oil and gas, likes to eat his morning McDonald's and then go blockade the drive through line urging him to divest from killing us

This may sound like a ridiculous concern, yet every time there is a world war, a major country in the world goes communist, it's plausible that this will occur in our lifetimes that say, India goes communist at the end of a potential large war. To me this will be a step in the sideways direction unless that communist revolt is focused on dismantling and replacing petrofascism with a viable system of storing and distributing clean energy. Truly if your revolt is only about shifting around paper then it's nothing more than a banking transaction, a true revolt needs to re-program how energy flows in a society, with clean energy.

[spidersinthesky]

solarpunk manifesto

create orbital mirrors to burn the entire world

[justalittlesolarpunk]

hi,

I just wanted to ask how if you have any tips on improving relationships with your neighbours?

I know a sense of community is super important to the whole solarpunk movement but I’m not quite sure where to start😅

Thank you so much for answering everyone’s asks btw! It feels way more accessible than reading a massive manifesto

(Context: I just received a cake from my neighbour randomly and social anxiety is making it hard to know what to do lol)

Ooh what a great question! The good news is, it sounds like your neighbours already want a good relationship with you! I’d say accept the cake, eat it, thank them, and return the gesture by either baking or buying them a cake in turn, is a good place to start. Next you could try inviting them round for a meal or to go to an event, depending on your personalities, ages, location, and other contextual factors.

Going to community events like fairs, repair cafes, talks at a public library, etc, and striking up conversation is a great way to start building a relationship with your neighbours. You could offer some other neighbours cake or just knock on the door one day and introduce yourself if you feel confident to.

A lot of this stuff can feel very nerve-wracking for the socially anxious, I know. But it helps to remember that your neighbours are just people like you, with aspirations and insecurities and strange quirks and things and people that they love. And if you feel like you’ve botched an introduction, you can always just awkwardly move on and try to befriend a different set of neighbours! A lot of getting good at community is just practicing and being awkward and messing up and fixing it until you start to have more confidence in your own capacity for it.

Hope this helps!

[cobaltsoulsearcher]

what theory is solarpunk based on? like what books or similiar media does it draw its ideals from? or is it just kinda based on vibes

Okay. This is a bit of a long one, so I’m putting a read more :) I’m going to answer a lot based on the solarpunk manifesto—because it’s a document that simultaneously covers the aesthetic and the movement—but first I want to go over related movements. Ultimately, what is solarpunk is about vibe/approach—anything earth-centered, community-centered, inclusive, and anti-techoverreach can probably qualify as solarpunk!

Solarpunk is heavily influenced by a lot of things it has huge intersections with. Hopepunk and ecopunk ans derivative movements for certain: also to a degree eco-anarchism. Think also DIY and Mutual Aid. In the opposite direction, solarpunk also owes a lot to homesteading. Solarpunk also absorbs a lot of decolonialism, New Urbanism/Pedestrianism, anti-state and even anti-globalization theory depending on the particular work and person doing it.

If it fits with the first four points of the solarpunk manifesto, it probably qualifies:

As for specific media….tbh not really my side of solarpunk! I’m maybe not the person to ask! But in general you can find a lot of short story collections and zines labeled as solarpunk. R/solarpunk also has this rec list: https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/wiki/media/#wiki_literature

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

RPGs get a reputation for being all about fighting. How does that work if the RPG is solarpunk? Or utopian even? What is an RPG, in the first place? What is the usefulness of a solarpunk RPG? Join us as we discuss these questions and more.

Art from the Fully Automated website used in episode cover is by Sean Bodley as well as a few other artists and this will get updated to credit them when we track them down :)

Links:

You can find Fully Automated at https://fullyautomatedrpg.com/ The Sogorea Te Land Trust: https://sogoreate-landtrust.org/ Solarpunk 2050: http://solarpunk2050.de/ Solarpunk Pioneers Fund: http://solarpunk-pioneers.org/ Coyote & Crow: https://coyoteandcrow.net/ Lunar Echos: https://affinity-games.itch.io/ Neon Black: https://notwriting.itch.io/ Legacy: Life Among the Ruins: https://ufopress.co.uk/legacy-life-among-the-ruins/ Fighting for the Future: https://www.android-press.com/product-page/fighting-for-the-future-ebook “Murder in the Tool Library” by AE Marling: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/murder-in-the-tool-library-a-e-marling/1144354144 “Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto” by Aaron Bastani: https://www.versobooks.com/products/476-fully-automated-luxury-communism “Four Futures: Life After Capitalism” by Peter Fraise: https://www.versobooks.com/products/59-four-futures

[dailyanarchistposts]

A Brief History of Solarpunk

There’s a full history of it linked below, but basically, around 2008 a blog named Republic of the Bees published the post, “From Steampunk to Solarpunk”, which conceptualized solarpunk as a literary genre inspired by steampunk. There were a few articles and works here and there, but it gained more steam, or should I say solar, with Miss Olivia Louise’s Tumblr post in 2014, establishing some of the aesthetics of solarpunk. Quote:

“A world in which children grow up being taught about building electronic tech as well as food gardening and other skills, and people have come back around to appreciating artisans and craftspeople, from stonemasons and smithies, to dress makers and jewelers, and everyone in between.”

Her post was later referenced by Adam Flynn, in his Notes Toward A Manifesto in late 2014. He describes the difficulty of being a futurist under 30, watching the world dive down the path of cyberpunk, with the ever present existential threat of climate change. Solarpunk, to him, is the only alternative to denial or despair. It rejects the individualistic, unsustainable approaches of some futurists, who refuse to acknowledge the limits of energy on our Earth. Solarpunk is about “ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.” It’s suffixed by punk because it opposes our existing world. It creates local resilience, authorities be damned, from rooftop solar to guerilla gardening. Finally, a group called The Solarpunk Community published Un Manifiesto Solarpunk in 2019. It’s a short article, written in Spanish, that basically reiterates some of the previous ideas, albeit more succinctly.

As for my relationship with solarpunk, I’ve been into it for a pretty long time. I can’t remember exactly when I first heard about it, but it was probably on Tumblr. It was also on Tumblr where I was first introduced to the basics of revolutionary and progressive politics.