What do you think of the Solarpunk literary genre? I find it very interesting, not only because I find the aesthetics very attractive, but also because it is openly anti-capitalist and has a very strong ideological content.
But I would like to know what /leftypol/ thinks.
Do you find a Solarpunk society the ideal society?anarcho-communismAnarcho-Communism
>>16137>>16138>>16139the "punk" is a stereotype of a person who does not conform to the current system, a person who does not follow the rules and is very rebellious, etc…
All these literary styles that are called punk is because they propose a way out of the current society or because they have a character or characters that fit in the definition of punk that I have given before. Cyberpunk is a style that exists as a warning of what will happen if we continue to exist within the current system, and Solarpunk serves as a platform to imagine a future outside the system focused mainly on ecology.
But it is true that during the last years the style has been reduced to an aesthetic and has lost all its political significance.
anarcho-communismAnarcho-Communism >>16134I hate it; I hate everything about it. I especially hate the greenwashed, "sustainable" architectural renderings that people jack off to in Solarpunk literary circles—as if that aesthetic hasn't already been adopted by Big Tech! OP, your image
literally has one of the fucking Amazon Spheres in it! Have you seen their "Helix" design for HQ2? I'm just imagining cities using crop dusters to maintain their plant-covered skyscrapers, and residents getting mouthfuls of pesticides and fertilizer. These are monuments to the preservation of Capital's robbery of nature; simple as. One could almost be forgiven for thinking Solarpunk's anti-capitalism has always been surface-level. Its incessantly idealist, prefigurative politics caught the attention of some of the most obnoxious people I know. Their vision of the future can be reduced to a kind of Socialism with Chobani® Characteristics. I think Salvagepunk is a much more compelling alternative, although the folks at
https://salvage.zone/ droning on about the "Proletarocene" will never not be funny. Still, the future won't be as green as you hope for; best come to terms with that now rather than later. Actually existing sustainable housing projects like ZEDFactory's BowZED or public housing estates like Goldsmith Street are a far cry from anything tumblr artists were coming up with almost a decade ago, and all for the better. Eco-Socialists take note.
>>16227What
it is (i.e. a literary movement w/ a fetish for New Urbanism and greenwashed ornamentation, as well as Chobani® futurism or the "Ghiblification" of life under monopoly capital) is very different from what it
ought to be (i.e. a literary movement that seeks to interrogate the metabolic rift w/ theories of planetary urbanization all the while supporting a full-on assault against climate apartheid regimes). I think it's interesting how some of the original Solarpunk stories sometimes attempted to depict this, and mostly came from Brazil. It reminds me of a quote that often gets mistakenly attributed to JG Ballard: "The periphery is where the future reveals itself." I always saw a kinda of favela chic in both Solarpunk and Salvagepunk; but it was the latter that presented a much more grounded aesthetic commonality to me, speaking as someone who grew up in the Rust Belt. Of course, São Paulo or Rio are much denser than say, St Louis or Detroit but no matter what, it's hard to retain a childlike optimism for the future when you're surrounded by industrial blight that actively risks polluting your drinking water. I think recognizing that our world has been irrevocably structured as an apocalyptic wasteland that's gradually unfolding is a great reference point, and that the best future we can hope for now quite literally is a salvaged or repurposed one. There ain't nothing wrong with a little despair.
>>16243Moronic post. To say porky is adopting the Solarpunk "aesthetic" is actually giving the subgenre and its artists too much credit. Big Tech was getting into sustainable architecture well before 2014; it's just a testament to how utterly unimaginative and ignorant of art history these tumblr artists were. What shreds of afrofuturist influence was at last somewhat interesting; but I rarely see that anymore. Also, BowZED and Goldsmith Street look fucking amazing. Again, that's what good, actually existing sustainable housing looks like—notice the lack of lawns on their roofs or jungles on their balconies; amazing! If all you're concerned with are simple façade changes, then you might as well become a trad architecture revivalist instead. Hell, you'd probably fit in with the New Urbanists.
>>16997no he's right, that's mostly dated / bad design with some green added
better than nothing i guess
>>16171So, soulless steel and glass shit and housing blocks?
>>16242I lived near it. Nothing but concrete, and it house a small mall.
>>16843While looking good, it's just an arcology.
>Trees>Without roots>>17008A bit better than the regular vertical sleep factory.
>>17684Dave, from the marketing department just mashed together all the things hipsters like. Please buy our shit now.
>>16255How the fuck does this shit
>>16843 inspire hope? If I lived in a solarpunk future the only thing I'd be 'inspired' to do is wear a bee suit all day, and cover my apartment with the world's largest mosquito net.
>>16983If you go by some of the influences seen in solarpunk concept art over the years that would be: Bjarke Ingels, Thomas Heatherwick, and NBBJ. All are
extremely 'problematic' for the lack of a better word.
>>17684I know it's been almost a year, but why would you post this again. This single ad has had me convinced that solarpunk fans dream of Ghibli in the same sense Disney adults dream of living in EPCOT.
>>17867Someone probably already has. I'm not well-versed enough in architectural and literary criticism to write a full length article on it yet. I still might give it a try though, perhaps later this year.
>>17879A 'decommodified' edition has been making the rounds since December 2021. I'm so tired of seeing people gush about it and the Oregon travel advertisements done by Sun Creature Studio too.
>>17885We need
sustainable and
affordable housing blocks; in practice they look
nothing like what passes for 'solarpunk' today. To use another British example, Peter Barber is another favorite of mine.
>>24624What capitalism is 'structurally incapable of providing' is the boring and mundane—that is, everyone's basic needs should be met
without packing them into rooms like sardines. This became one of the main concerns of architects in the 19th and early 20th centuries (especially to those of a socialist persuasion) when the global population soared and the masses really started getting compelled by productive forces to live and work in cities. This relation, which is still new in the history of our species, continues largely unabated; and I don't think it will ever completely stop even with the prospect of imminent climate catastrophe. In my view, the most 'subversive alternative to solarpunk' is essentially: modernism, and a kind of instrumentalist one at that, for I think 'degrowth' is otherwise impossible. We see hints of this every time so-called 'solarpunks' take inspiration from capitalist fixations with 'smart cities' (see my many references to Big Tech). Their total lack of self-awareness is also why solarpunk has always struck me as a very bourgeois, Malthusian fantasy. It's not so much concerned with environmental conservation—and the violent restructuring of society that would entail, as it is in romanticizing life in the ruins of modernity. What apocalyptic crises that produced the ruins have long passed; now, there's only joy. It's like neoclassicism, but there's no ornament to speak of; all we're left with are images of people prancing around plant overgrowth. Again, it's why I mentioned salvagepunk because since the early 2010s it's served as a sort of transitional movement pointing to
something more politically useful than what Eco-Socialists have been parading for generations. It's basically solarpunk but with a marxist tinge, and technically predates it by a couple years. I'd be curious see a fusion of that with Andreas Malm's recent conceptions of 'Eco-Leninism' in all honesty.
>>17879Can I have my marketing without the marketing, please? 😂
ideology doing ideologyless ideology oms
>>24624>Cyberpunk is too pessimistic to be politically useful.To quote Fredric Jameson: "Utopia is not a positive vision of the future so much as it is a negative judgement of the present." Solarpunk is too much of the former and not enough of the latter. Cyberpunk began as a handful of stories about the crisis of modernity that, in the span of 40 years, was then transformed into an innocuous aesthetic for redditors to gawk at. Solarpunk on the other hand is all aesthetic without a defining work. People think it's punk simply due to its oppositional character (it has '-punk' in the name you see) so unlike Cyberpunk, it’s ground appears first and foremost
political. But the politics it advocates for is very often retrofit. To this day, I still associate the US-backed Kurdish experiments in northern Iraq and Syria with this pathetic excuse for a literary subgenre; all because solarpunk enthusiasts insisted on vague connections between real world and aesthetic. If derivative Bookchinist nonsense is the furthest extent Solarpunk as a
political project can go, then that is equally underwhelming.
>>24633Is salavagepunk not malthusian and anti-modern?
I have not read the genre so this is not a rhetorical question, but this is what it seems like based on the aesthetic.
>>24645See this is exactly what I've been saying; even Solarpunk's supposedly foundational fiction is retrofit. I having nothing against Le Guin and Robinson (big fan of the former), and there's nothing wrong with identifying your influences or precursors; but come on, man.
>>24647No, Salvagepunk's big claim to fame has always been its desire to reintroduce considerations of class conflict to these post-apocalyptic environmentalist stories. I'm aware that
some Solarpunk short stories apparently do this, but that's never been
the emphasis.
>>31275I thought I was being clear in that I think the violent restructuring of society for eco-socialist ends
isn't avoidable.
It is neoliberalism complete with bourgeois psychology brainwashing trying to get their wage slaves to be "happy" with "positive thinking":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk< themes of do it yourself ethics, convivial conservation, self-sustainability, social inclusiveness and positive psychology are often present. <Self-sustainability, in which a person or organization needs little or no help from, or interaction with, others. Literally just neoliberal individualism for DIY anarcho-redditors alone in their apartment pods. Hard to think of anything less communist than this anti-collective-struggle response to crisis like a dying dog going off to die alone.
>literary genreSci-fi is idealist, not materialism for people learning actual science, a word not used a single time in this thread. You can tell it's a technocrat redditor genre because they don't care about plants and fungi/bacteria who already have perfected solar extraction over millions of years. Why reinvent the wheel? The answer is obvious: $$$$$$$
>very strong ideological content.Zizek disgusted
>>16140>the "punk" is a stereotype of a person who does not conform to the current system,<the word 'punk' meant prostitute in Shakespeare's time and now means prison bitcha utopia dreamed by rape victims? No wonder its so dreary lol
>called punk because they propose a way out of the current societySolar power is such a normal, non-edgy part of ruling class capitalism that Obama did corporate subsidies for some grifters. Is it "edgy" to demand we extract exponentially more rare earth minerals from the periphery for the imperial core?
>Cyberpunk is a style that exists as a warning Literally used as a how-to guide for every Silicon Valley neoliberal. Solarpunk must be a guide for imperialist resource extraction.
>the style has been reduced to an aesthetic and has lost all its political significance.Liberals have been saying "solar power will save the world when the market improves" since the '70s, it was idealist utopianism then.
>>24624>what exactly is the subversive alternative to solarpunk? It should be something that capitalism is structurally incapable of providing.Very easy answer:
<collective struggle<class consciousness<literally just any politics outside of individualist consumer aesthetic subcultures>>16288Did you bother looking it up? Fucking retard. Can't a person read a fucking architecture thread without being slandered? It means across gender and transsexual generally means they had a sex change operation and is a term more popular in the past. Transgender is more inclusive since not all trans people are transsexual. Literally nobody brought up trans people but somehow "solarpunk" convinced you to write a transphobic rant, pseudretard
T. Trans person
>>16134Wouldn't the better word be SolarCore? SolarPunk implies there's something dystopian about it.
A solarpunk dystopia would be an interesting concept tho.
>>33372>SolarPunk implies there's something dystopian about it.The -punk part of fiction usually is in reference to punks or rebels in the setting. At this point it's become kind of a perfunctory suffix though. The "punks" of solarpunk would essentially be people buliding communes and doing guerilla gardening within capitalism, but that doesn't fit the format of how the word is constructed.
>A solarpunk dystopia would be an interesting concept tho.Yes it would.
>>33368Touching grass isn't gonna do anything about the metabolic rift, anon.
>>33370If they aren't Nazis then they're Jehovah's Witness, which somehow might be even worse. I wanna say it's almost like people's recurring fixations with Solarpunk is symptomatic of a much larger yearning to return to the very utopian communal experiments that dominated America throughout the 19th century.
>>33374Probably something like that copypasta that reactionaries post about Avatar where the humans are the good guys because they have the technology to go to the stars, while the ayys are lame because having all their needs met means nothing motivates them to supersede themselves. Idk how you could do it in a way that isn't right wing unless you just decide that the solarpunk world is capitalist. Maybe do a version where it's just greenwashed capitalism instead of eco-socialism.
>>33375>Touching grass isn't gonna do anything about the metabolic rift, anon.Smoking some might make you care enough to do something about it.
>If they aren't Nazis then they're Jehovah's Witness, which somehow might be even worse.Idk how JWs are worse than nazis but go off queen.
>I wanna say it's almost like people's recurring fixations with Solarpunk is symptomatic of a much larger yearning to return to the very utopian communal experiments that dominated America throughout the 19th century.Or maybe people are noticing the effects humans are having on nature and want to make dealing with that a major plank of future political projects.
>>33379Yeah I guess.
I guess you could also say that solarpunk may be likely to amuse ourselves to death, ie. without adversity and higher purpose beyond hedonism humanity will slowly die out
>>33372'SolarCore' would be a lot better.
>>33373>The -punk part of fiction usually is in reference to punks or rebels in the settingNo, the '-punk' adjective always indicated an aesthetic reflection of the crisis of modernity. This is what made post-punk, cyberpunk, etc so compelling from their outset. Solarpunk isn't concerned with that; if it did, then that would betray its 'optimistic' premise.
>The "punks" of solarpunk would essentially be people buliding communes and doing guerilla gardening within capitalism, but that doesn't fit the format of how the word is constructed.How is this any different than nearly every recent-ish anarchist group ever? It just goes to show that y'all haven't changed much since Fredy Perlman joined Fifth Estate's editorial board like 50 years ago.
>>33380Hmm yeah the idea of collapsing birth rates continuing might work. Like the opposite of Malthusianism lol.
>>33381>How is this any different than nearly every recent-ish anarchist group ever?You are asking why bending over backward to make an inappropriate term make sense yields kind of stupid results. There's nothing necessarily anarchist about solarpunk.
>>33376There's nothing wrong with that
per se, but the alignment of boulevards down to yes, the placement of trees, have historically been used by city planners to justify discriminatory policies! Just look at the confluence of the 'City Beautiful' and 'Progressive' movements during the rise of Jim Crow here in America! I'm tried of being met with a chorus of impressionable people yelling, "What's so bad about trees?!" when, to treat them charitably, they likely haven't dug beyond introductory readings on social ecology and the right to the city to begin with.
>>33377>Smoking some might make you care enough to do something about it.I'm more into amphetamines if I'm being honest; which is funny seeing how much I think Solarpunk is Hitlerite nonsense at worse.
>Or maybe people are noticing the effects humans are having on nature You're forget that America has long, storied history of utopian communal experiments under its belt and any political project (socialist and otherwise) with as lofty aims as Solarpunk will almost certainly, unfortunately, revert back to that state. Americans need to reckon with with the legacies of Owen, Rapp and Amana
>and want to make dealing with that a major plank of future political projects.I'll have uhh, one Green Five Year Plan please. Maybe a reconstituted Civilian
Conservation Climate Corps on the side, with college student conscripts wearing Adidas track suit uniforms or something.
>>33382>There's nothing necessarily anarchist about solarpunk.People have been bending over backwards trying to make the case for Solarpunk as a
political project for almost a decade. They absolutely want us to think it's anarchism. They have wanted us think it's the Kurdish experiment in Northern Syria, and even Exarcheia. As the climate crisis deepens, any 21st century anarchist movement will be coded as Solarpunk. Seeing at how the subgenre hasn't produced a foundational work yet, that has been its lasting impact (to me anyway).
>>33383>but the alignment of boulevards down to yes, the placement of trees, have historically been used by city planners to justify discriminatory policies!capitalists used urban planning to discriminate against people before
therefore trees are bad
>>33385>People have been bending over backwards trying to make the case for Solarpunk as a political project for almost a decade. They absolutely want us to think it's anarchism.Yes, people will try to make the case that appealing things are related to their politics.
>As the climate crisis deepens, any 21st century anarchist movement will be coded as SolarpunkWhy is that anarchist specifically? Why not solarpunk Stalinism?
>>33391>Yes, people will try to make the case that appealing things are related to their politics.I don't think Cyberpunk suffered from that within its first 15 years at least.. It wouldn't be until the 'Post-Cyberpunk' era of the 90s did Silicon Valley techies mistake satire for sincerity.
>Why is that anarchist specifically? Why not solarpunk Stalinism?Well it just speaks to the state of the left in the global north and its historical relationship to environmentalism ig since Marx and Engels' time. As much I like the sound of Eco-Stalinism, we barely have Eco-Leninism formulated and made palatable yet.
>>33383interestingly in some cities there also now exists a disparity in trees and some types of plant life in general with more affluent areas having more trees and older trees.
This ofc means working class areas dont get any of the benefits associated with trees such >biodiversity
>erosion control>reduced heating/cooling costs>positive mental health benefit from plant life/green spaces>shade(which other than being good for pedestrians can reduce UV ray damage to concrete and asphalt)>some trees are very good at reducing air pollutionurban heat island bad tree good
>>34326>concrete buildings😑
>concrete buildings with TREES IN THEM🤯 WAAOOOOW
>>34327the people complaining about
>>24631 being ugly are like libs going le depressing soviet architecture. just slap some paint on them if it's so ugly
function trumps form every day. formfags are and always will be libs
>>34328Bosco Verticale also weirdly comes up every time people talk about "Brutalism with trees" which is just hilarious. Unless it looks like Alt-Erlaa I sleep.
>>34328Peter Barber's output has interesting formal qualities too! His sketch/draft work clearly takes inspiration from ancient Middle Eastern cities like Shibam.
>>40769There's nothing inherently wrong with those things, but why's it called solar punk and why is it rooted in Tumblr scifi and consumerism (seen here
>>16171 )
>>40813>but why's it called solar punkIt's like cyberpunk… But with no punk… and with barely any cyber… You know, people used to call that "utopian fiction" back in the day.
It's like with goblincore, it has nothing to do with hardcore punk or even hardcore techno but normies like to appropriate le funni suffixes to sound cool without understanding what they mean. It's not even Goblin Slayer porn.
>>40840https://medium.com/solarpunks/on-the-political-dimensions-of-solarpunk-c5a7b4bf8df4Engaging prose, meh content.
<It is a dark truth of environmentalism that wind farms, solar arrays, hydroelectric dams and other triumphs of sustainability require completely engineered landscapes. Building them means ripping up the ground and installing massive amounts of metal and concrete.I agree that's true but I don't see what's dark about it.
<In light of their power, overthrowing the mega-rich is a dicey project, and one perhaps left to a different kind of political aesthetic. Instead solarpunk can challenge the capitalist status quo by nurturing alternative economic arrangements at a community and network level. Encourage resiliency that insulates towns and neighborhoods from economic shocks. Forge mutal aid pacts that protect members from fiscal predation. If we can prove that we don’t need them or their money, the chokehold of the plutocracy will loosen.Without freely available land, how would that work? I don't need the landlord in the sense that I don't need that person to exist for the house to exist, but I must pay rent to a landlord and there is no practical way of sneaking out of this except for a tiny minority. The only thing that could do away with landlords is class struggle. There is a lot in the text about doing this or that in a sneaky way (growing food on land you don't own), all of these have to be niche activities or they cease being sneaky.
>debt jubilee>tax on extreme wealth>the regulation or even abolition of usuryNot gonna happen without taking state power.
<vertical farmsInefficient.
<As Vaclav Havel explained: “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Havel, an artist turned activist turned statesman who led his nation out of a time of crisis, in many ways embodies the transformational power of ideas and aesthetics — and thus the potential of a movement like solarpunk to do real good in the world.Strange source of inspiration. Coming from an ultra-rich family of real-estate moguls, Havel was unsurprisingly pro-capitalist. Havel was also for expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and was in favor of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia and the Iraq war.
This was the most serious text. The other two have barely anything to say.
https://solarpunkmagazine.com/what-would-a-solarpunk-government-look-like/<Solarpunk has a lot of dreams for a future we’d like to live in. Cultural and racial diversityDiversity isn't good or bad in itself so I don't see the point of having a pro or anti diversity position.
<Isn’t there room in solarpunk for imagining, not a nanny state, but a state whose honest purpose is to support people to live the best, most meaningful lives as possible?Which government would not say that about itself? Super lame article. The comment by Joel Spector is more interesting. He shills for proxy voting that can be redelegated at any time (calling it Positive Proxy, it's usually called Liquid Democracy) and that laws should expire. Though I don't know how Spector got the idea that German law is some sort of open-source process (
Reichsgerift isn't a proper German word btw.), it appears to be an online hobby project and not something that politicians actually look at.
https://www.re-des.org/es/a-solarpunk-manifesto/<it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendenciesAh yes, very important point. I was going to throw my support behind the steampunk party (they also have a strong presence in my union), but now…
For calling yourselves solar you punks have produced a lot of coal :P If you solarpunks vibe with what you call anti-authoritarian socialism, my advice is to stop shlicking to that yogurt commercial and seek out the Parecon people.
>>40840Who's gonna mine the material needed for the solar panels?
>Anarch-hobbitAustin TX ass ideology
>>44867fascism = aesthetics
all aesthetics all fascism 100% solarpunk
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