chapotraphouse

Okay, to be more serious, my main vibe from looking at solarpunk art is that the artists aren't involved in production, especially industrial production. Ultimately, I wonder how production is handled in a solarpunk society. There's essentially two ends of a spectrum: industrial production and artisan production.

Industrial production means factories, and I struggle to find any meaningful difference between a solarpunk factory vs a futuristic factory vs a cyberpunk factory. All futuristic factories converge to a design of being:

1. Autonomous
2. In near/complete darkness
3. Filled with inert gas

And since a society is ultimately organized by how production is handled, then there's really not a whole lot of difference between a solarpunk society and a more generic futuristic society. Less chrome and more trees I guess? From a purely aesthetic perspective, you turn a futuristic factory into a solarpunk factory by photoshopping a bunch of trees right next to the factory and replacing a field of invasive grass with a field of native wildflowers. But the actual interior of the factory would be identical, and a faithful depiction of the interior of a solarpunk factory would be identical to a faithful depiction of the interior of a futuristic factory.

Artisan production is the other end, and that's where the fashy vibes come from, especially when artisan production is artistically extolled by artists living in a settler-colonial society where the ideal form of living is larping as a yeoman homesteading pioneer living on stolen Indigenous land. Even "communal living" doesn't cut it because artisan production can't keep up with industrial production, meaning the outputs of artisan production often goes to the immediate community and the immediate community only. And if you live within a community that lacks the means or ability to produce that particular commodity because your skin color is different or you live in an arid desert? Well, tough shit.

looks at the 180+ comments from a post about how solarpunk sucks and is reactionary

Hexbear is not ready for the post about how cyberpunk sucks and is reactionary.

I'm a fan of the YouTuber "andrewism", who regularly makes videos on an anarchist solar punk society. I don't think he supports solar punk just as an aesthetic, but believes it's legitimately part of what an ideal and egalitarian society would look like, alongside other concepts he's discussed like library economies.

I don't think solar punk is idealist either. Idealism doesn't just mean it's still just a concept, or that people want to use it as a goal. Solar punk is materialist because it describes a society that reproduces the values that sustain it, like land stewardship and collectivism. It describes a super structure with communal control of resources, which then does the whole self reinforcement with the base (which, admittedly, solarpunk also describes). It's not just the aesthetic.

I wonder why there's nearly 200 comments in this post

And here I thought the low population bit was supposed to be because technology and decentralization allows humanity to spread out and higher standards of living and education being the birth rate down 🤔 I guess either way we're making a lot of assumptions about a hypothetical commercial like future aesthetics....

This thing had 3 comments when I went to bed. Did Yogthos rile up the libs again?

EDIT: Nope, just another struggle session.