Is Solarpunk a movement? I thought it was just Ghibli-inspired drawings of technology coexisting with trees.
What other people have said.
What happens when your "movement" is an aesthetic with zero theoretical grounding?
It gets co-opted and commodified to be used for the consolation of the oppressed classes with the intent of duping them while robbing the movement of its revolutionary edge by vulgarising it.Now, if only someone had written about this exact phenomenon in theory a century ago so that we would be aware of this and we'd be able to take steps to outflank it.
It's also re-inventing the wheel because certain districts of 重庆 has looked like an urban version of that for decades.
Show
Show
Show
I love how we have one person in this thread vehemently saying "this is utopian fantasy nonsense that could never happen because it takes too much work" and another person saying "this already exists in china here are pictures"
The vast majority of the Tumblr libs who love solarpunk yogurt ads would hate this because it's in China.
Doesn't show on my device so I get to tell you how! it's { followed by the Mandarin, then vertical bar | followed by the pinyin, finally }
It’s a movement insofar as it’s an aesthetic that people want to see around them, but have no ideological understanding of how to get there or if that’s even something people should strive for in general.
It's a vibes based "movement" the point is the put a lot of pretty aesthetic into the world and thus manifest it as a future.
it's an online utopian fandom. anarchism without the an, the arch, or the ism.
profoundly deranged tweet, and yet, true in every word
certainly makes sense that they made cruelty squad which is a deranged game, and yet, true in every frame
When I think solar punk, I think Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization
Noone yet in this thread addressing how "gooner" relates to any of this lol, or is it just being used as ornamental punctuation to end a series of somewhat related nouns
rubbing yrself raw to the prospect of a rooftop garden
I think it's being modified by the word "nostalgia", so they're saying that solarpunk aesthetics are for people who really like nostalgic scenery, which is common among fascists.
it's emotional and social gooning, an anti-agitprop that instead of edging you toward revolution, functions as an outlet and masturbatory hope. the emotional equivalent of reaching right for the prostate stimulator. idk maybe
Yeah I was VERY confused why "gooner" is there I swear to god its just the ultimate buzzword right now.
either solarpunk came from something awful or thr word is “nostalgia gooner” and means someone who jerks off over nostalgia?
how the fuck is it hitlerite adjacent are solar panels made of racism particles or something
I think it's just kinda milquetoast at worst
edit: I forgot about lithium, ok I can see it
I think it's been somewhat co-opted by ecofash, apparently it appeals to people who want a tradwife living on a vast property but still have their Xbox and Bazingamobile. Lebenstraum vibes with a Studio Ghibli coat of paint.
Idk anything about solar punk, but i sure do know a lot of eco-fascists that use "there's too many people!" as an excuse to implement eugenics against minorities and developing nations.
to be fair to that particular picture it does have a city in the background which is usually the thing that's entirely missing from the single family ranch home surrounded by pastures in the real grim solar panels / our fertilizer is other the undesirables depictions
Sodium ion batteries are the new up and coming battery technology that removes the need for lithium, sodium is abundant.
https://www.ft.com/content/826fb9bb-b27f-4c68-ad4b-a54ad74713c9
no idea who this villecallio fellow is, but that's a really 3 bells alarm chili the morning after burning your asshole spicy take
Now im not a solarpunk fan myself but I have seen many leftwing/leftish people seen positive on it. Is it good / bad ? I havent really looked into it beyond surface level.
IMO it's good at its roots but can be easily coopted, it's like cottagecore in that sense.
Twitter solarpunk is cooked because they all use screenshots from the same yogurt ad with lines like "a business is only as good as its people" lmao
Exactly, it's basically been reduced down to just the aesthetics which can be readily repackaged and recuperated. It's a floating signifier, waiting for a brand to attach to and be capitalized on. But since there's something fundamentally good at its core, I still see value in it.
Sorry for being a boomer mom-type character archetype. Could you explain how solarpunk and cottagecore connect and why they are good but can be coopted? I honestly need to google cottagecore again; I remember hearing the word, but I'm not that online yet, I guess.
Cottagecore was a lesbian aesthetic about escaping heteronormative society and going off grid. It got turned into a tradwife aesthetic about neo lebensraum. Solarpunk is similar, but the way it gets coopted is via green capitalism washing away the revolutionary parts of solarpunk and replacing them with consumerism of the eco friendly variety.
Thank you, that makes sense. It's nice to see young people respect their elders :^)
Tradwives really out here dressing like lesbians, except much like a heterosexual trad-douche, they really struggle with like everything aesthetically
I think if I just continue cooking my mind with enough Brace rants I'll eventually become a good version of BMF
The sad part for me is that BMF was always completely legible to me, but I don't think I can cook myself enough to ever actually post like that because I despise obscure jargonism.
Please continue your journey to become whitehat BMF.
Nah I think what set BMF apart was not so much the jargon, but assuming that the reader could keep up with immense amounts of subtext and implied meaning; usually their posts were long sequences of quotations followed by replies that imply several layers of contradicting and layered cultural criticisms, which you could only keep up with if you synchronized your mind to theirs in a fundamental way.
Meh, I always thought everything was pretty straight forward and textual, maybe I misinterpretated it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/1dqmbu1/when_the_heavens_gate_ufo_cult_did_a_mass_suicide/
All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading "Heaven's Gate Away Team" (one of many instances of the group's use of the nomenclature of the fictional universe of Star Trek).
least psychotic Captain Janeway stans
There's at least 4 layers of decoding necessary to parse this post.
Idk, it's mostly just knowing about Heaven's Gate and their idiosyncratic pop culture use, with abit of internet slang. It's just three layers of pop culture, and one layer of UFO death cult culture. I guess I'm so used to it I barely even register it as sub-text. Yikes.
But also, haven't read this one before! Yet another fascinating BMF point, though one I have heard expressed before.
Wait the lesbians did cottagecore first? Thats cool and makes me feel better about it. There's a minecraft youtuber I like called GeminiTay who's wlw and before she came out she was doing Cottagecore builds in Minecraft and people found it unsuprising when she came out as bi because of this lol.
I think a really strong example of this is the fact that the most popular thing to showcase the solarpunk aesthetic is a freaking ad for a yoghurt brand that comes in disposable plastic packaging…
It's alright, auntie, lol.
For cottagecore - I think it's the fascist idealization of a past that never really existed. I've never really thought about the connection between cottagecore and solar punk, but I could see both having a twee idealized rural life aesthetic (with solar punk adding a dash of sci-fi)
I wouldn't say it's hitlerite adjacent, but it's full idealism - impossible under capitalism and unnecessary under socialism. Also most of solarpunk art is really bad if you look at it second time - shitty infrastructure, rotting plant matter everywhere, erosion of cityspaces, insane amounts of labour to maintain it, disconnected primitivism, strong postapo ruin vibes, and this is even before we talk about AI artefacts in said pics.
There are anarchist ultra-strains of solarpunk that straight up want to ban fertilizer and stuff as soon as possible and let the food system collapse before an alternative is made to feed everyone. And I don't mean in an indirect way, I mean they admit this.
Shows how that's just pure vibes and idealism. The result would be more like cannibalpunk when 8 billion humans suddenly reverting to subsistence farming.
insane amounts of labour to maintain it
Labour has never been the problem. It’s whether those maintaining it socially reproduce capitalism, or socialism/communism/anarchy.
I feel like even if we had communism tomorrow we’d still have discussions on if X thing is worth doing labor wise or if that labor could be used more effectively doing something else. It’s not like having a bunch of vining plants on every building is inherently a good thing. Those plants are going to want water from somewhere and they’ll probably get it from the sewer system or something which means clogged drains everywhere.
insane amounts of labour to maintain it
Ok I'm only a little familiar with this aesthetic and its art, but I always thought the idea was that it isn't being actively maintained. Like the art I saw seemed to imply a vaguely socialist society rising up out of the overgrown ruins after the apocalypse in a capitalist one. The idea being that civilization doesn't necessarily mean the destruction of all existing life within it, that you can build a new society and let the plants that are already there just continue being there.
but I always thought the idea was that it isn’t being actively maintained
That would be logical, but unfortunately it is not so. On the art of cities/towns you have greenery absolutely everywhere, roads, roofs, houses, walls, tons of flower pots and other bigger and smaller containers. It again shows how idealist vision this is and how they know shit about greenery in city spaces, all this would very quickly just wither and die without constant care and the amount of plants needing that care means the labour would been simply crazy, especially that on the art if anyone is even doing that is always by hand. Even moderate amount of city greenery we have in some cities today need quite a lot of care. Alternatively they could make it less maintained by planting some crazy invasive species which would overgrown everything and look like Angkor Wat before rediscovery but that's not possible under most climates and not only monoculture weed is not close to the idea, but again, the erosion of cityspace would be huge.
Also there is a thing that solarpunk is nearly always vision of at least harshly understood degrowth if not outright primitivism and you have the full vision closer to postapo disaster than to any socialism.
It's an aesthetic. And yes aesthetics are political, but I think this is one of those ones that can go either way, in fact I feel that way about most "Punk" genres. There's been progressive and reactionary cyberpunk, steampunk, whatever.
Some of solar punk seems to be "hey what if we did Soviet brutalist commie blocks but with more greenery", so a more naturalistic and whimsical version of dense, organized, urban-proletariat society, which I think is kinda cool. Other times it looks more like an idealized version of what "techno-feudalism" would look like, a quaint, pastoral, sustainable version of being petite-bourgeois.
Soviet brutalist commie blocks but with more greenery
Of course, when you look at pictures of Soviet brutalist commie blocks that show the whole street instead of a single weirdly framed building, a lot of them fit that definition already (or at least they did until the 90s when the funding went away and nobody maintained the green spaces anymore).
It's also telling that one of the major artworks used to "promote" the aesthetic is literally a yoghurt commercial, but since it's a cute animation, it gets a pass.
a quaint, pastoral, sustainable version of being petite-bourgeois.
Or as I like to call it, "Hobbitcore."
I think it's fine. The societal changes necessary to address climate change are so wild that people literally lack capacity to imagine them. Solarpunk is an art genre to fill in that space.
