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This shit is so frustrating 🤬 I wish I knew how to express how toothless and fake this whole article, and “solarpunk” in general, seem to me. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx5aym/solarpunk-is-not-about-pretty-aesthetics-its-about-the-end-of-capitalism
I’m going to write more about this today because some of my friends are in this article (hi Jay, hi Andrew) and I don’t mean to belittle the work they’ve been doing. But I’ve been around since day one of solarpunk and the discourse has not improved.
On second read, it looks like this author took a lot of nuanced quotes from Jay and Andrew and smashed them into a narrative of “this movement is antithetical to capitalism, which is the destroyer of our world.” I do not impugn them or the other people quoted.
I think there is a type of article in which the author learned to write from college, where saying “capitalism is bad” is an intellectual applause light that saves you from having to make any other argument.
You can see it here, where a Chobani yogurt ad is used as an example of capitalism making money off solarpunk aesthetics. And yet, the artist and others are quoted as saying they think this art is converting minds and providing an alternate vision, no matter who pays for it.
Contrast to this comment:
But you can’t get your piece picked up by Vice (an impressively capitalist organization) if it doesn’t contain this “capitalism is bad” message. And to be fair, the writer probably didn’t pick the “End of Capitalism” headline. But this attitude has been a throughline of solarpunk. Why?
Don’t get me wrong, I have been equally guilty. Just a couple years ago I wrote an essay that declares that solarpunk utopians have to lead the way against capitalist growth. It ended with the words “How do we do that?” https://deepfates.com/sciops/2019/01/07/keanu-face.html
This line of questioning is the point at which many Solarpunks start doing 🤷🤷🤷 and saying phrases like “decentralization,” “stewardship,” “regenerative agriculture,” “creating a movement.” These are all surely headings to follow, but they don’t provide a theory of change.
Even “get solarpunk imagery into corporate advertisements as a way of popularizing a better world” is a theory of change. And there have been some more practical pieces, like ADH’s seminal 2015 essay https://medium.com/solarpunks/on-the-political-dimensions-of-solarpunk-c5a7b4bf8df4.
Still a great essay. He discusses the gritty climate-collapse scenarios that put the “punk” in solar punk, and has a real grasp of the demographic basis of the near future. But he takes it as an axiom that technical problems are downstream from political problems. I disagree.
I have done political organizing. I have built a community center in a big city, occupied parks, marched and blockaded and communed. I helped start an XR chapter and I have interfaced with the Sunrise movement. I don’t think it works. Not fast enough, anyway.
The feedback loops on climate collapse are fast and unpredictable. We’re going to need massive technological development to rehabilitate the planet, as well as the buy-in of most of the people. This is good! Most people want the climate to not collapse.
Unfortunately, most people are not in control of the decision-making apparatus. There is a ruling class. Critics of capitalism are correct in this. They are incorrect in thinking that democratic oversight is the answer. Democratic nation-states are currently in a bad way.
Democracies can’t outmaneuver corporations. Democracies are made of people, and people are fallible. They have all kinds of complicated desires. And capitalism is nothing if not good at exploiting desire.
Democracy is slow. Modern data-backed corporations are getting constant feedback, from their users and from the markets. They’re hyperfocused on their one goal, usually profit, and they have tons of flexibility to decide how to do that. They can be slightly evil, as a treat.
Again, I am not saying this is a good value system! Just that it’s a strong design and keeps winning over “political” style organization. slaps roof of Decoupled society of market transactions This baby can hold so many contradictions. And still runs like a beaut.
Democracy and capitalism will both fail to bend to external conditions fast enough. The future people will create too much novelty for these centralized models to contain. Half of the people on Earth were born since 1970.
it's not a culture war, it's a time war
— web weaver (@deepfates) September 3, 2021
A minority from the 20th century rule over billions of 21st century citizens. they fear the demographic change. every battle is on the back foot.
And yet the people of the future are still oppressed. the machines still burn their world
So in my view the best leverage point is not politics, but technology. Things like DAOs, microfab, AI models, and of course solar power will enable the actual movement of the means of production to communities in a decentralized way, and give them access to markets, bazaars.
I don’t think that forcing people to change or falsify their preferences is a route with very much traction. Giving them new options, new powers, does. But it still won’t be the end of capitalism. Because these guilds, coops, patches will still find conflict.
The high-coupling way says you can simply War your enemies into going along with your way. And that certainly does solve conflict, in a sense, but it’s expensive and takes a long time. The decoupling side says, Trade and Ignore. Transactional society scales across cultures.
Time is a thing we don’t have much of. Desire for a better future is something that we have a lot of, but can’t act upon. And democracy and capitalism are both warped by the lack of feedback available to those at the top. They literally can’t feel our pain, hear our desires.
The process of commodification of technology will continue until the living standards improve, is what I’m saying. And many people don’t know how to envision a world where they have choice in that process. So they write it off as “capitalism” and wait for its inevitable End.
This quote always gets thrown around. In this article Adam Flynn is quoting it from Jameson or Zizek. Attributions vary. I think it is backwards.
It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of the world. Because if you truly imagine the end of the world—the corpses, refugees, dust bowls, hard work, unanswered prayers… You might accept that capitalism could be part of the solution.
Also it’s ironic that Vice used this quote from Jay: “If you’re looking at an eco-future image and it doesn’t have people in it, then it’s not Solarpunk” and then put an eco-brutalist designfoam render with no people as the cover.
What I’m saying is: the Chobani ad IS SOLARPUNK. The future will be robot DAO permaculture farms selling organic GMO produce to big cities full of old people maintaining the sky. Get used to it.
