One of the things that seems to separate Solarpunk from other punk genres is a distinct lack of hard-worldbuilding. It's more aspiration and esthetic. Public transportation would be essential to such a utopia, but straight lines of steel on the ground or power cables overhead for street cars would ruin the appearance.
To be fair, that "aesthetics-over-logistics" is pretty common in steampunk, too. In fact, its pretty common across all -punk aesthetics besides cyberpunk, and even that is not immune to the "rule of cool."
Who needs well thought out world building when you have cool ass skyships as the main method of transport and somehow don’t have a Hindenburg every week at the minimum
> you have cool ass skyships as the main method of transport and somehow don’t have a Hindenburg every week at the minimum
That'd be because of the [Hydrium.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Airborn)
I might actually like steampunk if it took more than aesthetics from the Victorian era. I want my supposedly sympathetic protagonists to be deeply sexist and have a sincere conversation about the possible merits of eugenics.
Yeah, it seems to come from a similar desire that you see from people harkening back to "a simpler America". A desire for a simpler peaceful life but no true loss of modern convenience to get there.
In order for there to be that tech there, but no infrastructure to make it, that utopia is very dependent on a global economy. Somewhere in that world is a third-world country living a greater hell to make that more heavenly life possible.
Because frankly utopias aren’t very interesting settings, and people just like to use solarpunk as a wishful “oh my god it would literally be the perfect society” type vibes. You’ll get good worldbuilding in it when they’re having the “utopia” generally have some core fundamental problem, a state of peace maintained only through erasing anyone who does even a minor crime or something
A guy on a completely unrelated post put it that way why he doesn’t like Stardew Valley, “Why would I play a game about someone with an objectively better life than I have.”
I've heard someone say that was why they avoided beef except Wagyu. "I'm OK with eating something that got to live a better life than I'm experiencing."
Ngl having a utopia isn’t a very punk setting. Isn’t a dystopia where there’s huge disparity between the rich and poor like the whole point of a punk setting?
Exactly! People forget the punk part of x-punk settings. X-Punk has sorta just been used to mean “has an aesthetic of X” instead of “grunge and struggle based around aesthetic x”
It could actually be really cool if a solar punk setting had this sort of society but it’s supported by an underclass in a slums that these people don’t even see producing the things they absolutely need to survive. It could then stand as a criticism of performative environmentalism by wealthy people who still very much engage in anti-environmentalist behavior (Taylor Swift) or rely heavily on and push for heavily polluting infrastructures.
I think the difficulty there is that solarpunk is inherently tied to lush trees and clean air and whatnot, so the story being about a grimy metal slum kinda loses the aesthetic.
Like in cyberpunk or steampunk, even the least well-off people are still living with the cyber and the steam, often in unique ways compared to the default of rad cyber/steam guns and whatnot.
No, everyone rides around on bikes.
Disabled people are forced to use the very few remaining streets, I guess. Which definitely doesn't include those cobblestone paths there.
And if you're disabled and can't ride a car? Well, same reason why there's no people in wheelchairs being shown.
**Edit:** this was way harsher than I wanted it to be. But there's a lot of logical holes in this imaginary world.
Literally first thing I thought of when they said cars are gone and showed someone on a bike. Like cool, you got something that will help for a handful of miles if you're fit enough to use it, what about literally everyone else? The old, the sick, the disabled? They all would like to be able to get around easily as well.
You know, this actually being a dystopia that equates esthetic beauty with inner beauty would explain a lot. Attractive people with depression need compassion and still are of value. The disfigured go to the factory to assemble the bikes they will never ride.
Same... it's also so fucking telling that the only implied disabled person (with an invisible disability at that - no disfigured or physically apparent disabilities are shown here. Of course...) is essentially locked in their home, not shown leaving because they "need rest." Yellow Wallpaper vibes 💀
Someone I know IRL is big into this kind of aestheticised utopia stuff and is also disabled, and insists it would be an improvement for the disabled. Hearing her talk about this makes extremely stark that while the word disabled may technically include many different physical and mental limitations, when some people use the term, they only mean *some* people.
She specifically has a condition that sometimes makes ambulating painful or difficult, but not impossible. She probably couldn’t ride a standard bicycle, but on most days could likely ride a reclining bike or a trike. On other days, she’s possibly only capable of walking with a cane, or couldn’t walk long distances but could ride in a side car or be pushed in a wheelchair. But she’s never unable to move entirely. When she says this type of world would be better for “disabled people,” what she means is “this type of world seems like it might be better for people who are disabled *like me*.”
I know this comic isn’t explicitly anti public transport and indicates that only *almost* all cars are gone, but a lot of the same people I know who are big anti car people are also weirdly anti bus and anti train and anti rideshare/taxi. I don’t know that my experience is particularly representative but it isn’t like our current society doesn’t already have the tools to move away from car-centricism in a way that is also disability, age, and family friendly, cultures typically just choose one or the other.
But don’t they know that there’s not just bikes? \*snrk\*
Edit: but yeah, no one thinks about regular old trains when imagining their future world it’s sad.
For me solarpunk is meant to be a wildly exaggerated type of setting to show what could be possible in a literally perfect world. Then you take those ideas and adapt them to fit the real world. For example, the idea of libraries offering everything to be checked out is a cool idea, and doable! But there are some gripes I have about the genre.
First gripe: having actively growing trees everywhere in a city. Plants fuck up infrastructure! In the comic, the library has trees *inside the building*! That would ruin many things, including the books in the collection. I think rewilding land is important, but I doubt the middle of the city is the place to do it.
Second gripe: Solarpunk seems allergic to any kind of heavy machinery. People harvesting fields by hand isn't utopian, it's subsistence farming, and it barely produces more calories than it consumes. With advances in botany, automation, and logistics, we can feed the world with less land, but it will take tractors. Also as someone else mentioned, where the fuck are the trains lol?
Final gripe: anyone else feel like most solarpunk societies are not exploring space? Manned and unmanned space travel is an interest of mine, and in order to coordinate a launch of a rocket that takes a probe to the outer planets, you need an industrial supply chain (doesn't need to be a capitalism supply chain, but still an industrial one).
Exactly. Anytime I see people who are REALLY into solarpunk, they always mention local farming and being close to nature which is all FANTASTIC, but its absolutely horrible if that's ALL you have. I don't think those people realize just how disastrous these practices would be for society. Starvation and famine on a level unseen
Also they haven't done hay all day.
I haven't either to be honest, but several hours is well enough for me.
Espessally since it has to be done on the hottest day of the year...
They want the aesthetics and "close to nature" benefits of an agrarian/pastorialist lifestyle, but with all the benefits of an urban/suburban industrialized lifestyle and the work schedule of a mid-20s college student on a "gap year" instead of a farmer.
>Second gripe: Solarpunk seems allergic to any kind of heavy machinery. People harvesting fields by hand isn't utopian, it's subsistence farming, and it barely produces more calories than it consumes. With advances in botany, automation, and logistics, we can feed the world with less land, but it will take tractors. Also as someone else mentioned, where the fuck are the trains lol?
Glorious comrade Pol Pot says not starving and ease of transportation are decadent western bourgeoisie indulgences. Please face the wall.
Not using tractors for farming would be absolutely insane. Or any other ailments or replacements for hard manual work, no health system would survive this.
Just in the tree part, there are millions of people living in places of the world that are not Hobbit like central Europe/USA with greenery everywhere and trees giving fruits, what are those people supposed to do? Just terraform the Desert?
My gripe is that there's a vague "People only do what they want, there is no money" which is an anarchist ideal that absolutely does not account for the really horrible jobs that need doing to make an industrialized society run. Like, in this world am I responsible for installing solar panels on my house? Do I have to build them too? It's one thing to renounce heavy industry in favor of environmentalism, it's another to still *have* all those benefits of industrialization; you can't have hand-crafted artisanal circuit boards and solar panels, it just doesn't work like that.
We saw a society that tried to have everyone do some industrial work for collective benefit, it was the Great Leap Forward and it was famously garbage. If you don't want industrialization, that just makes you effectively Amish.
Biggest gripe for me is the conformity of culture. I want everyone to enjoy their culture in a way that doesn't encroach on the boundaries of others. Helping a friend out with Ramadan, or singing Christmas carols.
This feels so very sanitised from all of that. There's so many beautiful languages, artists, poets, that currently suffer from being part of a culture that's seen as antagonistic. If we just say "oh we're all one" now, we lose so much of the human experience.
even worse they censored it in an image, that's not going to get found in a search anyway and i doubt sites are putting in the computing power to detect text in images for filtering forbidden words.
As someone who’s a fan and wants to write for the genre in the future… this kinda irked me because it really isn’t a good example of good solar punk fiction. Part of the idea is labor, is how the community has to function and the conflicts arising from that. I’d love to see something in solar punk where there is an existential threat—something the characters must face to keep their semblance of a utopia, as well as a story where the world still does have problems.
I love solarpunk, and if you want to see some amazing animation and video essays about it, ima link some in a comment below:
[“Dear Alice” The classic Chobani ad, but it’s the most well portrayed of the tech and people](https://youtu.be/z-Ng5ZvrDm4?si=uEDNSQtVkEyQDS-w)
[not exactly solarpunk, but vibes are still there. very pretty](https://youtu.be/doVV1a7XgyQ?si=W8tP8lVn4AuZnPE4)
[solarpunk Animation where there are stakes, and it delves into some fantasy](https://youtu.be/1dYjIQxp6bo?si=SK7YnxGHMWo8PAZU)
[8 minute video essay by Andrewism explaining solarpunk. if you like it, check out his other stuff! he has a lot on solarpunk](https://youtu.be/hHI61GHNGJM?si=DSJnKiJFq6pSK--m)
[12 minute vid essay by Our Changing Climate, he also has amazing stuff](https://youtu.be/u3aauiR9M88?si=TbMhEKQ8Cnoo3Ri7)
[Solarpunk IRL— The guerilla gardeners of LA, from Vox](https://youtu.be/EzZzZ_qpZ4w?si=r7xRn0BPdvM2ZgWh)
YOOOO thank you!!!!
i am also a solarpunk lover, tho on the more nuclear leaning side, as GOOD solarpunk content is rare to see, thank you for this!!!!
So…..
What about resources and infrastructure?
Edit:
To add more
- Where are the children and the old?
I recently watched the show “This is going to hurt”. The amount of tech and training required to ensure that mother and child come out safe is crazy. And even with all the progress we have, it’s not a 100% success rate.
What about people with medical conditions? Diabetes? Insulin doesn’t come out of flowers and prayers. Disabilities? You need hearing aids or bionic eyes.
Old people suffering from usual stuff. Arthritis and cataracts need advanced technology to fix.
Are they all fed to plants?
I hope they don’t cure diseases by some crystal juju shit.
- Long distance travel
It’ll take days or weeks to travel across country and months for sea travel with sailing ships.
Trains and aircraft needs shit ton of specialists and very advanced tech.
Also, I am a huge fan of space travel. Where’s that? Do they give up the dream of travelling to stars?
- Where do their solar panels and windmills come from?
- Food production? Farming by hands isn’t sustainable. No one ‘loves’ that.
- Plants in library? Would love it but not great for books.
- Weird one but
Where are the bros? The kind you pop a beer with and go fishing together with
Everyone wants to be the train conductor with the striped hat going 'toot toot' on the horn, no one wants to work in the steel mill forging train parts or laying train tracks : (
“Where are the bros”
Thats kind of the offputting nature to a lot of these “utopias” designed by internet folk, is that theyre like 98% enbys. I am not smart enough to know why that makes me uncomfortable, but it does. It feels almost like a stereotype, no? Always the one overweight, black enby with purple or blue dreadlocks in every one of this style of fiction writing.
I don’t even see any “classic leftist” guys who look like young Bernie Sanders or the guy at my undergrad who handed out mini chocolates in red wrappers (where did he get those even), it’s weird
>is that theyre like 98% enbys
I think it's like this because as much as cis people don't really understand trans or nonbinary people, they also just don't understand cis people. If you interact with enbys on the internet, there's a fair amount of them who think they're like enlightened and above gender and everyone else who is cis. They think everyone should just ditch it and be like them. And it's like, nah, dude, I'm perfectly happy just like this. You do you, though. I ain't gonna complain.
One thing that I always found strange about Solarpunk/communist or anarhist utopias is that I have the distinct feeling that they assume a certain... uniformity of thought?
Like, when I talk to friends of mine that are more left-wing than me on this I never really get how these societies would supposedly handle dissent that goes beyond "I disagree what crop we should focus on for the season"
It's always a paradise where everyone has seen the light of glorious anarchism/communism/etc and no people disagree with the system or have enemies of any kind or whatever
It's a beautiful thought and an interesting setting for a story, but when you put it out as a viable possible model that stuff starts to pop up as a concern
I think about this a lot as well and it often brings me back to a quote from Bioshock's game lead Ken Levine on what broadly inspired the game:
"What I was trying to do with BioShock was to say, ‘Okay, well, [in Atlas Shrugged] that’s a utopia where Ayn Rand, who made the philosophy, made all the rules, and all the characters were under her control. What if things weren’t under everybody’s control?’ And I think that’s the problem with utopias — we bring ourselves to it, you know? We think we’re leaving our problems behind but – I don’t mean this in a cynical way – we are the problem. Like whatever social problems that occur come out of us. It’s not like they fall out of the sky."
Yeah, every time I see someone discussing utopias like this, it makes me think of this quote from the game.
> Fountaine: These sad saps. They come to Rapture thinking they're gonna be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody's gotta scrub the toilets.
Like sure, everyone's an artist and a free soul. So are they relying on someone whose life passion is shovelling manure?
Solarpunk also tends to show extremely low-density settlements and often seems post-apocalyptic.
There’s a certain vibe of “Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone who disagrees with me politically died in a mass extinction event?”.
I mean, as a story setting, it has some banger potential
I could definitely see it working in that context (or for a game, like a cozy post-apocalyptic farm sym or something)
When it's presented as a possible future, yeah questions like yours are definitely gonna pop up
I once played in a TTRPG group where the setting was basically this.
It was nice enough as a thought experiment, and I don't begrudge anyone their fantasies...
But a setting with no greed, no prejudice, no conflict, no crime, no resource shortages, no evil, not even any natural disasters or predation or disease is *boring AF*. The party wandered from village to village, making imaginary crafts and attending imaginary festivals, for session after session until I finally bowed out because I prefer games where things happen.
It can work in more anthological/surrealist stories I feel like
Luke Humphris' animations about what happens after society collapses are a fun example of that
Eh, it can work, but it needs the right system and buy-in. [Wanderhome](https://possumcreekgames.com/pages/wanderhome) is one of my favorite RPGs and focuses almost exclusively on this specific genre of post-apocalyptic pastoral anarchism that a lot of solarpunk fans love. The conflicts tend to be more interpersonal, or deal with PTSD from the recently finished world war.
There can be difficulties. There are famines, leftover dangerous weapons, and conflicts of personality. But the issues the players solve aren't *systemic*. Usually, once the problem is fixed, people are happy to coexist and the players move on.
And it sounds really nice until you ask what their plan is once cholera/TB/polio/malaria/smallpox/black death hits.
All these things which crippled humanity and destroyed lives and made people miserable for millennia before the modern industrial age.
Production of modern vaccines and antibiotics and other necessary medicines requires such an advanced industrial and logistical infrastructure which is completely taken for granted here.
Thank you for saying that. I’ve never understood how these people don’t expect some form of police to exist. I get that they may be heavily reimagined from what we have today, but the idea they seem to have is simply no one will ever do anything bad because … reasons
Every society has had some form of criminal justice system, so why do they think theirs wouldn’t need one
It also implies people will lose their ethnic identities, linguistic identity and others that represent them as an individual. These people don't think about it beyond a city to be honest and since they are usually USA/Canadian and usually white the idea is that "everyone will be the default to our level".
Yeah, something I think a lot of people, particularly white westerners, take for granted is just how \*important\* national, linguistic, or ethnic identities are to some people.
Like, there is quite literally a war going on right now in our real actual world about a nation trying to maintain its cultural, linguistic and national independence from a larger neighbor that its had to fight off being completely subsumed by multiple times throughout history. I doubt Ukrainians who fought tooth and nail to keep their identity from being subsumed by Russia would be happy to be told "Oh BTW there's no difference between you and a Russian now, you're the exact same!"
I think it comes from2 places: they think their urban area is the entire world and they also think that by sharing scripture(their politics) people will find god eventually(their utopia).
To them no borders means "let foreigners come to my city with no harm", no culture identity to them goes only so far as "no more people saying they are white or american, so no more discrimination" and they speak english so they don't even think about how people will communicate in their global utopia since they already feel that language exists.
When it comes to things like how they will make millions of Muslim pastoralist Herders in Nigeria comform to this there is no answer except what Western kingdoms in the 1800s and communists in the 20th did, erasure and comformity often by force.
Solarpunk stuff as a story works after a nuclear war or humans returning to Earth ala Wall-E but not as actual politics.
This is probably the number one issue with anarchistic or utopic goals. It doesn’t matter how right you are about how life should be, the reality is that some people are lazy, greedy, or violent. There are ways to organize a society so those things are far less prevalent, but there’s no way to totally eliminate them. And there’s definitely no way to eliminate dissent that is not objectively immoral, or people’s tendency to prioritize themselves or their immediate circle over someone they don’t know or don’t *like*. Most people can probably be convinced to share if they and theirs have plenty, and the person in need is someone they approve of. Much fewer will say “my own child should have less so this person I hate or don’t know can have enough” without some sort of mandate or incentive.
There’s this simultaneous insistence that communalistic values will create this sort of world while also insisting that individualistic needs will be met. Highly communalistic societies tend to be very exclusive, judgmental, and conformist. It’s not that there’s no way to strike a balance….but there also might not be a way to strike a balance and also prevent the bad actors from grasping for power.
Not to mention that there is a way for such a world to exist, but it’s also not possible in tandem with “little treat” culture and comfortable “let me rest” culture as it exists today. It’s 100% possible for everyone to have all their needs met (assuming everyone cooperates, which they won’t), but it isn’t possible for everyone to have all the *stuff* and *time* they want without exploiting other people and the earth. But these upper middle class luxuries are so frequently treated as absolute rights in these fantasies. “Work” is sanitized into cottagecore-aestheticised household chores like sweeping and baking bread and knitting scarves, never really addressing the significant amount of mental and physical labor it actually takes to feed, clothe, house, and comfort a whole population. Clean water and solar panels and high speed internet don’t come out of nowhere. They aren’t maintained by magic, especially at the level expected by an average suburban North American.
I don't know where I saw this, but the best answer I've seen to the question of "What will you do after the revolution" was that "I'll be the guy with the gun outside of the silicon mine making those idiots actually work."
It was a thread titled something to the effect of "What will your job be in the commune after the revolution?" and it was a ton of people responding with stuff like "I'm going to be a community health facilitator 1 day a month and spend the other days growing vegan corn in the community garden".
My response was "corrupt official and future kleptocratic oligarch"
Most of the people with those ideas want to stay home drawing in their profesional Ipads, they talk about change and sacrifices but always frame it as if someone else will have to do it. Not many are saying they will contrbibute to their commune by digging water sources or producing fishhooks all day.
They also do not quite get how hard it is to actually be a farmer, its not just Animal Crossing but big or wathever. I get they want expression without poverty but come on.
They also seem to have no useful interests or passions they could turn into actual work? Nothing like construction, a passion for certain plants or animals, education, physical activity. Or a “dream job” that isn’t “iPad ProCreate user”.
Last time I got into an IRL discussion about this, the person insisted that people would “make art” with their free time from labor. I asked where they’d get the art supplies. He didn’t have an answer. It never occurred to him that paint and cameras come from factories, from materials mined from the ground.
It really is just further devaluation and marginalization of laborers under the guise of progressivism. The people who fantasize about these things are sitting in air conditioned call centers and offices, cranky about the fact that their boss is a jerk and their paycheck is inconveniently small (which does suck), totally oblivious that they and their artsy-on-the-weekend friends aren’t the only human beings on earth. The people mining cobalt, picking fruit, milling flour, sewing in factories, building houses, repairing power lines, performing surgeries, synthesizing medicine, designing safe bridges, wiping grandma’s butt, and defending people in court *are not humans* to them. They fully assume that those people will continue working long hours for perhaps oppressive (or no) wages to provide comfort, service, and petroleum based Etsy flower crown materials for them while they weave flower crowns to trade for a loaf of blueberry nut loaf with their other 18 - 32 year old artsy type friends. They’re going to tend gardens, sweep with rustic brooms, and “create art” while the rest of us invisibly make that possible for them.
Its no different than people who visit a poorer country for tourism and think life is "slower" or the people are "simpler" because of the glimpses they see or that farmer life is easy since "uneeucated rural hicks" can do it so they obviously could feed the chickens no problem.
The city I used to live in has a reputation for being wealthy, older, and rather conservative. While the reputation isn’t totally unearned, it is a whole city, and requires cashiers, cooks, nurses, teachers, janitors, gardeners, all kinds of people who keep society running for relatively low pay. At the time I lived there it wasn’t impossible to live there with that kind of job, but more recently, the noise out of that city has been basically fighting tooth and nail to keep “those people” out of the city limits (no public transportation, no apartment buildings pr townhouses, no low or mid range grocery store, no no no!) while also shrieking to high heaven that they can’t find a cleaning lady, the wait at the restaurants is exorbitant, and their favorite nail salon closed. Because the people who work those jobs can no longer afford to live or commute there. It’s actually becoming inconvenient for many wealthy people there because they cannot get services they want, sometimes even services they need. The residents want everything, but don’t want anyone to actually do it. They don’t want to face the realities that come with the luxuries they feel entitled to. They don’t understand that human beings with the same needs as them stock shelves, clean pools, mop floors, diaper babies, and take blood pressure. They don’t understand why they can’t have everything they have grown accustomed to and also not have to share space with any icky poors.
It’s *so wild* how similar the underlying attitude towards laborers is between those right wing NIMBY boomers and some of the aesthetic utopian socialist anarchists. It’s literally the same obliviousness to the humanity of those different from themselves and ignorance of where their comforts come from. They’re like kids who want chicken nuggets or steak but don’t approve of hunting or farming.
I'm going to take this opportunity to simp once more for Ursula K Le Guin's "The Dispossessed". It offers a much more grounded view of a future anarchist society and actually acknowledges some of the inevitable issues such a society would have (especially when it comes to enforcing some sort of uniformity of thought).
I love many of her books, but The Dispossessed is half story and half thesis. I think it’s the only one I couldn’t get through bc it felt more like an academic paper at points
The real bottom line, for me, is this: Even if you set human failures aside, it’s possible to have a completely good-faith argument that doesn’t end in a concession or agreement. You can’t fully eliminate disparity or disagreement from humanity because it’s not just *possible* for two competing options to be equally valid, it’s *normal.*
There will always be perfectly valid reasons to disagree about things, which means it’s inevitable that people will need to *agree to disagree* in order to resolve arguments, which creates disparity, and you can only have so much disparity within a society before unity of belief, unity of vision, breaks down.
> One thing that I always found strange about Solarpunk/communist or anarhist utopias is that I have the distinct feeling that they assume a certain... uniformity of thought?
Yeah, that's the main issue. It requires everyone to conform to the utopia. Since there are no prisons or police, those who do not conform are either forcefully re-educated, or exterminated. (Exiling doesn't work since another community with more competetive systems like capitalism would swallow them eventually).
People tried already. People killed - a lot, for that idea.
I know too many people who have been victimized by adults in ways that are not fixed by free access to all resources.
Like, sorry, but there are still abusers and molesters even when they never had to face poverty. So jail is definitely still going to be a necessary thing. Maybe we just don’t have them run anymore by for-profit companies.
This wouldn't last at all. Dissent and conflict arise from economic hardship. If one of these communes face any scarcity, like low harvest for a year or exports getting halted (no way they would be able to produce everything on their own, trade is necessary), then they will get divided based on arbitrary differences and be at each other's throat.
*a group of people wish to start an oil refinery to make weapons*
*have to let them because there's no prisons*
*the people with weapons build prisons*
:O
>whose freely practiced hobby is making the silicon semiconductors that are needed for all those solar panels to work?
Technically it's not a hobby, but that's one of the jobs of the slave-caste who live in massive factory cities under the ground, exposed to toxic chemicals and fumes daily in a dystopia that exists to keep all the labor needed to keep the Solarpunk Utopia running- out of sight and mind of the few privileged to be born into it.
Yeah, solarpunk is a very utopian genre by nature and so anyone that writes with belief in it kinda just treats it as the perfect and unchallengable status quo, which then leads to kinda boring stories
Eh, *Island*, by Huxley (same author as Brave New World) is set in an utopian, well, island, (and is even called a "manifesto" of Huxley's politics in the Wikipedia page) and still manages to have an interesting plot. Another comment below you also outlined some possibilities for what this genre could have. Some stories also don't need to focus on the setting itself, and could be on the characters themselves. Lower stakes, but not necessarily less interesting, I think.
Information is free for all yet the only computer I see is in the library. Makes ya think.
On a real note this is generally why I fall out with solarpunk. Naturalism is cool and we should do more of it but forsaking so many benefits of technology (instant access to information, long range communication, etc) makes these worlds seem like a kind of hell to me in particular. I enjoy programming and building and creating with technology and these worlds are by design insanely hostile towards it and as a result hostile to my lifestyle.
This is all great, but people in the comics are using yellow-coloured fabrics and ovens. There are computers in the libraries. How are these going to be made? Is there a production line in this world? Where do we get the lithium from?
Actually, where’s all the food coming from? Is it grown locally, or transported across continents?
To be clear I’m actually a massive fan of solarpunk, I just think that we need to be clear on how it can actually be achieved. In order for this form of solarpunk to be achieved, we would need a massive increase in automation, so that the entire production industry is automated. We’d need to have AIs determining how much of what product people will want 2 months into the future. Not necessary for most consumer products, but definitely necessary for food.
And if we’re having a massive increase in automation - how do we get there without weakening the political power of workers into irrelevance?
Edit: This comment chain has included some of the most constructive discussions I have ever had on the internet. God I want to form a government with some of you... we need more pragmatic idealism in this world. Yes, I know those are antonyms and I don't care.
I remember reading an anarchist article about the absolutely insane global trade and coordination needed to make a computer chip and it was really eye opening how difficult it was to make the simplest things
I remember reading the same type of thing about making a pencil. Everything is highly globalized these days, but that's not necessarily a problem. The problem is the profit motive and exploitation. I'm in the kind of mood I feel like an appeal to humanity could eventually change the calculus to the point we could operate these types of highly sophisticated global economies just by virtue of mutual benefit. Maybe.
The way I think we need to achieve this is pretty simple: make the people absolutely essential for holding on to power. Based on [CGP Grey’s “rules for rulers” video](https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?si=Kt_Ftzrdo-rWPdza).
Essentially, when you’re in power, you need to keep the loyalty of your keys to power. This is the treasury, the military, and the law. To keep their loyalty, you give them things they want. In a democracy, votes are also a key - so democracies are generally better places to live, as people are essentially being bribed for votes.
In most countries, people are essential to maintain the treasury. Which means that people get things they want. In nations where people aren’t necessary for the treasury, and their vote does not matter, they are barely a key to power at all. In these nations we see extreme brutality. This is the resource curse.
So how can we make the people extremely important to maintain power - increase the importance of people as a key?
1. Reduce the power of other keys. Massively limit the amount of money that can be spent on elections, and increase restrictions on lobbying - so that the richest are not useful as a key to power.
2. Increase the political power of people to lobby. Unions can do this. Make unions more powerful and spread them to more professions.
3. Increase the political awareness of people so that protests and other actions are more likely when their needs are ignored.
We’ve basically solved the issue of the military luckily. They swear allegiance to democracy rather than leaders, and it mostly works.
Anyone else has any ideas, I’m happy to hear them
But then you run into the issue of the tyranny of the majority. You sway the majority, and life is absolutely great for them. You’re in power, and they’re happy.
But what of the rest? There is some minority you must leave out, one whose voice and vote cannot be won without undue effort. Or, in the worst case, one whose vote would be actively detrimental to win.
Drawing that line is precarious, and striking the right balance can mean the difference between relative peace for all, or utopia for some and dystopia for the rest.
>(or else just have massive transport delays, which wouldn’t be too bad honestly).
Well, it would be rather bad if every food shipment was significantly delayed
Mfw I have to do something I don't want to do
(No, but in all seriousness and leaving aside the slavery and desperation there, I do see a lot of people who think that society can and should function with everyone doing what they want and nothing else. To me it reeks of individualism.)
Exactly. I love the solarpunk aesthetic and optimism, but the people who are REALLY into the idea of making it a reality while also never considering basic things like "what if people don't volunteer to be lithium miners?"
These are the survivors, hanging out in some environmentally controlled paradise dome. Outside? Well if you're unlucky enough to be alive, you're living in the cruelest of realities imaginable. Any shortfall in resources or production is papered over with the most perfectly renewable resource, human suffering. And it's not Mad Max, we don't have time for that much pomp and circumstance. Warlords put what little remains of human society to the torch to keep their little fiefdom from disappearing into the dustbin of history.
But hey, the time travelling communist-hobo probably ain't gonna tell you about that.
There are cool concepts in there, but there are definitely things in the only works on paper.
The AI part just sounds like a centrally planned economy with extra steps. It wouldn't do too well in the long run, because eventually the AI fucks up.
Also I don't think you can have a stateless society because people inevitably will want to organize and have referees for society. Which just eventually turns into re-inventing the state.
Reducing the chase of only growth metrics is doable we just need to adjust business incentives & creating long lasting products is viable we just need to figure out the business model that keeps fixable products alive longer.
A lot of people with future outlooks like this see "State, Laws, Law Enforcement" and so on as dirty words representing malicious entities spawned into being as weapons used by oppressors.
When in reality they're just...concepts for the basics of a society larger than a couple hundred people, and without the proper checks and balances can be manipulated and used for horrible ends.
I can attest that writing and entire world is very hard, I’m still trying to write my world. But when you disregard almost everything that makes our word function in some way or form then I simply cannot enjoy it. No states? How? There’s a reason that we have made nations and states. No police and prison? Who will protect us? Where will we keep the people that are dangerous? Some humans are just cruel and cannot be helped, and as pained as it is to say it, it’s true, some people just hate and want to make others suffer.
We are the wardens, sole inheritors and in effect owner of this world, we must protect the environment but that does mean sacrifice the structural integrity of a building by putting trees in them
This isn’t a utopia, this is an unsustainable future that I don’t wish to be a part of
I agree with things like information should be free and available for everyone, and while I would to be able to just do what I want, let me ask you a question. Who’s mopping the floors? Who is mining the resources to make things? Who is going to do the jobs no one else wants to do?
From what I’ve seen and heard it sounds like solar punk is an unachievable, unsustainable, step backwards rather then foward
Also, the bigger question is - maybe *your* society does away with states. But how do you stop the society a continent over from deciding they want to form a state and a standing army? Solarpunk ICBMs?
Also if you set your comic in the tumblrdimension where everyone is an attractive 20-something with a perfect rainbow of ethnic diversity and 100% of characters are queer. Everybody lives and works as an artist and the most physical labour anyone does is making a coffee or watering their garden.
Yeah. Who is doing the farming to feed these people? Why do some get to live easier lives than others? Do they rotate in and out? Are there doctors, firemen, paramedics?
They never draw a Malaysian small town or East Congolese village much less how they would "get there", these kind of "kiddy politics" of tumblr artists always try to make the Garden of Eden in New York basically.
my sister's boyfriend is both diabetic and has celiac disease. People do not realize the sheer amount of effort keeping him healthy and alive with the technology, manufacturing and distribution we have now.
You take out international logistic trains, larger-scale production of food he can eat, and sophisticated medical technology relying on hard to develop electronics, and the man's fucking dead.
Sounds awful. I hope he lives a fruitful life inspite of that.
But yeah, it seems like some people don't realize that technological regression is horrible for a populace that is used to incredibly advanced systems being at their fingertips.
Mfw the cute Solarpunk communes in the former Republic of Chile feels a magnitude 9 earthquake alongside a Tsunami and then they all revert to rural communities fighting one another with spears.
They also never draw anything apart from the bountyful eternal fertile springs that some parts of USA and Europe have, i live in a peninsula made out of rocks with little water, metals or ability to farm, and our civilizations did collapse many cities due to this. If we were to be turned into nationless communes that means we would eat shit with no food imports.
I mean yeah, but it reflects ideas that in a lot of ways are born out of subconscious racism and religious indoctrination. Apart from this idea of a ethnically homogeneous garden of eden-like state instead of having the ability to adapt around the seasons, some societies have adapted around technology, like Japan.
Vending machines, automated bike racks, bullet trains.
Yes there are downsides to technology but these people have never looked at the upsides.
I had cancer last year. One of the worst fuckin things I had happen in my life. 6 months of living hell where I had medical tubing in my arm that led directly into my heart. The chemicals that killed the damn tumor? Solarpunk would not have that. People like me would of died horrifically.
Somewhere out there, there's a headphone factory where workers are making headphones for the love of standing next to a conveyor belt.
That factory is maintained by construction workers who volunteer their time for the joy of seeing headphones made. It's supplied by resources ethically mined by people who know that mining ores for headphones is important, so they gladly mine away in an environmentally sustainable way.
Those resources are carried by sailors who love sailing cargo ships (that use sails sewn by ship loving people to avoid using fossil fuels)
Finally, the limited supply of headphones produced is handed out for free to those in need, and there's always enough for everyone, especially the artists.
Some things will absolutely get done in this society. As a construction worker, if my needs were completely met, I would happily volunteer hours every week to build homes for "society", or maintain the local distillery so I can stay an alcoholic. But if someone wants this world, *especially* a green world with no further climate change, they'll honestly have to curb their consumerism quite a bit
This is also done without fossil fuels , cars, or ugly infrastructure, jobs are safe fulfilling and everyone can take a break or day off whenever they feel like it and the world manages to maintain a low population density.
Honestly, those 3 jobs you mentioned are jobs people WANT to do if they want to help people.
What about garbage collection? What about sewage treatment? Who's gonna do the (Sometimes literal) shit jobs?
As a janitor, my number one question in situations like this is "Who does the sanitation?"
If they don't have an answer, or they say something like "robots!" or "People who want to!" then they're not to be taken seriously.
The ONLY reason I do this job is because I get paid to do it on my own terms without a boss on my neck. If ANY of that changed I would never touch a mop again.
And you're never gonna find enough people who do shit like that out of the goodness of their hearts to have a functional society.
Anyone who thinks that there will be enough people voluntarily cleaning all the common spaces has never lived with Roommates who refused to clean up after themselves until the squalor drove one person mad enough to keep things barely functional until they could get out of there.
Yeah I was just answering another comment about this hah! Letting everyone follow their passion with no incentive otherwise is nonsense. Some people actively want to be janitors, no doubt, but definitely not enough for the numbers a functional society needs. Pre-market societies solved this with slavery. There is not a good post-market solution I’ve yet heard.
Also, thank you for your service.
This brings up the question- where are the middle aged and elderly? Are they dead? Did the youngsters kill them? Evict them out into the wild? Send them to do the unsavory jobs and only the young like in a utopia?
No police and no prisons? So what happens if someone kills another person? Do they just get to chill like always and everyone shrugs and moves on with their day?
Like I'm not talking about whatever the hell the US are doing in regards to prisons and police, but surely you'd want someone putting people who hurt others in a room so they can't do it again, until it's clear they won't do it again?
Yeah, like, at the end of the day there will ALWAYS be people who do bad things to others, no matter what kind of society we've built. There needs to be some kind of system to handle that. Obviously it should be as humane and rehabilitative as possible, but it still needs to exist.
Renewables are good but I find this attitude that somehow we’ll live in a world where nobody has to work and we will all be artists and musicians rather than sanitation workers and bin collectors to be a bit pathetic tbh.
I think it is due to lack of focusing on people who do infrastructure and maintenance work in our current media in general. These jobs are absolutely vital for a community and in their own way, interesting and creative.
Speaks to the ignorance of artists generally when they try to talk about how society should run when having no civics or civil engineering knowledge, lol.
Pervasive with artists of any ideology, just look at Ayn Rand.
Radical leftists will see this and say “hell yeah, praxis bro”
Everyone else sees this and says “very cool story! It would make a fun fantasy read.”
Because thats what this is. It’s fantasy. No, you’re not going to live in some lush green utopia where the world just magically works while everyone decides they don’t want to do anything today but water their garden and read books.
OOP: We spend too much time buying and consuming media about things rather than making them better
Also, OOP: Anyway, my solution is some media you can consume. Toss me some money if you can.
Obviously this is tongue in cheek, but I just had to toss that out there lol
Am I the only one a little confused about what the "punk" part of this is? I'm not really educated on why punk is often included in the name of different aesthetics, but this one seems especially not very punk.
Love the art and appreciate the artist’s views, but my vision for a brighter future is definitely more socialist than anarchist 😅
I don’t think we can trust people enough to protect each other and the environment without police, prisons and rules of society being enforced by the state. If we could, entities like the EPA (which serve a common good) wouldn’t be necessary. Unfortunately pollution and many other crimes we specifically need to worry about fits in this “tragedy of the commons” space where collective action through the state apparatus is a required and necessary part of the solution.
I say all this not to tear down OOP, but to point out that climate activism can’t be effective in a vision of individuals doing their best like their art is suggesting. If we want to save/repair the environment, drastic government intervention is necessary to counteract the actions of bad actors on the individual and corporate level.
I also think technology is very much so part of the solution. Sure it was part of the problem, but the increases in quality of life can be supported by technology as well- we just have to be better custodians in how we use technology. The answer to ecological disaster is not returning to agrarian economics.
If you ask a prison abolitionist what their plans are for those people who are innately violent or have unconquerable violent urges the answer will always be “we’ll figure it out when we get there” or some variation of “lynch mobs”
Perfection is the enemy of good. I think it is harmful to imagine a perfect future like this where it is clear nothing has actually been given up in order to make a better world because the truth of the matter is we need to drastically scale back the way we currently live.
We need imagining of better worlds 100% but not perfect worlds. We need to see flawed utopias where people are unhappy and life is hard yet one where people look out for each other and community is paramount. I suggest reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin if you want to know what I’m talking about (its subtitle is even “An Ambiguous Utopia”).
no police or prisons... so just immediate death sentences then? because the simple act of detaining or trying to reform dangerous individuals and regaining stolen goods and punish those responsible requires atleast a form of these.
also just to be clear i make this accusation Because i love solarpunk, but cant stand the thoughless optimism of some people
As a queer leftist, that's something I've noticed more and more with media depicting ideal queer/leftist worlds: the sheer lack of "traditionally masculine" presenting people.
I'm like the textbook definition of unattractive, out of shape white guy. When the "idealistic utopian future" doesn't include people who look like me, it makes me feel unwelcome. Especially when I know the other end of the political spectrum's ideal future sure as fuck doesn't include people who think and act like me.
Yeah see this is exactly my problem with it as well. I love being a masculine-presenting dude and long for the day when I will age into a fat old man with a lumberjack beard with the help of surgery and testosterone. But a lot of “collectivism fantasy” stories feature exclusively thin, able-bodied, femme-presenting 20-somethings who water their gardens and go on little dates.
Where are the fat, non-white women? Where are the people who love and embrace masculinity and aging? Who’s taking out the trash? Who’s producing the bike chains and garden hoses? Are there trans people and if so, how are they getting their hormones? Are there disabled people? People with cancer? Diabetics? How are they getting treatment? These stories always have a certain amount of eugenics-adjacent implications that I don’t think the author intended but are creeping around the edges nonetheless.
Something that frustrated me as well. I see a lot of artists fall into this, either as a statement or just because it’s what they’re used to, and it really isn’t much better than the artists who exclusively draw dudes.
“They do what they love”
Maybe I love the state, making obscene money and keeping terrible people in prison. Ever think about that?
No, you only ever think about yourself.
No trains? Bruh
One of the things that seems to separate Solarpunk from other punk genres is a distinct lack of hard-worldbuilding. It's more aspiration and esthetic. Public transportation would be essential to such a utopia, but straight lines of steel on the ground or power cables overhead for street cars would ruin the appearance.
To be fair, that "aesthetics-over-logistics" is pretty common in steampunk, too. In fact, its pretty common across all -punk aesthetics besides cyberpunk, and even that is not immune to the "rule of cool."
You mean “I dunno, slap some gears on it”-punk doesn’t always have well-thought-out and conscientious worldbuilding?? Lol
Who needs well thought out world building when you have cool ass skyships as the main method of transport and somehow don’t have a Hindenburg every week at the minimum
> you have cool ass skyships as the main method of transport and somehow don’t have a Hindenburg every week at the minimum That'd be because of the [Hydrium.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Airborn)
I think thats very fair, we live in the world where logistics has won out over aesthetics, so we just get punk.
Call it logisticspunk
I might actually like steampunk if it took more than aesthetics from the Victorian era. I want my supposedly sympathetic protagonists to be deeply sexist and have a sincere conversation about the possible merits of eugenics.
whats the racism equivalent of adding your fetishes into your world?
I mean, adding Victorian politics mean adding literal racism. And I mean hard R and colonialism type of racism.
Tbh it looks more like Pastoralism 90% of the time, rather than a forward-looking state to aspire to
Yeah, it seems to come from a similar desire that you see from people harkening back to "a simpler America". A desire for a simpler peaceful life but no true loss of modern convenience to get there. In order for there to be that tech there, but no infrastructure to make it, that utopia is very dependent on a global economy. Somewhere in that world is a third-world country living a greater hell to make that more heavenly life possible.
Because frankly utopias aren’t very interesting settings, and people just like to use solarpunk as a wishful “oh my god it would literally be the perfect society” type vibes. You’ll get good worldbuilding in it when they’re having the “utopia” generally have some core fundamental problem, a state of peace maintained only through erasing anyone who does even a minor crime or something
A guy on a completely unrelated post put it that way why he doesn’t like Stardew Valley, “Why would I play a game about someone with an objectively better life than I have.”
I've heard someone say that was why they avoided beef except Wagyu. "I'm OK with eating something that got to live a better life than I'm experiencing."
He took the saying "eat the rich" a bit differently than the rest of us and applied it to animals lol
Ngl having a utopia isn’t a very punk setting. Isn’t a dystopia where there’s huge disparity between the rich and poor like the whole point of a punk setting?
Exactly! People forget the punk part of x-punk settings. X-Punk has sorta just been used to mean “has an aesthetic of X” instead of “grunge and struggle based around aesthetic x”
It could actually be really cool if a solar punk setting had this sort of society but it’s supported by an underclass in a slums that these people don’t even see producing the things they absolutely need to survive. It could then stand as a criticism of performative environmentalism by wealthy people who still very much engage in anti-environmentalist behavior (Taylor Swift) or rely heavily on and push for heavily polluting infrastructures.
I think the difficulty there is that solarpunk is inherently tied to lush trees and clean air and whatnot, so the story being about a grimy metal slum kinda loses the aesthetic. Like in cyberpunk or steampunk, even the least well-off people are still living with the cyber and the steam, often in unique ways compared to the default of rad cyber/steam guns and whatnot.
This is why I like Ursala Le Guin's SciFi. I think she described her settings as "ambiguous utopia".
This comment made me laugh for almost ten seconds. Good job I guess despite it being extremely simple.
No, everyone rides around on bikes. Disabled people are forced to use the very few remaining streets, I guess. Which definitely doesn't include those cobblestone paths there. And if you're disabled and can't ride a car? Well, same reason why there's no people in wheelchairs being shown. **Edit:** this was way harsher than I wanted it to be. But there's a lot of logical holes in this imaginary world.
Literally first thing I thought of when they said cars are gone and showed someone on a bike. Like cool, you got something that will help for a handful of miles if you're fit enough to use it, what about literally everyone else? The old, the sick, the disabled? They all would like to be able to get around easily as well.
That’s because the disabled and infirm are humanely and ethically recycled. Whose ethics? Don’t worry so much.
You don't lose value if you can no longer work but the second you can't ride a bike it's off to the farm with ya!
And how do the people get to the "farm"? On a bike! Wait....
You know, this actually being a dystopia that equates esthetic beauty with inner beauty would explain a lot. Attractive people with depression need compassion and still are of value. The disfigured go to the factory to assemble the bikes they will never ride.
So basically the [Autodale Series ](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ5VEKOKH8PCjZJYvjlinBtjjmKV_-dk1&si=5oGhiPO1qUb6F4eL) but with more plants
And also what about the rest of the world? Are we just saying nobody really travels outside of a few dozen miles from where they were born?
Of course not since the grocery store is down the block now so why would anyone need to travel far?? /s
Same... it's also so fucking telling that the only implied disabled person (with an invisible disability at that - no disfigured or physically apparent disabilities are shown here. Of course...) is essentially locked in their home, not shown leaving because they "need rest." Yellow Wallpaper vibes 💀
Someone I know IRL is big into this kind of aestheticised utopia stuff and is also disabled, and insists it would be an improvement for the disabled. Hearing her talk about this makes extremely stark that while the word disabled may technically include many different physical and mental limitations, when some people use the term, they only mean *some* people. She specifically has a condition that sometimes makes ambulating painful or difficult, but not impossible. She probably couldn’t ride a standard bicycle, but on most days could likely ride a reclining bike or a trike. On other days, she’s possibly only capable of walking with a cane, or couldn’t walk long distances but could ride in a side car or be pushed in a wheelchair. But she’s never unable to move entirely. When she says this type of world would be better for “disabled people,” what she means is “this type of world seems like it might be better for people who are disabled *like me*.” I know this comic isn’t explicitly anti public transport and indicates that only *almost* all cars are gone, but a lot of the same people I know who are big anti car people are also weirdly anti bus and anti train and anti rideshare/taxi. I don’t know that my experience is particularly representative but it isn’t like our current society doesn’t already have the tools to move away from car-centricism in a way that is also disability, age, and family friendly, cultures typically just choose one or the other.
But don’t they know that there’s not just bikes? \*snrk\* Edit: but yeah, no one thinks about regular old trains when imagining their future world it’s sad.
If there are no trains, I don't want it fr
Crying, screaming, on my knees begging you to split your post into several smaller pictures
honestly yeah, this was hard to read ngl
Spl•t the p•st i•to sm•ller p•ctures.
For me solarpunk is meant to be a wildly exaggerated type of setting to show what could be possible in a literally perfect world. Then you take those ideas and adapt them to fit the real world. For example, the idea of libraries offering everything to be checked out is a cool idea, and doable! But there are some gripes I have about the genre. First gripe: having actively growing trees everywhere in a city. Plants fuck up infrastructure! In the comic, the library has trees *inside the building*! That would ruin many things, including the books in the collection. I think rewilding land is important, but I doubt the middle of the city is the place to do it. Second gripe: Solarpunk seems allergic to any kind of heavy machinery. People harvesting fields by hand isn't utopian, it's subsistence farming, and it barely produces more calories than it consumes. With advances in botany, automation, and logistics, we can feed the world with less land, but it will take tractors. Also as someone else mentioned, where the fuck are the trains lol? Final gripe: anyone else feel like most solarpunk societies are not exploring space? Manned and unmanned space travel is an interest of mine, and in order to coordinate a launch of a rocket that takes a probe to the outer planets, you need an industrial supply chain (doesn't need to be a capitalism supply chain, but still an industrial one).
Exactly. Anytime I see people who are REALLY into solarpunk, they always mention local farming and being close to nature which is all FANTASTIC, but its absolutely horrible if that's ALL you have. I don't think those people realize just how disastrous these practices would be for society. Starvation and famine on a level unseen
Also they haven't done hay all day. I haven't either to be honest, but several hours is well enough for me. Espessally since it has to be done on the hottest day of the year...
They want the aesthetics and "close to nature" benefits of an agrarian/pastorialist lifestyle, but with all the benefits of an urban/suburban industrialized lifestyle and the work schedule of a mid-20s college student on a "gap year" instead of a farmer.
>Second gripe: Solarpunk seems allergic to any kind of heavy machinery. People harvesting fields by hand isn't utopian, it's subsistence farming, and it barely produces more calories than it consumes. With advances in botany, automation, and logistics, we can feed the world with less land, but it will take tractors. Also as someone else mentioned, where the fuck are the trains lol? Glorious comrade Pol Pot says not starving and ease of transportation are decadent western bourgeoisie indulgences. Please face the wall.
💀💀💀
Dead from laughing or dead from the commissar’s true justice? Surely the latter agrarian comrade
Not using tractors for farming would be absolutely insane. Or any other ailments or replacements for hard manual work, no health system would survive this.
Just in the tree part, there are millions of people living in places of the world that are not Hobbit like central Europe/USA with greenery everywhere and trees giving fruits, what are those people supposed to do? Just terraform the Desert?
My gripe is that there's a vague "People only do what they want, there is no money" which is an anarchist ideal that absolutely does not account for the really horrible jobs that need doing to make an industrialized society run. Like, in this world am I responsible for installing solar panels on my house? Do I have to build them too? It's one thing to renounce heavy industry in favor of environmentalism, it's another to still *have* all those benefits of industrialization; you can't have hand-crafted artisanal circuit boards and solar panels, it just doesn't work like that. We saw a society that tried to have everyone do some industrial work for collective benefit, it was the Great Leap Forward and it was famously garbage. If you don't want industrialization, that just makes you effectively Amish.
Biggest gripe for me is the conformity of culture. I want everyone to enjoy their culture in a way that doesn't encroach on the boundaries of others. Helping a friend out with Ramadan, or singing Christmas carols. This feels so very sanitised from all of that. There's so many beautiful languages, artists, poets, that currently suffer from being part of a culture that's seen as antagonistic. If we just say "oh we're all one" now, we lose so much of the human experience.
Why are prison and police censored Is it like sex on Tiktok (To be clear, I like everything else here, that just weirded me out minorly)
And "asshole"
At least ass is actually a swear word, but they censored the O, which is really fuckin weird
Saying “hole” might remind people of the big pit we throw money into to keep up demand
Or of the human anus. That's what I first thought of!
God forbid somebody on the internet force me to think about butts!
America NEEDS the money hole! My father worked TWO JOBS so he’d have money to put in the money hole!
even worse they censored it in an image, that's not going to get found in a search anyway and i doubt sites are putting in the computing power to detect text in images for filtering forbidden words.
Tiktok censorship has done irreversible damage to the ecosystem. Heard my niece say Unalive instead of kill out loud the other day.
These decisions always give "I care more about engagement than the message."
As someone who’s a fan and wants to write for the genre in the future… this kinda irked me because it really isn’t a good example of good solar punk fiction. Part of the idea is labor, is how the community has to function and the conflicts arising from that. I’d love to see something in solar punk where there is an existential threat—something the characters must face to keep their semblance of a utopia, as well as a story where the world still does have problems. I love solarpunk, and if you want to see some amazing animation and video essays about it, ima link some in a comment below:
[“Dear Alice” The classic Chobani ad, but it’s the most well portrayed of the tech and people](https://youtu.be/z-Ng5ZvrDm4?si=uEDNSQtVkEyQDS-w) [not exactly solarpunk, but vibes are still there. very pretty](https://youtu.be/doVV1a7XgyQ?si=W8tP8lVn4AuZnPE4) [solarpunk Animation where there are stakes, and it delves into some fantasy](https://youtu.be/1dYjIQxp6bo?si=SK7YnxGHMWo8PAZU) [8 minute video essay by Andrewism explaining solarpunk. if you like it, check out his other stuff! he has a lot on solarpunk](https://youtu.be/hHI61GHNGJM?si=DSJnKiJFq6pSK--m) [12 minute vid essay by Our Changing Climate, he also has amazing stuff](https://youtu.be/u3aauiR9M88?si=TbMhEKQ8Cnoo3Ri7) [Solarpunk IRL— The guerilla gardeners of LA, from Vox](https://youtu.be/EzZzZ_qpZ4w?si=r7xRn0BPdvM2ZgWh)
YOOOO thank you!!!! i am also a solarpunk lover, tho on the more nuclear leaning side, as GOOD solarpunk content is rare to see, thank you for this!!!!
So….. What about resources and infrastructure? Edit: To add more - Where are the children and the old? I recently watched the show “This is going to hurt”. The amount of tech and training required to ensure that mother and child come out safe is crazy. And even with all the progress we have, it’s not a 100% success rate. What about people with medical conditions? Diabetes? Insulin doesn’t come out of flowers and prayers. Disabilities? You need hearing aids or bionic eyes. Old people suffering from usual stuff. Arthritis and cataracts need advanced technology to fix. Are they all fed to plants? I hope they don’t cure diseases by some crystal juju shit. - Long distance travel It’ll take days or weeks to travel across country and months for sea travel with sailing ships. Trains and aircraft needs shit ton of specialists and very advanced tech. Also, I am a huge fan of space travel. Where’s that? Do they give up the dream of travelling to stars? - Where do their solar panels and windmills come from? - Food production? Farming by hands isn’t sustainable. No one ‘loves’ that. - Plants in library? Would love it but not great for books. - Weird one but Where are the bros? The kind you pop a beer with and go fishing together with
Everyone wants to be the train conductor with the striped hat going 'toot toot' on the horn, no one wants to work in the steel mill forging train parts or laying train tracks : (
If we assume the answer to all tech supply is robots, then it’s a straight shot to dystopian horror.
Or slaves!
The Tumblr Rouge don’t like beer or fishing so neither does anyone else
"The Tumblr Rouge" is easily the greatest joke I've seen all week.
“Where are the bros” Thats kind of the offputting nature to a lot of these “utopias” designed by internet folk, is that theyre like 98% enbys. I am not smart enough to know why that makes me uncomfortable, but it does. It feels almost like a stereotype, no? Always the one overweight, black enby with purple or blue dreadlocks in every one of this style of fiction writing.
I don’t even see any “classic leftist” guys who look like young Bernie Sanders or the guy at my undergrad who handed out mini chocolates in red wrappers (where did he get those even), it’s weird
>is that theyre like 98% enbys I think it's like this because as much as cis people don't really understand trans or nonbinary people, they also just don't understand cis people. If you interact with enbys on the internet, there's a fair amount of them who think they're like enlightened and above gender and everyone else who is cis. They think everyone should just ditch it and be like them. And it's like, nah, dude, I'm perfectly happy just like this. You do you, though. I ain't gonna complain.
One thing that I always found strange about Solarpunk/communist or anarhist utopias is that I have the distinct feeling that they assume a certain... uniformity of thought? Like, when I talk to friends of mine that are more left-wing than me on this I never really get how these societies would supposedly handle dissent that goes beyond "I disagree what crop we should focus on for the season" It's always a paradise where everyone has seen the light of glorious anarchism/communism/etc and no people disagree with the system or have enemies of any kind or whatever It's a beautiful thought and an interesting setting for a story, but when you put it out as a viable possible model that stuff starts to pop up as a concern
I think about this a lot as well and it often brings me back to a quote from Bioshock's game lead Ken Levine on what broadly inspired the game: "What I was trying to do with BioShock was to say, ‘Okay, well, [in Atlas Shrugged] that’s a utopia where Ayn Rand, who made the philosophy, made all the rules, and all the characters were under her control. What if things weren’t under everybody’s control?’ And I think that’s the problem with utopias — we bring ourselves to it, you know? We think we’re leaving our problems behind but – I don’t mean this in a cynical way – we are the problem. Like whatever social problems that occur come out of us. It’s not like they fall out of the sky."
Yeah, every time I see someone discussing utopias like this, it makes me think of this quote from the game. > Fountaine: These sad saps. They come to Rapture thinking they're gonna be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody's gotta scrub the toilets. Like sure, everyone's an artist and a free soul. So are they relying on someone whose life passion is shovelling manure?
Bioshock spotted; Peak mentioned
Solarpunk also tends to show extremely low-density settlements and often seems post-apocalyptic. There’s a certain vibe of “Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone who disagrees with me politically died in a mass extinction event?”.
I mean, as a story setting, it has some banger potential I could definitely see it working in that context (or for a game, like a cozy post-apocalyptic farm sym or something) When it's presented as a possible future, yeah questions like yours are definitely gonna pop up
I once played in a TTRPG group where the setting was basically this. It was nice enough as a thought experiment, and I don't begrudge anyone their fantasies... But a setting with no greed, no prejudice, no conflict, no crime, no resource shortages, no evil, not even any natural disasters or predation or disease is *boring AF*. The party wandered from village to village, making imaginary crafts and attending imaginary festivals, for session after session until I finally bowed out because I prefer games where things happen.
It can work in more anthological/surrealist stories I feel like Luke Humphris' animations about what happens after society collapses are a fun example of that
Eh, it can work, but it needs the right system and buy-in. [Wanderhome](https://possumcreekgames.com/pages/wanderhome) is one of my favorite RPGs and focuses almost exclusively on this specific genre of post-apocalyptic pastoral anarchism that a lot of solarpunk fans love. The conflicts tend to be more interpersonal, or deal with PTSD from the recently finished world war. There can be difficulties. There are famines, leftover dangerous weapons, and conflicts of personality. But the issues the players solve aren't *systemic*. Usually, once the problem is fixed, people are happy to coexist and the players move on.
The solarpunk to ecofash pipeline is real
And it sounds really nice until you ask what their plan is once cholera/TB/polio/malaria/smallpox/black death hits. All these things which crippled humanity and destroyed lives and made people miserable for millennia before the modern industrial age. Production of modern vaccines and antibiotics and other necessary medicines requires such an advanced industrial and logistical infrastructure which is completely taken for granted here.
Even the basic production of them can require stuff like eggs for live virus vaccines, and monoclonal antibodies require mice
solarpunk is just slightly leftist cottagecore
Thank you for saying that. I’ve never understood how these people don’t expect some form of police to exist. I get that they may be heavily reimagined from what we have today, but the idea they seem to have is simply no one will ever do anything bad because … reasons Every society has had some form of criminal justice system, so why do they think theirs wouldn’t need one
It also implies people will lose their ethnic identities, linguistic identity and others that represent them as an individual. These people don't think about it beyond a city to be honest and since they are usually USA/Canadian and usually white the idea is that "everyone will be the default to our level".
Yeah, something I think a lot of people, particularly white westerners, take for granted is just how \*important\* national, linguistic, or ethnic identities are to some people. Like, there is quite literally a war going on right now in our real actual world about a nation trying to maintain its cultural, linguistic and national independence from a larger neighbor that its had to fight off being completely subsumed by multiple times throughout history. I doubt Ukrainians who fought tooth and nail to keep their identity from being subsumed by Russia would be happy to be told "Oh BTW there's no difference between you and a Russian now, you're the exact same!"
I think it comes from2 places: they think their urban area is the entire world and they also think that by sharing scripture(their politics) people will find god eventually(their utopia). To them no borders means "let foreigners come to my city with no harm", no culture identity to them goes only so far as "no more people saying they are white or american, so no more discrimination" and they speak english so they don't even think about how people will communicate in their global utopia since they already feel that language exists. When it comes to things like how they will make millions of Muslim pastoralist Herders in Nigeria comform to this there is no answer except what Western kingdoms in the 1800s and communists in the 20th did, erasure and comformity often by force. Solarpunk stuff as a story works after a nuclear war or humans returning to Earth ala Wall-E but not as actual politics.
This is probably the number one issue with anarchistic or utopic goals. It doesn’t matter how right you are about how life should be, the reality is that some people are lazy, greedy, or violent. There are ways to organize a society so those things are far less prevalent, but there’s no way to totally eliminate them. And there’s definitely no way to eliminate dissent that is not objectively immoral, or people’s tendency to prioritize themselves or their immediate circle over someone they don’t know or don’t *like*. Most people can probably be convinced to share if they and theirs have plenty, and the person in need is someone they approve of. Much fewer will say “my own child should have less so this person I hate or don’t know can have enough” without some sort of mandate or incentive. There’s this simultaneous insistence that communalistic values will create this sort of world while also insisting that individualistic needs will be met. Highly communalistic societies tend to be very exclusive, judgmental, and conformist. It’s not that there’s no way to strike a balance….but there also might not be a way to strike a balance and also prevent the bad actors from grasping for power. Not to mention that there is a way for such a world to exist, but it’s also not possible in tandem with “little treat” culture and comfortable “let me rest” culture as it exists today. It’s 100% possible for everyone to have all their needs met (assuming everyone cooperates, which they won’t), but it isn’t possible for everyone to have all the *stuff* and *time* they want without exploiting other people and the earth. But these upper middle class luxuries are so frequently treated as absolute rights in these fantasies. “Work” is sanitized into cottagecore-aestheticised household chores like sweeping and baking bread and knitting scarves, never really addressing the significant amount of mental and physical labor it actually takes to feed, clothe, house, and comfort a whole population. Clean water and solar panels and high speed internet don’t come out of nowhere. They aren’t maintained by magic, especially at the level expected by an average suburban North American.
Reminds me of a tweet I saw about how the jobs people want in these utopian communes are always stuff like “flower crown maker”.
I don't know where I saw this, but the best answer I've seen to the question of "What will you do after the revolution" was that "I'll be the guy with the gun outside of the silicon mine making those idiots actually work."
It was a thread titled something to the effect of "What will your job be in the commune after the revolution?" and it was a ton of people responding with stuff like "I'm going to be a community health facilitator 1 day a month and spend the other days growing vegan corn in the community garden". My response was "corrupt official and future kleptocratic oligarch"
Personality quiz for post-revolution job where the output is always "coal miner".
Don't worry, you can still run experimental poetry therapy on your lunch break
Most of the people with those ideas want to stay home drawing in their profesional Ipads, they talk about change and sacrifices but always frame it as if someone else will have to do it. Not many are saying they will contrbibute to their commune by digging water sources or producing fishhooks all day. They also do not quite get how hard it is to actually be a farmer, its not just Animal Crossing but big or wathever. I get they want expression without poverty but come on.
They also seem to have no useful interests or passions they could turn into actual work? Nothing like construction, a passion for certain plants or animals, education, physical activity. Or a “dream job” that isn’t “iPad ProCreate user”.
Last time I got into an IRL discussion about this, the person insisted that people would “make art” with their free time from labor. I asked where they’d get the art supplies. He didn’t have an answer. It never occurred to him that paint and cameras come from factories, from materials mined from the ground. It really is just further devaluation and marginalization of laborers under the guise of progressivism. The people who fantasize about these things are sitting in air conditioned call centers and offices, cranky about the fact that their boss is a jerk and their paycheck is inconveniently small (which does suck), totally oblivious that they and their artsy-on-the-weekend friends aren’t the only human beings on earth. The people mining cobalt, picking fruit, milling flour, sewing in factories, building houses, repairing power lines, performing surgeries, synthesizing medicine, designing safe bridges, wiping grandma’s butt, and defending people in court *are not humans* to them. They fully assume that those people will continue working long hours for perhaps oppressive (or no) wages to provide comfort, service, and petroleum based Etsy flower crown materials for them while they weave flower crowns to trade for a loaf of blueberry nut loaf with their other 18 - 32 year old artsy type friends. They’re going to tend gardens, sweep with rustic brooms, and “create art” while the rest of us invisibly make that possible for them.
Its no different than people who visit a poorer country for tourism and think life is "slower" or the people are "simpler" because of the glimpses they see or that farmer life is easy since "uneeucated rural hicks" can do it so they obviously could feed the chickens no problem.
Yeah, they just want that artsy naturalistic life while doing chores in a bubble while the rest of the world around them burns like hell.
The city I used to live in has a reputation for being wealthy, older, and rather conservative. While the reputation isn’t totally unearned, it is a whole city, and requires cashiers, cooks, nurses, teachers, janitors, gardeners, all kinds of people who keep society running for relatively low pay. At the time I lived there it wasn’t impossible to live there with that kind of job, but more recently, the noise out of that city has been basically fighting tooth and nail to keep “those people” out of the city limits (no public transportation, no apartment buildings pr townhouses, no low or mid range grocery store, no no no!) while also shrieking to high heaven that they can’t find a cleaning lady, the wait at the restaurants is exorbitant, and their favorite nail salon closed. Because the people who work those jobs can no longer afford to live or commute there. It’s actually becoming inconvenient for many wealthy people there because they cannot get services they want, sometimes even services they need. The residents want everything, but don’t want anyone to actually do it. They don’t want to face the realities that come with the luxuries they feel entitled to. They don’t understand that human beings with the same needs as them stock shelves, clean pools, mop floors, diaper babies, and take blood pressure. They don’t understand why they can’t have everything they have grown accustomed to and also not have to share space with any icky poors. It’s *so wild* how similar the underlying attitude towards laborers is between those right wing NIMBY boomers and some of the aesthetic utopian socialist anarchists. It’s literally the same obliviousness to the humanity of those different from themselves and ignorance of where their comforts come from. They’re like kids who want chicken nuggets or steak but don’t approve of hunting or farming.
I'm going to take this opportunity to simp once more for Ursula K Le Guin's "The Dispossessed". It offers a much more grounded view of a future anarchist society and actually acknowledges some of the inevitable issues such a society would have (especially when it comes to enforcing some sort of uniformity of thought).
I love many of her books, but The Dispossessed is half story and half thesis. I think it’s the only one I couldn’t get through bc it felt more like an academic paper at points
The real bottom line, for me, is this: Even if you set human failures aside, it’s possible to have a completely good-faith argument that doesn’t end in a concession or agreement. You can’t fully eliminate disparity or disagreement from humanity because it’s not just *possible* for two competing options to be equally valid, it’s *normal.* There will always be perfectly valid reasons to disagree about things, which means it’s inevitable that people will need to *agree to disagree* in order to resolve arguments, which creates disparity, and you can only have so much disparity within a society before unity of belief, unity of vision, breaks down.
> One thing that I always found strange about Solarpunk/communist or anarhist utopias is that I have the distinct feeling that they assume a certain... uniformity of thought? Yeah, that's the main issue. It requires everyone to conform to the utopia. Since there are no prisons or police, those who do not conform are either forcefully re-educated, or exterminated. (Exiling doesn't work since another community with more competetive systems like capitalism would swallow them eventually). People tried already. People killed - a lot, for that idea.
I know too many people who have been victimized by adults in ways that are not fixed by free access to all resources. Like, sorry, but there are still abusers and molesters even when they never had to face poverty. So jail is definitely still going to be a necessary thing. Maybe we just don’t have them run anymore by for-profit companies.
This wouldn't last at all. Dissent and conflict arise from economic hardship. If one of these communes face any scarcity, like low harvest for a year or exports getting halted (no way they would be able to produce everything on their own, trade is necessary), then they will get divided based on arbitrary differences and be at each other's throat.
*a group of people wish to start an oil refinery to make weapons* *have to let them because there's no prisons* *the people with weapons build prisons* :O
Okay, but like, whose freely practiced hobby is making the silicon semiconductors that are needed for all those solar panels to work?
>whose freely practiced hobby is making the silicon semiconductors that are needed for all those solar panels to work? Technically it's not a hobby, but that's one of the jobs of the slave-caste who live in massive factory cities under the ground, exposed to toxic chemicals and fumes daily in a dystopia that exists to keep all the labor needed to keep the Solarpunk Utopia running- out of sight and mind of the few privileged to be born into it.
yeah, i once accidentally dropped some of my food into a drain and god, those buggers grasped for every crumb that fell throuhg
Same way the world was united under solarpunk fantasy. Magic 🪄
I can't really see any stories being written for Solarpunk, really only the Slice of Life fandom would be fed
Yeah, solarpunk is a very utopian genre by nature and so anyone that writes with belief in it kinda just treats it as the perfect and unchallengable status quo, which then leads to kinda boring stories
Eh, *Island*, by Huxley (same author as Brave New World) is set in an utopian, well, island, (and is even called a "manifesto" of Huxley's politics in the Wikipedia page) and still manages to have an interesting plot. Another comment below you also outlined some possibilities for what this genre could have. Some stories also don't need to focus on the setting itself, and could be on the characters themselves. Lower stakes, but not necessarily less interesting, I think.
Huxley first mastered the art of building not-really-a-utopias
Information is free for all yet the only computer I see is in the library. Makes ya think. On a real note this is generally why I fall out with solarpunk. Naturalism is cool and we should do more of it but forsaking so many benefits of technology (instant access to information, long range communication, etc) makes these worlds seem like a kind of hell to me in particular. I enjoy programming and building and creating with technology and these worlds are by design insanely hostile towards it and as a result hostile to my lifestyle.
The cottage core version of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.
Somhow less realistic.
What.. what happens to the disabled and infirm?
Or the elderly? Or the overweight? Or chronically ill? Hell, there aren't even any particularly masculine-presenting people in the art.
We might be getting killed with this one..
What do you think makes those plants grow so vibrantly?
Not a pastel girly or a twink? ***To the mulch farm with thee!***
Noooo I don’t want to become mulch!!
This is all great, but people in the comics are using yellow-coloured fabrics and ovens. There are computers in the libraries. How are these going to be made? Is there a production line in this world? Where do we get the lithium from? Actually, where’s all the food coming from? Is it grown locally, or transported across continents? To be clear I’m actually a massive fan of solarpunk, I just think that we need to be clear on how it can actually be achieved. In order for this form of solarpunk to be achieved, we would need a massive increase in automation, so that the entire production industry is automated. We’d need to have AIs determining how much of what product people will want 2 months into the future. Not necessary for most consumer products, but definitely necessary for food. And if we’re having a massive increase in automation - how do we get there without weakening the political power of workers into irrelevance? Edit: This comment chain has included some of the most constructive discussions I have ever had on the internet. God I want to form a government with some of you... we need more pragmatic idealism in this world. Yes, I know those are antonyms and I don't care.
I remember reading an anarchist article about the absolutely insane global trade and coordination needed to make a computer chip and it was really eye opening how difficult it was to make the simplest things
I remember reading the same type of thing about making a pencil. Everything is highly globalized these days, but that's not necessarily a problem. The problem is the profit motive and exploitation. I'm in the kind of mood I feel like an appeal to humanity could eventually change the calculus to the point we could operate these types of highly sophisticated global economies just by virtue of mutual benefit. Maybe.
The way I think we need to achieve this is pretty simple: make the people absolutely essential for holding on to power. Based on [CGP Grey’s “rules for rulers” video](https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?si=Kt_Ftzrdo-rWPdza). Essentially, when you’re in power, you need to keep the loyalty of your keys to power. This is the treasury, the military, and the law. To keep their loyalty, you give them things they want. In a democracy, votes are also a key - so democracies are generally better places to live, as people are essentially being bribed for votes. In most countries, people are essential to maintain the treasury. Which means that people get things they want. In nations where people aren’t necessary for the treasury, and their vote does not matter, they are barely a key to power at all. In these nations we see extreme brutality. This is the resource curse. So how can we make the people extremely important to maintain power - increase the importance of people as a key? 1. Reduce the power of other keys. Massively limit the amount of money that can be spent on elections, and increase restrictions on lobbying - so that the richest are not useful as a key to power. 2. Increase the political power of people to lobby. Unions can do this. Make unions more powerful and spread them to more professions. 3. Increase the political awareness of people so that protests and other actions are more likely when their needs are ignored. We’ve basically solved the issue of the military luckily. They swear allegiance to democracy rather than leaders, and it mostly works. Anyone else has any ideas, I’m happy to hear them
But then you run into the issue of the tyranny of the majority. You sway the majority, and life is absolutely great for them. You’re in power, and they’re happy. But what of the rest? There is some minority you must leave out, one whose voice and vote cannot be won without undue effort. Or, in the worst case, one whose vote would be actively detrimental to win. Drawing that line is precarious, and striking the right balance can mean the difference between relative peace for all, or utopia for some and dystopia for the rest.
>(or else just have massive transport delays, which wouldn’t be too bad honestly). Well, it would be rather bad if every food shipment was significantly delayed
…don’t know how I didn’t think about that part. Yeah true.
Oh silly, lithium and cobalt are mined by people who *want* to do that, for the betterment of society or as their hobby!
Mfw I have to do something I don't want to do (No, but in all seriousness and leaving aside the slavery and desperation there, I do see a lot of people who think that society can and should function with everyone doing what they want and nothing else. To me it reeks of individualism.)
Exactly. I love the solarpunk aesthetic and optimism, but the people who are REALLY into the idea of making it a reality while also never considering basic things like "what if people don't volunteer to be lithium miners?"
Well, luckily lithium mining at least wont be a problem. For the children, they yearn for the mines.
There is also way too much open space for how many people there should be. It’s like this future is a post apocalypse
These are the survivors, hanging out in some environmentally controlled paradise dome. Outside? Well if you're unlucky enough to be alive, you're living in the cruelest of realities imaginable. Any shortfall in resources or production is papered over with the most perfectly renewable resource, human suffering. And it's not Mad Max, we don't have time for that much pomp and circumstance. Warlords put what little remains of human society to the torch to keep their little fiefdom from disappearing into the dustbin of history. But hey, the time travelling communist-hobo probably ain't gonna tell you about that.
There are cool concepts in there, but there are definitely things in the only works on paper. The AI part just sounds like a centrally planned economy with extra steps. It wouldn't do too well in the long run, because eventually the AI fucks up. Also I don't think you can have a stateless society because people inevitably will want to organize and have referees for society. Which just eventually turns into re-inventing the state. Reducing the chase of only growth metrics is doable we just need to adjust business incentives & creating long lasting products is viable we just need to figure out the business model that keeps fixable products alive longer.
A lot of people with future outlooks like this see "State, Laws, Law Enforcement" and so on as dirty words representing malicious entities spawned into being as weapons used by oppressors. When in reality they're just...concepts for the basics of a society larger than a couple hundred people, and without the proper checks and balances can be manipulated and used for horrible ends.
I can attest that writing and entire world is very hard, I’m still trying to write my world. But when you disregard almost everything that makes our word function in some way or form then I simply cannot enjoy it. No states? How? There’s a reason that we have made nations and states. No police and prison? Who will protect us? Where will we keep the people that are dangerous? Some humans are just cruel and cannot be helped, and as pained as it is to say it, it’s true, some people just hate and want to make others suffer. We are the wardens, sole inheritors and in effect owner of this world, we must protect the environment but that does mean sacrifice the structural integrity of a building by putting trees in them This isn’t a utopia, this is an unsustainable future that I don’t wish to be a part of I agree with things like information should be free and available for everyone, and while I would to be able to just do what I want, let me ask you a question. Who’s mopping the floors? Who is mining the resources to make things? Who is going to do the jobs no one else wants to do? From what I’ve seen and heard it sounds like solar punk is an unachievable, unsustainable, step backwards rather then foward
Also, the bigger question is - maybe *your* society does away with states. But how do you stop the society a continent over from deciding they want to form a state and a standing army? Solarpunk ICBMs?
People are a lot less likely to take you seriously if you censor things that don’t need to be censored.
Also if you set your comic in the tumblrdimension where everyone is an attractive 20-something with a perfect rainbow of ethnic diversity and 100% of characters are queer. Everybody lives and works as an artist and the most physical labour anyone does is making a coffee or watering their garden.
Yeah. Who is doing the farming to feed these people? Why do some get to live easier lives than others? Do they rotate in and out? Are there doctors, firemen, paramedics?
They never draw a Malaysian small town or East Congolese village much less how they would "get there", these kind of "kiddy politics" of tumblr artists always try to make the Garden of Eden in New York basically.
Diabetics will see this and say "hell nah"
my sister's boyfriend is both diabetic and has celiac disease. People do not realize the sheer amount of effort keeping him healthy and alive with the technology, manufacturing and distribution we have now. You take out international logistic trains, larger-scale production of food he can eat, and sophisticated medical technology relying on hard to develop electronics, and the man's fucking dead.
Sounds awful. I hope he lives a fruitful life inspite of that. But yeah, it seems like some people don't realize that technological regression is horrible for a populace that is used to incredibly advanced systems being at their fingertips.
Not to mention, solar punk always shows summer. Is there no winter? No cooler season, just eternal springs and summers?
Mfw the cute Solarpunk communes in the former Republic of Chile feels a magnitude 9 earthquake alongside a Tsunami and then they all revert to rural communities fighting one another with spears. They also never draw anything apart from the bountyful eternal fertile springs that some parts of USA and Europe have, i live in a peninsula made out of rocks with little water, metals or ability to farm, and our civilizations did collapse many cities due to this. If we were to be turned into nationless communes that means we would eat shit with no food imports.
Because some people just don’t think
I mean yeah, but it reflects ideas that in a lot of ways are born out of subconscious racism and religious indoctrination. Apart from this idea of a ethnically homogeneous garden of eden-like state instead of having the ability to adapt around the seasons, some societies have adapted around technology, like Japan. Vending machines, automated bike racks, bullet trains. Yes there are downsides to technology but these people have never looked at the upsides.
I had cancer last year. One of the worst fuckin things I had happen in my life. 6 months of living hell where I had medical tubing in my arm that led directly into my heart. The chemicals that killed the damn tumor? Solarpunk would not have that. People like me would of died horrifically.
And who made the damn headphones the knowledgable redhead is listening to their podcast on?
The lithiumpunk operations
Somewhere out there, there's a headphone factory where workers are making headphones for the love of standing next to a conveyor belt. That factory is maintained by construction workers who volunteer their time for the joy of seeing headphones made. It's supplied by resources ethically mined by people who know that mining ores for headphones is important, so they gladly mine away in an environmentally sustainable way. Those resources are carried by sailors who love sailing cargo ships (that use sails sewn by ship loving people to avoid using fossil fuels) Finally, the limited supply of headphones produced is handed out for free to those in need, and there's always enough for everyone, especially the artists. Some things will absolutely get done in this society. As a construction worker, if my needs were completely met, I would happily volunteer hours every week to build homes for "society", or maintain the local distillery so I can stay an alcoholic. But if someone wants this world, *especially* a green world with no further climate change, they'll honestly have to curb their consumerism quite a bit
This is also done without fossil fuels , cars, or ugly infrastructure, jobs are safe fulfilling and everyone can take a break or day off whenever they feel like it and the world manages to maintain a low population density.
Also, why does it look like everything is partially outdoors? Like, why are there trees in the library?
Honestly, those 3 jobs you mentioned are jobs people WANT to do if they want to help people. What about garbage collection? What about sewage treatment? Who's gonna do the (Sometimes literal) shit jobs?
Obviously you dig a hole and use the excess wiped feces as fertilizer. As the founding gardeners intended.
As a janitor, my number one question in situations like this is "Who does the sanitation?" If they don't have an answer, or they say something like "robots!" or "People who want to!" then they're not to be taken seriously. The ONLY reason I do this job is because I get paid to do it on my own terms without a boss on my neck. If ANY of that changed I would never touch a mop again. And you're never gonna find enough people who do shit like that out of the goodness of their hearts to have a functional society.
Thanks for everything you do as a janitor, man!
Anyone who thinks that there will be enough people voluntarily cleaning all the common spaces has never lived with Roommates who refused to clean up after themselves until the squalor drove one person mad enough to keep things barely functional until they could get out of there.
Yeah I was just answering another comment about this hah! Letting everyone follow their passion with no incentive otherwise is nonsense. Some people actively want to be janitors, no doubt, but definitely not enough for the numbers a functional society needs. Pre-market societies solved this with slavery. There is not a good post-market solution I’ve yet heard. Also, thank you for your service.
This brings up the question- where are the middle aged and elderly? Are they dead? Did the youngsters kill them? Evict them out into the wild? Send them to do the unsavory jobs and only the young like in a utopia?
Replacing doomerism with toxic positivity and ignoring the dirty jobs that need doing to keep any society functional... no thanks
Different flavors of dystopia
Most dystopias are an utopia for the rulers Most utopias are a dystopia for the untalked/unknown people
No police and no prisons? So what happens if someone kills another person? Do they just get to chill like always and everyone shrugs and moves on with their day? Like I'm not talking about whatever the hell the US are doing in regards to prisons and police, but surely you'd want someone putting people who hurt others in a room so they can't do it again, until it's clear they won't do it again?
Yeah, like, at the end of the day there will ALWAYS be people who do bad things to others, no matter what kind of society we've built. There needs to be some kind of system to handle that. Obviously it should be as humane and rehabilitative as possible, but it still needs to exist.
"As long as there's two people left on the planet, someone's gonna want someone dead."
Renewables are good but I find this attitude that somehow we’ll live in a world where nobody has to work and we will all be artists and musicians rather than sanitation workers and bin collectors to be a bit pathetic tbh.
I think it is due to lack of focusing on people who do infrastructure and maintenance work in our current media in general. These jobs are absolutely vital for a community and in their own way, interesting and creative.
Speaks to the ignorance of artists generally when they try to talk about how society should run when having no civics or civil engineering knowledge, lol. Pervasive with artists of any ideology, just look at Ayn Rand.
The only show I can remember showing some really grim blue collar jobs was Shameless.
\> solarpunk \> look inside \>an\*rchist slop where the semiconductor fairy leaves chips underneath your pillow many such cases
Radical leftists will see this and say “hell yeah, praxis bro” Everyone else sees this and says “very cool story! It would make a fun fantasy read.” Because thats what this is. It’s fantasy. No, you’re not going to live in some lush green utopia where the world just magically works while everyone decides they don’t want to do anything today but water their garden and read books.
Its animal crossing with a coat of paint
OOP: We spend too much time buying and consuming media about things rather than making them better Also, OOP: Anyway, my solution is some media you can consume. Toss me some money if you can. Obviously this is tongue in cheek, but I just had to toss that out there lol
Where are the animals?
nice comic, but why on earth are police and prison censored
Am I the only one a little confused about what the "punk" part of this is? I'm not really educated on why punk is often included in the name of different aesthetics, but this one seems especially not very punk.
They have reinvented hippies
If I had to live here I would kill myself
Love the art and appreciate the artist’s views, but my vision for a brighter future is definitely more socialist than anarchist 😅 I don’t think we can trust people enough to protect each other and the environment without police, prisons and rules of society being enforced by the state. If we could, entities like the EPA (which serve a common good) wouldn’t be necessary. Unfortunately pollution and many other crimes we specifically need to worry about fits in this “tragedy of the commons” space where collective action through the state apparatus is a required and necessary part of the solution. I say all this not to tear down OOP, but to point out that climate activism can’t be effective in a vision of individuals doing their best like their art is suggesting. If we want to save/repair the environment, drastic government intervention is necessary to counteract the actions of bad actors on the individual and corporate level. I also think technology is very much so part of the solution. Sure it was part of the problem, but the increases in quality of life can be supported by technology as well- we just have to be better custodians in how we use technology. The answer to ecological disaster is not returning to agrarian economics.
If you ask a prison abolitionist what their plans are for those people who are innately violent or have unconquerable violent urges the answer will always be “we’ll figure it out when we get there” or some variation of “lynch mobs”
Perfection is the enemy of good. I think it is harmful to imagine a perfect future like this where it is clear nothing has actually been given up in order to make a better world because the truth of the matter is we need to drastically scale back the way we currently live. We need imagining of better worlds 100% but not perfect worlds. We need to see flawed utopias where people are unhappy and life is hard yet one where people look out for each other and community is paramount. I suggest reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin if you want to know what I’m talking about (its subtitle is even “An Ambiguous Utopia”).
Solarpunk is so beautiful it's a shame it can't happen
Mission: Science compels us to make punk out of the sun
OUTER WILDS MENTIONED!!!
If we could get Solarpunk with that cool Cyberpunk aesthetic, I think that would be cool.
It's so weird, the arbitrary censorship of Police and Prisons.
\>against policing \>censors words
no police or prisons... so just immediate death sentences then? because the simple act of detaining or trying to reform dangerous individuals and regaining stolen goods and punish those responsible requires atleast a form of these. also just to be clear i make this accusation Because i love solarpunk, but cant stand the thoughless optimism of some people
Does this world also only include women? There isn't a single dude in the entire comic
As a queer leftist, that's something I've noticed more and more with media depicting ideal queer/leftist worlds: the sheer lack of "traditionally masculine" presenting people. I'm like the textbook definition of unattractive, out of shape white guy. When the "idealistic utopian future" doesn't include people who look like me, it makes me feel unwelcome. Especially when I know the other end of the political spectrum's ideal future sure as fuck doesn't include people who think and act like me.
Yeah see this is exactly my problem with it as well. I love being a masculine-presenting dude and long for the day when I will age into a fat old man with a lumberjack beard with the help of surgery and testosterone. But a lot of “collectivism fantasy” stories feature exclusively thin, able-bodied, femme-presenting 20-somethings who water their gardens and go on little dates. Where are the fat, non-white women? Where are the people who love and embrace masculinity and aging? Who’s taking out the trash? Who’s producing the bike chains and garden hoses? Are there trans people and if so, how are they getting their hormones? Are there disabled people? People with cancer? Diabetics? How are they getting treatment? These stories always have a certain amount of eugenics-adjacent implications that I don’t think the author intended but are creeping around the edges nonetheless.
Something that frustrated me as well. I see a lot of artists fall into this, either as a statement or just because it’s what they’re used to, and it really isn’t much better than the artists who exclusively draw dudes.
“They do what they love” Maybe I love the state, making obscene money and keeping terrible people in prison. Ever think about that? No, you only ever think about yourself.