6 ms·

As much as it sounds like a nice future, I've come to the painful realization that solarpunk triggers the same trap that the "Technology will save us" mind viru

As much as it sounds like a nice future, I've come to the painful realization that solarpunk triggers the same trap that the "Technology will save us" mind virus lures us into. A future where we get to keep doing the same destructive practices that abundant evidence suggests are the prescription for the termination of life on earth. Concepts like "Abundance without waste" are like saying "Humane torture", sorry that's an oxymoron. We have absolutely zero idea how to maintain current lifestyles for N billion people across tens of thousands of years. 10k years of heavy mining to replace solar panels will poison this world, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of problems with ideas like solarpunk.

AstralStorm 2y ago
The worst part of the aesthetic is the actual cost of building in it. Solarpunk designs are notorious for being expensive to make, compared to native ones they try to crib off of. Some of it could be reduced with say 3D printing, or more advanced ground engineering. Some of it requires particular local conditions. See, solarpunk is distinct from classic futurism in that it is supposed to be both bespoke and green. Zero waste is not the goal. None of it scales... Which degrowth advocates think actually helps. The question of cost brings out its shadow - colonialism in a green paint. Someone pays the costs of manufacturing, mining and transport.
- berkes 2y ago
  Why must everything always "scale" in order to be good? That's a very limited view, IMO. I've come to love working in my garden, producing fruit, vegetables, eggs, honey. None of it has to scale. Our 8 chickens provide our six households with eggs. My 6m2 vegetable patch gives me enough veggies for my household and some more (to give away). My three hives produce enough honey and wax to sell off and give away. None of it scales. None of it is optimized. None of it has to. My time spent on these "chores" is free, because I recharge and enjoy that time. I am aware this isn't "self sustaining". But it does relieve from my footprint a lot. I'm not contributing to bio industry, contributing much less or non at all to food dragged all over the world. All of it while gaining mental energy, joy and happiness. We could easily start doing more of this. It doesn't have to be absolute and "everything or nothing". I mean, I drink coffee, for example that won't grow here. But only a little, because all the tea that I can and do grow, brings my coffee "needs" down to a handful of coffees a week. I don't want it to scale or be made efficient, because it would remove a lot of the joy I get from it.
  - rcxdude 2y ago
    That's fine in and of itself, as a hobby. But it's not going to save the world, either, due to aformentioned inability to scale (most importantly, it would be impossible for the whole world to live like this: the world population is large enough that we rely on high-yield farming).
    - berkes 2y ago
      > That's fine in and of itself, as a hobby. Is it? All my "hobby" needs, is to feed me and my household and some friends and they me. My "hobby" doesn't need to feed the entire world population. All I want is for it to *reduce* the footprint of five, maybe ten people around me. It does that. And therefore is a net benefit. Ten people with less emissions, less pollution, less animal harm, and more fun. Even if only one in hundred thousand people does this, thats 700000 people with significantly reduced footprint. I honestly have a problem with the absolutism in such discussions. Something doesn't have to "feed the entire world" in order to help us move forward. To compare the 700000 figure: Tesla churns out 3 times that amount of cars in a year. If we presume these teslas are bought by people who want to reduce their footprint, and that the reduction of one bought tesla is close to my reduction (its not, its obviously much more complex) just being a bit more self-sustaining would be similar to a third of the win all of Tesla contributes. And if we agree that "one tesla" equals "some reduction of footprint" (I don't agree, though), every tesla is a win. This isn't only valuable until every car is an EV. It's not absolutes.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > Why must everything always "scale" in order to be good? Because there's eight billion of us. A lot of things work for one person but not for everybody. The big issues of land use, density, water, and transport end up forcing people into choice that perhaps nobody ultimately wants. (this is not a reason for you or anybody else not to do it! But it's a reason against all sorts of "why doesn't everybody just X")
    - 9dev 2y ago
      Yet we've seen how centralising everything has made our world a lot less resilient. Redundancies are good, at least to a certain degree. If more people had a small vegetable patch, we didn't need as many soil-destroying farming mega-corps, and would use less aggressive fertilisers and herbicides, for example.
pjc50 2y ago
> We have absolutely zero idea how to maintain current lifestyles for N billion people across tens of thousands of years Perhaps, but then you end up in the extinctionist/Malthusian doom loop instead.
notarobot123 2y ago
> a future where we get to keep doing the same destructive practices If anything, I see it as an antidote to the trap you describe. It doesn't reject technology (it's fundamentally progressive) but it also doesn't imagine a future where technology solves all the problems. The objective of Solarpunk is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits. It is very much about re-imagining culture and exploring what a meaningful lifestyle looks like with a strong focus on community and creative self-expression. It resists the ideology of limitless growth and necessary scarcity while also saying that human societies can continue to progress and flourish in ways that matter. Every genre of "punk" has explicitly resisted the status-quo and this one is no different.
lukan 2y ago
"10k years of heavy mining to replace solar panels will poison this world" Have you heard of this new concept called recycling? Also, solar panels are mostly made of Si, which is basically pure sand. Melt it, reforge it. Done. I believe Uranium mining is somewhat dirtier.
- Voultapher 2y ago
  > Have you heard of this new concept called recycling? Yes, I have. If you have absurdly good 90% recycling - unheard of in this area - and a cycle period of 10 years, you run through material once entirely in less than 500 years. Sure the Si part is readily available, but what about the metal used for building the thing that transports the thing to the other thing that transports your solar panels for recycling? What about waste products of smelting when recycling? What about the ground water use? And here is the real killer, what about the cost? Show me a design that scales to even 1 billion people, without forcing the rest into slave like conditions. Our technology, is not sustainable period. Practically none of it is. That thought does not bring joy to me. I used to subscribe to the technology and ingenuity will fix it mindset. But the harsh reality is, 999/1000 needles point in one direction. It's desperation to cling to that one last little maybe, the verdict has been reached. Physics doesn't care about our sentiments or arguments, our politicians can't reason with physics or bribe it. In Tom Murphy's words: > Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
  - lukan 2y ago
    "Our technology, is not sustainable period." But it can be. With enough energy, any physical process can be reversed. The sun provides enough energy. Period.
grumpy-de-sre 2y ago
The real mind virus is that "Technology is evil" and it's been infecting the western world for the last fifty years. Technology is completely indifferent to human and environmental outcomes. Solar panels are insanely resource efficient, and every study has shown lifespans in practice far exceeding initial expectations. Due to the fact that energy is inherently valuable, I'm sure there'll be a rich circular economy for solar cells/panels (same goes for batteries). No idea if it leads to a solarpunk "utopia" or just a world with much cleaner air, and electricity abundance.
- lm28469 2y ago
  > Technology is completely indifferent to human and environmental outcomes. "technology" doesn't mean anything... Are we talking about mass made penicillin or the Twitter guy pretending to solve the world by replacing 1.5B ICE vehicles with 1.5B EVs ? I can defend the former all day long, but to believe the later you have to be quite uninformed and subscribe to the technosolutionist cult blindly I'm still not convinced anything good came out of mainstream tech after google maps. We get a few ultra niche gadgets that are useful but the bulk of it is at the service of the people in charge and are net negatives to the bulk of humanity
  - JohnBooty 2y ago
    bulk of it is at the service of the people in charge and are net negatives to the bulk of humanity Do we underrate the impact of YouTube and LLM videos when it comes to mundane household know-how? In the last year alone they have combined to help me with dozens upon dozens of upon dozens of things, from changing the air filter in my car to waterproofing a canopy. It has been an extremely challenging year for me for personal reasons and there's so much stuff that would have gone undone without this combo. Asking ChatGPT why synthetic motor oil lasts longer than regular oil is perhaps not a "sexy" application of the technology, especially when concerned with weightier matters like whether or not LLMs will achieve AGI and/or replace software engineers. But this has indeed been life-enhancing. Yes, LLMs need double-checking to ensure they're not hallucinating. And yes we've been able to use tech to "learn how to do things" ever since search engines were invented or perhaps even back to the days of newsgroups and BBSs. But it's so much more effective than its ever been IME. (YouTube technically predates GMaps, but Google purchased YT a year after GMaps, and while Google's stewardship has not been perfect, their decision to allow literally unbounded growth has allowed so much niche information to take root there) I have also personally found Apple's AirTags to be life-enhancing as fuck. They are, of course, enabled by the sort of always-connected networked life that brings a lot of other ills. But it is also invaluable to me from both a practical standpoint and a state-of-mind standpoint to not have to worry where my important shit is.
9dev 2y ago
Please don't use the mind virus adage. That term is completely burnt by Musk's braindead agenda—there is no virus, if anything, there's opposing viewpoints that you may not agree with, but are just as valid as yours.
- itsoktocry 2y ago
  >there's opposing viewpoints that you may not agree with, but are just as valid as yours. >"Musk's braindead agenda"
- Voultapher 2y ago
  I'm a little torn, I see your point. I don't get to choose by myself how language and symbols are co-opted and used - see the whole "all lives matter" debacle that had many well meaning ignorant people spouting off racist garbage. On the other hand, do I really want to let an egotistical asshole - the very one actually fallen prey to the thing he claims so many others are victims of - dictate how I use language? There is a movement to reclaim words - or maybe not let them be misused - in a way that doesn't just roll over, hading over parts of the language, whenever fascistic assholes decide to appropriate them.
  - 9dev 2y ago
    That makes sense. I’m not sure, though, if your argument really applies to terms made up (or at least coined) by said fascistic assholes; „Sieg Heil“ is very likely no phrase that’ll ever see any justification for using, even if somehow claimed by counter-fascists. Then again, it’s probably a taunting metaphor to describe a certain ineradicable, flaming fanatism that cannot be tainted by facts anymore, which is what you used it for, so that’s that.
dkarl 2y ago
I agree that it's fluffy and empty. Utopia in art isn't worth much except for advertising. However... > Concepts like "Abundance without waste" are like saying "Humane torture", sorry that's an oxymoron Sustainable abundance isn't a logical contradiction, even if we haven't figured it out yet. "Waste" is unavoidable, and as a word and an idea, it tends to take on moral dimensions that overshadow the practical.

AstralStorm 2y ago

The worst part of the aesthetic is the actual cost of building in it. Solarpunk designs are notorious for being expensive to make, compared to native ones they try to crib off of. Some of it could be reduced with say 3D printing, or more advanced ground engineering. Some of it requires particular local conditions. See, solarpunk is distinct from classic futurism in that it is supposed to be both bespoke and green. Zero waste is not the goal. None of it scales... Which degrowth advocates think actually helps. The question of cost brings out its shadow - colonialism in a green paint. Someone pays the costs of manufacturing, mining and transport.

berkes 2y ago
Why must everything always "scale" in order to be good? That's a very limited view, IMO. I've come to love working in my garden, producing fruit, vegetables, eggs, honey. None of it has to scale. Our 8 chickens provide our six households with eggs. My 6m2 vegetable patch gives me enough veggies for my household and some more (to give away). My three hives produce enough honey and wax to sell off and give away. None of it scales. None of it is optimized. None of it has to. My time spent on these "chores" is free, because I recharge and enjoy that time. I am aware this isn't "self sustaining". But it does relieve from my footprint a lot. I'm not contributing to bio industry, contributing much less or non at all to food dragged all over the world. All of it while gaining mental energy, joy and happiness. We could easily start doing more of this. It doesn't have to be absolute and "everything or nothing". I mean, I drink coffee, for example that won't grow here. But only a little, because all the tea that I can and do grow, brings my coffee "needs" down to a handful of coffees a week. I don't want it to scale or be made efficient, because it would remove a lot of the joy I get from it.
- rcxdude 2y ago
  That's fine in and of itself, as a hobby. But it's not going to save the world, either, due to aformentioned inability to scale (most importantly, it would be impossible for the whole world to live like this: the world population is large enough that we rely on high-yield farming).
  - berkes 2y ago
    > That's fine in and of itself, as a hobby. Is it? All my "hobby" needs, is to feed me and my household and some friends and they me. My "hobby" doesn't need to feed the entire world population. All I want is for it to *reduce* the footprint of five, maybe ten people around me. It does that. And therefore is a net benefit. Ten people with less emissions, less pollution, less animal harm, and more fun. Even if only one in hundred thousand people does this, thats 700000 people with significantly reduced footprint. I honestly have a problem with the absolutism in such discussions. Something doesn't have to "feed the entire world" in order to help us move forward. To compare the 700000 figure: Tesla churns out 3 times that amount of cars in a year. If we presume these teslas are bought by people who want to reduce their footprint, and that the reduction of one bought tesla is close to my reduction (its not, its obviously much more complex) just being a bit more self-sustaining would be similar to a third of the win all of Tesla contributes. And if we agree that "one tesla" equals "some reduction of footprint" (I don't agree, though), every tesla is a win. This isn't only valuable until every car is an EV. It's not absolutes.
- pjc50 2y ago
  > Why must everything always "scale" in order to be good? Because there's eight billion of us. A lot of things work for one person but not for everybody. The big issues of land use, density, water, and transport end up forcing people into choice that perhaps nobody ultimately wants. (this is not a reason for you or anybody else not to do it! But it's a reason against all sorts of "why doesn't everybody just X")
  - 9dev 2y ago
    Yet we've seen how centralising everything has made our world a lot less resilient. Redundancies are good, at least to a certain degree. If more people had a small vegetable patch, we didn't need as many soil-destroying farming mega-corps, and would use less aggressive fertilisers and herbicides, for example.

pjc50 2y ago

> We have absolutely zero idea how to maintain current lifestyles for N billion people across tens of thousands of years Perhaps, but then you end up in the extinctionist/Malthusian doom loop instead.

notarobot123 2y ago

> a future where we get to keep doing the same destructive practices If anything, I see it as an antidote to the trap you describe. It doesn't reject technology (it's fundamentally progressive) but it also doesn't imagine a future where technology solves all the problems. The objective of Solarpunk is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits. It is very much about re-imagining culture and exploring what a meaningful lifestyle looks like with a strong focus on community and creative self-expression. It resists the ideology of limitless growth and necessary scarcity while also saying that human societies can continue to progress and flourish in ways that matter. Every genre of "punk" has explicitly resisted the status-quo and this one is no different.

lukan 2y ago

"10k years of heavy mining to replace solar panels will poison this world" Have you heard of this new concept called recycling? Also, solar panels are mostly made of Si, which is basically pure sand. Melt it, reforge it. Done. I believe Uranium mining is somewhat dirtier.

Voultapher 2y ago
> Have you heard of this new concept called recycling? Yes, I have. If you have absurdly good 90% recycling - unheard of in this area - and a cycle period of 10 years, you run through material once entirely in less than 500 years. Sure the Si part is readily available, but what about the metal used for building the thing that transports the thing to the other thing that transports your solar panels for recycling? What about waste products of smelting when recycling? What about the ground water use? And here is the real killer, what about the cost? Show me a design that scales to even 1 billion people, without forcing the rest into slave like conditions. Our technology, is not sustainable period. Practically none of it is. That thought does not bring joy to me. I used to subscribe to the technology and ingenuity will fix it mindset. But the harsh reality is, 999/1000 needles point in one direction. It's desperation to cling to that one last little maybe, the verdict has been reached. Physics doesn't care about our sentiments or arguments, our politicians can't reason with physics or bribe it. In Tom Murphy's words: > Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
- lukan 2y ago
  "Our technology, is not sustainable period." But it can be. With enough energy, any physical process can be reversed. The sun provides enough energy. Period.

grumpy-de-sre 2y ago

The real mind virus is that "Technology is evil" and it's been infecting the western world for the last fifty years. Technology is completely indifferent to human and environmental outcomes. Solar panels are insanely resource efficient, and every study has shown lifespans in practice far exceeding initial expectations. Due to the fact that energy is inherently valuable, I'm sure there'll be a rich circular economy for solar cells/panels (same goes for batteries). No idea if it leads to a solarpunk "utopia" or just a world with much cleaner air, and electricity abundance.

lm28469 2y ago
> Technology is completely indifferent to human and environmental outcomes. "technology" doesn't mean anything... Are we talking about mass made penicillin or the Twitter guy pretending to solve the world by replacing 1.5B ICE vehicles with 1.5B EVs ? I can defend the former all day long, but to believe the later you have to be quite uninformed and subscribe to the technosolutionist cult blindly I'm still not convinced anything good came out of mainstream tech after google maps. We get a few ultra niche gadgets that are useful but the bulk of it is at the service of the people in charge and are net negatives to the bulk of humanity
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  bulk of it is at the service of the people in charge and are net negatives to the bulk of humanity Do we underrate the impact of YouTube and LLM videos when it comes to mundane household know-how? In the last year alone they have combined to help me with dozens upon dozens of upon dozens of things, from changing the air filter in my car to waterproofing a canopy. It has been an extremely challenging year for me for personal reasons and there's so much stuff that would have gone undone without this combo. Asking ChatGPT why synthetic motor oil lasts longer than regular oil is perhaps not a "sexy" application of the technology, especially when concerned with weightier matters like whether or not LLMs will achieve AGI and/or replace software engineers. But this has indeed been life-enhancing. Yes, LLMs need double-checking to ensure they're not hallucinating. And yes we've been able to use tech to "learn how to do things" ever since search engines were invented or perhaps even back to the days of newsgroups and BBSs. But it's so much more effective than its ever been IME. (YouTube technically predates GMaps, but Google purchased YT a year after GMaps, and while Google's stewardship has not been perfect, their decision to allow literally unbounded growth has allowed so much niche information to take root there) I have also personally found Apple's AirTags to be life-enhancing as fuck. They are, of course, enabled by the sort of always-connected networked life that brings a lot of other ills. But it is also invaluable to me from both a practical standpoint and a state-of-mind standpoint to not have to worry where my important shit is.

9dev 2y ago

Please don't use the mind virus adage. That term is completely burnt by Musk's braindead agenda—there is no virus, if anything, there's opposing viewpoints that you may not agree with, but are just as valid as yours.

itsoktocry 2y ago
>there's opposing viewpoints that you may not agree with, but are just as valid as yours. >"Musk's braindead agenda"
Voultapher 2y ago
I'm a little torn, I see your point. I don't get to choose by myself how language and symbols are co-opted and used - see the whole "all lives matter" debacle that had many well meaning ignorant people spouting off racist garbage. On the other hand, do I really want to let an egotistical asshole - the very one actually fallen prey to the thing he claims so many others are victims of - dictate how I use language? There is a movement to reclaim words - or maybe not let them be misused - in a way that doesn't just roll over, hading over parts of the language, whenever fascistic assholes decide to appropriate them.
- 9dev 2y ago
  That makes sense. I’m not sure, though, if your argument really applies to terms made up (or at least coined) by said fascistic assholes; „Sieg Heil“ is very likely no phrase that’ll ever see any justification for using, even if somehow claimed by counter-fascists. Then again, it’s probably a taunting metaphor to describe a certain ineradicable, flaming fanatism that cannot be tainted by facts anymore, which is what you used it for, so that’s that.

dkarl 2y ago

I agree that it's fluffy and empty. Utopia in art isn't worth much except for advertising. However... > Concepts like "Abundance without waste" are like saying "Humane torture", sorry that's an oxymoron Sustainable abundance isn't a logical contradiction, even if we haven't figured it out yet. "Waste" is unavoidable, and as a word and an idea, it tends to take on moral dimensions that overshadow the practical.