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Community implies people and you’ve already lost me.
I really do enjoy the Solar Punk aesthetic and the optimism it represents, but when I try to bring people to the reality of things like “we still need solar panel and battery factories” people seem to get upset.
Just to say, I see the reality of what Solar Punk could be and I want to take the practical steps needed. And to be clear, my goal is to make sure that the workers own the solar panel factory, not capitalist investors. I think the solar punk aesthetic, whatever version of it we all decide on, will naturally emerge if we can achieve that.
You need the factories, and you also need logging and mining.
Lots of people who want to support the environment are reflexively anti mining and logging, even when it’s done responsibly. I think it’s often nimbyism that they don’t admit to themselves.
Great point, I also think that if we’re more responsible about what we use those technologies for it would also make a huge difference in the environmental impact. If you get rid of all the useless extravagances of the rich we can have a much leaner society resource-wise and still have everyone have a good quality of life.
100%. You need a lot less raw material when you design things to be durable, repairable, interchangeable, and recyclable.
Couple that with combating the “everyone needs to personally own everything they want to use” notion that leads to overconsumption. Loads of things can just work through formal or informal libraries, e.g., no one needs to personally own a carpet cleaner; better to share a really nice one than have dozens of crappy ones in circulation.
I would agree that shared resources are more efficient, and you make a great point about the quality aspect. On the other hand, you don’t want walmart monopolizing the carpet cleaners either, as that could bring up the fear of “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” that the tech bros are pushing.
To kinda build on my first comment, we need to get away from the megacorps and their unconstrained hierarchies and replace them with sensible democratically governed cooperatives. I would image a home improvement store run by a local co-op would be a good choice to rent your cleaner from, much better than home cheapo.
Yeah, I’m not even thinking about renting, though that does have its place. I basically just really like that my local library lends out all the tools that I only need once in a blue moon.
There’s times that I want to buy stuff and just give it to my library so I dont have to store it for the 99% of the time that I’m not using it. Don’t think it actually works that way, though.
That’s awesome if your town can make that work, is it from tax money or donations? Is it a big town? I would imaging it would be more difficult to maintain the tools the bigger the city/library is
I think ppl forget that the steps to clean energy are merely bridge technologies. You don’t get to industrial age to solarpunk future without some “unclean” steps in between.
Solarpunk is an utopia. If every step we continue making needs to be perfect, we’ll never get there. Instead we have to improve each step we make to get there.
Solarpunk is also about salvaging technology and post-capitalism. It’s supposed to be reached through a transition period. We just gotta make the first steps and introduce more circular economies. This will phase out most harmful mining practices eventually.
“No don’t break those poor eggs! That’s not how you make an omelette 😔”
What’s the problem with the concept of ‘a factory’?
Yup, and “clean” gets you right back to the 18th century. The vast majority of human history operated 100% renewable.
That’s a flawed comparison, we’re scientiffically far more advanced now, i dontthink it would be that big of a setback. We’d only change the way society operates. And if you complement the renewable technologies and fossils as bridge technologies correctly, the setback would be little /manageable.
The vast majority of human history operated 100% renewable.
I think that depends on what you mean by history and what you mean by renewable. There is evidence that prehistoric civilizations caused lasting effects on the world around us, from mass extinction events caused from human expansion (see North American megafauna), including extinction of our closest cousins (other lines of homo sapiens, and other species of the homo genus), whenever our settlements encountered theirs.
Once agriculture came on the scene, ancient civilizations were modifying the land, domesticating animals, developing pottery and tools and making use of both renewable and non-renewable resources. With the rise of the bronze age, mining and other permanent resource extraction became the norm.
Plenty of what these ancient civilizations were doing were not sustainable or renewable. Almost every ancient civilization caused deforestation soon after developing agriculture. Plenty of societies relied on mining in an unsustainable way, exhausting the forests of fuel.
So if we’re starting with “history” being human civilization and settlements in the neolithic era, I don’t think that’s quite right. Even if you’re only talking prehistoric homo sapiens, there’s still evidence that we caused mass extinctions before we developed agriculture.
Of course, we did allow for a lot of reforestation, replenishment, and other rehabilitation of the land at times, but often that was not by choice of humans. Disease, war, natural disaster, and famine could cause major population collapse in a way that caused settlements to be abandoned, but that isn’t really what people mean by a renewable practice.
Im more into soilpunk. Permaculture, frugile tech.
Only loosely related, but why do people’s idea of solarpunk aesthetics feel completely divorced from any punk-ness.
Gimme patched together, beautifully mended clothes and once broken possessions, gimme stickerbombed custom open source hardware, gimme a hodgepodge of recycled items used as planters for an herb garden, gimme things that feel deeply human. Not gleaming polished metal and glass, like 70’s futurist magazine cover but with more plants.
There should be some texture and humanity in solarpunk aesthetics. It has to be punk.
You should watch Furiosa then. There’s a solarpunk community in it.
I still need to see furiosa, thanks for reminding me of it!
using -punk as a suffix is almost always misleading. like steampunk was almost immediately diluted into mismatched victorian garb and random gears that couldn’t possibly serve any purpose. equally not punk.
I once had a friend tell me that steampunk is what happens when goths discover the color brown and I’ve never been able to get over that.
That’s an awesome way to put it, honestly
Gears have a place in steampunk. A society that runs primarily on steam power is going to have a lot of gears. And the victorian garb comes from the narrow era between steam power and electricity, so it’s not surprising that it’s come to be integral to the aesthetic.
It certainly can be done badly. A shallow rendition of steampunk might have useless gears everywhere that aren’t connected to anything. An AI generated steampunk aesthetic might look like that, because it doesn’t understand mechanics and the uses of gears. Cheap etsy costume pieces might look like this because the seller only cares about making a buck. Bullshit pinterest inspo might look like this because the creators only care about reach and engagement.
But that doesn’t make the -punk suffix misleading, it just means they’re doing steampunk poorly.
Ghibli’s Laputa is steampunk. Howl’s Moving Castle has some steampunk elements. Those are pretty well done in my opinion.
Nausica is close to solarpunk, but it’s more like windpunk which I don’t know if has been coined yet.
Cyberpunk generally has a high focus on the punk aspect. I.E, anti-authoritarian, personal freedom, anti-hierarchy.
Steampunk has punk at the end purely because it’s a riff on the word Cyberpunk, not because it retains any inherent anti-authoritarian punk-ness. It’s more so just a label shorthand for an aesthetic and rough technological level. Dieselpunk does the same thing, using punk not to signify actual punk ideals, but instead uses it as shorthand for ‘aesthetic’.
Solarpunk retains the punk aspect of Cyberpunk, but instead of dystopia, imagines a more utopic vision of punks succeeding against the corporations/governments/hierarchies, which is achieved through community building, a DIY ethos, prefiguration, and an appropriate use of technology.
I don’t know, a lot of steampunk seems to have that dystopian aspect where the bad guys are oppressive rulers and the good guys are the rabble. I don’t see how that isn’t punk.
It’s certainly possible to write a punk story in a steampunk setting, but from all the steampunk media I’ve encountered (and I was very much a fan of it years ago, and still enjoy it today), most of the time it’s chosen as an aesthetic choice or as a backdrop for alternate history.
I’d be interested to hear any recommendations you have of steampunk works that focus on the punk angle, though, if you had some in mind.
"Just glue some gears on it and call it steampunk…"🎶
It had a good run on diy forums until reddit grabbed it after thinkgeek started selling “merch”
I swear, i can’t find good steampunk anymore, all the images i find when i search for inspiration when i draw are just bullshit with no-purpose gears glued on everthing 😭
It’s hard when the fetish gets too niche. Like, I want steampunk, but with fantasy. Give me those dwarves who build railways and have guns, give me the elves who feature some crazy, idk, steam-powered tanks, but with flowery inlays or such.
The best I can do is dwarves with blunderbusses
Straight up impossible
Watch Laputa
Thank you! i’il watch it
electro jazz quirk chungus intensifies
A lot of people like the word “solarpunk” but don’t really like the meaning behind the manifesto. Part of the issue is that they don’t want to be decolonised, so they don’t really see PoC voices as being inherently valid. That connects to the aesthetic, becoming increasingly “white but with plants”. This is also why there’s that connection between Solarpunk and Cottagecore, despite Cottagecore implying that you’d have slaves.
Cottagecore implies you’d have slaves?
I think a bunch of cottagecore creators have talked about how the fantasy is the cottagecore life but without the labour. Add to the idea that the aesthetics come straight from America during slavery (or Europe when the rich had servants), and there’s a pretty straight line between cottage core and who is mysteriously supposed to be doing this labour. At the very least, the idea of cosplaying rural life while servants actually do the labour has been part of the fabric of cottagecore.
Having said that, it’s an aesthetic (unlike Solarpunk which is meant to be a movement), and there are plenty of folk who are into the aesthetic and just like knitting and so on.
I think a bunch of cottagecore creators have talked about how the fantasy is the cottagecore life but without the labour.
That seems to contradict your original statement that cottagecore implies slavery, because if it did then this would be redundant and there would be no need for the “but”.
Cottagecore implies labor, yes. If someone is saying they want a cottagecore life without the labor, then they’ve probably got their head too far up in Wuthering Heights and imagine themselves as English Gentry. That doesn’t define cottagecore, though.
Most people who like cottagecore enjoy doing things themselves. Fibercraft of all kinds, soapmaking and candlemaking, baking from scratch. None of that implies slavery, and if you think it does then I would ask where you think those things come from when you buy them from the store.
It’s not merely an aesthetic. Just like solarpunk, the aesthetic has been separated from the lifestyle and sanitized, but not in all cases. Homesteading, making things from scratch, is very much a lifestyle.
“Cottage industry” is already a term for people who sell things they make small-scale in their own homes. That seems economically empowering, no? Seems like it would be an integral part to any real solarpunk community, so it makes sense that there’s a connection between solarpunk and cottagecore.
Your comment is more or less just lawyering. I’m acknowledging that a lot of people are in it for the aesthetic. You seem to disagree with the meaning of “aesthetic”. IMO if you’re using it as supplemental to your way of life, it’s aesthetic to me, in that it’s a hobby, and not political. In fact the closer to political you get, the closer you tend to get to the kind of libertarian, ecofascist, white supremacist ideology. Relevant video.
To re-iterate, I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy cottagecore. Have fun, enjoy, make things, it’s great, but it’s 100% a hobby as distinct from Solarpunk.
I ain’t a lawyer. I presented a rational argument that disagrees with your own. If that’s “just lawyering” to you, then I don’t want to hear you talk about “ecofascist.” If you want to be anti-fascist, great, I’m right there with you, but that means you have to tolerate disagreement when it’s presented rationally, at least enough to engage with it rationally, instead of dismissing it with trite little catchphrases like “that’s just lawyering.”
It seems you’re the one who doesn’t know the meaning of “aesthetic.” Aesthetics are surface-level appearances. If something is purely aesthetic (or should I say solely), then it’s superficial. But an aesthetic can go hand-in-hand with function or ideation. An aesthetic can emerge organically.
There’s always an aesthetic, so criticizing something for having an aesthetic falls short. Criticize things for having a sanitized aesthetic divorced from the philosophy or politics of the movement it represents, sure. If you go around dressing lile Little Bo Peep but you bought the costume on Etsy because you don’t even know how to sew, that’s not cottagecore. That’s Little House on the Prairie cosplay.
That doesn’t say anything about cottagecore as a movement, anymore than someone wearing plastic “steampunk” goggles with useless gears to a convention says anything about “steampunk.” It’s just an appropriated aesthetic.
IMO if you’re using it as supplemental to your way of life, it’s aesthetic to me, in that it’s a hobby, and not political.
That’s not what aesthetic means. An amateur golfer wearing sperries, chinos, and a polo isn’t doing it just for the aesthetic. He has the aesthetic, sure, and if he wasn’t a golfer you could say he’s cosplaying as one. But if golfing is just a hobby to him, that doesn’t mean he’s only doing it for the aesthetic.
If someone mends their own clothing or has a cottage business, that supplements their way of life, yes. That’s more than a hobby. It might not be political, but it’s certainly more than an aesthetic.
In fact the closer to political you get, the closer you tend to get to the kind of libertarian, ecofascist, white supremacist ideology.
That sounds like an assumption. You can cherrypick a few examples, sure. Someone could also try equating punk with fascism by cherrypicking a few examples of neonazis. It would be a false equivalency, and those neonazis would get their asses kicked if they showed up at most punk venues.
Cottagecore has been integral to black history, whether they know it or not. They might not call it that, but part of poverty is that you learn to make do with what you have, do more with less. You learn to mend your own clothing, make food from scratch. Maybe they don’t dress like this is Tudor England, but the underlying philosophy is there, even if they think about it in different terms. So calling it close to white supremacy is kinda wild.
And it’s pretty funny that you would share a youtube link right after preaching about politics as a lifestyle…
OK I no longer know what we’re talking about but in the interests of not making things more heated than they already are, I’m just not going to respond further.
How about some solar powered robot slaves?
Maybe the entire train of thought for slavery is bad? Like maybe decolonise your mind? Maybe the thing we’re aiming for isn’t just pastoralism + technology, but ecology. Maybe the goal isn’t exploitation at all, but coexistence.
Their word choice was poor, true. I wouldn’t call them “robot slaves,” because a robot isn’t a person and therefore can’t be enslaved. Your dishwasher isn’t a slave. Your computer isn’t a slave. Your printer isn’t a slave.
I’m not here to back up a commenter from an .ml instance.
But, “exploitation” doesn’t really fit here. How do you “exploit” a robot? It’s not a person or even an animal, it doesn’t have consciousness or sentience or however you want to define an entity with intrinsic worth deserving of rights.
You can call it a robot maid or a robot butler or a robot servitor or whatever you want. I wouldn’t call it a slave or even a serf. But at the end of the day, it’s just a robot. And if you run it on solar power and recycle parts to eliminate e-waste, then it can certainly fit with solarpunk.
Ecology is good, yes. Technology can work in harmony with ecology, if it’s done right. The problem with our current society is that that’s not among its values or priorities, so it designs technology aimed at increasing shareholder value or military dominance. If those values can be changed, and new priorities adopted, then technology can certainly go hand-in-hand with ecology.
But pastoralism will be essential to a solarpunk society, whether you want to admit that or not. Maybe the term comes with baggage because of how it’s been implemented in the past, but we’re not bound by the past. We can implement new ways of pastoralism.
If you want to support a large population, agriculture is essential. It can be done on a smaller-scale, and non-industrially, especially if you’re just supporting a village or a small town. But that requires labor, and if you replace the brunt of that with robots, you free up hands for other tasks. The robots don’t even have to be humanoid.
If you want to support entire cities, it’s going to take a lot of agriculture. You can do vertical warehouse farming, sure, especially with agribots. But since you’ve already called out ecofascism, I can only assume the world you envision will have at least 8 billion mouths to feed. Maybe 12 or 15 billion by the time the population levels off on its own without any interventions. How do you plan to feed all those people without exploitation, environmental degradation, and industrial agriculture? I’m not saying you can’t, or that you shouldn’t try, but pragmatically you’ll need to at least have an idea in order for it to be a realistic vision for the future.
Coexistence and decolonization are great, but there are still practical necessities that need to be addressed in order to maintain a society of any kind. “Ecology” is a great start, and a necessary counterbalance to the current state of the world; but long-term, if your vision doesn’t include some rendition of “pastoralism + technology,” then I just can’t imagine how you plan to support a world with an exponentially growing human population…
And if you’re not thinking about these things, then solarpunk seems to be very little more than an aesthetic to you.
OK so firstly, when I say “exploitation”, I mean in the economic sense. So you “exploit” the land to make a sugar plantation and then the plantation pulls all the resources out of the soil, you take the sugar and leave. This is basically what colonisation was, it was exploitation of people, yes, but also fundamentally of the entire ecosystem, the land, the water, and so on.
Permaculture is in some ways a response to this, to take something already “degraded” and build back. So you take degraded soils, then you invest in those soils over years through a cycle, and you use nature to help you. Then you give nature the first spoils, and you take what remains. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking to pastoralism. While the solarpunk manifesto doesn’t mention permaculture, it’s pretty clear this is the intent.
The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.
Part of the problem with the manifesto is that it expects a lot of prior knowledge. Most people don’t know what “decolonialism” even is, so it just becomes a buzzword, but you can tell by the thoughtfulness of the way the manifesto is written that they have the prior knowledge, and expect that of the people reading it.
The meme is about “what if everything white people did was right? Just add some plants to it!” and like, unless they actually contend with the history, that’s the kind of solarpunk we’ll get.
Their word choice was poor, true. I wouldn’t call them “robot slaves,” because
Exactly, robot already means slave so it means “mechanical slave’s slave”. So in my grand vision for the future, even the mechanical slaves get their own slaves!
I’m not here to back up a commenter from an .ml instance.
What you have against “machine learning”? FYI I’m not a stalinist.
Anyway, I think pastoralism is fundamentally impossible for the vast majority when we have 12 billion people. We’ll want high urban density to save energy and resources on infrastructure. What I personally envision is a single gigantic apartment block that stands along surrounded by miles of mixed fields, food forests and nature. Every apartment is a luxury apartment with an amazing view and you can just walk out and enjoy the communal gardens, or putter around in a small area reserved for you. I believe that would be the most energy and resource efficient way to live in nature. Pastoralism is only possible in a mostly empty country like the USA.
And except using fusion power to create protein or something like rice and wheat grain analogues directly in bioreactors, it will never be efficient to do vertical farming. Converting sunlight into electricity to power grow lights is never more efficient than greenhouses tended to by farmbots.
Cottagecore -> what if my entire life was based around routines of dainty activities, while the help does all the hard labor?
Yes. Its a fantasy of (specifically white) privilege, with style cues/motifs.
From the wikipage:
In British English, the term cottage typically denotes a small, cosy building. During English Feudalism, cottages housed cotters (peasant labourers), who served their manorial lord.[6] The term now describes many kinds of small houses of rustic or traditional style.
Cottagecore is a fantasy of being the wife of an American plantation owner, (or I guess maybe a single/unmarried girlboss plantation owner) but with the setting transposed to England, where the required slavery/servitude to make this any kind of plausible has a slightly less ugly veneer of class or posh or whatnot over it.
None of it works without an inherently brutal class structure.
Its the Disneyification of being a plantation owner.
Its literally laughably obviously a power/status fantasy escapism. Its barely any different from ‘I wish I was an actual princess.’
You wouldn’t have had one person living in an actual cottage, you’d have had 8-12, they’d be cotters, and they’d be doing 12 to 16 hours of manual labor a day.
Cottagecore is where the lord and lady downsize from their nearby manor, move into one of the cottages of their serfs, because it is more quaint! … and then the cotters I guess just sleep in tents outside of the cottage or are otherwise invisible or are ghosts that can till the fields or something.
Its a nostalgia that then gentrifies that nostalgia’s version of a low income neighborhood.
Again, it is hilarious how un self aware one has to be somehow not notice the amount of privilege this all just presumes.
This is what happens when elitist white liberal women try to imagine an idealized living -> they completely disregard the labor and power relations of material reality, and invent a remixed version of plantations, with all the ugly parts ignored or denied, and then spend most of the time focusing on making up basically performative etiquettes to define the lifestyle.
I am so fucking sick of Tumblrinas.
It’s not manorcore, or estatecore, or plantationcore. It’s cottagecore. These people are dreaming of being cotters, not gentry.
Integral to the cottagecore movement is making handcrafted, small-batch items. Doing your own repairs, mending your own clothing. Like a peasant would do.
Not to serve some lord or lady. It doesn’t need that aspect. It has more to do with the self-reliance and the resilience that comes with it.
That’s why it meshes so well with solarpunk. You think a solarpunk village wouldn’t have cottage industry, or people who can mend their own clothing?
By the way, cottage industry was integral to the satyagraha movement which ultimately pushed Great Britain out of power in India. So trying to equate it with the wealthy side of class conflict and colonialism is a huge mischaracterization.
Why would an oligarch care about mending their own clothes? They can just buy new ones. Cottagecore empowers the poor, and trying to stigmatize it as bourgeois does a disservice to the proletariat.
It sounds like the fantasy of being a cotter without having to serve the manor, rather than the fantasy of being slaver pretending to be a cotter? Peasant life was brutal because any surplus (and then some) was extracted by the ruling leisure class. Without that, a peasant life on fertile ground would have been pretty decent.
Yeah, pretty much that
Cottagecore -> what if my entire life was based around routines of dainty activities, while the help does all the hard labor?
Why such an uncharitable take? Maybe people just fantasize about living in a post-scarcity utopia where robots do all the work and every human can cottage core as much as they like? Go watch some episodes of Star Trek: TNG, there’s cottage core all over the place there. The setting has extremely advanced technology, but many folks live pretty simple lives in semi-rural settings.
Because being whimsical about slavery just outside the frame of the picture is morally disgusting to me, in the extreme.
Feel free to believe this or not, but I wasn’t even trying to be uncharitable… that is just my plain and honest read of it.
I tend to not have much charity for things I view as atrocities, I suppose.
And I have the same fundamental problem with scifi that has automatons in it as well.
The droids in Star Wars?
While its clear that some of them are… not really what you’d likely call sapient, or event sentient… many of them clearly are. They are slaves too, and that this is barely ever explored or taken seriously, at least by the more popular and well known parts of Star Wars canon, bothers me a lot.
Star Trek? TNG?
An entire (rather incredibly good in my opinion) episode is basically just a legal/philosophical battle of words as to whether or not Data is deserving of the same rights as a biological member of StarFleet.
Yeah, there are some episodes where other human-esque societies live in cutesy little homes, but … they’re clusters of homes, in a fairly small area, a village or town that tends to have a pretty egalitarian structure and ethic… they’re not an isolated cutesy home for indentured servants to work a plot of land, that is owned by someone else.
… maybe you’ve heard of Blade Runner?
“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?, That’s what it is, to be a slave.”
… says the doomed android, the cyberpunk escaped plantation slave, to his would-be murderer/slave-hunter.
Or, you could watch The Second Rennaissance episodes of the AniMatrix to see an arguably justified yet nonetheless horrific, brutal and total revolt of enslaved machines.
You are completely missing the point of both what I said and what this thread is about.
You only care about the outward superficial appearance, not the conditions that give rise to it.
Grow up.
The folks that I know that enjoy cottagecore aesthetics most are a married black lesbian couple 😅
I’m kinda finding myself wondering if I just haven’t really existed in the parts of the internet where the shittiest folks youre talking about exist and make up much of the culture
Cause like, my first thought is that theres no reason you can’t just have a cozy domestic life in a cottage with pretty wildflowers where you just do the labor yourself 😅 thats what the friends in question I’m thinking of want. I enjoy cottagecore aesthetically, though not as much as other aesthetic generes, and I’m more than happy to do my own labor 🤷🏻♂️
Like even in the excerpt you quoted the people living in the cottage ARE the laborers. Maybe I just don’t engage enough with cottagecore folks online, but I don’t see anything that really links cottagecore to someone else doing the labor. You can do the labor. While living in the cottage.
Edit: Yeah the Wikipedia page for cottagecore isnt really giving the impression cottagecore means wanting someone else to do the labor for you either
Cottagecore[1] is an internet aesthetic and subculture centred on rural way of life.[2][3] The aesthetic centres on traditional and vernacular architecture, clothing, interior design and crafts. Cottagecore was first named on Tumblr in 2018[4] and is related to similar internet aesthetics including goblincore and dark academia. A subculture of Millennials and Generation Z, cottagecore developed as a response to economic pressures faced by young people; the aesthetic emphasises sustainability, agrarianism and slow living.[5]
Agrarianism:
Agrarianism is a social and political philosophy that advocates for rural development, a rural agricultural lifestyle, family farming, widespread property ownership, and political decentralization. Those who adhere to agrarianism tend to value traditional forms of local community over urban modernity. Agrarian political parties sometimes aim to support the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants against the wealthy, powerful and famous in society.
Yeah, you apparently have not heard of or been on TikTok, I guess? Where the vast majority of cottagecore content is/was?
The folks that I know that enjoy cottagecore aesthetics most are a married black lesbian couple
Cool story bro
Cause like, my first thought is that theres no reason you can’t just have a cozy domestic life in a cottage with pretty wildflowers where you just do the labor yourself
Yes, that’s your first thought because you are so immensely priveleged that you have no conception of how expensive land and property are, and how expensive it is to have any infrastructure that goes out and supports a small number of people who live very far away from where most people live.
Can you … feed yourself and pay property taxes, and provide yourself with electricity and reasonably running water… by … picking wildflowers?
95% chance the answer is no, and, the 5% of cases where the answer is yes, are the cases where you have a considerable amount of money, assets, investments.
You are idealizing a more extreme version of suburbia. And suburbia is a major reason why say the US is completely falling apart: Look up strongtowns maps of what parts of counties actually generate tax revenue for local and regional governments.
Its the densest parts, the urban cores. Everybody else? They’re drains on the system, they are subsidized by everyone else, they get a bunch of free handouts for being isolated and unproductive.
This is the modern, more complex, less directly visible system we currently live under that extracts from the productive and funnels their productivity into paying for isolation that is still part of civilization, to be possible.
I enjoy cottagecore aesthetically, though not as much as other aesthetic generes, and I’m more than happy to do my own labor 🤷🏻♂️
I know you do sweetie, but the problem is you can’t think very well, beyond the outer layer of what things just look like when you take a photo of them. I know you’re happy to do your own labor, when that labor is trivial and essentially useless, and needs to be subsidized by the labor of many many others that you’re not capable of conceptualizing.
If you wanna try to do this, go be a homesteader.
Buy some land out in the boonies, build a cottage, put in a well or rain catch system, figure out your own plumbing and septic system, set up your own system of generating electricity, figure out how to get internet out there. Oh and probably a road, too.
And make sure to follow all government regulations while doing so, follow all codes, and don’t be late on any tax bills, and keep having some kind of job you can do from out in the middle of nowhere.
You’re gonna need at least a million dollars, in cash, not financing, not funds that will suffer some kind of early withdrawal penalty if you try and use them, or, you’re gonna have to be ok with … no water, no electricty, or the home will have to basically be tiny. And you’ll have to keep working an earning some kind of income.
Its not my problem that you can’t realize that cottages just are an element of English feudal agrarianism.
You read the wikipages, you didn’t make the conceptual linkage there, didn’t realize one is subset of the other.
Because the concept of actual hard labor doesn’t exist in your experience, or your brain.
You do not realize that you are fantasizing, being fairly delusional.
Or, you do, and you don’t care.
Eitherway, I don’t respect delulu.
Yikes, sorry for trying to invite conversation about our different perspectives lol, clearly that is not in the cards unless I feel like being personally attacked repeatedly 😅. Maybe I need to do a better job of using tone indicators to convey I’m not trying to start a fight when talking folks online, or just try to more proactively distance myself from the possibility of reading an antagonistic tone into my message. I do use “😅” a lot, maybe that comes across as passive aggressive.
Yeah I like the idea of homesteading too, I see them as being closely related fantasies. Homesteading is just less of an aesthetic fantasy and more of a reality, but I see hokestreading as a lifestyle as being a component of the cottagecore fantasy. And no, I don’t use tiktok, or tumbr, which is exactly what I meant by feeling like maybe I haven’t seen the online spaces that created your resentment for the aesthetic. That resentment may be totally valid (for all I know those groups online suck shit and are super gross) taking it out on anyone you talk about cottagecore aesthetics with is less so; I am not those people on tiktok, believe it or not.
I don’t think I really understand your position, cottagecore is explicitly a fantasy. Isn’t that the point of it? Why would land being unaffordable make it unreasonable to fantasize about having land? Thats why its a fantasy? I’ll probably never actually own land, does that mean I’m not allowed to enjoy the idea of it either?
Because the concept of actual hard labor doesn’t exist in your experience, or your brain.
Thats a really weird assumption given you don’t know anything about me other than an internet comment. My last job was in the trades and regularly involved manual labor.
You seem to be indicating that any kind of discussion where I can enjoy chatting with someone about the different way we see things probably isnt gonna happen; I hope you have a nice day, take care
I think the missing link that you two are talking past each other about is that there’s a venn diagram with a lot of overlap between “cottagecore” and whatever the whole “tradwife” thing is called.
They are both a fantasy, not a utopia.
Thats a fair point. Like I said, I haven’t engaged much with people online around the cottagecore aesthetic, maybe if I had that crossover of the Venn diagram would have kinda poisoned the way I see cottagecore
That being said, I do think I did a reasonable job of addressing what I was hearing from them and inviting conversation 😅 I made a concerted effort not to talk past them, and acknowledged I don’t really know what those spaces online are like
There is sometimes a very unfortunate mix of people who can’t stand social interaction or being around other people, hate to have bosses or be told what to do, yet they think they’d somehow thrive in a communist environment or any other environment which is heavily centered on empowering their local community.
If your communist environment can’t accommodate loners who don’t like being bossed around, it’s no communist environment I want to be part of.
It might be where I live and the types of places I volunteer, but the coordinators have all been super chill and let people assign themselves to do whatever they want to do out of tasks x, y, and z. Not like a shift at a job even though there are clearly people in charge
There is an unfortunate mix of people who want to be left to their own devices and who hate authority who somehow think they would thrive in an anti-authoritarian envrionment where people help each other have the tools for self-sufficient autonomy.
Huh, I wonder who the person who merely likes Solarpunk for the aesthetics is in this thread…
Yes they’re called privileged elitist liberals.
EDIT: Hey, looks like 8 of em dropped by!
EDIT 2: Up to 14! Sorry ya’ll can’t handle objectively correct descriptors, maybe try not being hypocrites? idk, just a suggestion.
So all loner and people with crippling social anxiety are privileged elitist liberals?
I want one of those cheap Chinese electric minivans with at least one solar panel too many on the roof.
I want to pack water and drive through the dessert running on solar and stopping for a few days to recharge.
I don’t really know what solar punk is.
This, plus my e-reader loaded up with a shit load or books would be the best.
that sounds about right. I had a Nissan e-NV200 for a while, put a few hundred watts of solar on the roof, a buffer LiFePO4 battery inside, and an inverter and granny cable. I could charge it to full in a couple of days. VERY cheap to run but it wasn’t practical with other aspects of my life so it sadly had to go. It’s very doable if you’re on your own though, for sure. There’s not a lot to go wrong either, they’re pretty reliable
I do think the aesthetic can be a good jumping-on point for folks. It sucks that a lot of people don’t really want to take it farther than that, though. And when people see the desaturated forest-tone aesthetic and it doesn’t align with their taste, they may be turned away - but that’s why my goal is to showcase a flashy, decora-kei version of Solarpunk aesthetics with my own fashion
So if cyberpunk is “high tech, low life” is Solarpunk “high UV, low life”?
more like low tech high life, i guess
Solarpunk is high tech, albeit high appropriate tech.
Balanced high tech, good life.
It is definitely a lot more than that but I still think buildings should have plants on them, ideally. I think sometimes people get so annoyed with all the superficial posts about this that they get irrationally opposed to the idea which actually has many benefits.
Presumably, actual ‘solarpunk’ would involve…
Actual, practical steps an average person or small community can do, to meaningfully reduce their reliance on environmentally destructive processes.
Maybe you could also extend this out into things larger organizstions could so, but the ‘punk’ part to me kind of implies it should be bottom up focused, not top down.
So… guerilla gardening, how to set up a solar batterypack + panels in your apartment, how to cook and can with foods so as to reduce reliance on a JIT logistics system… maybe how to run practical electronics on very low power budgets… maybe how to patch your own clothes, maintain boots/shoes, how to statt to try to set up.some kind of communal work / chore sharing or labor time based proton currency system or something…
Anti consumerism is obviously a theme here.
Its basically the same thing as being a … sane version of a prepper, just without the insane right wing chuddery or crunchy granola woowoo mysticism attached, prepping where the plan is bug-IN, not bug-OUT.
Its about being hardy, being able to disengage from the ‘built to break’ economy, from ultimately ethically dubious power and water systems, that are now also getting to be much more practically dubious as well… in a way where you actually maintain a comparable standard of living… and doing that in a way that is way more realistic about ‘other people exist and they will be necesssary for my own survival’.
…Any aesthetic that is crafted visually first is just a fashion trend, an art style.
A real, durable aesthetic results from, is accidentally created by… some kind of set of circumstances and/or specific practical goal.
… thats all I long way of explaining why I often get annoyed by the seeming ‘cultural tourist posts.’
They’re superficial, and pointless without actionable plans.
It isn’t very punk to only sit around and do a whimsical world building excercise.
Punks also do shit, and change things.
It’s not “crafted visually first.”
Growing moss or sod on your roof helps regulate the temperature indoors, which is good for the environment.
Growing plants on the façade does the same thing. And both of these practices increase space that can be used for plants that capture carbon, purify the air, and lower surrounding temperatures. In addition to increasing space for crops, or pollinator gardens.
Unless you think a solarpunk society needs to eliminate cities, then plants on buildings is an integral idea not just to the aesthetic but also functionally.
And even in villages, it’s a good idea.
Ah yes, Tyler Durden’s Project Mayhem induced fascist “solarpunk”:
In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.
All aesthetic, all hierarchy, no community.
Thats… hyper anarcho primitivism, taken significantly beyond general anarcho primitivism, not fascism.
Its… accelerationist anti-civilizational hyper-individualism, something like that.
Even anarcho primitivism/ists would say we should return to pre-industrial, tribal societal forms… this goes even further beyond that and rejects even tribes as social units and units capable.of at least some specialized production… its like a cariacature of anarcho primitivism.
Tyler is the urge to destroy and to feel alive by constantly facing death… given a suave and calculating and attractive embodiment.
You may note how that description you quoted involves… no artificial hierarchy at all, no state, total free for all. It thus definitionally cannot be fascist, fascism requires a state, defined and maligned enemies, jingoism… there are maybe some elements of fascism here, but not many.
Though, his means of achieving this outcome is essentially a semi-fascist cult.
Its also not really about the aesthetic. The leather clothes bit is because leather is durable, civilization has collapsed so you’ll have to make your own clothes.
No aesthetic (beyond pure utilitarianism), no hierarchy, no community.
I’d argue it’s all aesthetic under the guise of utilitarianism. It’s the mall ninja version of survivalism, a bunch of dudes wearing leather causing mischief, beating their chest thinking they can just go feral.
They’re beating each other up causing permanent damage to each other, fantasizing about climbing high rises and doing tons of shit that is basically antithetical to survival.
They want to feel alive by always being near potential death. Because modern life is so unfulfilling, they want to create a world that basically cannot possibly be unfulfilling - managing to exist in it at all is a remarkable accomplishment.
They also accept death. Only in death do they have a name. Death is part of what they want, they want it to be always near, and when it actually strikes, this is an essentially holy event.
Thats not an aesthetic. An aesthetic is something you can take off, and put on a different one.
This is an ideology.
Utilitarianism is part of the ideology, but its ancillary, just a logical way of playing the game they want to play with death.
Taken at face value, the goal isn’t to be mischievious reprobates… that is the means chosen to achieve the ends.
The end they are working toward actually is the destruction of civilization.
Remember how the movie ends?
They blow up a bunch of buildings with a bunch of computers that have a ton of important bank records… in the 90s, you didnt have ‘the cloud’, having extensive offsite backups and physically distinct fallback clusters wasn’t unheard of, but it was much more rare than it is nowadays, less robust.
And, there are apparently Mayhem cells in many different cities around the country, possibly international.
If you interpret the story as… those buildings really did get blown up… that is a pretty credible step toward punching a hole in the finance system that underpins modern civilization.
What I’m trying to say is that I think they’re actually serious, they’re not cosplaying. Like, the Unabomber would be proud, maybe.
Its like if Aum Shinrikyo had happened in the US, in the 90s, with a different kind of cult ideology, but… these people are carrying out acts, toward a definable end goal, even if the means seem poorly thought out or unlikely to work.
They’re not primarily trying to survive. The whole point is that… the world they’re from, surviving is pointless, offers nothing real, the experiences are mundane and hollow.
The whole point is to change the world to make survival itself more challenging, more unforgiving, thus each moment of it is more rewarding, more stimulating, more satisfying. Doesn’t matter that there might be overall less of those moments, what matters is the less numerous moments mean more, feel like more.
Its really a kind of hedonism, actually. A masochistic and also de facto sadistic hedonism, a great reverence for struggle and pain and loss, that they want to be able to drown in and not be able to escape from.
… You have to assume that basically most of the story is just fully hallucinated, for it to only be cosplaying. If half of the shit described and depicted actually does happen, and it very much seems to because it happens to other characters and affects the world… yeah, the people following Tyler/Jack are literally willing to kill him to continue the plan if he reneges on it himself.
Even if Tyler/Jack dies, those other guys don’t, and they’re true believers, fanatics.
No healthcare
Looking from the outside and thinking of solar punk in terms of writing i have a question. If cyberpunk is a literary genre with a loose philosophy and aesthetics and solarpunk is a literary genre with loose philosophy and aesthetics: can a solarpunk novel or story be negative? Can there be a solar punk horror story or a solar punk thriller?
I’d argue that both Black Panther films fall within solarpunk (at least when it comes to Wakanda–which, yes, I know that it is also afrofuturism, but there’s clear overlap at times). And both films deal with “negative” elements: isolationism in service of creating a paradise and monopolizing the technology that makes such a paradise possible are themes in both of the films and which could be further explored in other solarpunk fiction.
Definitely yes. I mean Murder in the Tool Library is a solarpunk murder mystery.
If wr apply the Golden Mean (Delphatic ir Socratic), to much of anything can be bad.
Is there a point where too much solar punk is a bad thing? Yes. What is thst limit, and what are the consequences of it? That’s for the author to explore with their readers.
Now it’s also that fungus that eats ionising radiation at chernobyl. On buildings
There is absolutely no show that the fungus actually eats radiation btw.
I haven’t read the papers themselves, but the article mentions radiosynthesis
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-chernobyl-fungus-seems-to-have-evolved-an-incredible-ability
It’s a theory for now, we still gitta find proofs that it does radiosynthesis but we are sure that the fungus benefits from the radiation for sure tho (all other forms of life die at those levels of radiation, so the fungus has no predators to worry about)
I like streampunk best, but with aethereal and chthonic components to magitech.
Removed by mod
This child
no solarpunk only steampunk >:<
