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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Holy shit, I hope this is sarcasm because if not you’re delusional dude
What you have against “machine learning”? FYI I’m not a stalinist.
Just so you know, your instance is run by proud bolsheviks, not AI-researchers…
What I personally envision is…
Okay, that’s fine in fiction as long as you don’t care about sounding convincing, but in reality providing food, water, utilities, and living space to that many people is a bit more complex than that.
And except using fusion power to create protein or something like rice and wheat grain analogues directly in bioreactors,
That’s not what fusion is. Nuclear fusion is only necessary for changing atoms into different elements. Bioreactors and protein synthesis are chemical reactions, not nuclear. They only change on the molecular level.
it will never be efficient to do vertical farming.
It might be less energy efficient, but if you have infinite solar generation that won’t matter. Vertical warehouse farming is more efficient in terms of space, water consumption, fertilizer, and most every other externality such as pesticides, harvesting, etc… It can even be hydroponic or aeroponic, using self-contained and circular systems, and almost every step can be automated.
Converting sunlight into electricity to power grow lights is never more efficient than greenhouses tended to by farmbots.
That won’t be the main issue if you have infinite solar power, and farmbots can still be used in vertical warehouse farming. Single-layer greenhouses take up a lot of space though, especially if you need to produce enough to feed several billion people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
You should watch Furiosa then. There’s a solarpunk community in it.
I still need to see furiosa, thanks for reminding me of it!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Holy shit, I hope this is sarcasm because if not you’re delusional dude
Just so you know, your instance is run by proud bolsheviks, not AI-researchers…
Okay, that’s fine in fiction as long as you don’t care about sounding convincing, but in reality providing food, water, utilities, and living space to that many people is a bit more complex than that.
That’s not what fusion is. Nuclear fusion is only necessary for changing atoms into different elements. Bioreactors and protein synthesis are chemical reactions, not nuclear. They only change on the molecular level.
It might be less energy efficient, but if you have infinite solar generation that won’t matter. Vertical warehouse farming is more efficient in terms of space, water consumption, fertilizer, and most every other externality such as pesticides, harvesting, etc… It can even be hydroponic or aeroponic, using self-contained and circular systems, and almost every step can be automated.
That won’t be the main issue if you have infinite solar power, and farmbots can still be used in vertical warehouse farming. Single-layer greenhouses take up a lot of space though, especially if you need to produce enough to feed several billion people.
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:
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
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
Agrarianism:
Yeah, you apparently have not heard of or been on TikTok, I guess? Where the vast majority of cottagecore content is/was?
Cool story bro
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 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?
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