this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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chapotraphouse
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So idk anything about solar punk, but I did an image search for it and about half the images have people in them and none of it seems particularly fascist?
Imo, it's an aesthetic. Ideologically, the worst I can call it is idealist.
I think to that point, if we want to figure out how you get from solarpunk to fascism, you need to consider what it implies by its analysis (or lack thereof) of the actual material reality that's necessary to make the solarpunk vision come true and how that analysis/blind spots coincide with ecofascism.
What's going on that made dilapidated buildings get overrun by plantlife? Is it massive depopulation? Are we idealizing that?
What's the whole idea about self sufficient communities using technology to live in some kind of frontier? Is this class-conscious, or is it just repackaging settler mythology about frontiersmen and Lebensraum?
And maybe the problem with it "just" being an aesthetic is that it leaves the audience to fill in the blanks for those questions, and I think the default answers aren't great.
I always saw it as cope. "Here is far in the future, after we've mostly destroyed the planet. Here is a small pocket where things have calmed down enough that people can settle back into something resembling a primitive state."
Yeah I see it the same way too, but the reason I take so much issue with it (and I've even spoken about it here before IIRC) is that it's exceedingly common for all sorts of reactionary and ahistorical ideologies to fester when people start fantasizing about going back to primitive societies or some other form of pre-modern life.
those were the factories where the now retired subjects of the art built all their green energy tech and they don't need it any more. A highly automated communist society wouldn't have the same pressures driving population growth as modern capitalism with all it's racist crying about demographics, maybe the birth rate goes down over time, maybe it stabilizes over several generations. I don't think a deliberate program of reducing human population is reasonable (especially with any current government) but I also don't think we should be attached to "8 billion and growing" either.
or maybe the farmers are weirdos and everybody else is living in cool cities with trains and bodegas. Division of labor isn't fascism.
100% agree and I like to think that way about the art too, but I guess where I still take issue with it is that it makes people ask the wrong questions. In some ways, you provided the right answers to those questions, but I don't know that people are generally gonna arrive at those same conclusions, more likely they're gonna get stuck in the reactionary sort of framing. We only arrived at the right answers because we already have the ideology.
If anything, I feel like I prefer cyberpunk as an aesthetic, because the questions it makes people ask are questions that naturally lead them to better conclusions even if they aren't equipped with ideology yet. Where solarpunk makes people wonder about how they're gonna live like they're running back Manifest Destiny in the future, cyberpunk makes them wonder how they're gonna resist surveillance technology.
that's a fundamental problem with communicating ideas with art and the reading tea leaves approach common to western art education.