chapotraphouse

Solarp8nk could be an actual thing if it was actually punk in any way. Like a critique of the greenwashing many companies and countries like to do.

Okay, to be more serious, my main vibe from looking at solarpunk art is that the artists aren't involved in production, especially industrial production. Ultimately, I wonder how production is handled in a solarpunk society. There's essentially two ends of a spectrum: industrial production and artisan production.

Industrial production means factories, and I struggle to find any meaningful difference between a solarpunk factory vs a futuristic factory vs a cyberpunk factory. All futuristic factories converge to a design of being:

1. Autonomous
2. In near/complete darkness
3. Filled with inert gas

And since a society is ultimately organized by how production is handled, then there's really not a whole lot of difference between a solarpunk society and a more generic futuristic society. Less chrome and more trees I guess? From a purely aesthetic perspective, you turn a futuristic factory into a solarpunk factory by photoshopping a bunch of trees right next to the factory and replacing a field of invasive grass with a field of native wildflowers. But the actual interior of the factory would be identical, and a faithful depiction of the interior of a solarpunk factory would be identical to a faithful depiction of the interior of a futuristic factory.

Artisan production is the other end, and that's where the fashy vibes come from, especially when artisan production is artistically extolled by artists living in a settler-colonial society where the ideal form of living is larping as a yeoman homesteading pioneer living on stolen Indigenous land. Even "communal living" doesn't cut it because artisan production can't keep up with industrial production, meaning the outputs of artisan production often goes to the immediate community and the immediate community only. And if you live within a community that lacks the means or ability to produce that particular commodity because your skin color is different or you live in an arid desert? Well, tough shit.

Wall-E is ecofuturist, and both depicts capitalism as a social ill, and emphasizes the hard work that the humans put in to make Earth livable again post-apocalypse.

I don't have a point to make, I just like Wall-E

^ᶦⁿ^ ^ᵗʰᶦˢ^ ^ᵉˢˢᵃʸ^ ^ᶦ^ ^ʷᶦˡˡ^

looks at the 180+ comments from a post about how solarpunk sucks and is reactionary

Hexbear is not ready for the post about how cyberpunk sucks and is reactionary.

I wonder why there's nearly 200 comments in this post

One of the core issues in Marxist ecology is the separation of town and country, how we unevenly develop urban/rural systems and the increased toll that takes on natural ones as a result. We need degrowth, decommodification, and a biocentric reintegration of those three systems. Solar punk is just an aesthetic but alongside art nouveau it's the kind of aesthetic you need to communicate a better way of life. If people just see their treats being taken away they turn reactionary. If they just see the climate crisis as an inevitable apocalypse, they turn reactionary. Solar punk is a non-reactionary example of the neo-luddite garden cities we should be moving toward. It's much more holistically anticapitalist than other punk or traditionalist movements, and it's pleasant when we need radical optimism and significant lifestyle changes that otherwise seem difficult.

The task of a Marxist with a movement like that is to identify the things people like about it and situate it in theory. There's a solid 100+ years of theory on those themes which tie them into larger and more practical things to organise around. Solar punk is a vehicle to get people interested in socialist urbanism and critical ecology, not some utopian goal in itself.

This is very silly.

Imma be real, I can't see the point in debating about the political tendencies of aesthetics. It's literally fiction. It doesn't have to adhere to reality and so can be appropriated by anyone.

Listen, if your hopecore fanfic art doesn’t sufficiently conform to the standards of socialist realism as to please your Soviet’s censors, it’s basically just fascist slop sorry I don’t make the rules

what percentage of solarpunk art contains the people who live in or work in or build its subjects

I looked at google images and it's not close to 0% and I have no idea what's specifically fascist about pictures of solar panels covered in tree leaves if you forget to add the person in overalls holding a hammer.

Everyone I've ever known into solarpunk has been a socialist. Collective action for housing, food, water, and energy production to all has always been their main goal, with ending exploitation by oligarchic control over those resources as their main entry point into the genre. I'm sure there's plenty of lib bullshit like literally every aethetic choice but this is just trolling tbh

Oh and btw we're doing Neo-Andean architecture for our socialist society, please make the necessary arrangements.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/03/freddy-mamanis-neo-andean-architecture/

twitter users: is this fascism?

the famous fascist artform of, uh... landscape painting?

"EVERY PAINTING MUST FIT A QUOTA OF PEOPLE IN-FRAME" is a take that even actual state censors in communist countries didn't have, truly we never stop innovating

posting the rest of these on Imgur since I'm tired of waiting on the rate-limit: https://imgur.com/a/zVOjY4E

Solarpunk is just "what if we did futurism with lots of trees or literally just solar panels?"

Futurism is sci-fi (sometimes a little fantasy) and can therefore mesh with any political tendency except maybe the most purist of reactionaries / primitivists.

I'm not sure how you'd even know the people in the place built it. Let's say you have a big shiny complex full of trees and people. If the people built it, do they have to wear overalls and safety helmets or can they wear casual clothes? How can you tell that a person in an image built a structure unless they're actively building it or just finished building it?

[thing you are invested in] is actually somewhat [thing that you would hate to be associated with]

this is just a generic Twitter troll post, right down to the hedging intended to keep the argument going in the replies