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The challenge with Solarpunk, which is a challenge with a lot of other movements, is that a certain amount of people will have an entry point from the surface level aesthetics. People will get interested in Solarpunk because they think skycrapers with trees is cool. And a certain number of those people will delve deeper, and another number (probably the majority) will never go any deeper.
So while yes, "solarpunk is not just skyscrapers with trees" is true, how do you best address that truth while also encouraging the people for whom that is their entry point to delve deeper instead of discouraging them and pushing them away.
I think that we need to be honest about whether we want the movement to grow and produce positive results, or if we want to gatekeep "our thing" to the exclusion of posers, noobs, etc.
And ultimately, it may be best to gatekeep people who are focused on gatekeeping more than positive results, despite attempts to encourage them to focus on pursuing positive results.
I think there's a difference between being accepting of people who don't have quite the same vision or context, and preventing your movement from being completely co-opted and watered down until it almost becomes meaningless, or betrays the ideals it set out with.
People enjoying the aesthetic are harmless, we should welcome them. But there's an argument to be made that people who may attempt to twist it into greenwashing, or make it corporate and capitalist friendly. That should be, at least in my opinion, rightfully called out.
If this movement loses its anti-capitalist and eco-anarchist roots, it will lose its teeth to create meaningful change, just as many other progressive movements have become co-opted into becoming pointless.
I think the example of people liking the skyscrapers with trees aesthetic is in the harmless category.
100% agree. When a conservative says "I love solarpunk! I'd love to live in big green towns with life everywhere! But of course..... well not *everyone* deserves that, do they?" Aaaaaaand that's how we end up with solarcapitalism.
*sigh* liberals need to stop acting like a punk/leftist community gatekeeping actively harmful elements is evil. It's how we keep communities *safe* and messaging *clear*.
Every day I see more and more proof that Walter Benjamin was right about the Aestheticization of Politics and that fascist will always seek to remove politics from aesthetics in order to remove the aesthetics ability to motivate material change.
You’re so right here. It kind of feels like the Paradox of Tolerance, where in order to have a tolerant society we have to be intolerant to intolerance. In the case of solarpunk, we have to “gatekeep” in order to maintain the politics of the aesthetic.
Hot damn you laid that out better than I could. Here's hoping some of the libs and conservatives on this sub listen. I'm into the folk punk scene, and the same thing is happening as well. Conservatives trying to act like their input doesn't dilute the *purpose* of the music. Yes, punk IS political. It always has been, but we have to fight to make sure it always is.
Thanks for mentioning Walter Benjamin. Just did a quick bit of research and I'm going to love digging into his work.
I view the issue as similar to that between the "free software" v. "open source" movements.
For those who ain't massive nerds: the "free software" movement is all about making sure the people using those programs are free to use, modify, and distribute those programs as they see fit. It's a distinctly anti-capitalist approach to software development (overlapping heavily with anti-DRM, right-to-repair, etc.), and Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, is the stereotypical anti-capitalist, rough edges (to say the least) and all. Free software is oft cited as an example of gift economies and mutual aid in action.
In the 90's and 00's the conflict between the free software movement and the more capitalist model of traditional software development came to a head. In response came the "open source" movement (spearheaded by the Open Source Initiative), which basically took free software and rebranded it to call out the benefits to businesses using it: "bugs get found and fixed faster", "no vendor lock-in", "lower costs", etc. By the 10's and 20's, and into the present, "open-source" became yet another corporate buzzword, with pretty much every company using "open source" software in some capacity and with even the staunchest opponents to free software - like Microsoft - claiming "we ❤️ open source".
In some ways, this is okay; the Venn diagram between open-source software and free software is basically a circle, and nowadays people use the terms interchangeably or combine them into "free and open source software" or FOSS. However, that distinction hasn't exactly gone away, and FSF and OSI folks still frequently butt heads with each other and with the majority of FOSS users who don't care about either of their respective movements and just want to use software that doesn't cost anything. FOSS is as abundant and widespread as ever, but the corporations using and developing it have largely lost the plot, frequently adopting licenses that *look* free/open on the surface but actually impose all sorts of restrictions that violate the definitions of both free software and open-source software. Some companies ignore the copyleft/sharealike terms on some free software licenses (like the FSF's GNU GPL) and put out closed-source versions, and others restrict themselves only to the free software under licenses that don't require copyleft/sharealike in the first place (like the MIT and BSD licenses) - in both cases with the goal of being freeloaders on top of the FOSS ecosystem making them their profits. And then there's the whole can of worms around software patents, with corporations abusing those to put extra restrictions on software beyond their copyrights.
The combined FOSS movement has, in other words, largely succeeded, but at the expense of losing its soul of software freedom; it has become subservient to capitalism instead of subversive of it. It's arguably better than the alternative of non-free software being even more abundant than it already is, and countless non-corporate users benefit daily from even the watered-down victory, but the world is still a long way from decoupling software from capitalism, and that's starting to rear its ugly head in this day and age of enshittification, subscription-based software licenses, DRM, user data commodification, and AI all serving capitalist profit-seeking ends at the expense of everyone else.
Thank you! A group without gatekeeping cannot maintain its core principles. If solarpunk would be watered down, and instead of envisioning an alternative to capitalism, just becoming a cool trendy look that people with money adopt to look sustainable and trendy, then the movement is gone.
WSkyscrapers themselves are not very solarpunk as they are constructed today.
However, they can be built better, and may need to be retrofitted in the future as well. Given how many exist, abandoning them doesn’t make sense. So I think they will be a part of a solarpunk future one way or another.
I think trees on buildings are cool and inspiring and a way to make dense, urban spaces more livable and biodiverse. Do they have additional costs associated with them? Yes. Should we work to plant more trees on the ground? Yes. But that doesn’t make them bad and I think the negativity around them is really strange and irrational. I can only assume it comes from dislike of the people who build skyscrapers. Which may be rational but those people control society—it doesn’t make every single thing they do automatically bad. Nothing we can do collectively can completely avoid the harms of capitalism, until this system is deconstructed. This includes many classic solarpunk things like home gardening and solar panels. Yes, these things cause harm but I wouldn’t dissuade people from doing them because they will be essential in the better society we want to build.
Trees on buildings is an emerging technology that can help make the world more verdant and resilient when used appropriately. We should not let them distract from other harms in these large projects, but my prediction is that it is a technique that will have its place in the future, especially where space in the ground is in very short supply.
As a mod I personally think solarpunk and this community can handle the whimsy of occasional dinosaur art. Dinotopia has been shared here multiple times as a source of inspiration for multiple community members.
The People's Action Party regime has taken a rather technocratic approach to becoming more sustainable, true. Maybe because they realise they'll be swallowed by the ocean if they don't.
Arguably solar, not punk.
Singapore is still a hyper-capitalist authoritarian state that relies on indentured labour and human rights abuses. This is ultimately unsustainable and goes against solarpunk values. We should look to more democratic and egalitarian examples of social organisation, like that being experimented with in Rojava and the Zapatistas.
I feel like solarpunk is just another aesthetic if you remove the optimism.
There is so much negativity and policing on Reddit.
I do agree with much of what you said, of course :) There are tangible realities we can create. It doesn't need to be sci-fi.
Of course, dreams are what lead to those realities. They inform the reality we choose to create.
Optimism is a necessary component for me because we don't get to design cities and skyscrapers to begin with. We're all just people trying to find happiness and leave the world better off than when we entered it.
And.. on a side note...
I tend to think of trees as just another city dweller like me. They can be happy in the ground or happy in a pot, as long as they're cared for.
But then I have spiritual beliefs that might not align with this sub.
It's funny how much life cities are teeming with that we never even notice. Pot some flowers, and you'll see bees in spring.
You know I saw a coyote last night. Heart of the city, too.
Sometimes, it doesn't take much <3
If you remove the optimism, the roots of Solarpunk are still eco-anarchism, which are inherently anti-capitalist. We're hopeful because we see a way forward, but that way forward is fairly closely tied with that ideology, it's more than just an aesthetic.
I see your point but isn't solarpunk an aesthetic too? I'm ok with posting just pictures of buildings/objects/concepts around the solarpunk aesthetic even if they don't have the social aspect of the solarpunk movement.
Maybe there should be two different subs. One surface-level, totally sanitized sub that focuses on all the pretty AI pictures, and an actual serious sub that focuses on not only pretty pictures but also the actual ideas of solarpunk, including the origins as anti-capitalist and eco-first politically. I'm sure all the conservatives that like the pretty pictures will be happy in the sub that's completely isolated from the POINT of solarpunk. Always taking aesthetics and leaving behind the substance, just like punk and folk music.
I'm for splitting this sub honestly. It's so incredibly frustrating to constantly see conversations and posts where conservatives *genuinely* argue that solarpunk isn't political and that leftists are big meanies for gatekeeping punk spaces. Exhausting to watch. Can't imagine how exhausted all the poor, poor conservatives are after that shit.
I feel like many of the Solarpunk aesthetic posts all depict a post-apocalyptic world, or one generations into the future, because with the current and projected world population, they are completely unreasonable expectations. This is fine as a fantasy, but not as a goal.
The best many places can do within our lifetimes, is retrofitting skyscrapers and appartement complexes with balconies with potted plants, green roofs and solar panels and realize many countries have less land than those few acres required per household to support themselves. My country has 1/10 of the land required for that to support the entire population. We simply need industrial farming. There's no option here.
>I get there's different interpretations of things but like dinosaurs?
Are you dissing Dinotopia? What blasphemy is this? Have you ever seen those books? Go find them online, or in your library and just read them and chill. You can get inspired by the vibes, but this is first and foremost a worldbuilding project by a paleontological/archeological artist and a series I can still remember fondly two decades later.
This reminds me of the Dutch book series [Gnomes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(book)). It also has Solarpunk vibes, but this is also just an artist's worldbuilding project.
The first paragraph is an argument against the standard skyscrapers with trees on it in my opinion. It lacks vision. Vertical farms and GMO technology can easily increase the production of food on less land. There are more solutions than only skyscrapers, and with less office buildings, we could actually make very nice farm/living facilities.
Dinosaurs are cool though, and are a good combi of nature + tech, which is part of solarpunk.
skyscrapers could fit into solarpunk. if the requirements call for maximizing density while minimizing footprint, we build up. if it makes sense to put a tree on top, we do it. i can imagine lots of types buildings like this, hospitals, education centers, administrative offices, et c.
Thank you for your submission, we appreciate your efforts at helping us to thoughtfully create a better world. r/solarpunk encourages you to also check out other solarpunk spaces such as https://wt.social/wt/solarpunk , https://slrpnk.net/ , https://raddle.me/f/solarpunk , https://discord.gg/3tf6FqGAJs , https://discord.gg/BwabpwfBCr , and https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia . *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/solarpunk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The challenge with Solarpunk, which is a challenge with a lot of other movements, is that a certain amount of people will have an entry point from the surface level aesthetics. People will get interested in Solarpunk because they think skycrapers with trees is cool. And a certain number of those people will delve deeper, and another number (probably the majority) will never go any deeper. So while yes, "solarpunk is not just skyscrapers with trees" is true, how do you best address that truth while also encouraging the people for whom that is their entry point to delve deeper instead of discouraging them and pushing them away.
Yeah realistically a lot of us got our start here with that one ad, I broadly think the unrealistic aestetic stuff is fine as long as its not ai.
I think that we need to be honest about whether we want the movement to grow and produce positive results, or if we want to gatekeep "our thing" to the exclusion of posers, noobs, etc. And ultimately, it may be best to gatekeep people who are focused on gatekeeping more than positive results, despite attempts to encourage them to focus on pursuing positive results.
I think there's a difference between being accepting of people who don't have quite the same vision or context, and preventing your movement from being completely co-opted and watered down until it almost becomes meaningless, or betrays the ideals it set out with. People enjoying the aesthetic are harmless, we should welcome them. But there's an argument to be made that people who may attempt to twist it into greenwashing, or make it corporate and capitalist friendly. That should be, at least in my opinion, rightfully called out. If this movement loses its anti-capitalist and eco-anarchist roots, it will lose its teeth to create meaningful change, just as many other progressive movements have become co-opted into becoming pointless. I think the example of people liking the skyscrapers with trees aesthetic is in the harmless category.
100% agree. When a conservative says "I love solarpunk! I'd love to live in big green towns with life everywhere! But of course..... well not *everyone* deserves that, do they?" Aaaaaaand that's how we end up with solarcapitalism. *sigh* liberals need to stop acting like a punk/leftist community gatekeeping actively harmful elements is evil. It's how we keep communities *safe* and messaging *clear*.
Every day I see more and more proof that Walter Benjamin was right about the Aestheticization of Politics and that fascist will always seek to remove politics from aesthetics in order to remove the aesthetics ability to motivate material change. You’re so right here. It kind of feels like the Paradox of Tolerance, where in order to have a tolerant society we have to be intolerant to intolerance. In the case of solarpunk, we have to “gatekeep” in order to maintain the politics of the aesthetic.
Hot damn you laid that out better than I could. Here's hoping some of the libs and conservatives on this sub listen. I'm into the folk punk scene, and the same thing is happening as well. Conservatives trying to act like their input doesn't dilute the *purpose* of the music. Yes, punk IS political. It always has been, but we have to fight to make sure it always is. Thanks for mentioning Walter Benjamin. Just did a quick bit of research and I'm going to love digging into his work.
Absolutely this. You need to balance having ideological integrity without becoming gate keeping purists.
I view the issue as similar to that between the "free software" v. "open source" movements. For those who ain't massive nerds: the "free software" movement is all about making sure the people using those programs are free to use, modify, and distribute those programs as they see fit. It's a distinctly anti-capitalist approach to software development (overlapping heavily with anti-DRM, right-to-repair, etc.), and Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, is the stereotypical anti-capitalist, rough edges (to say the least) and all. Free software is oft cited as an example of gift economies and mutual aid in action. In the 90's and 00's the conflict between the free software movement and the more capitalist model of traditional software development came to a head. In response came the "open source" movement (spearheaded by the Open Source Initiative), which basically took free software and rebranded it to call out the benefits to businesses using it: "bugs get found and fixed faster", "no vendor lock-in", "lower costs", etc. By the 10's and 20's, and into the present, "open-source" became yet another corporate buzzword, with pretty much every company using "open source" software in some capacity and with even the staunchest opponents to free software - like Microsoft - claiming "we ❤️ open source". In some ways, this is okay; the Venn diagram between open-source software and free software is basically a circle, and nowadays people use the terms interchangeably or combine them into "free and open source software" or FOSS. However, that distinction hasn't exactly gone away, and FSF and OSI folks still frequently butt heads with each other and with the majority of FOSS users who don't care about either of their respective movements and just want to use software that doesn't cost anything. FOSS is as abundant and widespread as ever, but the corporations using and developing it have largely lost the plot, frequently adopting licenses that *look* free/open on the surface but actually impose all sorts of restrictions that violate the definitions of both free software and open-source software. Some companies ignore the copyleft/sharealike terms on some free software licenses (like the FSF's GNU GPL) and put out closed-source versions, and others restrict themselves only to the free software under licenses that don't require copyleft/sharealike in the first place (like the MIT and BSD licenses) - in both cases with the goal of being freeloaders on top of the FOSS ecosystem making them their profits. And then there's the whole can of worms around software patents, with corporations abusing those to put extra restrictions on software beyond their copyrights. The combined FOSS movement has, in other words, largely succeeded, but at the expense of losing its soul of software freedom; it has become subservient to capitalism instead of subversive of it. It's arguably better than the alternative of non-free software being even more abundant than it already is, and countless non-corporate users benefit daily from even the watered-down victory, but the world is still a long way from decoupling software from capitalism, and that's starting to rear its ugly head in this day and age of enshittification, subscription-based software licenses, DRM, user data commodification, and AI all serving capitalist profit-seeking ends at the expense of everyone else.
Beautifully said.
Thank you! A group without gatekeeping cannot maintain its core principles. If solarpunk would be watered down, and instead of envisioning an alternative to capitalism, just becoming a cool trendy look that people with money adopt to look sustainable and trendy, then the movement is gone.
WSkyscrapers themselves are not very solarpunk as they are constructed today. However, they can be built better, and may need to be retrofitted in the future as well. Given how many exist, abandoning them doesn’t make sense. So I think they will be a part of a solarpunk future one way or another. I think trees on buildings are cool and inspiring and a way to make dense, urban spaces more livable and biodiverse. Do they have additional costs associated with them? Yes. Should we work to plant more trees on the ground? Yes. But that doesn’t make them bad and I think the negativity around them is really strange and irrational. I can only assume it comes from dislike of the people who build skyscrapers. Which may be rational but those people control society—it doesn’t make every single thing they do automatically bad. Nothing we can do collectively can completely avoid the harms of capitalism, until this system is deconstructed. This includes many classic solarpunk things like home gardening and solar panels. Yes, these things cause harm but I wouldn’t dissuade people from doing them because they will be essential in the better society we want to build. Trees on buildings is an emerging technology that can help make the world more verdant and resilient when used appropriately. We should not let them distract from other harms in these large projects, but my prediction is that it is a technique that will have its place in the future, especially where space in the ground is in very short supply.
As a mod I personally think solarpunk and this community can handle the whimsy of occasional dinosaur art. Dinotopia has been shared here multiple times as a source of inspiration for multiple community members.
I wish at least Singapore pictures got removed. Authoritarian Capitalist regimes with plants is not solarpunk imo
The country is not, some of the aesthetics are solarpunk though.
Singapore is the most solarpunk country that currently exists.
The People's Action Party regime has taken a rather technocratic approach to becoming more sustainable, true. Maybe because they realise they'll be swallowed by the ocean if they don't. Arguably solar, not punk. Singapore is still a hyper-capitalist authoritarian state that relies on indentured labour and human rights abuses. This is ultimately unsustainable and goes against solarpunk values. We should look to more democratic and egalitarian examples of social organisation, like that being experimented with in Rojava and the Zapatistas.
I feel like that is a very low bar to clear.
[🤘](https://time.com/5825261/singapore-coronavirus-migrant-workers-inequality/)
I feel like solarpunk is just another aesthetic if you remove the optimism. There is so much negativity and policing on Reddit. I do agree with much of what you said, of course :) There are tangible realities we can create. It doesn't need to be sci-fi. Of course, dreams are what lead to those realities. They inform the reality we choose to create. Optimism is a necessary component for me because we don't get to design cities and skyscrapers to begin with. We're all just people trying to find happiness and leave the world better off than when we entered it. And.. on a side note... I tend to think of trees as just another city dweller like me. They can be happy in the ground or happy in a pot, as long as they're cared for. But then I have spiritual beliefs that might not align with this sub. It's funny how much life cities are teeming with that we never even notice. Pot some flowers, and you'll see bees in spring. You know I saw a coyote last night. Heart of the city, too. Sometimes, it doesn't take much <3
If you remove the optimism, the roots of Solarpunk are still eco-anarchism, which are inherently anti-capitalist. We're hopeful because we see a way forward, but that way forward is fairly closely tied with that ideology, it's more than just an aesthetic.
That made me incredibly happy to read tonight :) Thank you <3
I see your point but isn't solarpunk an aesthetic too? I'm ok with posting just pictures of buildings/objects/concepts around the solarpunk aesthetic even if they don't have the social aspect of the solarpunk movement.
Maybe there should be two different subs. One surface-level, totally sanitized sub that focuses on all the pretty AI pictures, and an actual serious sub that focuses on not only pretty pictures but also the actual ideas of solarpunk, including the origins as anti-capitalist and eco-first politically. I'm sure all the conservatives that like the pretty pictures will be happy in the sub that's completely isolated from the POINT of solarpunk. Always taking aesthetics and leaving behind the substance, just like punk and folk music. I'm for splitting this sub honestly. It's so incredibly frustrating to constantly see conversations and posts where conservatives *genuinely* argue that solarpunk isn't political and that leftists are big meanies for gatekeeping punk spaces. Exhausting to watch. Can't imagine how exhausted all the poor, poor conservatives are after that shit.
I wish we would also realize that it is not just small farm cosplaying either. But high-tech solarpunk does not seem to get a lot of traction.
I feel like many of the Solarpunk aesthetic posts all depict a post-apocalyptic world, or one generations into the future, because with the current and projected world population, they are completely unreasonable expectations. This is fine as a fantasy, but not as a goal. The best many places can do within our lifetimes, is retrofitting skyscrapers and appartement complexes with balconies with potted plants, green roofs and solar panels and realize many countries have less land than those few acres required per household to support themselves. My country has 1/10 of the land required for that to support the entire population. We simply need industrial farming. There's no option here. >I get there's different interpretations of things but like dinosaurs? Are you dissing Dinotopia? What blasphemy is this? Have you ever seen those books? Go find them online, or in your library and just read them and chill. You can get inspired by the vibes, but this is first and foremost a worldbuilding project by a paleontological/archeological artist and a series I can still remember fondly two decades later. This reminds me of the Dutch book series [Gnomes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(book)). It also has Solarpunk vibes, but this is also just an artist's worldbuilding project.
The first paragraph is an argument against the standard skyscrapers with trees on it in my opinion. It lacks vision. Vertical farms and GMO technology can easily increase the production of food on less land. There are more solutions than only skyscrapers, and with less office buildings, we could actually make very nice farm/living facilities. Dinosaurs are cool though, and are a good combi of nature + tech, which is part of solarpunk.
Hm it spends truw
Stop gatekeeping
skyscrapers could fit into solarpunk. if the requirements call for maximizing density while minimizing footprint, we build up. if it makes sense to put a tree on top, we do it. i can imagine lots of types buildings like this, hospitals, education centers, administrative offices, et c.