Mastodawn

A rant on why I think we need realistic Solarpunk, plus some other things 1/2 ☀️

Felt compelled to make this. It will finally stop floating around in my head 🎉

Podcast over here if you're interested: https://podcast.tomasino.org/@SolarpunkPrompts

#solarPunk #hopePunk #art #myArt #comics #sustainability

Solarpunk Prompts (@SolarpunkPrompts) • Activity

What is Solarpunk? Why does it matter? In this series we discuss Solarpunk as a movement within art, literature, and activism. We explore its themes and talk about what separates it from its genre peers. Each episode explores a writing prompt set in a Solarpunk aesthetic with examples and inspirations from our world today. Based upon story prompts created by Paweł Ngei⁩. Episode transcripts available here New logo and cover image by Natalia Vish (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Tomasino Podcasts

A rant on why I think we need realistic Solarpunk, plus some other things 2/2 ☀️

The Tired Horizon May 16

@the_lemonaut are you familiar with Guerilla Solar?

The act of bypassing the official routes of solar power and installing small off-grid and grid-tie systems to do your bit.

@the_lemonaut I really like this

👾 Attila Gonda May 17

@the_lemonaut > If you want more ideas to think about, check out the Solarpunk Prompts* podcast.
> *: No AI involved

music to my ears, already checking out the website ☺️

*(small comment: the asterisk and the explanation is missing from the ALT text, I think it'd be good to also include it!)*

Solarpunk Presents Podcast May 17

@the_lemonaut love this so much! This is the impulse behind Solarpunk Parents Podcast for me ... How can we ensure we're making a better future? Let's talk to people who are doing that right now, so solarpunk can see a way forward / what needs doing!

Also, your art style is so fun, very aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable (to me at least!) -Ariel

_GreyWolf May 17

@the_lemonaut
I love your positivity, but I really don't see it.
Humanity is a lost cause because everyone optimizes for themselves

Ovidi Nawer May 18

@_GreyWolf @the_lemonaut rather suboptimal look at humanity. As the best look for oneslef is to have everything be as perfect as possible, which means cooperation allows for a rather better outcome for the self as long as self defense is applied too.
i don't remember who said this first, but the root of all humanity's problems is...Missunderstandings, most probably. Then resentment and hard feelings make the never ending ball of pain and hypothetical evils becoming true.

_GreyWolf May 18

Well, game theory and limited knowledge are the root of the problem.
And as this is math, it won't change

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 18

@_GreyWolf @the_lemonaut not everyone ;)

Some people create Wikipedia.

Some people contribute their visions of the future to https://storyseedlibrary.org/

Some people build it with https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia

Welcome to Story Seed Library!

A library of Solarpunk art and story seeds helping you imagine a better climate future!

Story Seed Library

Carlos Cámara May 18

@the_lemonaut I've never read solarpunk, but I'm eager to find and read about utopias for the same reasons you argued. Do you have any recommendations in that sense?

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 18

@ccamara @the_lemonaut I would recommend:

Gamechanger - LX Beckett
A Half Built Garden - Ruthanna Emrys
When You Had Power - Susan Kaye Quinn
Walkaway, The Lost Cause - Cory Doctorow

My own essay on Solarpunk is at https://lenses.alxd.org/

Solarpunk: lenses and foundations

Round Mirror by Ethan Sees Last year I published a lengthy videoessay on Solarpunk as a part of collaboration with a philosophical YouTube channel "Myśleć Głębiej" (Think That Through in English). It took me a few months to translate it and update a few sections (especially regarding cyberpunk's romanticism), but I'd like to present you with a written form of my essay - available in audio HERE! The recorded form follows a deeper exploration of philosophy of the movement, thoroughly discussing the notions of cultural hieroglyphs and squeecore I only briefly mention in the text below: Who am I? My name is Pawel Ngei, on the internet also known as A-L-X-D. I’m a software developer and hacker, someone analysing technology outside of a formal framework of a company or university. I’m especially interested in cultural narratives about technology and engineering, their impacts on societies and communities. I first encountered Solarpunk soon after the “Notes towards a Manifesto” came to be at Arizona State University in 2014 while looking for a way to express some …

alxd - solarpunk hacker

Carlos Cámara May 19

@alxd @the_lemonaut thank you!

@alxd @ccamara @the_lemonaut your essay is brilliant ! Quite challenging, which if I understand correctly is the whole point. 👏

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 20

@Letitbe @ccamara @the_lemonaut thank you!

Honestly engaging with Solarpunk is challenging on multiple levels. There is still no masterpiece because a lot of writers trying to approach it take shortcuts which defeat the purpose, for example with technosolutionism.

We need to imagine the dirty and imperfect social change ;)

@alxd @ccamara @the_lemonaut I love this perspective. The more I look at a world which is increasingly alien to me, the more I see that the narrative is locking us up in what becomes an unquestionable vision. This also transpires in the semantics.

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 20

@Letitbe @ccamara that's why I admire artists such as @the_lemonaut and others who joined the https://storyseedlibrary.org/ , trying to find new narratives and new visual languages to talking about the future. Do check them out :)

Welcome to Story Seed Library!

A library of Solarpunk art and story seeds helping you imagine a better climate future!

Story Seed Library

@alxd @ccamara @the_lemonaut I did 👍

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 20

@Letitbe @ccamara @the_lemonaut then do throw some ideas at us if you find anything that could be useful to imagine in Solarpunk! :)

@alxd @ccamara @the_lemonaut I'll first read your prompts and get familiar with the vision, then maybe why not? ;)

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 20

@Letitbe @ccamara @the_lemonaut do listen to the podcasts, Tomasino is doing awesome work presenting them in depth!

Also, if you're speaking French, you're welcome to translate them! I will be uploading some translations soon!

@alxd @ccamara @the_lemonaut will do. As for translation not sure I'm qualified but I'm willing to give it a try

TinJar (Author: "A New Faith")5d ago

@alxd @Letitbe @ccamara @the_lemonaut

I definitely tried to do exactly that in “A New Faith” < https://tinjar.ghost.io >

A New Faith by TinJar

A New Faith - a solarpunk novel by TinJar

TinJar

manchicken May 19

@the_lemonaut love this

BramblyBearWhuffling May 16

Love this!!!

#SolarpunkEveryday
#NotJustForSundaysAnymore
#solarpunk

NKTSecurity May 16

@the_lemonaut I feel I have to follow you now.
The theme last year at EMFcamp was Solarpunk, and you've done a far better job of explaining it than I ever managed!

@Dss @the_lemonaut yeah, the emf theme was disappointing. Great artwork, not much else :(

NKTSecurity May 17

@chewie @the_lemonaut Because we all had to Google it! I was trying to explain it to baffled people on site.
Maybe if they redo it next year? If we all know what it means now, we can do it justice?

@Dss @the_lemonaut oh :( I hope so, it would be a shame not to use the same design again.

Daniel Quinn May 16

@the_lemonaut you've hit the nail on the head here: #solarpunk is a way to re-tool our culture to imagine a better future the first step toward building it.

I love your art! Please keep it coming <3

Charlie Stross May 16

@the_lemonaut @qlaras You just reinvented the Mundane SF movement from 20 years ago.

cwicseolfor May 16

@cstross @the_lemonaut @qlaras This variation on solarpunk, under the solarpunk name, has been pretty prominent for a decade or so (though it’s being brilliantly summed up and illustrated here in my absolute favorite iteration of itself.) Most the major citations date to the early twenty-teens.

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 16

@cwicseolfor @qlaras

Hey @cstross - first, let me thank you for your books, Accelerando inspired me to be who I am today!

I'm one of the writers of the @SolarpunkPrompts podcast @the_lemonaut mentions and wrote quite a few essays on the movement.

Solarpunk doesn't claim to be anything new, it's just a label people are rallying around to imagine how a future could look like if we are to become a sustainable civilization.

Something which is still way too hard to imagine.

Solarpunk Presents Podcast May 17

@alxd @cwicseolfor @qlaras @cstross @SolarpunkPrompts @the_lemonaut I see solarpunk as a new iteration of older impulses, outfitted to meet this moment (like cyberpunk met the moment of the mid-late eighties). I think solarpunk definitely needs to spend time considering its forbears and the movements in SF/literal social movements that inform it, not just to understand solarpunk as it is now more fully, but also to learn from those who have come before us and carry forward their visions, tweaked to respond to reality as it is now :) If there are solarpunks out there who do that, they're so few and far between and their voices aren't super prominent that they aren't represented well...- @arielkroon

(Ugh tried to post this from my personal account and got dinged for character count. I hate breaking things up over multiple posts if I don't have to. Let me have my gigantic run-on sentences!)

Leather Daddy but Straight May 17

@alxd @cwicseolfor @qlaras @cstross @SolarpunkPrompts I would propose: (and this may be controversial, I’m open to being told I’m wrong) that if solarpunk is to be worth an ounce it cannot be only an artistic movement. It must be something that is, as @the_lemonaut proposes, a behavior or a design that materially impacts the world. Otherwise it’s just another demonstration of what Vonnegut said about Vietnam.

Maybe I’m full of shit

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 17

@Jetengineweasel @cwicseolfor @qlaras @cstross @SolarpunkPrompts @the_lemonaut

Or maybe it already is a movement, one which couldn't find a name before, all these technologies from the Global South, open source and open culture values from Wikipedia to Appropedia, Safecasts and more? ;)

I wrote about it extensively at https://lenses.alxd.org/ !

I came to Solarpunk because I had no other language to tell the real stories I saw.

Solarpunk: lenses and foundations

Round Mirror by Ethan Sees Last year I published a lengthy videoessay on Solarpunk as a part of collaboration with a philosophical YouTube channel "Myśleć Głębiej" (Think That Through in English). It took me a few months to translate it and update a few sections (especially regarding cyberpunk's romanticism), but I'd like to present you with a written form of my essay - available in audio HERE! The recorded form follows a deeper exploration of philosophy of the movement, thoroughly discussing the notions of cultural hieroglyphs and squeecore I only briefly mention in the text below: Who am I? My name is Pawel Ngei, on the internet also known as A-L-X-D. I’m a software developer and hacker, someone analysing technology outside of a formal framework of a company or university. I’m especially interested in cultural narratives about technology and engineering, their impacts on societies and communities. I first encountered Solarpunk soon after the “Notes towards a Manifesto” came to be at Arizona State University in 2014 while looking for a way to express some …

alxd - solarpunk hacker

Collector Of Dreams 10h ago

@alxd @Jetengineweasel @cwicseolfor @qlaras @cstross @SolarpunkPrompts @the_lemonaut call it "realismo mágico", but as Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia understands it: like oneironauts do with reality: not separated from the spirit...so REAL anyway. That concept was seeing with condescending attitudes but we the ones who have lived or come from Global South, is a lifestyle that doesn't need to be counterpart of #cyberpunk to exist or to express other layers of existence, that include #eutopias and #utopias but also the #unseen...

@cstross @the_lemonaut
TIL! (Or re-learned. That Wikipedia article feels slightly familiar...)

Always interesting when concepts come back under a new name, and comparing the changes.

Jonathan Dowland May 17

@cstross @the_lemonaut @qlaras there’s significant overlap but it’s not 100%, IMHO. I don’t think mundane sf insisted on forward-looking, utopian ideals.

cwicseolfor May 16

@the_lemonaut Thank you so much for making and sharing these. This is exactly the side of the movement I’ve been advocating for the last eight years - a (nonexclusive) focus on realistic ideation and action, with better dreams keeping up the momentum.

Also this art/ comic style is extremely soothing, so great work there too.

South #Australia, my state, is the world most advanced #renewable energy state.
Last year's, 73% of our Electricity came from #solar and wind.

We have 8 grid batteries, and building 8 more.
I work in a multistory building (kinda rare outside of CBD) and without exaggeration, 90% of properties have solar on their roofs.

We have natural gas and uranium mines.

All under centre right Labor #government

We also have one of the most expensive electric power in the world, which motivates people to invest in solar because the cost of a solar setup returns in only a few years.

My monthly power bill is now U$ 20 per month and I have three women living under that roof.

Neil Kandalgaonkar May 16

@the_lemonaut I really appreciate this

My exposure to solarpunk has been a) a yogurt commercial, b) thanks to super-technology, cats are enthusiastic partcipants in the weekly commune meetings*

In theory I liked the genre but I didn't see anything I really identified with. Subbing to the pod for more.

Hard-solarpunk? Though "hard" has the wrong connotations

* Extremely unrealistic, obviously the cats would skip them

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 16

@neilk I'm one of the proponents of such hard solarpunk - and while I don't know if we have a label, together with @the_lemonaut and a dozen other artists we created https://storyseedlibrary.org/ to promote more grounded climate future art! :)

Welcome to Story Seed Library!

A library of Solarpunk art and story seeds helping you imagine a better climate future!

Story Seed Library

Solarpunk Presents Podcast May 17

@alxd @neilk @the_lemonaut I must burst in on this thread like the Kool-Aid man with a random fact from SF history... The "hard" moniker was to delineate more technical SF that was "for men" who enjoyed that sort of thing and "soft" was the social implications that girls would enjoy and be far more drawn to ostensibly, because gender roles in 1950s America.

Thankfully those adjectives have mostly shed their original implications but to me it's an interesting way in which biases persist in language even once we've mostly forgotten why the terms were used in the first place.

Okay I'ma stuff the academic nerd back down. Carry on ;) -Ariel

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 17

@solarpunkpresents @neilk @the_lemonaut

I think at this point we're safe to use them to discuss how much something is about "understanding how the world works" versus "vibes".

Sanderson writes hard fantasy worlds.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote hard social science fiction.

Kim Stanley Robinson writes soft economic science fiction (where AI blockchain saves all!)

Solarpunk Presents Podcast May 17

@alxd @neilk @the_lemonaut Good point! I'm just a big nerd for how language morphs and changes over time ;)

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 17

@solarpunkpresents @neilk @the_lemonaut oh I totally agree with you on the historical meanings! I'm just saying that I'm glad we can use them wider today :)

Neil Kandalgaonkar May 18

@alxd @the_lemonaut I tried listening to this but I realized it’s intended for writers

I’m not sure I approve of this tbh. There are two independent premises that are assumed true: that there is an optimistic future, and that it has the solarpunk aesthetic. Then we’re supposed to construct rationalizations for it

I could understand the prompt to be optimistic xor to write about future communitarianism but both simultaneously? idk. Le Guin would never.

@neilk, not sure what the problem is in this situation, or whether you're being serious at all (apologies if you are). Why is a suggestion to write speculative fiction that combines multiple premises bad? Is giving a prompt "write a story set in a world where robots have gained sentience AND where humanity has colonized Mars" automatically unviable? Why? 🤔 These premises don't exist to divine the future. Also...the podcast is called Solarpunk Prompts. What else could the premises be?

Neil Kandalgaonkar May 18

@the_lemonaut Perhaps I should not have said anything. You have a project and it gives you hope. There is lots of undiscovered country even within the parameters you have set

In my defense. I’m very suspicious of anything that constrains the artist to affirm a vision of the future. Been there done that. My reference to Le Guin was that she could only offer “ambiguous” utopias because she understood people all too well

https://inventwithpython.com/theguyialmostwas/

The Guy I Almost Was | Graphic Novel by Patrick Sean Farley

The Guy I Almost Was by Patrick Farley

@neilk, it's is A version of A future, and also nobody is forcing anyone to fit the stated parameters. If they feel like it too limiting they can just...not follow them 🤷 And they don't have to follow them forever in every piece they make

Creative prompts specifically suggest frames within which people can create, if they find the idea interesting or compelling. There is also the concept of creative limitation.

I am very curious to know what you had expected to see from this podcast instead

Neil Kandalgaonkar May 18

@the_lemonaut It’s what I expected but it raised some other things in me

I think it’s just not for me. I should have let it alone

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 18

@neilk @the_lemonaut

Out of curiosity - if I told you about a (possibly utopian) country, would you believe that it's achievable within the next few decades?

It's powered by 80-90% renewable energy. 65+% of people work in co-ops, which generate at least 33% of the GDP. The transport is not even public, it's communal - local co-ops own it. Public healthcare. Every child speaks 2-4 languages from the very beginning. Three major religions exist there without big tensions.

Neil Kandalgaonkar May 18

@alxd @the_lemonaut

*sigh*

You’re pushing on an open door. I am not the person you need to convince that ways of living, other than what white suburbanites in the US know about, are possible and even exist today

I just don’t believe that writing narratives with the overarching purpose of prefiguring some desired political or economic end state makes for good art. That’s just reverse Ayn Rand.

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 18

@neilk @the_lemonaut

and I'm trying to show you something else here. Because I am not trying to write art.

I am trying to write reporting.

What I described in the message above is just modern day Kenya. With its own share of problems, but a lot of _good_ things we don't notice.

I started looking into Solarpunk because I needed to have a new language for describing the reality around me that people wouldn't notice, wouldn't listen to normally!

https://lenses.alxd.org/

Solarpunk: lenses and foundations

Round Mirror by Ethan Sees Last year I published a lengthy videoessay on Solarpunk as a part of collaboration with a philosophical YouTube channel "Myśleć Głębiej" (Think That Through in English). It took me a few months to translate it and update a few sections (especially regarding cyberpunk's romanticism), but I'd like to present you with a written form of my essay - available in audio HERE! The recorded form follows a deeper exploration of philosophy of the movement, thoroughly discussing the notions of cultural hieroglyphs and squeecore I only briefly mention in the text below: Who am I? My name is Pawel Ngei, on the internet also known as A-L-X-D. I’m a software developer and hacker, someone analysing technology outside of a formal framework of a company or university. I’m especially interested in cultural narratives about technology and engineering, their impacts on societies and communities. I first encountered Solarpunk soon after the “Notes towards a Manifesto” came to be at Arizona State University in 2014 while looking for a way to express some …

alxd - solarpunk hacker

alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts May 18

@neilk @the_lemonaut most of the Story Seeds / Writing Prompts are based on real stories, real situations, real communities.

I want people to notice them around.

Does it give it a desired political purpose? Yes, to change people's perspective.

Is it bad art? Maybe. But maybe I don't want to create good art, whatever it's definition.

I just want to create a language to talk about what's worthwhile for me.

@alxd @neilk @the_lemonaut

I digress, but there's no such thing as objectively good art.

TinJar (Author: "A New Faith")5d ago

@alxd @neilk @the_lemonaut

This is what motivates me to write, too.

Listening to the linked vid.

"But enough about Avatar movies" 🤣