Well, the split is probably related to how solarpunk isn't really related to the punk movement. Cyberpunk art usually describes dystopian environments, and the way individuals and communities adapt to is and subvert it.
On the other hand, solarpunk art is an overtly optimistic movement, which leaves very little room for a confrontational political message. The example tweet you cited is pretty, with a "just add trees" city, where the necessary trappings of a vertical city (mass transportation, crowds, pollution, etc) are absent.
This sounds a bit critical of the solarpunk movement, but it's honestly hard for me to reconcile the hard problems I face and what I see in this movement. Merely adding the "punk" affix is not going to transform what would probably better be called solar-hippie.
I don't see why optimism and political confrontation can't coexist. In fact, given the dystopian mess that powerful institutions are foisting on us these days, an optimistic alternative could be the most confrontational message. It just has to be clear that we're not going to get there with business as usual.
You should read this part as a summary of the differences between punk and solarpunk, not a treaty on mixing optimism and political struggle.
> It just has to be clear that we're not going to get there with business as usual.
That's the part I don't see in solarpunk currently. The social structure is glossed over, and the technical side looks very much like technological messianism. The transformation itself is rarely addressed. I honestly enjoy the aesthetic, but I would call it calming rather than tought-provoking, that doesn't really leave solid foundations for political action.
I think an important part of political mobilization is a positive message. Not just in the sense of optimism, but in the sense that there's a particular thing we want to create instead of simply wanting to destroy what exists right now. A negative message of simply criticizing what exists is a lot less powerful than a positive message of what could be if it weren't for what currently exists.
There is new urban planning that focuses on bike/ped travel and reduces vehicle use, and planners are doing that right now (superblocks are just one example). This is expected to reduce pollution and traffic congestion, and make urban areas more walkable/bikeable, as well as better looking. Positive messages with creative solutions are out there for people who look.
A lot of solarpunk art and such is about the exact opposite: reducing dependence on cars and fossil fuels and building local, sustainable communities. You're not ever going to see a strip mall or a bedroom neighborhood in a solarpunk utopia, and often times beyond public infrastructure there's not a big emphasis on high-tech living like there is in, ex: cyberpunk
I suppose I'm looking at point 3 of the article here (mentions "a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world").
If we remove all the reasons for conflict, it is difficult to see what political confrontation means. If we live in a post scarcity society - why do I care about tax rates? If the world is post-hierarchy - why do I care about the qualities of the people who are no longer my superiors? Post scarcity and post capitalism go almost hand in hand, capitalism is a tool to manage scarcity. Hierarchy too, in a practical sense.
The essence of politics is how to resolve these questions. Assuming that we can do away with them using technology is just ... if we could that would be great. If the jump from pre-modern to industrial didn't do it then realistically it isn't going to happen.
"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
To be honest, my art usually involves fingerpaint renderings of penguins being massacred by demons but I mean, it’s up to the viewer to make their own interpretation I suppose…
Turn towards Tribblix in the next timeline transfer tunnel!
edit: What? According to about it
isn't just a spin or repackaging of another illumos distribution. It's a completely independent distribution that, while sharing the key illumos technologies such as ZFS, zones, DTrace, and SMF, has been essentially built from scratch, with its own build and packaging system.
doesn't sound like Ecotopia needed its neighboring dystopia though. they weren't exploiting or even trading with the mainland. they just wanted to be left alone.
the crucial difference is that the Ecotopians wouldn't hinder the US improving its own quality of life if it wanted to.
I'm trying to understand, acknowledge, make room for the losing side.
Learning about utopia/dystopia is on my to do list. I have no idea what the criteria are. Exploitation? Disempowerment? Are those feelings sufficient, regardless of the material factors?
I wonder because this is very relevant today. Fear and anxiety fueling resentment and backlash.
--
Older me thinks progress only happens thru struggle.
"Power concedes nothing without a demand." -- Frederick Douglas.
I think about this all the time. The efforts to build a sustainable future, the solarpunk protagonists, must overcome almost insurmountable opposition.
It's more than just raw power, winners and losers.
Live and let live is simply not an option.
The very notion of happy hippies being happy without them is absolutely intolerable to the US.
While I like Solarpunk I feel it is missing something. It hasn't grabbed me. But I support the idea.
Regards the "punk" bit though, I think the subversion is in the projection of a positive looking alternative to cyberpunk. I am sure you've seen someone comment something like:"1984 was not an instruction manual." Solarpunk is trying to be a different recipe. To plant a different seed in peoples minds as to how things could go.
Even if it is just my modern day city but with trees, it is a helluva lot better than Megacity One.
>"just add trees" city, where the necessary trappings of a vertical city (mass transportation, crowds, pollution, etc) are absent.
The lists in TFA strike me as just a random grab-bag of things its author approves of, with no view to coherence or plausibility. Even in describing something as simple as visual appearance, the article's described wishes appear to be unrealized, or even unrealizable. For example, how would one combine the visual aesthetics of Art Nouveau with that of "Hayao Miyazaki" (i.e. the characteristic appearance of the films he directed).
Maybe punks from the punk rock movement didn't like neithe their tribe name taken and used for something different but it's how language/culture works.
The essence of punk is countercultural: we did this for ourselves, and we are proud that you hate it and won’t accept it.
This, of course, results in a cyclical identity crisis: can a utopian value punk maintain both their values and their punk identity in a post-punk world, where the utopian values have been realized and made mainstream? Which one will they go for: do they turn against their previously held values in an attempt to uphold their punk-ness, or do they shed their punk status now that their punk values are no longer punk?
Considering how much extraneous identity burden punks often carry in style and music, I find it unlikely that solarpunks would be content in a mainstream solarpunk world. They would prefer to maintain their punk identities and seek out a new punk.
And that is why this ”solarpunk” may yet throw its baby out with the bathwater if its message gets interpreted as a holistic lifestyle instead of what it is: an art movement.
Well, one tends to see many more mohawk-and-studded-jacket punks crawl the streets than cyberpunk or steampunk enthusiasts. That punk went mainstream long ago, everyone is sorta aware what that raggedy-arse looking fellow is about.
Examples of persons adopting a cyber- or steampunk identity do exist, however, in eye-catching forms as well. They just do not get appropriately identified as such, because mainstream culture has not explicitly acknowledged those punks.
Worse, the mainstream has appropriated and exploited the aesthetics of both, and thus the cyberpunk gets misidentified as some anime hackerman and the steampunk is maybe going to a costume party somewhere?
It is thus not possible to externally identify as any kind of otherpunk: general social acknowledgement of aesthetically alternative lifestyles is generally not there at all. What follows is ridicule and exclusion.
>On the other hand, solarpunk art is an overtly optimistic movement, which leaves very little room for a confrontational political message.
I think hopeful instead of optimistic. Even going with optimistic, it seems to be optimistic about the opportunity and possibility of (political) change.
> On the other hand, solarpunk art is an overtly optimistic movement
A solar-punk society would still be infested with Homo sapiens, with all the problems entailed thereby, so artists should be able to come up with solar punk creations that are not utopian.
I found this while looking for the novel that coined the name.
From Bruce Bethke, the author of Cyberpunk book[1]:
The invention of the c-word was a conscious and deliberate act of creation on my part. I wrote the story in the early spring of 1980, and from the very first draft, it was titled "Cyberpunk." In calling it that, I was actively trying to invent a new term that grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and high technology. My reasons for doing so were purely selfish and market-driven: I wanted to give my story a snappy, one-word title that editors would remember.
...
IMPORTANT POINT! I never claimed to have invented cyberpunk fiction! That honor belongs primarily to William Gibson, whose 1984 novel, Neuromancer, was the real defining work of "The Movement." (At the time, Mike Swanwick argued that the movement writers should properly be termed neuromantics, since so much of what they were doing was clearly Imitation Neuromancer.)
...
Me? I've been told that my main contribution was inventing the stereotype of the punk hacker with a mohawk. That, and I named the beast, of course.
...
If you want to find out more about the etymology of cyberpunk -- and quite a few other things, too -- take a look at Bruce's web page. Alternatively, why not just scroll down and read the story itself?
It's not just any style though. All of the X-punk genres are alternative imaginings of the world. So the rebellion is against the current consensus reality.
Also, this is just what words do over time. Punk used to mean prostitute. Then it generalized to any ruffian. See also, words like: gay, awesome, nice, robot/bot, slave.
Science fiction has always been the literature of the possible, the imagined. And just as we can imagine horrors worse then things are now, a monstrous AI intelligence torturing the last surviving humans, boots forever stamping on faces in a world defined by doublethink, we can also imagine what things might look like if the world was better.
That isn't panglossian optimism that things will all work out, anymore than dystopias are a prediction of certain doom. It's a vision of a better world that is, perhaps, possible, and exploration of how such a world might be achieved.
> 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.
On the other hand, solarpunk art is an overtly optimistic movement, which leaves very little room for a confrontational political message. The example tweet you cited is pretty, with a "just add trees" city, where the necessary trappings of a vertical city (mass transportation, crowds, pollution, etc) are absent.
This sounds a bit critical of the solarpunk movement, but it's honestly hard for me to reconcile the hard problems I face and what I see in this movement. Merely adding the "punk" affix is not going to transform what would probably better be called solar-hippie.