this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Solarpunk
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Ok, let me address the punk thing.
Punks are people who resist oppressions and who defy rules, mostly censorship and mostly in arts. Singing profanities in a democracy and doing things that are legal is fashion-punk. As soon as improving your community, and progressing towards more acceptance and inclusiveness is legal, you don't need to be punk anymore.
Punks have no future because their own fight is to make them irrelevant. It is to turn a fascist society into one that does not need them, one where it is effective to engage in social works and to collaborate with public institutions.
Solarpunk is a joke on "cyberpunk", that's all. It is an utopian movement in which punks are irrelevant.
If you want to write punk stories in a solarpunk setting, then you need to construct a dystopian antagonist.
And we don't actually live in that society yet, and therefore protesting, feeding people, helping drug addicts, and doing odd jobs for your neighbors all remain punk af.
JFC. Selling food without a permit is illegal. Doing most home repairs without a license and permit is illegal. If I install a set of solar panels for my neighbor and she pays me in raw milk and eggs we could both be arrested. Don't tell me helping your community isn't punk.
Please pasteurize your milk.
Not if you want to make cheese with it
It's only illegal to do so if you don't have proper qualifications, which you can easily pay for. Of course, that's not punk, but not everything has to be punk if your intention is helping others.
Proper qualifications for sharing food?
Yeah, nah. Punk is resisting the state and it’s ridiculous rules. If a rule is good, we can follow it without an oppressive regime to tell us what we can and can’t do.
My point was that you have to choose which is more important. Is helping people RIGHT NOW important to you or is helping people in the future, sometimes in a more LASTING way, more important. Sometimes the message is more important, but that won't always also also help people who are struggling right now. If you want to help people right now then it is better to go through the proper channels so bullshit laws can't slow you down.
Where do you live?
Perhaps strong communities are exactly what we need to resist modern fascism. Communities of high trust and resilience that can resist culture war propaganda.
Strong communities are good for a ton of different reasons, resisting fascism (or maximizing relative safety even if fascism comes) being a big one
TV killed American communities, and they haven't really recovered. Everyone just sits in their house or goes in their car.
I'd argue TV is a side effect of the same thing that killed strong communities in the US, not the cause. Look at Europe, they all have TV's and screens, plenty laying video games, but they still have active third spaces.
I think your comment on cars is more right. Americans "embraced" (thanks car companies for buying and killing our public transit) suburban sprawl through our embrace of cars. This meant we moved away from denser downtown areas where people could intermingle by chance and moved instead to splintered specialized places (thanks for having the way to our modern hell Edward Bassett). This got mixed with the American dream picket fence and lawn pushed by Monsanto post WWII and sprinkled with some casual racism and other issues to become a death spiral away from mixed use zoning and into large separate houses and plots of land. So life became "simple". Home, grocery store, work.
You can't just walk five minutes down the street anymore to a coffee shop or jazz club and find yourself rubbing elbows with people, and everyone driving cars to a dense social area just doesn't work, if everyone tried to go to their city's downtown the parking would just not support it. So we replaced this socializing with TV. A symptom sprouted from the root cause, not the cause itself.
There's been a push to change zoning laws back to allowing mixed zoning which would directly improve this, but NIMBYs are out in force against it because it will lower the value of their home, which is a whole other related issue.
@mynachmadarch @stabby_cicada @keepthepace @Pencilnoob @mozz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOJ8Hdd1Nus
Ol' Georgie boy wasn't wrong. (Well, about cars. If I remember correctly he was wrong about his mom's love).
It started with TV. Accelerated a thousandfold with "social" (it's anything but social) media.
Exactly. And the punk attitude of instinctive opposition to almost any organized effort becomes detrimental to that at one point.
First off, solarpunk is literally a literary AND art protest movement in direct response to the greed that is fueling climate change and harming the earth.
https://builtin.com/articles/solarpunk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk
Punk is a music AND art protest movement that is in direct opposition to consumerism and greed that exploits the working class in interest of profit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_subculture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_rock
Gatekeeping is not very punk
"If you want to write punk stories in a solarpunk setting, then you need to construct a dystopian antagonist."
Here's a great list of dystopian antagonists for you.
Peter George Peterson
Carl Icahn
Sheldon Adelson
Mark Zuckerberg
Silvio Berlusconi
Gina Rinehart
Alice Walton
Rupert Murdoch
Charles and David Koch
Peter Theil
Well, yes, obviously we are not in a utopia (yet) and you have plenty of obstacles in the way. But if you depict a solarpunk utopia, it typically has no "punks" in it unless you invent a dystopian aspect as well.
I think I didn't properly express my point. We're currently in the solarpunk dystopian future. We don't need to invent any dystopian aspect for punks because we are those punks.
Your fictional argument doesn't click with the posted meme for me.
To me it sounded like you were saying there is no dystopia, and with solarpunk there woll be no punks, and in my current experience both are patently untrue.
If I misrepresented your argument I apologize.