Solarpunk has pretty strong anti-capitalist leanings. It doesn't have the punk element of being "low-life" like cyberpunk is, but the commonality between the two genres is that cyberpunk imagines the world that unlimited corporate power would create (from an 80s perspective, hence the neon and ascendant Japanese themes), and solarpunk imagines a world where the negative side-effects of capitalism (exploitation, alienation, environmental damage etc) are mitigated. It's like the optimistic mirror image to cyberpunk.
A recurring thing in punk/cyberpunk culture is that the existing system is overbearing, and can't be removed. So the punk elements live in the shadow of that system, and thrive in the cracks, the neglected parts. That's usually why (cyber)punk characters are bottom feeders that do stuff that is either not well known, not profitable, or too risky.
Solarpunk usually describe societies where the negative aspects have just disapeared, and been replaced by stuff that the genre proponents enjoy. From what I read, the claim is that the "punk" aspect is the rebellion against negativity. But that's not something we can see in their production.
Arguably, if it's optimistic, it isn't "punk." That "low-life" alienation and rage against the system is what makes it punk - the "cyber" part is just aesthetic.
Anticapitalism isn't punk in a world where the anticapitalists win.
This is just my headcanon but I think of the punk in solarpunk as being metatextual: it's not rebelling against its own world, it's rebelling against ours, and against the pervasive pessimism of capitalist realism. I think we need something like that in a time where most fictional futures are dystopian.
Cyberpunk is nothing if not a rebellion against our own world and status quo. Liberal governments are put under the thumb of for-profit corporations, which continue to develop and unleash new technologies on the public without any thought given to the social consequences or any check from the government. At the same time, the inexorable march of technology empowers authoritarian governments and those who rebel are pushed into the sidelines to become social outcasts. Cyberpunk asks us to consider what happens if social development doesn't keep pace with technological development sprinting forward at breakneck speed. Believing social development will keep pace with technology is the essence of solarpunk. Solarpunk is a lullaby.
Solarpunk isn't about believing that social development will keep pace with technological development, it's about imagining what would happen if it did. Its politics are not a fairytale but a call to action to divert course. Cyberpunk says "the future is just gonna be awful" and explores just how awful it's going to be (which isn't rebellion, it's apathy), solarpunk says "imagine what the future could be like if we made it better". It's only a lullaby if you believe there's no hope for change.
Cyberpunk is a call to action: seek social reform before this happens. Solarpunk is the opposite, Solarpunk encourages people to believe that everything will turn out well in the end after green technology saves us from our past follies.
They're both calls to action: avoid cyberpunk, seek solarpunk. We've gotten so much "avoid this" fiction in the past decades that people are just burnt out and actual visions of a positive future have been largely absent since Star Trek, so it makes sense to say "hey, you know all these abstract political ideas that we talk about? this is what the world might look like if we implemented them". Nothing about solarpunk says that it is the default outcome. No reasonable person thinks that it is. It's an ideal to fight for.
The era of collapse fiction like cyberpunk has only really given rise to one political movement: accelerationism. Whose defining trait is "if the world's going to collapse, we should probably hurry it along so we can see if there's anything to salvage afterwards".
Punk was never about collapse, you're confusing that with post-apo.
Also I'm unconvinced about the political potential of solar utopias: they're usually centered on art, and completely avoid the how. So many of them draw nice-looking landscapes that make no sense: glass and steel have to come from somewhere, urban centers can't exist without a periphery, etc. All the issues are carefully avoided and labeled as "negative thinking, which [authors] rebel against".
Totally disagree. Solarpunk is providing an out for the future that cyberpunk warns us about. Hoplessness is endemic amongst the young people in Western socities at the moment. A hopeful vision for the future is something necessary to pervade the public consciousness and create a better future in reality. It honestly happened with cyberpunk already. The aesthetic was taken up subconsciously by designers and engineers and actualised into reality. The same could happen for solarpunk.
it's also indicative of company culture if people with this type of disrespectful approach to interviews are allowed to continue without reproach. Remember that this person wouldn't just be joining a company where there's an asshole, they'd be joining a company that tolerates open assholishness.
Of course, this is predicated on the assumption that OP's perception of events was reflective of reality. Sometimes high-pressure situations can also make people over-sensitive (I know it can for me, at the very least).
Maximum tractor-trailer weight in the US is 80,000 lb, with typical weight closer to 44,000 lb. Dry weight is about 32,000 lb, for a maximum payload of 48,000 lb.
An articulated bus has a curb weight of about 35,000 lb and a capacity of up to 92 passengers. At 177 lb each, that's a gross weight of 51,284 lb. (net: 16,284 lb of passengers).
I'd presume a potato's density is close to that of water. As such, capacity is actually mass rather than volume-constrained --- you'd be unable to fill a truck to its volumetric carrying capacity before exceeding gross vehicle weight limits.
Many grocery products have much lower density: chips, bread, paper products, etc.
I still tend to agree it makes more sense to move goods than people, but the differential may not be quite as great as you might think.
Well, as this article is about the Netherlands, you can go and have a look there, at rush hour. Say, boarding a train from Almere to Amsterdam. And the answer is: a lot..
I'm anti-capitalist too, but I think the capitalist argument is that wealth is the incentive to innovate in the marketplace - it doesn't matter whether it's actually useful, but that it motivates hard work. I think this argument is easily debunked by pointing to the comparative innovation of businesses versus state-funded research, or that wealth is created by the work of the employees moreso than the founders, but that's the argument.
it is incomprehensible to me that people can be "anti capitalists" when capitalism has reduced poverty and suffering to the lowest level in human history.
Socialist countries routinely nationalize food production and immediately create shortages. This happens over and over.
Capitalism isnt just the innovation of the kernel of a product, it is marketing, selling, manufacturing, distributing, and supporting a product.
That takes capital and it requires risk. Capital is constantly being squandered on ideas that go nowhere, but some are successful and the overall system is more productive.
The key point is that no one can predict in advance which ideas and teams will be successful. Capital backs them all and the market determines which ones succeed.
It is human nature to try to acquire more, when that is rewarded, people respond (by working harder, more efficiently, or with innovation).
Labor usually thinks management is useless or dumb. And most managers are bad. But you can look at world class leaders and see that they do matter and can make or break an organization. Look at the bulls under phil jackson, then when he left for the lakers. And then when he left the lakers.
> Socialist countries routinely nationalize food production and immediately create shortages. This happens over and over.
Socialist countries are routinely embargoed by capitalist countries, severely limiting their access to global markets. That's if they're lucky, if they're unlucky they're destabilised through targeted assassination of their leaders[0].
If you're even less lucky you'll be captured by the people the U.S. think are the good guys[1] instead of whatever socialist party was gaining traction. I sure hope the torture centre the U.S. military helped set up was built with private capital:
> The United States backed Alfredo Stroessner's anti-communist military dictatorship and played a "critical supporting role" in the domestic affairs of Stroessner's Paraguay. For instance, U.S. Army officer Lieutenant Colonel Robert Thierry was sent to help local workmen build a detention and interrogation center named "La Technica" as part of Operation Condor. La Technica was also a well known torture centre. Stroessner's secret police, headed by Pastor Coronel, bathed their captives in tubs of human vomit and excrement and shocked them in the rectum with electric cattle prods. They dismembered the Communist party secretary, Miguel Ángel Soler , alive with a chainsaw while Stroessner listened on the phone. Stroessner demanded the tapes of detainees screaming in pain to be played to their family members.
> That takes capital and it requires risk. Capital is constantly being squandered on ideas that go nowhere, but some are successful and the overall system is more productive.
Government funded research through universities and the military do so much of the foundational work here that it seems crazy to attribute it to private capital.
It seems to me that except for a small group of crazy persons on the internet fascinated with the imagery of the Soviet Union and a "US bad justifies anything" hard line on the internet and some sectarian self-proclaimed marxist-[leninist] groups no modern anti-capitalist will seriously defend any of the self-proclaimed "socialist" state. (I very much hope that) the consensus in the Left seems to be that a state-owned economy + no democracy = Horror.
One of the hard part is trying to understand what capitalism even is. In that endeavour, Marx has only laid out the basis for an analysis at the end of his life in The Capital. It's an unfinished work, hindered by a philosophical education he did his best to shake off. Most social sciences did not exist or weren't well established to help him then.
You are only seeing the good sides of capitalism because you are on the good side of the stick if I may say. But without regulations, capitalism incentives are to brutally exploit all living workforce at hand, and this has been very from the beginning of capitalism. It is true that scientific advances in production (and especially the algricultural revolutions) have enabled to production of a incredibly well (in terms of calories available) and cheaply fed workforce which in the end also benefits the working class but this might well be a relatively recent development in the history of capitalism and may have with the fact that investing in mechanization may have seem the best of option in times of working people unrest. Plus you have to factor in the competition that took place with the USSR to be the most prosperous for all state/model.
Maybe the solution is capitalism with regulations/better incentives, maybe it is democratic governance inside of corporations, maybe something else I don't know but history has shown times and times again that unregulated capitalism is awful for most of humankind. I am ready to acknowlegde that market mechanisms have their usefulness but that usefulness must be harnessed for greater good, it should not be turned into a religion.
Whether there exists or not a "human nature", trying to derive social phenomenas directly from it seems a deeply unscientific approach to understanding social systems that does not seem fit for the 21st century.
true, but you were talking about investing in the financial sense before. Having good money sense should definitely be taught in school, but few will benefit from an education in investing.
Got it. When talking about the basics I don’t think of the two as distinct.
It’s like you don’t need to understand business very deeply to understand the longer you’re talking to a salesman the more you’re getting hosed in the transaction. Rather that should be obvious from the underlying economics that allow businesses to function.
So sure just about every 401k is going to have a handy calculator designed to convince you to hand them more money every month. But, that’s not the basics that’s a sales tactic.
has Thiel ever specifically claimed to be a monarchist? not that I'm aware of - but he has close ties with Curtis Yarvin who is a technocratic monarchist, has explicitly expressed anti-democratic sentiment, and hangs around in a mixed crowd of paleolibertarians (a system which leads directly to the sort of hyper-capitalist corporate monarchies Yarvin yearns for) and crypto-fascists like Trump. His behaviour, the company he keeps and his stated beliefs all point to him being a reactionary.
"Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."
Which he clarified this way after so much outrage.
"It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
His talk of women being a "problem" in politics is just one example of this broader theme in the article. He talks about establishing a new territory (where /who/ would rule exactly?), he complains about welfare recipients and champions economic depressions without a care for the lives they ruin.
This isn't even taking into account the evidence for what libertarian politics actually create (the Gilded Age is instructive) or the fact that capitalists who get too fed up of either liberal reform or socialist agitation tend to ally themselves with, or outright create, fascists, as Thiel is doing nowadays with Trump, Yarvin and Blake Masters.
It's clear to me that he's moving down the pipeline from libertarian to fascist, as many have done before him.
crypto is just purely distilled capitalism. Of course it's not going to solve any problems - it's an ecosystem entirely dedicated to the pursuit of profit, without the inconvenient side effects of actually producing useful work.
it's a descriptive take on capitalism. profit is the motivating force for businesses, and in the crypto economy the profit is primarily derived from speculation and scamming. in the real world, at least capitalism is driven by demand that often comes from actual utility. crypto is like if the entire economy was wall street, including boiler rooms and market manipulation.
Profit might be #1 , but immediately after profit there is a huge moat to protect profits.
When you don't build anything of value the only moat you have is your political ability to convince people that you are.
I mean banks and insurance companies don't have to justify their existence, whereas the massive campaign that crypto enthusiasts mounted on the interwebz is telling that they are not even sure that their movement can survive.
Capitalism isn't an idea, it's a system that we live within.
Yes, if you care about blame then you can just blame people for bad actions and call it a day. But if you care about actually preventing bad actions then you need to look at incentives, and that's where the study of political economy comes in.
There's quite a few dogwhistlers here for sure but I'd say it's availability bias - people comment more on threads about things they care about. Id say the community skews libertarian, not far right.
sounds like you just don't like the project - I wouldn't read too much into it. If it becomes a trend of "new ecosystem = burnout" then I'd start to consider a specific cause.
