This is an article written in response to a Twitter discussion thread by @deepfates. The original thread is probably worth reading.
The discussion is in response to a Vice article that claims solarpunk looks to end capitalism, and rebuts Vice, suggesting that capitalism is, in fact, deeply entrained in a solarpunk future.
When I first read the discussion I broadly agreed with the gist, but disagreed with the endpoint. On reflection, I was specifically disagreeing with the closing line
The future will be robot DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) permaculture farms selling organic GMO produce to big cities full of old people maintaining the sky.
At the time that felt weird, mechanistic even. Still does, that image of big cities full of old people sustained by robots growing them GMOs is…disconcerting.
I didn’t realise it then, but do now, but this line is a nod to a Bruce Sterling reference in the Andrew Dana Hudson article: On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk: “the future is about ‘old people in big cities afraid of the sky’”. “Old people in big cities afraid of the sky” is from Bruce Sterling, who along with William Gibson, can be credited as one of the founders of cyberpunk.
So, it makes a little more sense. The line has its origins in the cyberpunk dystopia, which is clearly why the line still feels dystopian. And I wonder if it can be re-imagined.
Stepping back a little, I have little trouble with permaculture farms, nor organic produce. These are straightforward staples of a “back to the land” movement that has deep roots, but most recently flourished in the 1970s of my childhood. All of that self-sufficiency stuff. Beautiful, juicy, and ultimately a fantasy for all but the most dedicated.
I also enjoy the notion of DAO, particularly its fuller flowering. An organisation that can be decentralised and autonomous has immense scope. Think of non-humans being given the ability to guide resources to themselves based on the laws baked into the DAO, essentially inserting themselves into the decision-making framework. Hence the inclusion, specifically, of robot DAOs. However it does not need to be robots, and can instead be anything (even nature can become self-governing).
The ideas of robot farms and GMO produce, however feel off. It is those ideas, coupled with the notion of “old people in cities”, that gives the vision a dead ring, a tone that does not bell clear. The vision feels like it could be more. It feels to be a vision that argues for capitalism because the artefacts that it calls upon can only be delivered by capitalism.
Actually, the discussion makes reference to “capitalism”, but may actually be making a case for the sensemaking and decision-making capacities of the market mechanism upon which capitalism (supposedly) rests [hint, whilst this sounds quite perceptive on my part, it’s not what the discussion argues because @deepfates explicitly writes “democracy and capitalism are both warped by the lack of feedback available to those at the top”].
I think that the core point of the article, and this is a point worth understanding, is that capitalism is the wave that must be ridden to deliver the technology that will ultimately save us all. Arriving at the promised solarpunk land needs the tech that can only be delivered by capitalism. To which I would respond: the benefits of capitalism (my loose definition in the footnotes)1 that the discussion argues are inseparable from solarpunk may, in fact, be supplanted by other ways of sensemaking and decision-making.
Fuck. I’ve just started writing one of those turgid radical vs radical critiques, exploiting micro-schisms to be the better radical theorist.
I ultimately think that the vision painted in the discussion is strong, it’s just not sufficient. It stops before its fullest expression. It’s main shortcoming, in my view, is that most of the discussion is about the Vice article, and specifically, the argument in Vice that solarpunk foreshadows the death of capitalism. Which is unsurprising, because that is what the author is trying to do.
Fuck. I’m writing an article to rebut a point of view that was never actually being made. Well ain’t that a thing.
Enough critique. What is it that I imagine? What do I see that is not old people in the city and the sky and the robots and all that? How would I build upon the point of view that I’m no longer rebutting?
Well, I think that the world is changing daily in very interesting ways.
I think that the naked face of coercion and of power has been showed to a great many people through the covid pandemic, and most particularly in the vaccine mandates. As any minority group can attest, this is not the first time it has been showed, but it is the first time is has been showed to a sizeable number of people who would ordinarily not feel the blow of its gauntlet-clad fist. People such as myself.
The State’s inability to act outside of coercion, as well as the fundamental entanglement of capitalism and media narratives with the State, have been laid bare. Again, not news for minority groups, but news for a whole new bunch of people who wants to believe otherwise. Red pills have been thrown around like confetti, and people are stepping out of the matrix, out of the machine world.
The red pill, in turn, opens not just a world of defiance and anarchistic thinking, but it also opens a world of spiritual transcendence. Just as the machine world becomes clear, the grandeur of the human also becomes clear.
This is where I feel there can be brilliance - the human and the humane. The soaring awe of spirit and the universe and a depth of connection that we cannot even begin to imagine. The machine world cannot supplant this because it cannot understand it. We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even realise that we know so, so little. The machine approximations are, then, horribly flawed.
So robots and GMO and cities filled with people? Probably. I suspect there will be a large part of the population that wants, that needs to live like this. These people will be caught up in the need for the government and the corporation to determine how they live, how to keep themselves safe against a hostile nature (fearing the sky), as governments are needed for sensemaking and decision-making in a machine world. Clearly I don’t favour this world, for which I am not sorry.
Alongside and woven through this world will be the punk movement. Call it solarpunk, hopepunk, ecopunk, call it what you will, but it will be a movement that is subversive as it rejects central dogma. Instead of trying to get people to do what has been decided for them to do, it will let people make their own decisions based on purer and cleaner feedback mechanisms.
To get even clearer, government and capitalism are not good mechanisms for sensemaking. They only see what they expect to see, and since they expect to see threats that require government or corporate intervention, this is what they see (Cold War, War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Covid…)
They are also fatally compromised for decision making, as they operate on monstrous scales and so feed self-interest on similarly enormous scales. GMO, robots and beautifully designed cities are all an artefact of scale, which in turn breeds further scale to make the tech work (of decision-making, of corporation to run them and so on).
The promise of crypto in general and the DAO in particular is that there are fewer intermediaries to distort messages. Sense-making becomes local and distributed. As better feedback loops are coded in, with sensors and decision makers at more points in the landscape (physical and political), politics becomes local. A distinctive localism emerges, and it can integrate up to the bioregional and national. This movement is in the opposite direction to scale. This is the tech we pursue to free ourselves from the centralisation of the machine, and connect to the everywhere-ness of the world.
The greatest example is also the longest living culture on Earth, the 60,000 year old Australian Aboriginal culture. The patchwork of language groups across the continent each had their distinctive culture and yet also understood how it all came together. For millennia The promise of crypto is to recreate this in the context of an age that places far greater demands on the planet.
So what, then, is my vision? It is similar to that of @deepfates, but different in that it displaces capitalism more completely. I think he is right in arguing that solarpunk calls on capitalism, but I think that this is not the best vision we can be creating. It’s not the best world we can imagine. I’m going to avoid giving it a label, and “-ism”, because that will encourage intellectual hair-splitting, but I’m sure there are a number of -isms that would suit.
This world looks like people, animals and things all becoming interconnected again. This will involve some tech, but it will be subtle and humble and directed by people who take a 7 generation view. It will be tech focused on how to do the difficult tasks of making sense of this world and coordinating action, without imposing a narrative and forcing a direction.
It will be centred in communities, both real, physical communities but also digital communities of interest. There will be human work and real dirt under the nails to grow real food from the soil. There will be huge efforts to heal, healing each other, the planet and our relationships with everything upon the planet.
Andrew Dana Hudson refers to solarpunk being guided by a project to build something lasting, something that is greater than human. In his view, it may be immense physical infrastructure or keystones of cultural continuity. The world I imagine lives for these keystones of cultural continuity, but the project is not one of cultural creation for the sake of culture. Instead, it works to repair the songlines that sustained Aboriginal Australia for so long, and threads them around the planet so that we are again held in their embrace. We are again all Aboriginal.
It is a world suffused with spirit, with humanity, a world that can thrive for millennia through the depth of culture it builds. The stories it weaves. The striving for the galaxies of internal truth and connection and marvel, not rocket ships to a dead rock in the solar system.
I see this world because I see it happening now. To return to the here and now, the covid red pill is creating exactly the dynamic that is needed for this new punk. Let’s call it Gaiapunk, a spiritually infused solarpunk that dismantles the machine and redeploys the useful bits in service of Gaia.
Populated by people expelled from the tyranny of the vax, but also those who don’t have a dog in that fight. People wanting to carve out a world, urban and rural, where they can be full participants in the world. People of all stripes turning to community, deploying tools to thrive outside the machine, and particularly tools for self-governance. Maybe it is a world of solarpunk vs cottagecore, people looking to find how to best make their way in connection with Gaia.
All of these things excite me, and all of these things seem newly possible with a careful application of Web3.
My shorthand definition of capitalism is “the deployment of capital (investment) to establish a way that adds to that capital (profit) by extracting wealth from the planet or people (or both)”.
Ok, this is great. I think it's pertinent to sketch out the possible ways to move forward from here, and it seems perfectly clear that we can't simply go back to classical growth-based capitalism however one squares it. Because we are indeed at some form of turning point here, the old order is crumbling in ways far beyond those imagined during the 60s, disrupting structures of power in place for many centuries.
I think you're spot on with that shorthand definition as well, framing capitalism as inherently extractive. However, one could add that it's incredibly effective along a one-dimensional axis due to its inherent tendency towards cumulative growth (which is why it's also so destructive). This is a great resource reflecting on contemporary end-stage capitalism:
https://endnotes.org.uk/issues