my issues with solarpunk

[alyaza]

Alyaza Birze (October 14)

since about 2017, i've been loosely in the orbit of solarpunk. for the unaware, solarpunk is variously an aesthetic (perhaps thought of as the antithesis of cyberpunk), a genre (primarily of speculative fiction) and a movement (in a broad sense seeking to make real the aesthetic and bring into being what is prescribed by the genre). taken at its most charitable, you might say for instance that "Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”" i think that's pretty interesting; i think it's also very important. we're in a climate crisis and an ecological disaster of our own making—our future will be sustainability or catastrophe. a "solarpunk" future might be what we need, especially if you subscribe to a vision of the future that involves degrowth and a reduction or redistribution of technological availability.

the trouble, i find, is that solarpunk the aesthetic and genre almost completely define solarpunk the movement—for the worse. with extremely scattered exceptions: there is no real "solarpunk" and likewise no real solarpunk "movement". unless you overfit what solarpunk is (which we'll get to) or define it by vague platitudes like "ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community" (we'll also get to this) it is far more of a vibe than a praxis. and this leads to interpretations that totally defeat what i presume should be the point of solarpunk.

the Chobani ad

take, for instance, the Chobani solarpunk ad—perhaps the single most defining work of solarpunk to exist so far. from a media critique perspective? it is genuinely a very good ad—it is hopeful, it is beautifully animated, and it presents a world you would want to live in that is unlike our current ecologically devastated and climatologically harmed world:

Watch on YouTube

but: is also an ad. it's an ad for Chobani, one of the largest yogurt companies in the world. it exists to sell products and induce good feelings for a brand. do you think Chobani particularly cares about solarpunk or even global sustainability generally? and do you think they would stand by these things if the aesthetic became more real and began to impact their bottom line? of course not. i'm sure that Hamdi Ulukaya thinks he does right by the world through his modest philanthropy (informed by his transient, Kurdish upbringing in a very unkind-to-Kurds Turkey), but at the end of the day he is now a billionaire whose company makes in excess of one billion dollars in sales every year. there is no ethical way for this to happen. his preferential hiring of (and defense of) refugees at Chobani is, i'm sure, very much appreciated by those refugees and comparatively humanitarian in a world generally content to treat them as subhuman—but among other things it's also a great way to launder good PR out of extracting the surplus value of a particularly desperate set of workers. and color me skeptical Ulukaya and Chobani as a company would accept, say, worker ownership of the company—or even anything more radical than an aesthetically kinder, gentler capitalism.

for all of the assertions from solarpunk manifestos that solarpunk is "about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm" and essays about how it "imagines an end to the global capitalist system that has resulted in the environmental destruction seen today"—does it? the Chobani ad and its influence seems like a definitive refutation of solarpunk as obviously countercultural or anticapitalist even limited to solarpunk aesthetic and genre. the VICE article from which i steal this second quote notes that "many Solarpunks saw the Chobani ad as fairly innocuous, given that the company sells a health food made with natural ingredients." but what is innocuous about a corporation appropriating an aesthetic, particularly one so supposedly joined at the hip of radical politics and the overthrow of capitalism? is it not obvious greenwashing for a "health food" corporation to steep itself in the visuals of a world it would have no place in? Chobani—or even a world with advertising as we understand it today—is not what i imagine from solarpunk. Hamdi Ulukaya and his billion dollars are not things i believe a solarpunk world should have. the most damning question in my view here is: why did solarpunks eventually reappropriate the ad—attempt to file its branding off, and reclaim its visuals—if it was innocuous? doesn't it seem like an issue that corporations can make better solarpunk propaganda than solarpunks themselves?

these questions and their answers have very real implications for solarpunk the movement, too. if the aesthetic and genre can be so coopted by Chobani—at best a minor note in the symphony of corporations that make up the world's hegemonic, capitalist economy—how might BP (innovator of the "carbon footprint calculator") weaponize it? how might Microsoft, Google, or Nestle, or any company whose existence is unavoidably tied to ecological harm and exploitation? a radical movement whose cultural essence could be—already is—so easily subsumed by capital strikes me as not much of a movement at all, and certainly not an anti-capitalist one.

the influence of Tumblr

but even granting that i overstate the possibility of/degree of cultural recuperation¹ taking place here, many proponents of solarpunk are woefully underequipped to build a serious political movement. this is in no small part because solarpunk grew up on—and is in many respect a product of—the website Tumblr. in my view almost every political, organizational, social, and intersectional issue in solarpunk the movement follows from being so strongly based there.

in blunt terms: Tumblr has always been dogshit for politics, for political education, and for endowing people with a good understanding of the world they live in. most of the bad politics i had at 13—an obnoxious obsession with "egalitarianism" over "equality" and a general lack of questioning authority and social structures—were inherited through Tumblr and its raging wars over social justice ca. 2012-2014. i consider this a comparatively good outcome—some of the other people in my former Tumblr vicinity became truly obnoxious scolds, or queer-exclusionary radical feminists, or genuine far-right reactionaries from Tumblr politics. the audience Tumblr historically cultivated—mostly white, mostly sheltered middle-school misfits and fandom teenagers who have since grown up—is simply not one you should trust with unfettered political discussion. solarpunk aesthetic and genre, unfortunately, inherited both these demographics and the byproducts of the great social justice wars.

one result of this Tumblr-heavy origin is that there's a remarkable level of fandom-brain or pop-culture-brain that can be found in solarpunk, and it undercuts how countercultural solarpunk actually is. Tumblr users understandably find much value in cultural analogues—but in this context they are often farcical. the Sunbeam City wiki, for example, is quite generous in its application of "solarpunk" and solarpunk-adjacent." i'm not saying that you can't find inspiration in WALL-E, Sonic CD, or Treasure Planet, but it strikes me as amusing to assert these as solarpunk works of art, doubly so while emphasizing post-capitalist and anti-capitalist politics. Welcome to Night Vale's inclusion meanwhile is just goofy in a classic Tumblr way. and even the more justified inclusions like Ursula K. Le Guin and Hayao Miyazaki are a bit weird. i would not call The Left Hand of Darkness "solarpunk" in any meaningful sense given that it was primarily written to challenge gender roles. and frankly i have no idea what Howl's Moving Castle—a film Miyazaki did to express his distaste for the Iraq War—is doing here unless we're making solarpunk mean "anything that has an agreeable, left-of-center political message".

then again, solarpunk manifestos will frequently assert by fiat that the aesthetic, genre, and especially the movement is "speculative", without bounds, and all-inclusive of "races, religions, sexes, [and] those with disabilities."

this actually brings us to another result of solarpunk's Tumblr-heaviness, and a place where the lack of political education really causes problems: in the rush to declare everyone included, there prevails a genuine tyranny of structurelessness in solarpunk the movement. from first principles everything falters. an anticivilizational anarchist finds as much home under the incredibly broad premises of solarpunk as Chobani and Hamdi Ulukaya. and there is simply no way to build a movement between these two things, or out of such drastic differences in what solarpunk actually is.

controversial as they otherwise tend to be, Jo Freeman's words in "Tyranny of Structurelessness" that

Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting [people] to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done. [...] The more unstructured a movement it, the less control it has over the directions in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages. This does not mean that its ideas do not spread. Given a certain amount of interest by the media and the appropriateness of social conditions, the ideas will still be diffused widely. But diffusion of ideas does not mean they are implemented; it only means they are talked about.

seem quite true as applied here. in the case of solarpunk everyone brings their own understanding to the table, but nothing exists to synthesize those understandings into something collectively workable. a lack of structure—and a lack of values beyond the most basic platitudes (everyone is included, the aforementioned "ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community", etc.)—means countless solarpunks who respond positively to Chobani, and call WALL-E and Welcome to Night Vale solarpunk(-adjacent) works. that lack of structure, in kind, is a consequence of solarpunk's Tumblr-heavy origin and its beginning as an aesthetic and genre—neither of which have owners. compounding matters is Tumblr's community structure, which is allergic to centralization of any kind. and despite the raging political battles—especially those that existed concurrently with the formulation of solarpunk—most of Tumblr's users have little to no experience with any form of organizing that would transfer to creating a centralized movement.

all of this adds up to something that is simply unable to become a movement—to become politically real. instead of there being solarpunk parties, pressure groups, cooperatives, or even small affinity groups, the solarpunk movement is almost exclusively Tumblr blogs, podcasts, and manifestos for an audience of dozens. instead of building off the legacies of people like Murray Bookchin—someone who arguably created a roadmap for solarpunks to adopt themselves—solarpunks seem to be very divided on whether they adhere to any theoretical doctrine at all. and instead of building a solarpunk future, people seem to mostly just fantasize about it and hope someone else does the work. but if there's anyone doing that work, i don't know about it.

Conclusion

i suppose my feelings would be summarized best by a statement: you can't build a cohesive political movement out of aesthetic and genre. really this feeling goes for everything that is punk, and doubly-so for solarpunk which doesn't have the benefit of 50 years of struggle and violence over what its fundamental values are; what it means; what adhering to it is like; who it's for; and how to live it. even today being a punk (with no qualifiers or specificity) doesn't intrinsically imply anything other than being visibly countercultural (and increasingly it doesn't even mean that. recuperation has come for many of the visible markers of being punk.) there are conservative punks. there are Nazi punks. there aren't many of them, but they still exist and people still have to fight them over what punk is.

so solarpunk runs into trouble immediately. it cannot really substantiate what it wants to be, even in ideal circumstances—and solarpunk has not been developed in ideal circumstances. that's not to say it doesn't have good people or good ideas, but if you're a "solarpunk" for political reasons and don't already have strong priors i think you're wasting your time. my sincere advice would be to read Bookchin and Öcalan, and learn from the Zapatistas and Kurds. become a social ecologist, or a communalist/libertarian municipalist, or a democratic confederalist. the Institute for Social Ecology does cool stuff and so does Rojava and its institutions (see Internationalist Commune, Cooperation in Mesopotamia, and Lêgerîn for just a few of these). and if you like the aesthetic and genre, it's fine to do that. just don't expect them to be vehicles of revolutionary politics or anything.

notes

¹ "the process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective" -- it's a very useful $10 word for your travels.