So I was playing this little
indie game called Terra Nil. It is sort of a solarpunk base building
or resource management strategy, kinda like Factorio, but unlike Factorio, instead of
constantly expanding your operation and extracting more and more resources your goal is to restore the ecosystem, collect all of your garbage and
fly away on this cool airship. I'm not really a huge fan of games like Factorio, to me they just look really overwhelming. But the concept of Terra Nil hooked me, so I put it into an easy mode like a cool person who doesn't have to prove themselves
to strangers on the internet and had a very nice time reclaiming the wasteland, planting trees and cleaning the oceans. And as I was playing it, I thought. Soo… Why do we call it Solarpunk? I mean, probably because of Cyberpunk. But I understand where it takes its name from. I mean, punk is aggression, it's
energy, it's down with the system. But what's so punk about
trees and grass and wetlands. But the more I learned about it, the
more it became crystal clear that Solarpunk is aptly named and it
is as punk as it can possibly get. And I realised how important this
relatively new genre actually is. But, let's not get ahead of ourselves,
we will tackle this in two stages, first we'll answer why solarpunk
deserves this big moniker, and then we'll talk about how this
genre can possibly save the world. To answer our first question
“Why is Solarpunk actually Punk” we need to look at the genre that preceded it. Because despite major stylistical,
and philosophical differences, there’re a lot of things that
these two genres have in common. I’m talking of course about Cyberpunk’s date of birth
is a cause of some debates. While writers like Samuel R. Delany, Phillip
K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov and many others explored similar
themes as far back as the 60s, to me the birthday of cyberpunk proper is July 1st 1984, the day when William
Gibson’s Neuromancer came out. The eighties saw the rapid
improvements in technology and the rise of neoliberal politics, associated mostly with Ronald Reagan in
the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. The latter brought into our collective
subconsciousness the slogan “there is no alternative” ie. Neoliberal market
capitalism is the only viable way of living. Naturally, with technologies becoming
better year over year and wealth gaps widening even faster, there was a lot of anxiety. Science fiction authors felt it as
well and they took these anxieties and Thatcher’s slogan and put it into overdrive. Creating a world of advanced technology,
massive wealth disparity and private corporations more powerful than any
government. Or as Bruce Sterling put it: High tech, low life. So, why are we talking about this? Because genres exist not only so that we know
how to sort books on the shelves. Genres are a mission statement. To quote Innuendo studios: The label "science-fiction" isn't there to tell you
whether a story has rayguns. It's there so you know
which mechansim of interpretation you should employ. Genre's not what's in the book. It's how you read the book. By that token, cyberpunk used its
stylistic imagery and allusions to the real world as a way to critique
the state of society in the 80s and where it was, and still
is, potentially headed. Unlike traditional science fiction, which for the most part praised
technological progress and science, This is the 24th century. Material needs no longer exist. cyberpunk was a warning. This intention, valiant as it was
though, came with a few problems. And nothing illustrates this better,
than the story of Kerry Eurodyne. Now, a warning. I’m going to talk about some
late game plot details in Cyberpunk 2077, so some minor spoilers, don’t worry
I won’t be discussing the main story. YET The rock band Samurai, formed by Johnny
Silverhand and Kerry Eurodyne in the early 2000s is an important part of the setting
of the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk and its video game adaptation. The band was playing what’s known in
the Cyberpunk universe as Chrome rock. Don’t ask. I have no idea what this is. With their lyrics representing a
protest against a corrupt system. Rallying listeners to resist
like in Chippin’ In or Archangel or telling stories of hardship under
corporate capitalism of Night City, like in The Ballad of Buck Ravers. Sometime around 2008 the band
members went their separate ways, leaving both Johnny and Kerry to carry the torch. Eventually, in 2023 Silverhand also exited
stage left and only Kerry was left standing. After a rocky couple of years Kerry
found his groove back and with this, a huge commercial success under the
banner of Night City’s major labels. He still continued to sing about the suffering and
the downtrodden. But was there any sincerity left, especially when the songs are coming from a
multimillionaire commercial artist with a villa? To Kerry’s credit, he is painfully aware
of that, although he chooses to remain in the corporations’ pocket, seeing it as a
price of fame, a cost of doing business. Kerry: Let's be real. Kerry: Say I break contract, then what? Kerry: Who's gonna release my new tracks? Kerry: Who's gonna deal with distribution,
promotion, influencers, media? Kerry: Labels have got them all in their pockets. Kerry: You out with them, you out - period. V: But you'd be free. Kerry: Seriously? Kerry: Free to sing until you're blue in the face Kerry: nobody hearin' a thing? Kerry: It's just another kind of cage. In a way, his story is an example
of what’s known as interpassivity, the term taken up by an Austrian
philosopher Robert Pfaller. Interpassivity refers to the work
of art or a piece of technology that acts on a user’s behalf. You listen to the angry rock song about
how corpos are bad and you’re like Then the song ends, and you return to your life. Nothing has meaningfully changed, yet
you feel like you’ve done something. It is important, however, to
not view this in broad strokes. I’m not saying that protest art is
meaningless, quite the contrary. But it is crucial to recognize
how capitalism interacts with art. As Joyce Messier said in Disco Elysium. Or, to quote Mark Fisher, whose
book this line references directly: “Nothing runs better on MTV
than a protest against MTV.” So cyberpunk got consumed by
the very thing it was critiquing and got turned into just another aesthetic. I think the main reason that led
cyberpunk to this was the fact that capitalism was basically
built into it from the start. It didn’t portray a world that
is different from our own, rather it just took it to the most extreme, unwillingly supporting the claim
that there is no alternative. So, eventually, as more and more people
started interacting with the genre, capitalism overtook it. To quote Noah Caldwell-Gervais’
critique of Cyberpunk 2077: Corporate capitalism doesn't care if you hate it. In fact, it can take that hate, package it in neon and chrome and sell it right back to you
for 60 dollars. While Solarpunk, I think, has
a better chance of survival, it still isn’t immune to the same fate. As well as any movement, frankly speaking. However, I believe it has a much higher chance
of leaving a lasting impact on our world. Because the way it critiques and
rebels against capitalism is different. And now is the time to finally
talk about the guest of honour. While Solarpunk is a relatively young
genre that started around the late 2000s, it has seen a massive spike of interest
in recent years especially on YouTube. You may have seen it brought up by creators
like Andrewism or Our Changing Climate. In 2014 an artist Olivia Louise
published on Tumblr a collection of concept arts (some were hers,
some - made by other artists). The caption read: At that point the specific traits
of the genre haven't solidified yet. Later in the same post Louise talks about people “focusing their expendable income on the arts”, which I think deviates from a more
matured vision of the genre we have now. And as a firmly post-capitalist
version of the future, it probably does away with the
concepts of income or money. Nevertheless, Louise’s post captured a lot of visual characteristics of
the genre extremely well. Over the next couple of years the genre
continued to look for its identity and in 2019 A Solarpunk Manifesto was published, based
in no small part on the works of Adam Flynn. Also, I just wanna say that I
really love that, unlike cyberpunk, solarpunk wasn’t born out
of a major novel or a film, but from a collection of social media
posts, concept arts and discussions. It seems fitting in a kind of meta way,
like it wasn’t manufactured from scratch, but rather grew organically. It’s just cool. The manifesto underlines a set of 22 proposals. One of these proposals is an
answer to our first question: This is the reason why Solarpunk, in my opinion, has a much better chance to
bring any meaningful change because the core principles of the genre: sustainability and the post-capitalist
world without hierarchy and class divide are at odds with the very nature of capitalism. The works of solarpunk rarely, if at
all, allude to our current system, and when they do, it usually isn’t
the main focus of the narrative. Capitalism and the age of heavy industrialization
are the long forgotten artefacts of the old world, not so different from the ruins of
ancient civilizations we find today. There is a passage in Becky
Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built, an amazing book and a great jumping
off point into solarpunk literature, where the main characters find
the remnants of an old plant This is what I'm talking about.
It isn’t as easy to use the world where the concept of profit no longer
exists to sell something for profit. Although, it’s not like no one is going to try. You probably noticed some gorgeous
animated scenes playing in the background. And maybe you thought. This looks cool. I wonder what film is it from? Hm, let me check the description. Patreon link, hmmm, gonna check that out later. There… Weird, there is nothing... Oh wait, what is this Dear Alice thing… That’s right, originally
Dear Alice was commissioned from the UK animation house The Line by a
yoghourt company which shall not be named. The clips you see in this video are
from the “decommodified” version, created by a canadian essayist Waffle To The Left who removed all the corporate branding. I’m particularly grateful that
this version has no voiceover, because the original narration borders
on dystopian, frankly speaking. Interestingly enough, when I watched
the corporate version of Dear Alice, throughout the whole video something felt off. The visuals are amazing, The Line did a
great job, credit where credit is due, and they even got legendary Joe
Hisaishi to score the piece. But there’s this veil of insincerity, between
the hope of the beautifully realised world and the food company trying to stuff as much
of their yoghurt inside you as possible. Another piece of corporate media that ventured into the solarpunk genre
is Disney’s Strange World. The film was a massive financial
failure for the company and largely flew under the radar, mostly because of reactionaries that
got upset that gay people exist. To recap, the story of Strange
World revolves around Pando, green plants that are used as an
energy source in the world of Avalonia. One day Pando suddenly started losing its
powers and the main characters (Searcher, Ethan and Meridian) accompanied by
Callisto, the president of Avalonia, venture into the depths of
the earth only to find out that they live on the back of the giant creature and Pando is an infection that
keeps attacking its heart. To save the land they break the Pando roots and give up its use as an energy source
to replace it with wind turbines. To the writer's credit, the film
has some good things to say, from promoting the idea of
coexistence with nature, The objective of "Primal Outpost"
is to live harmoniously with your environment. I throw masonry stones at it! And I shoot it with
my brand-new crossbow! to allusions to the fossil
fuels’ dependency of our world. But what struck me on my second
watch is that the film largely avoids any major structural critiques, settling on “green” energy as the main solution. To be fair, it was probably as far
as they were allowed to take it. However, it leaves the film with a fairly
mainstream message regarding climate change i.e. “How do we consume ourselves out of this?” Renewable energy and more
eco-friendly tech are great. However, you can put as many wind
turbines and solar panels as you like and get everyone to drive electric vehicles, but without radical structural
change you aren’t fixing the problem. The push for electric cars in
the mainstream, for example, overlooks the major thing that cobalt
used in production of modern batteries gets mined primarily in overexploited countries
of Congo, Indonesia or Papua New Guinea. So, even if, somehow, we stop
using fossil fuels altogether, we are still left with the same old
capitalism, but hey, this time it's in green. It is important to not get caught
up in the surface level aesthetics. Solarpunk isn’t when solar
panels or skyscrapers with trees. At its core the genre encapsulates
a plethora of progressive ideas from various fields: from urbanism to alternative economic models
such as a library economy, to the degrowth movement, progressive education and
international relationships. Building a better future, a
solarpunk future if you will, requires changes of many
parts of our current system. It is crucial to keep this in mind, next
time a VC firm or a real estate developer decides to slap a bunch of trees
on an architectural render and say There, we did it! We made solarpunk! There is a passage in Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism that reads: I can’t help but think about
solarpunk when I read these words. And this is why I wish to see more
people interact with the genre and why I see so much potential
in it to bring real change. I feel like, in recent times,
most of my fellow leftist creators Focus solely on clearing old misconceptions, critiquing the current system or
trying to mitigate its worst effects. Don't get me wrong, debunking myths
about alternatives to capitalism, providing well-argued critiques on
the failures of the current system or pushing for stronger unions is good. But ultimately, without a vision for the future, you're just dealing with symptoms
instead of curing the disease. Because the end goal isn't stronger collective
bargaining power or taxing the rich. The end goal is to create This is where Solarpunk is incredibly valuable. And the ultimate reason why it deserves its name. It takes the sledgehammer to the omnipresent
argument that there is no alternative and the neoliberal capitalist system
is the proverbial “end of history” by saying that no, actually,
there is an alternative. You could argue that it's just fiction and stories that have no connection to the real world. But I'd say that Adam Smith,
father of all capitalism, based his ideas in no small part
on a concept of a barter economy. A concept that has absolutely zero evidence, has been debunked by many anthropologists and Smith might have as well made it up. So you could do much worse with fiction. We live in a world that is getting
scarier and bleaker each day. From seemingly miniscule problems, like the need to buy a new phone
or laptop every couple of years, or video games getting more
predatory with monetization, to major things like climate catastrophes,
workers’ exploitation and armed conflicts. All of these problems stem from the same root, the same system that time and time again
continues to insist that there is no alternative. Frankly, I’m tired of listening to it. Which is why I think Solarpunk is so important. Right now it’s just a vision, yes, but to get anywhere you need
to have a vision, a goal. How do we get there? How exactly is this going to work? These things we will have to figure out. I hope to contribute some of my work
to these discussions in the future, but for now, in the
description you will find links to videos by other creators: in depth
investigations and different perspectives. Feel free to browse at your leisure. I will end this video with
words of one of the most influential science-fiction writers
of the 20th century - Ursula Le Guin. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now. And can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being. And even imagine
some real grounds for hope. We will need writers
who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. Right now I think we need writers who know the difference
between production of a market commodity and a practice of an art. We live in capitalism,
its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted
and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.
