IMO it’s good at its roots but can be easily coopted, it’s like cottagecore in that sense.
Twitter solarpunk is cooked because they all use screenshots from the same yogurt ad with lines like “a business is only as good as its people” lmao
Exactly, it’s basically been reduced down to just the aesthetics which can be readily repackaged and recuperated. It’s a floating signifier, waiting for a brand to attach to and be capitalized on. But since there’s something fundamentally good at its core, I still see value in it.
Cottagecore was a lesbian aesthetic about escaping heteronormative society and going off grid. It got turned into a tradwife aesthetic about neo lebensraum. Solarpunk is similar, but the way it gets coopted is via green capitalism washing away the revolutionary parts of solarpunk and replacing them with consumerism of the eco friendly variety.
It’s alright, auntie, lol.
For cottagecore - I think it’s the fascist idealization of a past that never really existed. I’ve never really thought about the connection between cottagecore and solar punk, but I could see both having a twee idealized rural life aesthetic (with solar punk adding a dash of sci-fi)
I wouldn’t say it’s hitlerite adjacent, but it’s full idealism - impossible under capitalism and unnecessary under socialism. Also most of solarpunk art is really bad if you look at it second time - shitty infrastructure, rotting plant matter everywhere, erosion of cityspaces, insane amounts of labour to maintain it, disconnected primitivism, strong postapo ruin vibes, and this is even before we talk about AI artefacts in said pics.
insane amounts of labour to maintain it
Labour has never been the problem. It’s whether those maintaining it socially reproduce capitalism, or socialism/communism/anarchy.
I feel like even if we had communism tomorrow we’d still have discussions on if X thing is worth doing labor wise or if that labor could be used more effectively doing something else. It’s not like having a bunch of vining plants on every building is inherently a good thing. Those plants are going to want water from somewhere and they’ll probably get it from the sewer system or something which means clogged drains everywhere.
There are anarchist ultra-strains of solarpunk that straight up want to ban fertilizer and stuff as soon as possible and let the food system collapse before an alternative is made to feed everyone. And I don’t mean in an indirect way, I mean they admit this.
insane amounts of labour to maintain it
Ok I’m only a little familiar with this aesthetic and its art, but I always thought the idea was that it isn’t being actively maintained. Like the art I saw seemed to imply a vaguely socialist society rising up out of the overgrown ruins after the apocalypse in a capitalist one. The idea being that civilization doesn’t necessarily mean the destruction of all existing life within it, that you can build a new society and let the plants that are already there just continue being there.
but I always thought the idea was that it isn’t being actively maintained
That would be logical, but unfortunately it is not so. On the art of cities/towns you have greenery absolutely everywhere, roads, roofs, houses, walls, tons of flower pots and other bigger and smaller containers. It again shows how idealist vision this is and how they know shit about greenery in city spaces, all this would very quickly just wither and die without constant care and the amount of plants needing that care means the labour would been simply crazy, especially that on the art if anyone is even doing that is always by hand. Even moderate amount of city greenery we have in some cities today need quite a lot of care. Alternatively they could make it less maintained by planting some crazy invasive species which would overgrown everything and look like Angkor Wat before rediscovery but that’s not possible under most climates and not only monoculture weed is not close to the idea, but again, the erosion of cityspace would be huge.
Also there is a thing that solarpunk is nearly always vision of at least harshly understood degrowth if not outright primitivism and you have the full vision closer to postapo disaster than to any socialism.
It’s an aesthetic. And yes aesthetics are political, but I think this is one of those ones that can go either way, in fact I feel that way about most “Punk” genres. There’s been progressive and reactionary cyberpunk, steampunk, whatever.
Some of solar punk seems to be “hey what if we did Soviet brutalist commie blocks but with more greenery”, so a more naturalistic and whimsical version of dense, organized, urban-proletariat society, which I think is kinda cool. Other times it looks more like an idealized version of what “techno-feudalism” would look like, a quaint, pastoral, sustainable version of being petite-bourgeois.
a quaint, pastoral, sustainable version of being petite-bourgeois.
Or as I like to call it, “Hobbitcore.”
