• @chobeat@lemmy.mlOP
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    22 years ago

    I can agree with this reading of SolarPunk and it’s kinda how I’m using it too. Nonetheless this doesn’t make it more of an aesthetic. You’re shifting the frame from considering SolarPunk as a model to considering it a tool.

    Indeed SolarPunk is “used”, like every utopia, to promote a specific political model that is not necessarily represented inside the utopic model, in its content, in its narratives. There’s more than one layer. You call it “not being in your face”.

    The author of the video, I believe, doesn’t make this distinction. For him, SolarPunk is a blueprint and taken as a blueprint, it lacks a lot of stuff. You might conflate the aestethic with the intentions and ideas of those using Solarpunk for a political goal, but they are not the same. In the world out there, most people take SolarPunk as a blueprint without looking at the broader “deeply anarchist project” behind it and think “it’s that easy”.

    The video correctly highlight that it’s not that easy. The criticism I would make is that the video suggests to embed a set of values, considerations and narrative elements to the aesthetic that will inevitably make it lose its appeal as an utopia and fail in its purpose as a tool for agitation and the creation of desires.

    • poVoqA
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      2 years ago

      That’s a fair take I guess. Although the author of the video is a relatively well known Anarchist and is surely aware of what I wrote.

      Regarding your last point: you can’t really divide the means (aesthetics) and the desired outcome. If you do that your outcome will be inevitably different from what you set out to do. So while Solar Punk is not so in-your-face political, I think it also does not try to hide its Anarchist roots for anyone who bothers looking for them. If that turns away certain people that is probably for the better as otherwise those people would likely try to distort the idea of Solar Punk (which is a well recognized risk; green-washing and the like).