Rick Deckard stares blankly out of the shadow-prison of his cavelike apartment into the monstrous night of a megacity. The audience suspects Deckard may actually be a very lifelike automaton, and he often acts like it, struggling to find connection in a nasty and wrecked world that keeps him at a distance. Greasy rain pelts the window as Deckard sits smoking cigarettes, every light source an artificial illumination, every surface a man-made façade.
Aesthetics matter. The way things look, their intentional form selected and pursued by their designer, is a clue to their function and can tell you much about the philosophy of their design. If you have been anywhere on the internet in the last decade you have encountered the cyberpunk aesthetic. Chrome, neon, glass, rain, shadowed vistas, grim cityscapes. The hallmarks of the cyperpunk aesthetic fit neatly with the philosophy of the genre, or at least they way it is currently expressed. Despair, nihilism, and a sense of total isolation of the individual from society and other humans pervades. These emotional colors of isolation, ennui and anger so tint the art that they can actually create the same feelings in the viewer. Whether the aesthetic itself is driving the growth of this emotional zeitgeist or it happened the other way around is more of an art history and philosophy question than I intend to confront right now. My main concern is to identify some of the causes of the helplessness and paralysis that seems to have gripped us over the last few years and offer some hope.
The despair is everywhere, once you start looking. The pop kitsch reduction of cyberpunk to a color palette and a feeling of loneliness has allowed the genre's ideas to be introduced into a huge variety of art forms, from which to influence a swath of society. Increasingly the Very Online display the hallmarks of the genre in their actual lives. Detached from society by fundamental and often physical differences, ridden with anxiety and rendered helpless by all-encompassing faceless corporate powers. Drugs, pornography, and metaverse filling the place of spiritual, relational and vocational lack. Parroting and becoming our memes, we accept the insistence of the narrative that Something Bad is happening just about everywhere, we are totally powerless to stop it, and yet we must worry. Any wonder that the cyberpunk hero is a lone person, a unique creation of technology unlike any other, homebound and smoking while they stare out at a landscape too massive to be affected by their hopes and too alien to care they exist?
It simply isn't good for us to face the world around us through a lens that channels our unexamined rage and fear at targets we will never see and cannot hope to actually influence. It creates madness, and I don't think I have to even justify that statement given that I'm currently writing in the year 2021. We've forgotten how to correctly value our actions and how to see problems in the world around us as potential, not cause for despair. And I think that a new set of tools, even if they are only memes and aesthetics at the start, would be a big help in changing that.
Enter solarpunk. An obscure aesthetic and fictional movement centered around climate change awareness, is is in many ways a mirror image response to cyberpunk. Instead of warmed-over late 1990s ennui and disenfranchisment, solarpunk advocates an optimistic and possibilistic approach to both the future and the present. Instead of a dark and rain-slicked color palette, solarpunk looks like sunshine, growing things, and bright hues. Humans depicted in solarpunk art are often clutching a tool, tending a garden, almost always standing outside. They are improving and enriching the built environment around them, making changes that last and benefit others. Growing out of a felt need for a less doom-and-gloom response to environmental concerns, solarpunk has begun to exhibit a generally positive approach to the future and to humanity's ability to use technology for good. Although we are very early in terms of the growth of the meme, I would argue that we will increasingly see solarpunk adopted as the new theme and visual language of the internet. You can already see it in the gaudy splashes of color that permeate the NFT landscape, or the marketing material of this popular stock trading app. Now I've already written about how I believe that the internet's massive shift towards optimism can be hugely beneficial, as long as we know why we are optimistic. In a similar way, I think solarpunk can be seen as an ideological toolkit, portable to many different situations. While it is currently being focused primarily on ecological goals, it can also apply to almost any community and their local needs. Here's what I've learned from using solarpunk as a way of seeing more than a specific agenda.
So what if, instead of seeing the world around us as a doomed place with ourselves as spectators, we looked closer to home and behaved like builders? We would first focus on what we could actually influence and shape, here and now, within the tiny scope that is the life work of the average human. We would look to conserve, not only our natural environment, but all the environments we interact with on a daily basis, whether the relational environment of our home or the ecosystem of the internet spaces we frequently enter. Defaulting to the belief that things can be improved and fixed and that it's ours to do, we would try and bring any skills or strengths we have to bear whenever we see a need. We would prioritize the immediate next step, retrofitting what is around us rather than waiting for someone else to bring the perfect solution. Instead of living in a sterile and chimerical realm where impermanence allows every shifting fantasy to be fleetingly realized, we would use our imaginations to realize something good and real and growing, somewhere that people could enjoy it. Build an environment made for drawing others into your home, for conversation rather than cocooning, for creativity rather than consumption. Then move outside your home and look around your community with the eyes of possibility, not critiquing what is failing but hoping for what could be if only someone had the vision and the tools to make it so.
Of course as always, I have theological reasons for thinking this way. Since I believe the universe began as a paradise and will end as one, this current and admittedly terrible condition we find ourselves in isn't the end of the story. I can't sit here waiting around for my ticket away from the destruction, either. I've got work to do, in these waning days. I can't afford the new gnosticism of entombing myself where hope cannot force me to take action. You see friends, that's really what pessimism is. A refusal to risk disappointment. A lack of faith. Hiding away from risk because we can't be sure of the outcome. I think we've tried it for long enough, and it's only deepened our fears. Let's try doing the next good thing, and then place the rest of our trust in something more sure than human failures. When you stare out your window and face the darkness of the world, what do you trust in?
WGMI 😎
"Go, eat your bread with joy, And drink your wine with a merry heart; For God has already accepted your works...Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going." ~ Ecclesiastes 9:7,10
“So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing…
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.” ~ Wendell Berry