It’s a movement insofar as it’s an aesthetic that people want to see around them, but have no ideological understanding of how to get there or if that’s even something people should strive for in general.
Now, if only someone had written about this exact phenomenon in theory a century ago so that we would be aware of this and we'd be able to take steps to outflank it.
Noone yet in this thread addressing how "gooner" relates to any of this lol, or is it just being used as ornamental punctuation to end a series of somewhat related nouns
it's emotional and social gooning, an anti-agitprop that instead of edging you toward revolution, functions as an outlet and masturbatory hope. the emotional equivalent of reaching right for the prostate stimulator. idk maybe
Idk anything about solar punk, but i sure do know a lot of eco-fascists that use "there's too many people!" as an excuse to implement eugenics against minorities and developing nations.
to be fair to that particular picture it does have a city in the background which is usually the thing that's entirely missing from the single family ranch home surrounded by pastures in the real grim solar panels / our fertilizer is other the undesirables depictions
I think it's been somewhat co-opted by ecofash, apparently it appeals to people who want a tradwife living on a vast property but still have their Xbox and Bazingamobile. Lebenstraum vibes with a Studio Ghibli coat of paint.
Now im not a solarpunk fan myself but I have seen many leftwing/leftish people seen positive on it. Is it good / bad ? I havent really looked into it beyond surface level.
Sorry for being a boomer mom-type character archetype. Could you explain how solarpunk and cottagecore connect and why they are good but can be coopted? I honestly need to google cottagecore again; I remember hearing the word, but I'm not that online yet, I guess.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's also telling that one of the major artworks used to "promote" the aesthetic is literally a yoghurt commercial, but since it's a cute animation, it gets a pass.
I think it's fine. The societal changes necessary to address climate change are so wild that people literally lack capacity to imagine them. Solarpunk is an art genre to fill in that space.