Solarpunk North Star

Embracing radical optimism

Solarpunk depiction

I’ve been thinking a lot about Solarpunk.

Not in an obsessive puzzle-to-solve way, but rather as a recurring theme that pops up in reference to conversations, news developments, and everyday activities. It’s a sort of background hum that has been growing a bit over the last few years, and noticeably stronger in the last several months and weeks. Like a piece of music that you can’t get out of your head, but that you also feel like whose melody fits into this soundtrack moment perfectly.

What is Solarpunk

Solarpunk, for the uninitiated, is a sort of aesthetic vision of the future. It emphasizes a co-existence of technology with nature that is more sustainable and integrated more holistically. It’s an “aesthetic” because it’s more a vibe than a concrete philosophy or guidebook on how to make sweeping political changes. But it sits at a higher level of abstraction, and helps us to imagine a world of clean energy (i.e., solar), sustainable cities, bending technology to explicitly serve social good as opposed to a that being a hopeful side effect, and working as various communities to partner with our lived world rather than dominating or fighting with it.

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. — David Graeber

There are very good elaborations on SolarPunk here and here. Media that comes to mind would that align with it would be Black Panther, Avatar, anything Miyazaki on the film end, and a nod in Butler’s Parable of the Sower or Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

Rejecting Cynicism

One reason I think it’s been helpful as of late is the “punk” nature of it too (related: cyberpunk, steampunk). It’s not a dystopian vision of the future, nor a post-apocalyptic collapse. As punk as punk is, it rejects cynicism and nihilism — it’s a “radical” departure from our current systems that aren’t working for really anyone.

But I also see it in smaller ways — in my day-to-day life, where I’m deciding between buying something new, or mending it myself, using my 3D printer to design and build a replacement, or using on-hand local-first computing and gadgetry to do something small, sustainable, and repairable.

Overall, it’s a “campaign in poetry, govern in prose” kind of aesthetic that I think a lot folks need right now. What kind of vision for the present-made-future do we want to strive towards?

Whether it’s politics, AI, climate change, energy, social media, or dozens of other challenging areas — these are simply too vast, too interconnected, and individually too dispiriting in many ways to tackle with a single philosophy or message.

Forward

I’ll have more to say about this and how it crops up around us (e.g., right to repair movement, local-first computing) — it’s one of the key themes of me restarting the Good Tinker newsletter and has in some ways been an undergirding of my approach to “tech for the social good” before I’d found the term.

It’s 2025, it’s good to be back on here, and I look forward to engaging with all of you.