Mental health looks different for everybody. For instance, for me being too functional is the issue and I have to actively root myself in the world, intentionally connect with people, break the flow of work, union organizing, networking, building stuff. Alienation is the consequence and it looks very different from, for instance, my GF’s experience of ADHD+Autism related stress
I play often automation games, management games and strategy games. I’m always looking for people to start a gaming group with, since I really don’t fit into gaming culture and I’ve left that world a long time ago.
Right now anyway I’m playing: Banners of Ruin, Timberborn (yeah no, I’m not a furry lol) and occasionally R6: Siege and Chivalry 2.
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.
why? I feel the same criticism has been developed more in depth by other people. The fact that there’s no social tension or politics implicit in the solarpunk aesthetic is a well-known problem. As is the general association of solarpunk with techno-optimism.
Also the video is not really criticizing the attitude or values of the “core” solarpunk writers and artists but more the reception in some internet circles. Let’s call it “base solarpunk”. That “base solarpunk” that exists in the mind of many is not a concept to be understood, but a forming ideology to be shaped that is just loosely coupled to solarpunk as an artistic aesthetic
I think it goes farther than that. All the anarchists that I know that have a strategy for change and they pursue it never define themselves as anarchists unless forced to. The ones too attached to the identity and symbols tend to be more ineffective and irrelevant. We call them “the targets” because they play the very useful role of making people believe anarchism is about reading and writing about irrelevant stuff and smashing some windows occasionally just to spend 20 years in prison for it.
There’s no major force pushing users to adopt federated software beyond privacy concerns and distrust for big tech. This means mass adoption won’t happen unless big tech collapses or gets regulated to death by forces external to the fediverse.
The only strategy I’ve seen articulated so far for federated social media is “be ready for when scraps will fall from the table of Big Tech”.
I’ve created a few at this point and I can give you some mixed advices:
- start with a clear path to impact: engage people only when you have a clear idea that goes from what you have now to a world changed for the better.
- avoid engaging with politicized people too early and engage with people impacted by the problem you’re addressing first.
- don’t go too horizontal too early: horizontality, democracy, fairness are a cost, a cost that most young organizations cannot sustain. Lay down a path from an early, efficient core to a more democratic organization with a clear transition process that triggers once the organization starts to be impactful. Transparency of intentions can make up for horizontality for a while.
- a small organization of like-minded people can do more of a big organization. Bring on board people that already agree with you on the important topics and share your idea and your plan.
- detach your public communication from your internal communication: what you say in public doesn’t have to be what you think or say in private. Learn how to play with it.
- structure your internal processes as soon as possible. Having somebody with experienced with setting up organizations, designing processes, automating workflows, picking tools and structuring informations is very helpful. If you don’t have such a person, reach out to an organization that seems impactful and ask them for help.
Any organization that is incapable of including you in an online or offline social space in 5 minutes and give you something meaningful to do in 30 minutes is a dead organization.
Unfortunately it’s not enough to drop the gatekeeping because that gatekeeping is a result of years and years of cumulated trauma, bad praxis, dysfuncational organization, lack of self-awareness, performativism and/or sectarianism.
The American Right (I assume you’re American from how you write) doesn’t have all this weight: they are not afraid to go to jail because they completely remove it could happen to them. They are not afraid of infiltration. They are not afraid of having their organization devolve into something too similar to an adjacent ideological space (i.e. a heresy). They are free to experiment, to be flexible, to create new organizational forms and let information and people flow way more freely than on the left.
That said, there are plenty of spaces that have been rejecting this mentality for a while. Usually this goes along with rejecting any kind of leftist symbolism and identity in public, mostly to avoid cannibalism from the people you described but also to attract people that haven’t lived through decades of this shit and with the impulse to repeat those patterns. Keep your eyes open, because they are around you.
As a suggested read on this topic: Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal from Rodrigo Nunes.
yeah but for what purpose? What new order would they try to install by committing such transgression?
This would be taboo maybe, but the kind of taboo that doesn’t get questioned, it’s just part of the new order, unchallengeable power. If you did actually violate such a taboo you would probably just be edgy
isolate yourself and become irrelevant. Any form of “purity politics” inevitably leads to sectarianism.
Engaging with the world means becoming contaminated. It’s inevitable and it’s also good. If one’s politics is not able to deal with this simple fact, those politics will soon become irrelevant, as did many radical ML or anarchist fringes.
I see this argument sometimes and also debated it in a panel once.
The shift to remote work for sure damages traditional unionization practices and pushes towards systemic changes that might create different conditions. If these are advantageous or not can be up for debate.
There’s one thing that I believe, in terms of strategy, ends the discussion really early: workers are overwhelmingly in favor to their right to do remote work. This means that opposing remote work is not a viable option, especially in places where the worker movements are weak. Workers would see this as attacking their interests and there’s no amount of solidarity that can convince you to do two hours of commuting a day to prevent systemic shifts that might or might not damage the worker movement.
If opposing such change is not a strategic option, we are left with the possibility of riding this change and make the best out of it: ditch old-fashioned union practices that require a specific spatial setting and replace them with effective online practices that allow to find workers, bring them together and build power in their workplaces. Work changes continually and would change even if we defeated capitalism once and for all. Practices and organizations that aim at building workers power need to be fast, flexible and up to date with the reality they have to deal with. The pace of change of most existing union is too slow and this, among other topics, might be a positive push towards a more flexible union ecosystem.
I’ve considered in the past the design of an open-source (possibly federated?) dating app and there are very complicated disincentives in a system that is not algorithimically mediated.
I believe the format of the dating app, let alone a dating app for platonic relationships, shouldn’t be proposed again unless you want to make money out of it.
The idea of a tunnel 1 to 1 across space to engage with another, isolated individual is not something that should be pursued further. This problem should be addressed by rebuilding social environments (even online, even through new forms of software if necessary) where you know you can meet like-minded people filtered by social dynamics that keep out toxic and predatory people (or horny people if you are in for a platonic thing) through swarm intelligence, social pressure and community values. We need a new grammar of online communities to build communities where flirting and getting to know people beyond a superficial level and with romantic or sexual intentions is feasible without attracting predators, groomers and other people that often target sex-positive or “dating-positive” online communities.