I might start sharing bookmarks here again from time to time. Ideally i would at least write a few words when sharing links but perhaps it’ll be links alone.
by Paul Graham Raven on Velcro City Tourist Board, april 2020, Necessary but not sufficient; on hope and optimism in solarpunk and cyberpunk
“[…] However, I’m starting to think that the precursors of the critical-utopian modality I’m looking for have been hiding in plain sight all along, disguised by a misparsing of anything that isn’t necessarily (techno)utopian as being therefore dystopian. It’s not a fashionable thing to say in this day and age, but the better writers and writings of cyberpunk seem to me to have been grappling with the challenges of adaptation to neoliberal capitalism run amok all along (rather than celebrating it, as seems to be the prevalent critical position, at least in the more fannish ends of the critical junket); that those challenges were not always exclusively ecological-environmental is, if anything, a prop to my assumption. Think of stories like Sterling’s “Green Days in Brunei” or “Bicycle Repairman”: I’d say they’re clearly solarpunk, albeit very much avant le lettre. Or at least I see them as being what solarpunk claims it wants to be… and what it might become when it sheds the techno-optimistic legacy and sees more clearly what the challenges really are.”
from huckmag.com, Haunting photos of life around the world’s oil fields, December 2022
Photography by Robin Hinsch.
