Solarpunk: Life in the Future Beyond the Rusted Chrome of Yestermorrow
I wrote up my 2019 Unsound Festival talk: ‘Solarpunk — Life in the Future Beyond the Rusted Chrome Of Yestermorrow’ on my blog.
It covers DIY Punk, Cultural Fracking, The Chrome Of Yestermorrow, Cyberpunk, Solarpunk, Visions of the Future and the Anthropogreen and more.
Here’s what the sentiers.media newsletter said about it:
Fascinating piece here (based on a presentation so lots of visuals) by Jay Springett who sets the table by covering some memetic theory and media narratives, to then beautifully present and explain what Solarpunk aims to achieve. He presents punk and mainstream, how our interests and where we can share them was atomized by the internet, to then re-cohear on the big platforms. Pre-internet is the last time there was a more defined mainstream, so Disney and others are constantly re-hashing old heroes and cultures. They “frack” the media of the past because it is the (somewhat) common ground they can make blockbusters from.
It’s the same with sci-fi and most of the futures presented to us; they are old futures based on and extracted from the culture of those past decades. As “climate change looms over all those futures and no-one seems capable of doing anything about it,” we need better futures, extrapolated from this present, not that of our predecessors. “We need to collectively foster a new way of seeing the world” and, quoting Madeline Ashby, we need “to talk, loudly and frequently and in detail, about the future [we] want. You can’t manifest what you don’t share.
I highlighted 32 passages from this talk so I highly recommend having a look, even if only to see his slides, it’s the best presentation of Solarpunk I’ve read, covers a lot of ground, is hopeful, and cites quite a few topics and people often covered in Sentiers.
futurecrun.ch called it an “incredibly cool exploration of solarpunk as both a sci-fi genre and radical social movement.”
Head on over to https://www.thejaymo.net/solarpunk-rusted-chrome/ if you want read it.
