Jay Springett: So I work pro­fes­sion­al­ly in and around the blockchain space. I have been involved in the solarpunk move­ment since 2013. I’m the edi­tor of solarpunks​.net. And I’m also respon­si­ble for coin­ing the term stack­tivism many years ago, for my sins. So, I will begin. 

So I’m @thejaymo on Twitter, and you can find me pro­fes­sion­al­ly therud​er​al​.com. This talk is in four sec­tions. I’m gonna be talk­ing about the present, going to be talk­ing about visions of the future, nar­ra­tive strate­gies, and strate­gic nar­ra­tives. And I’d like to say thank you to all of the speak­ers that you’ve heard so far tonight. And I’m hop­ing my talk might be able to hit every­thing that every­one’s spo­ken about. With luck. 

So, in part one, In Context. Terra0 are uti­liz­ing blockchain tech­nolo­gies to build auto­mat­ed sys­tems to allow a for­est to own and uti­lize itself. In New Zealand, rivers are final­ly becom­ing peo­ple. Mountains too have been grant­ed legal personality. 

Corporations are already peo­ple, my friend. States are run­ning ini­tial coin offer­ings. And China needs more water, so it’s build­ing a rain­mak­ing net­work three times the size of Spain. 

More than 500 burn­ers have been deployed on alpine slopes in Tibet; the age of cli­mate megaengi­neer­ing is already upon us. And most atolls will be unin­hab­it­able by the mid 21^st century. 

So we are starved for visions of the future that will sus­tain us. The sci­ence fic­tion author Cory Doctorow said, Science fic­tion isn’t pre­dic­tive of the future. It tends to be about diag­nos­ing our cur­rent aspi­ra­tions and anx­i­eties.

So then, this is a pic­ture of Netflix’s Altered Carbon. Cyberpunk is about the pol­i­tics of the 1980s. It is about urban decay, and cor­po­rate pow­er, and glob­al­iza­tion. Cyberpunk explores the way that tech­nol­o­gy shoves human life into ever greater lev­els of extrac­tion like cyber­space, the rise of zero-tolerance polic­ing, anx­i­eties around health­care and the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll of the cold for­ev­er war, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of nuclear anni­hi­la­tion. By the way, the Robocop head­quar­ters is like, a vast­ly under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed by cyber­punk icon, in my opinion. 

Many of the con­cerns of the cyber­punk genre have come true. The rise of cor­po­rate pow­er, ubiq­ui­tous com­pu­ta­tion, and the like. Robot limbs and cool VR gog­gles. But in many ways, it’s far far worse. The exis­ten­tial threat of cli­mat­ic change leans over all of our futures, and our insti­tu­tions seem to be unable or unwill­ing to do any­thing. But in the dark future that cyber­punk pro­duced, the 80s as a decade were book­end­ed by the erad­i­ca­tion of small­pox in 1980 and the glob­al ban of CFCs in 1989. 

Our cur­rent pop­u­lar cul­ture sees no such hope. It is full of nar­ra­tives of indi­vid­ual super­heroes, or sav­iors, in increas­ing­ly des­per­ate attempts to band togeth­er to defeat exis­ten­tial cri­sis of ever-increasing mag­ni­tude. The sci­ence fic­tion author and futur­ist Madeline Ashby on her blog gave us one piece of advice at the end of last year. And that is to talk loud­ly, and fre­quent­ly, and in detail about the future that you want. Because you can’t man­i­fest what you don’t share.

So, then. I am a solarpunk because the only oth­er options are denial or despair. 

Solarpunk as Narrative Strategy. In 2014, the EIA, CIA, and World Bank pub­lished a graph chart­ing the falling cost of solar and titled it ​“Welcome to the Terrordome.” But we don’t see ter­ror in this future. Solarpunk envi­sions a world with a dras­tic tech­no­log­i­cal shift towards renew­ables, and decen­tral­iza­tion empow­ers move­ments for social jus­tice and eco­nom­ic lib­er­a­tion. It sees infra­struc­ture as a site of poten­tial resistance.

Solarpunk is a move­ment in spec­u­la­tive fic­tion, art, fash­ion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the ques­tion, what does a sus­tain­able civ­i­liza­tion look like, and how can we get there? It is con­cerned with the strug­gles en route to a bet­ter world, and solu­tions to live com­fort­ably with­out fos­sil fuels, to equi­tably man­age scarci­ty and share abun­dance, to be kinder to each oth­er and to the plan­et that we share. 

Whilst the term has some antecedents online, solarpunk tru­ly began in Brazil in 2012, with the pub­li­ca­tion of an anthol­o­gy sub­ti­tled ​“eco­log­i­cal and fan­tas­tic sto­ries in a sus­tain­able world.” And today, the English trans­la­tion has just gone up for pre­order on Amazon, if you wan­na go check it out. Since then in 2012, the idea has been picked up as a flag, or as a ban­ner, by a diverse com­mu­ni­ty of activists, writ­ers, artists, and tech­nol­o­gists. There are now mul­ti­ple antholo­gies of short and not-so-short fic­tion you can find online. 

Rejecting both the low-life and high-tech dystopias of cyber­punk and the low-life and low-tech sur­vival slogs of post-capitalist sci­ence fic­tion like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Mad Max, solarpunk aims to can­cel the apoc­a­lypse. It attempts to fos­ter a socio­cul­tur­al envi­ron­ment which empha­sizes indi­vid­ual auton­o­my, con­sent, uni­ty and diver­si­ty, with free egal­i­tar­i­an dis­tri­b­u­tion of pow­er. Of course, with these prin­ci­ples comes polypho­ny. One can­not speak for oth­er solarpunks, only be in dia­logue and occa­sion­al cho­rus with them. 

Diane Cardwell, Solar Power Battle Puts Hawaii at Forefront of Worldwide Changes

The upcom­ing 21^st cen­tu­ry shift towards clean ener­gy opens the future to an age of inno­v­a­tive dis­sent. Solarpunk seeks to lever­age the nar­ra­tive log­ic of a decen­tral­ized infra­struc­ture and its tech­nolo­gies to change the kind of pol­i­tics and futures that we can imag­ine. A solarpunk plot unfold­ing in real time right now is Spain’s attempt to make it ille­gal to use solar pan­els to go off the grid, which has since devel­oped into the sun tax on pho­to­volta­ic instal­la­tions. Power has already seen the pos­si­ble points of nar­ra­tive entry and is already cir­cling wag­ons around the kind of future that we want. 

Solarpunk is not unaware of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy stud­ies and infra­struc­ture the­o­ry, and that has quite right­ly found that cer­tain tech­nolo­gies inter­nal­ize cer­tain ide­olo­gies. The effects of these inter­nal­ized ide­olo­gies are all around us, in some sense. The vertically-integrated but inter­de­pen­dent stack of tech­nolo­gies that keep us alive has grown over time, but the his­tor­i­cal and the inter­nal bias­es of the peo­ple that made them, and the tech­nolo­gies them­selves, some­how lean through time and still touch us today. 

Olivia Rosane, Anthem of the Sun: Solarpunk aims to can­cel the apocalypse

Solarpunk is also not unaware of the fact that new tech­nolo­gies don’t inher­ent­ly alter the pow­er dynam­ics that gov­ern the divi­sion of domes­tic labor, or even call them into ques­tion. Solarpunk attempts to play with the pow­er dynam­ics by imag­in­ing new ways of being in the world, with the new tech­nolo­gies as props. 

Solarpunk cre­ates a mul­ti­tude of spaces for indige­nous sov­er­eign­ties, repro­duc­tive jus­tice, and rad­i­cal queer pol­i­tics. It con­trasts the grim futures of cyber­punk with a bright virid­i­an green opti­mism. Solarpunk is a response to Szeman and Boyer’s call that we need to map out oth­er ways of being, behav­ing, and belong­ing in rela­tion to ener­gy in order to reimag­ine moder­ni­ty in the face of glob­al warm­ing. Rhys Williams on solarpunk in the LARB wrote,

It’s pos­si­ble that a shift to renew­ables will spell the end of cap­i­tal­ism; that alter­na­tive forms of ener­gy are not com­pat­i­ble with cap­i­tal’s grail of prof­it and growth. [But] where there’s a cap­i­tal­ist will there’s usu­al­ly a cap­i­tal­ist way. The neces­si­ty of ener­gy tran­si­tion pro­vides us with a his­tor­i­cal moment of cri­sis in which oppos­ing ide­olo­gies are wrestling over the future not only of ener­gy, but of soci­ety. The point is less whether renew­able ener­gy auto­mat­i­cal­ly equals a fair­er soci­ety, and more that the mas­sive infra­struc­tur­al changes ahead pro­vide lever­age to insti­tute some­thing better.
Rhys Williams, Solarpunk: Against a Shitty Future

In solarpunk, ener­gy is explic­it­ly polit­i­cal, and the unfold­ing process­es that renew­ables provide—the trans­mu­ta­tion of wind, water, and solar—projected for­ward result in new human life­ways. It is a human­i­ty in com­mu­nion with the environment. 

Its ​“futur­ism is not nihilis­tic like cyber­punk, and not quasi-reactionary like steam­punk. It is a great tragedy that steam­punk as a genre was not decolo­nial to its core from its incep­tion. Optimism and pes­simism, utopia and dystopia are not real­ly mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. They are coex­ist­ing con­cepts, like two sides of the same coin. And a coin is always pos­si­ble to flip. Progress/development is not the same as growth, and an inte­gral the­sis of solarpunk should be about decou­pling the first from the sec­ond. More is not bet­ter.” Solarpunk is punk because opti­mism and the prac­ti­cal route for­ward are very much not in vogue cul­tur­al­ly, or are they the sta­tus quo. 

Elvia Wilk, Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime?

Solarpunk treats sus­tain­able inno­va­tions as a prob­lem of pol­i­tics as much as engi­neer­ing. It is not a genre that relies on huge tech­no­log­i­cal leaps into the future, nor by tak­ing wist­ful glances at the past, but by look­ing lat­er­al­ly at what’s already in the world and pro­ject­ing it for­ward. And the world right now around us pro­vides a rich soil of ideas and action from which our strug­gles to an on-route to a bet­ter world can grow. 

One such exam­ple is David Holmgren, the co-originator of per­ma­cul­ture’s newest design man­u­al Retrosurburbia, The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future. It is a weighty tome of design pat­terns and men­tal mod­els that can be adopt­ed by any­one liv­ing in a city, with ideas for plant­i­ng in win­dow box­es and scal­ing up to retro­fitting whole streets in coher­ent ways. It focus­es on and rec­og­nizes top­ics such as the pro­vi­sion of basic needs rather than expen­sive wants that will dom­i­nate future pol­i­cy and action; sim­ple and robust sys­tems that are capa­ble of being main­tained with­out expen­sive and spe­cial­ized tech­nol­o­gy; pro­gres­sive rural­iza­tion of our set­tle­ment pat­terns and process­es in which bio­log­i­cal needs and func­tions of food sup­ply, water, and nutri­ent recy­cling will be fun­da­men­tal to the redesigns; and relo­ca­tion of our economies and deci­sion­mak­ing structures. 

Other books such as Sprawl Repair by Galina Tachieva (I’m sor­ry if I said that wrong) point to design pat­terns that can be used in con­cert with Hologram’s Retrosuburbia to redesign our cities and bring about a solarpunk-type future. 

Solarpunk then, should be con­sid­ered a grand dress rehearsal for the future that we would like to live in, told through sto­ry, dreams, and song, aligned with the prac­ti­cal devel­op­ments and inter­ven­tions in the world that exist today as its stage. 

Strategic Narrative. Unfortunately for us, to arrive at this future there is a laun­dry list of things that need to be reun­der­stood. I work pro­fes­sion­al­ly in and around the blockchain space, as I said ear­li­er, and align myself com­plete­ly with Jaya’s cri­tique. So with the remain­ing time that I have I’d like to intro­duce you to my cur­rent research project, Land As Platform. It’s gonna be a book as well, and it’s gonna be a long slog to fin­ish it. 

So Land As Platform. What can we learn from the log­ic of plat­forms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon that have arisen along­side our cul­ture of ubiq­ui­tous com­pu­ta­tion? And how could these log­ics be applied to our land­scapes around us? Platforms are more than enti­ties for cri­tique, as in plat­form cap­i­tal­ism. Stafford Beer’s huge­ly influ­en­tial book is called Platform for Change. What then in the 21^st cen­tu­ry are the kind of changes that land as plat­form needs to con­tend with? 

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Climate change: Drought may threat­en much of globe with­in decades

Given the pro­ject­ed changes to our cli­mate in the next cen­tu­ry, and depend­ing on which mod­els you look at, what does it mean to imag­ine the Netherlands as a Mediterranean cli­mate, or as a per­ma­nent, frozen icy tun­dra? Both out­comes are pos­si­bil­i­ties that require long-term think­ing and prepa­ra­tion com­bined with detailed sce­nario planning. 

So then, giv­en the dis­pas­sion­ate eye that they require us to think about the Netherlands as icy tun­dra or as Mediterranean cli­mate, whole cli­mat­ic zones mov­ing thou­sands, pos­si­bly tens of thou­sands of kilo­me­ters, we need to recon­sid­er what Western ecol­o­gy real­ly means when it talks about native, non-native, and inva­sive species. Plants and trees will have to be moved and assist­ed in their relo­ca­tion, just as human­i­ty will need to be replant­ed and resited. 

Natural per­son­hood and non-Western life­ways will need to be rein­cor­po­rat­ed back into our cul­ture after 500 years of inter­mis­sion. Decolonizing our cul­ture in nar­ra­tive, sci­ence, and law should be con­sid­ered one of the pri­ma­ry tasks for inter­est­ed per­sons in the 21^st cen­tu­ry. These new land­scapes will need to be designed. Ecologists and preser­va­tion­ists may squirm at the idea, but tru­ly there is no such thing as nature. Not with­out humans present inside it. The term ​“rewil­d­ing” should be con­sid­ered code for allow­ing a com­mu­ni­ty of enti­ties to unfold in place and time. 

I spoke last week in Berlin at Trust, which is a new insti­tu­tion for plat­form design and utopi­an con­spir­a­cy. I con­sid­ered the impli­ca­tions of deep sens­ing devices embed­ded with­in our envi­ron­ment, and the impli­ca­tions for these types of devices giv­en the end of general-purpose com­put­ing and the accel­er­a­tion of ASICs, or application-specific inte­grat­ed cir­cuit chip devel­op­ment. You can find that talk at peer2peer​web​.com. It’ll be online soon. 

The pos­si­bil­i­ties and ques­tions that arise from deep sens­ing are ques­tion of LoNo com­put­ing, low- or no-power devices embed­ded with­in our envi­ron­ments, sur­fac­ing data. These devices don’t sur­face the data with the log­ic of state-like leg­i­bil­i­ty and con­trol, but as the cre­ation of new data land­scapes that a plat­form can con­tain. These data land­scapes are new nich­es that human­i­ty can move towards, exist in, and reacts to. 

Deep sens­ing and embed­ded com­put­ing pro­duces a fur­ther impli­ca­tion for how we exist with things in the world. Coexisting along­side trees, plants, rivers, moun­tains, deep sens­ing devices out in the land­scape should be approached and thought about like minute bits of moun­tain tricked into think­ing with cap­tured lightning. 

Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir

The plat­form, then, exists in a kind of devel­op­ing present, rather than fixed to a spe­cif­ic idea of the future. Platforms like Facebook or Amazon, when dis­sect­ed can be decom­posed into mod­u­lar ele­ments that can be recon­fig­ured and rede­ployed to prospect new poten­tial lines of devel­op­ment. The mod­el of a plat­form is to con­tin­u­ous­ly flower, not control. 

Large-scale land design projects can trans­form land­scapes. The heavy lift­ing lift­ing is con­tained main­ly with­in the plan­ning phase. Working with local res­i­dents and plan­ning detailed, frac­tal water­cours­es takes far longer and more effort than regen­er­at­ing the land­scape and plant­i­ng trees itself. Does any­one know where the Loess Plateau is? 

[Unidentified speak­er: China?] 

Yes. So, on the left is where the ter­ra­cot­ta war­riors were dis­cov­ered, and on the left is what 10,000 years of agri­cul­ture will do to a land­scape essentially. 

So I want to con­sid­er the appli­ca­tion of land use plan­ning schemes such as key­line design algo­rith­mi­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed from the land­scape topol­o­gy, in an urgent call for holis­tic think­ing in mesh net­work pro­to­cols and radio design in order to best com­ple­ment the new geospa­tial log­ics of land as plat­form. This is a whole­sale reassess­ment of land in the light of cli­mate change. 

Leif Weatherby, Delete Your Account: On the Theory of Platform Capitalism

Meatspace and cyber­space have fused. But plat­forms are still raised areas that facil­i­tate. What does it mean for deep sens­ing and new land­scape log­ics being applied at the same lev­el of detail as we would apply build­ing codes and zon­ing in cities will only fur­ther this new real­i­ty. We should be mind­ful of what it means for forests to own and uti­lize them­selves, rivers and moun­tains to be per­son­ed, think­ing machines and dis­trib­uted autonomous orga­ni­za­tions with or with­out oth­ers to coex­ist along­side one anoth­er amidst the upcom­ing tur­moil of the 21^st cen­tu­ry. I’m not sure what it will look like, but I hope you will fol­low along with my work as I attempt to puz­zle it out. Thanks.