What do I think of solarpunk aesthetic(s)? Great question, thank you for asking.

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I love that solarpunk...

transmuted the grunge and cynicism of cyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk, atompunk into something hopeful

• This is confusing to me and seems to hold some strategic lesson - how did it borrow the name and the general form of “____punk” but completely invert the casual pessimism?

it recruits agency out of climate anxiety

• I’m using ‘recruit’ in the sense of ‘renew, restore' as well as 'enlist’ e.g. 'the athlete worked to recruit fast-twitch muscle fibers'
• It’s a good example of an aesthetic being genuinely responsive contemporary yearnings (ala Virgin Postrel on what makes something glamorous). I’m definitely less climate anxious than it’s intended audience, but it seems to resonate with people (and still appeals to me).
• This is a testable assumption (just needs artwork, some measures of self-efficacy & climate anxiety, and participants) - the hope / expectation is that it is can help, perhaps in some small way, with a kind of cognitive re-tooling (vs just serving as passive escapism).
• Hope theory (Snyder, 2002) nicely articulates this: “Hope is defined as the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways”

it communicates a lot quickly about values and intention

• If I know someone genuinely loves solarpunk, then I can make a guess at their interest in finding a humanly delightful outcome to environmental problems (as opposed to just enjoying leveraging a problem for narrative power, catering despair, or resigning to some destructive fate, which also happen). It’s a pretty good basis to start a conversation from - a kind of compressed value signal.
• In general, I think positive aesthetics are a great way to find deeper values alignment between the most solutions-oriented members seemingly disparate intellectual communities.
  • For example, experience of reading the AI 2027 projected future timeline (the one that ends well) or of opening a physical copy of Palladium both afford me a sense of relate-ability and shared ambition with communities or audiences that, at other times, can feel intellectually alien.
  • Of course, one still has to be careful - terrible movements and cultures can still produce excellent marketing.

can be flexible, dynamic, interpretable

• This has a downside - I find some instances of the aesthetic more useful / hopeful / relatable than others. Still, it offers something broadly recognizable while leaving room for experimentation and adaptation to context or taste.

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I wish...

that it were less constrained by green-ification.

• I recognize that the visual representation shouldn’t always be taken literally - the point is the atmosphere - but there is still something consistently compensatory or immersive in images:
  • by compensatory, I mean: “this future is still able to have cities because we’ve overwhelmed them with greenery to compensate for their impact”
  • by immersive, I mean: “this future is able to have cities because we’ve immersed them in flora and thereby restored a requisite literal integration of nature and civilization”
• Again, Virginia Postrel has a useful note that’s relevant to some subset of solarpunk city scapes: “Making the future alluring requires more than reconstituting twentieth-century visions with more greenery. It means understanding an ‘abundance agenda’ as a way to provide a common substrate for many different versions of the good life: not the future but many futures.”

it weren't so down on capitalism

• That's all. I'd rather see something counter-cultural in a radically laissez faire sense.

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‍I wonder...

how this template might be rendered into a protocol

The (partly hypothetical, partly presumed) benefit that I’m interested in here is that after seeing a piece of solarpunk artwork, someone anxious about climate is more likely & more excited to think about new technology or useful lifestyle changes than to fall into unproductive despair or helplessness (again, a great research question). This might be something specifically queued or role modeled in a visual or story, or it might just be the result of ingesting the hopeful idea that ‘things could go well’. In any event, this restoration of agency would be useful for anyone tackling a scary or exhausting problem. Of course, how someone reacts to art depends on the person and the art and the context, but I’m convinced there’s something there, even though it’s a complex relationship. Notably, there’s a reasonable case to be made for dystopian / catastrophic art as a partial complement to more optimistic content, either for the sake of tragedy or for the sake of ‘don’t let this happen’ motivation. Not all aesthetics should follow the form I am investigating here. That said, I do think more could be surprisingly beneficial.

My initial draft of a generalizable protocol looks like this:

1. ID an ‘anxiety cluster’ - Consider a group of people worried about a particular big problem. This might be visibly demonstrated by a community, or it might emerge unexpectedly through surveys or interviews (huh, people are worried about X). I imagine this works best if you’re in the cluster or near it. The goal is provide that cluster of concern with an aesthetic that reminds them of what they are or could be working towards.
2. Imagine resolutions - some hypothetical future scenes that demonstrate resolution of that problem (not by chance - like some combination of technology and philosophy / way of existing has addressed it).
3. Develop aesthetic signatures - some queues (visual or otherwise) that can serve as signatures of that resolution.
4. Test, refine -  share with folks and get feedback of some form on hopefulness, perceived agency, likelihood to act, perhaps sense of community or other outcomes of interest.
5. Encourage remixing - share process, make the starting point open source, easy to find, and easy to build on

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Trying it out

As a first-go, I’ll use myself and my knowledge of adjacent peers as default sources for anxieties, then brainstorming some potential elements that represent resolution. I use the naming format of “____punk” below to indicate it’s following the basic template from above, but in some cases, it’s not actually ‘punk’ at all and would need a different name (or could have a ‘punk’ version distinct from other variations, probably depending on one's solution path / philosophy). I think there’s a very reasonable argument that punk is over-used, or used in a way that dilutes the meaning. Nonetheless, it’s repetition has created a kind-of modularity or suffix-meaning that I’m using as a proxy / stand-in here.

• Safety_punk - the positive outcome of the AI 2027 report is a good example. More stories? Renderings? Drama featuring decision points in the narrative form the perspective of key actors? Elements like a Toyota plant’s subtle and ubiquitous safety messaging. Industrial environments featuring attractive PPE? Open kitchens or transparent food trucks?
  • The rationalist / ex-risk community already has its own aesthetic tastes, so it’s not clear what the difference would be. Something more broadly accessible and simply focused on providing a vision of successful resolution to a challenge (vs trying to teach something / make a point). Also something a bit more visually recognizable / signature; focusing on the feeling of a safe outcome.
  • Claude offered: Like IKEA's design philosophy meets NASA mission control—functional transparency with calm, reliable aesthetics.
  • GPT offered: Like what a Toyota assembly line feels like if it were a city. Clear signage, ambient feedback, calm precision. You could draw on Ben Mosior’s work on Wardley Mapping and operational safety.
• Civic_punk - an aesthetic featuring productive civic engagement and debate - spontaneous productive debates in public squares? Times-square scale advertisements for nuanced viewpoints, or invitations to lecture series? Stadiums full to the brim watching live political wargaming or simulation exercises? Children engaged in productive civic debate while doing normal children things like playing catch? Participants or bystanders easily preventing a fist-fight over a political discussion or a public speech (because they want to hear the rest of it and political violence is widely seen as profoundly barbaric and ridiculous and unhelpful).
  • GPT offered: Like Hannah Arendt’s “public realm” meets ESPN. Imagine live-streamed citizen juries with public commentary, aestheticized voting booths, or kids arguing zoning codes with LEGO.
    • the lego zoning scenario is sort-of amusing but also quite eerie to me
• Fission_punk? Fusion_punk (FznPunk?) - a world shaped by plentiful power featuring tons of lighting, electrical machinery, desalination - perhaps a lot of softly glowing decor. Landscapes / cityscapes feature aesthetically adventurous and prominently positioned nuclear power generators (of varied forms). Warm-climate plants in cold locations. Forests and parks in deserts. Landscape irrigation to prevent wildfires. Comfortable, high energy urban environments in previously harsh, inhospitable climates.
  
  • Claude offered: Blade Runner's neon glow meets Scandinavia's winter light festivals, but powered by elegant fusion reactors.

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• Philosophy_punk? Perhaps similar to civic_punk. If a cyberpunk character navigate alleyways of power cords and storefronts with neon signs and black market goods, then a character in philosophy_punk would navigate a physical marketplace of different ideas competing (civilly) - perhaps by wandering contemporary colonnades full of neo-Aristotelians arguing with neo-Epicureans arguing with neo-Nietzcheans arguing with neo-Confucianists arguing with neo-Stoicists etc. Styles and spaces reflective of different philosophical priorities. Would need to prevent this form looking like some multi-cultural traditionalist competition - perhaps individuals in a wide range of spaces set up for productive dialogue (lecterns, round tables, courtyards, soap-boxes, etc).
  • GPT offered: Think “The West Wing” meets Assassin’s Creed’s ancient debates. Highly memetic: TikToks of dueling philosophies in beautiful courtyards.
• Industrial_literacy_punk? Well, things would probably just work better, for one. There might be entrances to high end machine shops tastefully interwoven with (or reasonably nearby) Manhattan’s luxury goods stores and restaurants - while the process of producing or procuring luxury items might be marketed in great detail as evidence of quality or novelty. The most hipster parts of Brooklyn might have more experimental R&D spaces alongside breweries. Labels on food products might focus a bit more on the process of production and the history of its development (i.e. not the name of the cow you’re eating or how whether its local, but some detail on the production process and philosophy or the science behind artificial meat). Waiters and diners might likewise be literate in the time and temperature tolerances for different bacterial growth or the appropriate added or reduced costs associated with different fertilizer or other production methods. Diets might be more nuanced and technical than ‘vegan’ ‘gluten free’ ‘free range’ - instead preferring the taste of fruits and vegetables genetically modified with certain approaches or grown in soil of a particular composition; or of meats processed in facilities with especially demanding (and publicly known) tolerances for safety and quality consistency. Protest signs with with unexpectedly technical references.
  • Claude offered: Wes Anderson's meticulous detail meets How It's Made
• Progress_punk? Stadiums full to the brim for panels or presentations by scientists, engineers, founders, artists, on how they work and what they think (attended by the curious public, topical hobbyists, and professional practitioners alike - the speakers actively crowdsourcing ideas or prompting areas of research for attendees to undertake); University alumni forking over millions to outcompete rival institutions in funding various research initiatives ( with the same level of jubilant flair as for sports); museum exhibitions asking the public for help answering uncertain historical questions, or for input on the relevance of the displayed historical artifacts to a contemporary problem; fashion lines for underwater and aerial nightlife, space-tourism-wear, casual and formal outfits for medical practitioners, beautiful & high performing industrial safety gear, outfits that can be worn in two or more very geographically and culturally disparate locations within one day, comfortable and outfit integrated technomancer-esque pandemic PPE. Some more open-air, transparent version of cyberpunk black-market scenery?

I recognize people are already working on aesthetics in many of these areas - my goal is to try and exercise / begin to sort out something repeatable.

This is likely all wrong. A more realistic course may be that a small number of artists create some popular work(s) that deeply transports readers / viewers, sets a standard, and is mimicked and adapted. However, solarpunk seems more grassroots than this, and ai offers individuals a lot of increased creative capability, so maybe we’ll see aesthetic movements emerge (more and faster) without figure-head or keystone artworks / novels / films (e.g. the whole cottage-core or academia-core thing seems like a spontaneous aesthetic enabled by random online super-users/producers, so I’m optimistic about the feasibility).

Again, my initial brainstorm above is rooted in familiar anxieties and hopes - and I haven’t successfully distilled many repeatable visual cues, but it’s a start.

P.S. hopepunk is also an interesting case study, though I don’t regularly encounter self-described hopepunk content or hear the term used casually / descriptively, so I’m less sure equipped to react to it.

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