Why less fantastical shades of our genre have greater power to inspire
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing it badly. I really agree that tangible visions are easier to convert to action. But I think we need both visions - tangible and idealistic, since they feed each other in my eyes.
The idealistic is the end location, the tangible is the directions to it.
We can’t arrive there if we don’t know how, and knowing how won’t get us there if we don’t have the location.
Yup. I am not interested in packing if the destination is just the trailer park down the road. I prepared for utopia, I won’t settle for less! Your solar cooked organic food is really nice but it is just a rest in our trip to the fully automated space luxury communism we all deserve.
Well said!
Agreed. The end of the article refers to a “more rooted shade of solarpunk” implying a diversity of thought and tactics. I think sometimes people get stuck in a “this or that “ line of thought when it’s possible and useful to have “this AND that “
More realistic visions are super important, especially for people who arent as invested in far future concepts.
I think for the average person the super futuristic visions just feel like fantasy and dont really change how that person views their own life. More ‘reasonable’ visions actually feel achievable and motivate people to take action and feel like they can actually move towards a better future.
Thanks for sharing, it made me think more deeply about how how to bring more people into the community :)
I think it’s also important to have a diversity of aesthetics and cultural representations to gain a more universal appeal - and also that diversity needs to be understood very broadly. Movements like this seem to typecast themselves relatively quickly, as there are few role models available and people adopt an aesthetic, or mannerisms, or jargon as a sort of identifier that they belong to the group, which ends up being just as exclusionary as it is a marker of inclusion.
There will always be people who see the extreme version as wildly inspiring, and those who see it as ugly or frightening or wildly unrealistic. Ex: earthships - personally I think it’s awesome to have a self-sufficient space with indoor gardens, but they are huge and ugly af. But people renovating and retrofitting their century old houses with natural materials and respect for the original architecture? Yes please.
I guess I’m trying to say that the fantastic needs to have a place under the umbrella alongside the pragmatic, and the vegans alongside the people with turkeys in their backyard, and the DIY permies alongside people who would never ever use an old bathtub as a planter but are willing to xeriscape their front lawn with native perennials, and the people who make their own sandals out of bicycle tubes alongside the people who buy really expensive shoes for life etc etc.
This all sounds like roleplaying trying to use fantasy sounding words.
How so? Please elaborate. What could be worded differently?
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I talk like that in real life.
I play a lot of table top role playing games, so maybe that’s why, but we exist.
Yeah, idk but this comment seems a bit ignorant of the fact that other people use different words than you and whatever (boring sounding) publications you’re exposed to.
And “things with no practical value”, is absolutely a false statement. Just because you’ve blinded yourself to the practicality and usefulness of art, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Tho I will concede that your list of boring, sterile and utilitarian words there might be helpful in convincing establishment capitalists, since those are what they care about.
All that being said, your voice becomes uniquely important in taking the flowery prose us more artsy folk use, and converting them into the nutrient dense, flavorless block of knowledge that you can share to the people who need words like “easy” and “cheap” to sell them on a sustainable future.
You’re doing gods work lol
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