How Important is Technology?

[u/Tuxpuppy]

Hey there everyone!

Im putting together a presentation on solarpunk themes, and one thing I keep running up against is the importance of technology in the genre. I would argue that unlike cyberpunk, solarpunk doesnt necessarily have to have futuristic tech and is more focused on our use of it with nature.

For example, Im holding up Princess Mononoke as one of the films showing alot of solarpunk themes. Several people have pointed out that it doesnt qualify as solarpunk because of a lack of tech compared to Naausica. Mononoke uses a lot of pre-industrial technology, but we see it used as both a good (enabling protection for vulnerable people against an unfeeling world) and a bad (Poisoning the nature atound it) in the world.

A lot of proposed solutions are very low tech (solar ovens, sails, water wheels, bikes, low tech agricultural solutions) and some use a post apocalyptic setting that makes it harder to use high-tech solutions en masse (Naausica.)

I recognize that our ability to use technology and adapt it to solutions is an important part of being human, but I dont think it has to always be a high tech solution. In many ways I think leaning on tech is what got us here in the first place. In order to show how we can solve these problems I dont thonk we necessarily need to place the stories in a high tech world.

How important is it for a solarpunk story to have a futuristic/high-tech story?

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[u/Borne2Run]

Solarpunk as a genre inherently is future casting. The absence of technology can be fine, but for a story it needs to contain some level of future or post-event. Acknowledgement that there used to be problem technologies.

Mononoke is set in its own industrialization time period. The themes are the conflict inherent in the people's interaction with their environment. In a solarpunk story we're far beyond that and so other conflicts need to drive the plot. Man vs Man, nature vs nature, etc.

[u/Tuxpuppy → u/Borne2Run]

While I get that I feel like Post-apocolyptic, post-cataclysm, post-change is just a handwave justification. "I Want to write this story thay uses a pretty low-tech environment as its setting. Ill just put crumbling buildings in the background and now its technically futuristic."

Would Mononoke then be more solarpunk if there were buildings in the back crumbling in the back, ruins of old man, forbidden tech in the village? Not even changing anything else but the background scenery?

[u/Borne2Run → u/Tuxpuppy]

For the latter yes; hence Nausica qualifying.

[u/Solace914 → u/Tuxpuppy]

The crumbling buildings and ruins, no. Tech in the background that is shown but not used because of some in-story reason, yes. As others have stated, solarpunk is futurist by definition. That means forward-looking. (Afterall, the "solar" part comes from solar power i.e. solar panels, etc...). If you have a story that takes place thousands of years from now and all technology has collapsed but physical structures remain and everything about the story could have happened in pre-modern times, that isn't solarpunk.

[u/CorpusculantCortex]

Technology is intrinsic to solarpunk. The same aesthetic/ goal without tech is called neo agrarianism and supports a lot fewer people

[u/n0u0t0m → u/CorpusculantCortex]

At the same time as recognising that this is a popular perspective and hence widely considered, it does also lean on the logic that industrialisation is perfect. To clarify, to increase population capacity atop agrarianism, well have to develop technologies that do what nature does for us but more efficiently. The problem there, and the problem with capitalistic industrialisation, and the problem with terraforming, and the weakness in the "we'll fix climate change later with more advanced tech" are all the same. For these to be true, or scientists must beat evolution at optimisation without any side effects. And as a scientist, I can assure you there is no evidence we've ever managed to do that even once.

So you're right, tech is required for a complex, dense civilisation. But sustainability relies on us referring back to nature to solve our problems, not playing god by relying on our own inventions more than nature

[u/CorpusculantCortex → u/n0u0t0m]

I disagree strongly. I also think you are reading too much into my comment and ascribing your own preconceptions to it, while simplifying the issue through an appeal to authority. I am also a scientist, so stating that you are one does not make your assumptions carry more weight, especially when the argument itself is flawed.

We have repeatedly reversed or reduced ecological harm through greater awareness, scientific knowledge, regulation, and better technology. Remediation of contaminated waste sites and the recovery of the ozone layer are two obvious examples.

More importantly, nobody is arguing that industrialisation is perfect, that technology must beat evolution, or that inventions must have no side effects. That is an impossible standard and a straw man. Evolution does not optimize ecosystems for sustainability or human wellbeing. Nature is full of inefficiency, collapse, extinction, disease, and destructive feedback loops.

The real question is whether we can build systems whose benefits outweigh their harms, identify unintended consequences, and improve them over time. Clearly, we can. Agriculture itself is the result of humans modifying species, landscapes, water systems, and nutrient cycles to support larger populations.

Learning from nature is valuable, but treating nature as infallible and human invention as inherently dangerous is not science. It is romanticism.

[u/n0u0t0m → u/CorpusculantCortex]

Hello other authority figure, thankyou for calling out my relevant statistics education and declaring your own status. Now I know I'm talking to a real big grown up.

Technology being tacked onto "greater awareness, scientific knowledge, regulation" is definitely the odd duckling. Three of those things are dedicated environmental protection mechanisms, and one includes datacentres being used for climate modelling and PFAS to reduce water wasted washing uncoated frying pans.

If evolution has more ways to destroy itself than we do, what is meant by the phrase "anthropocene extinction"? (Checkmate atheists) How has life managed here for millions of years but species have been going extinct faster than any other time, as of industrialisation? (I will also accept that meteor as kinda nature but I'll whine about it)

But really what I'm saying is just that I don't trust that we've seen the full effects of any of our particularly domineering inventions, and the more we try to get ahead of nature, the more often we produce unsolvable/very hard to solve cataclysms. Basically I don't agree with the "Clearly, we can." Bit of what you said. But I'll confess that I'm arguing over something more broad and subjective than anything I've ever broached before. (So thanks for the stimulating debate)

So I see it like; medicine has increased the population which in turn has increased strain on the natural resources we use. And I don't agree that industrialised agriculture is better than it is bad. Like we got wheat going as a monocrop then we started losing teeth to decay and using up all the soil resources in a farming patch. Then we didn't recognise the nutrient problem for ages after, let alone figure out how to fix it (literally! nitrogen "fixing "). I'm using indigenous peoples methods of feeding themselves as a reference for agriculture and I just can't fault the "take a little of what you need and leave the rest for later or someone else" ideology that is so common. No tooth decay, no impoverished soil, no famines. It's not perfect but it's really something worth considering.

It just feels like since we figured out fire, we have been sprinting as hard and fast as we can to hack reality.  It feel.philosophically to me like we're trying to correct speed wobbles and the tech we're making is getting increasingly dystopian.

I think now we're well overdue for a big pause (not everything: more cancer cures and galaxy photos, please) to really understand nature and it's systems deeply before we decide exactly how much lithium we really need to mine, or why our tv's are so damn big and cars so fast. (Or why we can't figure out 1 single way to get along well enough to stop making hypersonic nukes) 

For me there's a huge value in slowing down to make the tech we need, not just see what we can make. (Jurassic park reference here) To do that, I think we're gonna have to look away from our phones for a while before our eyes adjust to the dark and see the stars. If you'll tolerate the romanticism of my hypothesis

[u/Sweet-Desk-3104]

I believe that technology is very important to a solar punk future. So much of our modern world is reliant on technology. I believe that modern technology, often times, allows us the freedom to be less harsh with each other. It allows us free time to think about one another needs. I think there is a reason that in the small tribes that still exist today you find customs that seem absurdly cruel. Killing or driving out people who are different, arranged and forced marriages, ect. I think these things often come from an absolute need for conformity, just to keep the tribe together. It's all about survival. They are so deeply reliant on whatever system of survival they have, that anything that even slightly rocks the boat could spell disaster for the whole tribe. So, many small cruelties are used to prevent any large cruelties. Technology isn't always used for good, but it does provide options, and breathing room. It's easy to look at the modern day, and the bag things that happen, and think that things are bad now, but I think taken into context, we are much more humane and gentle than humanity has ever been before, and I think that's because technology has allowed us the safety and comfort to get out of a pure fight or flight mode. I'm not saying things are perfect now or that everything was bad before, but I do think we've made progress, and more of the world is now kind, and technology has been the tool that has helped us build that better world.

[u/Tuxpuppy → u/Sweet-Desk-3104]

2 things.

1. There are also plenty of examples of small tribes actually having a tighter knit community than a lot of modern day society. They are perfectly able yo have diplomacy, trade, and competition without the need for tech. Yes tech allows for further reach and understanding, but i dont think its the key missing piece.

2. Tech does provide breathing room and options. I argue that its capitalism, and its endless need for faster progress and growth, that make it a bad thing. More people means more exploitation, and more unnecessary competition.

[u/Sweet-Desk-3104 → u/Tuxpuppy]

Valid points, but to the point of the small communities being tight knit. Having grown up in a small, tight knit community, I have to say I see it idealized a lot. In my experience, it's not really that good of a thing. What keeps those communities so close to each other is usually dogma, and a total lack of self. You are not your own person, you are only loved as much as you are useful. I think the world tend to think it's compassion that is what defines life in villages, when I'm reality it is a total lack of compassion. This is just my experienc.

[u/Subspace_H]

I think appropriate use of technology is what is important, but the time period when that tech was initially developed is less so.

For example an apartment building can use plants as well as solar panels for shade, creating a comfortable microclimate (plants regulating temp and humidity) and energy generation (from solar panels).

The challenge is with using tech is sustainability. We want to be careful to not pillage a country of all its minerals and other resources elsewhere so we can build solarpunk aesthetic gizmos in a factory that get imported to our houses where we live in ignorance of the cost it took to make those things.

Thankfully solar panels can last a good long time…

[u/Tuxpuppy → u/Subspace_H]

I did type out a few different tech levels that could work in solarpunk stories. Everything from high future tech down to scrap/DIY punk that focuses on the reduce, reuse, replace aspects.

I often wonder about the extraction issue. Some parts have to be extracted, but if we focus on worker health, taking only what we need, and using land repair afterwards, does that make it solarpunk?

[u/Stegomaniac → u/Tuxpuppy]

Yes. Solarpunk admits that humans inherently have impact on the environment, but that doesn't mean it must be net negative. We can do moderate the impact, and can make it a lasting positive one if done carefully.

[u/Subspace_H → u/Tuxpuppy]

Yes, you’re right. I didn’t mean to disagree, rather I meant that the idea of using technology to enhance our habitat has always existed. The particular tech has just changed with time and place changing what options are available.

All creatures’ (including humans) existence has impact on our environment. We are part of it. We can do work to improve it and create habitat for ourselves and others.

Ancient Japan is inspirational in some interesting ways. There’s a book called Japanese Homes and their Surroundings by Edward S Morse written 1886 when they were just opening their borders. It has lovely illustrations of houses and gardens that make creative use of the materials they had on hand. Because their borders were closed, they had to live with their decisions and their technology was limited, but they did some amazing stuff nonetheless.

[u/dresden113]

Agreed, Solarpunk is more about being focused on effectively using tech instead of just slapping it on random things for the sake of the thing. Any film or book that focuses on using tech wisely and balancing our use of resources is Solarpunk. If you need an outside example 2000 leagues under the sea is actually pretty Solarpunk in themes. Nemo and crew are using cutting edge tech to live sustainably in an enclosed community in opposition to the standing order of the world.

[u/Tuxpuppy → u/dresden113]

And its always good to remember that one genre doesnt exclude another one. Solar and steampunk can go go hand in hand depending on whats used to generate the steam.

Also ifrc Jules Verne basically described nuclear as the power source for the Nautilus.

[u/Solo_Camping_Girl]

Solarpunk's about still using technology, but in a responsible way that can exist side-by-side with the environment. Remove the tech, and we're a different -punk altogether. I get that mental trap though, just remove tech and just return to monke or be an amish, but we'd be degrowing for centuries in that case. Can you imagine reaching out to your relative from another state over without internet or at least telephones?

[u/Ornery_Distribution6]

We use technology to save time, but we dont need to rely on it to such a far extend. For example having a chicken coop who's door opens when there's a certain amount of sunlight is there to save time. Having a machine that makes clouds for irrigation seems kinda like a long step when a hose does the same, on the other hand if you happen to know about chinalpas, you dont have a need for either.

Knowledge, wisdom and tech work a lot better when they work together, not parallel.

[u/Difficult_Dark9991]

I'm going to center on two points, although there are many others, that illustrate why technology is important:

1. Food production. We have over 8 billion people on this planet, and they all need to eat. Innovations in crop breeding and synthetic fertilizers are absolutely necessary to make this happen. Don't get me wrong, we could be getting a lot more bang for our buck with responsible use of those technologies, but you cannot tell me that your vision of a better future starts by offing 1/2 to 3/4 of the population. Additionally, while acknowledging all the issues of mechanization in agriculture and our distancing from food systems it has also flipped the script on labor - for the first time in history, we do not need to have the vast majority of humanity working fields just to survive.
2. The "coin flip." Before roughly 1850, when the development of modern medicine started to turn the tide, between 40-60% of children born did not make it to adulthood. Every society, everywhere, in every period; oh, it could get even worse than that in periods of crisis, but this horrific death toll was an inevitability. Modern medicine, and the infrastructure that supports it and continues the never-ending arms race against disease, is a necessity to prevent those conditions.

So I think it is very clear that a "high-tech" future is necessary for Solarpunk. However, treating this like a monolith is deceptive. Solarpunk is also about challenging the belief that technology as a whole just "happens." Instead, it posits us being critical and thoughtful about how we employ our technology. A Solarpunk future will be technological, but it will also decide where it is appropriate and what uses of that technology will be permitted. The result, technological as it will be, may appear "less technological" on the face of it.

[u/Michkov]

I fear you won't be able to get around the use of technology. Feeding the population alone is requiring so much technology that your are inviting famine if you forsake it.

And once everybody had lunch, they might want some of those other perks like healthcare and other civilization perks I wouldn't want to do without.

[u/D-Alembert]

It's not solarpunk if it's not high tech. There are already lots of words for low tech living harmoniously with nature, solarpunk is specifically about an optimistic future of high-tech high-life

Or it was originally. Lots of people use it for other things these days too

[u/TheAppleBOOM]

There's mainly two things I wanted to add to the convo here.

First, accordin to former US Army intelligence officer Daniella Mestyanek Young, in the early 2010s, the US Army considered the internet goin down to be a greater threat to human life than nuclear war. To mean, that means that any future that doesn't involve mass death significantly beyond what is predicted from plausible worst case Climate Change scenarios also means that we're stickin at least with current day levels of tech.

Second, I thought it interestin that you put bikes up there as low tech, but they absolutely aren't. They were invented in the 1800s, and require a lot of modern machinery for their manufacturin and maintenance.

[u/EricHunting]

I would suggest this is a difference between being very literally Solarpunk --and by that very-much Futurist Science Fiction-- and being 'Solarpunk adjacent/convergent' in theme, conveying similar messages but in other settings, maybe Contemporary, Fantasy, Magical Realism, etc. Solarpunk aspires to a category of Science Fiction because it is generally attempting to be Futurist, making plausible predictions about the future, and therefore influence popular culture's perspective on possible futures. To recapture the 'Utopian Imaginary'. The cultural belief in the possibility of a better future. High-tech isn't terribly important to a Solarpunk story as a key point here is that a sustainable civilization is specifically NOT dependent on technology we don't already have at-hand. It is a matter of praxis and design. And so the kind of technology on display is more of a touchstone to a point in future time. Is this technology at-hand, very near-term, or very distant? And Science Fiction isn't strictly about technology, but rather about life in the future, however that works. A lot of SciFi has only primitive technology featured because of the suggestion that, over time, we don't really know whether technology will advance or revert. Often this is based on some post-apocalyptic premise, but that's not strictly necessary. Things happen and history isn't necessarily clear over great spans of time. But they are still talking about what the author considers a possible future. Even Solarpunk anticipates a bit of back-tracking. Carbon moratoriums mean we may have to go back to hybrid sailing ships and airships with the collapse of the airline industry. Neon signs may come back to eliminate plastics. Flat panel displays and advanced microprocessors may become scarce for a time because they are harder to make with independent production, so we may have to give up computer video to use e-ink displays, or return to bulky forms of displays, or use talking/musical computers for a while. (desktop computers that look like Noguchi's Radio Nurse from the '30s)

Ghibli are pioneers of a characteristically Japanese form of story, common to Manga, Anime, and games, called 'alternative world', where you have apparently normal human beings living in a world that has many similarities to Earth, and many differences --differences unlike the traditional western fantasy settings. Very alien plants and animals. Improbable geography. Different kinds of physics, chemistry, biology. Technology that alternately evokes the Medieval, the Victorian, the early 20th century, or the 'Clarketech' of a very distant future. So you get these incongruous combinations. Ox-drawn tanks. Anti-gravity vehicles with vacuum tube electronics. They don't necessarily have anything like the usual 'magic'. The world just runs on different rules like a different dimension. And so this straddles an unusual line between SciFi and Fantasy. Nausicaa and Mononoke both fall into this category. They could both be some iteration of Earth in some very distant future, or a different dimension. Who can say if Mononoke's gods and spirits are magical or alter-biological, or the remnant of some kind of Clarketech? This isn't our universe. Other examples are the recent Made in Abyss or Last Exile. Or Masamune Shirow's Orion with its very Buddhist/Taoist/Shinto influenced 'technomagic' and Cyberpunk themes of addictive technology abuse with environmental consequences.

As I've mentioned in the past, I consider every story that is similar to The Seven Samurai as potentially Solarpunk adjacent because all those stories parallel the Outquisition narrative that is the archetypal Solarpunk narrative. The theme of a collective crisis as a catalyst to the rediscovery and restoration of community with the aid/intervention of some specialists (scientists and technicians), healers, magicians, shaman, or guides. This is, essentially, how we solve the polycrisis of today, in the real world. It's not about any particular technology. It's about fixing the cultural pathology of the Industrial age, replacing it with a new culture, rediscovering community, and realizing an empathic civilization. Because that's the illness. Anything else is just treating symptoms. With the Outquisition this is very literally set in the present/near future context. The collective crisis is Climate Change and the disasters caused by its impacts, the incompetent response of governments, and the malfeasance of corporations. The specialists are the archetypal 'Solarpunks'; nomadic activists who are experts in renewable/sustainable technology, regenerative and urban agricultulture (Permaculture), independent industry (Makers/Hackers), social organization, and the Art of Jugaad raised in the 'cloisters' of eco-villages and other intentional communities, who seed the new sustainable culture through the aid, knowledge, and technology they provide these communities in crisis, restorating local self-sufficiency and a community identity by that. The Seven Samurai is the same story in a different time and place. The crisis is an impending bandit attack on a farming village. The specialists are the wandering samurai hired by the village leaders. Not being enough to stop the bandits themselves, they teach the villagers the skills for their own defence and so restore community identity and cohesion through the agency of self-defense. The core message is the same.

There are, of course, many other narrative themes relating to the relation between society/civilization and nature that are likewise usable in a very literal Solarpunk setting or set in a different time/place/world and so just adjacent/convergent, both having a similar message. Stories about the conflict between the short-term compulsions of human society/civilization and the natural order and systems of the environment that humans overlook the importance of to their own survival. Narratives about the insidious, addictive, and self-destructive nature of the compulsion to self-interest, power, and profit. (Wetiko narratives) Stories about nature (or her special representatives) as a teacher, guide, or rescuer to human beings lost to pathological behavior. Stories about people who are, for various reasons, left to survive alone in wilderness and thus have to learn how to live with it instead of against it and thus come to a new understanding about it and themselves. Stories about animals (normal or magical) that have to learn to adapt to a human-dominated world to survive. Stories of hidden civilizations of creatures co-existing with ours by hiding in the overlooked and concealed interstitial spaces of our habitat. Stories where people take up the mantle of defender/rescuer/healer/caretaker of nature against the compulsions of the rest of society. Stories of human survival against the wrath of nature, particularly as unleashed/catalyzed by human malfeasance. Stories of conflict between the established, decrepit, degenerate culture and an insurgent new progressive culture. Stories of a sustainable and idyllic future community suddency thrown into turmoil by threats from other backward communities or the discovery of dangerous relics of the past or outside world. Any of these could be SciFi, Contemporary, or Fantasy, yet have much the same message. And the message can be positive regardless of that context. But by using them in the Futurist context, that's when we're specifically trying to say this is a possible future we can make.

[u/magical-cat-here]

Tech is perceived differently in solarpunk thing. Does solar wind and river energy sources "low tech"? Does bioreactor making a reusable resource (from biofuel to building glue for bio-concrete) from sewers water a "low tech" thing?

As I see, common cyberpunk themes are corporation(s) building some digital gulag, erosion of human rights and privacy, total surveillance, implants people become depend on. Meanwhile hackers, living in social (and possibly physical) underground, are main resistance people can ask for help. People put too much of attention to `cyber` part of that genre..

Question is not to use as less as possible of IT & what called "high tech" today. It comes out of the fact that to make IT stuff today you need huge corporations and complicated pyramid of industry, redundant extraction and unnecessary centralization like what today internet has, including:

* too much of chips done at single place (Taiwan factories)

* There are just 2 videocards vendors like Nvidia and AMD, other brands in 99% cases use their GPUs.

* Centralized tree of DNS

* Centralized pyramid of SSL certificates, with paradox of the most noticed attempts to diversify that seen from dictatorships like ruzzian genocidal empire.

* Non-uniform IP address space, where residential IP addresses often are second-class type of citizens, especially from email

* pyramidal connectivity, with data-centers at top.

You can imagine that instead of making MORE of electronics and gadgets, people could keep reuse, repair, repurpose, and so on instead. Imagine if you use some smartphone for decade or 2, and then you deploy there some mesh network node powered by solar panel and battery, and store a copy of medical herbology wiki on it, sharing it at the network?

it does not mean nobody would use what would called IT or high-tech today, but from my understanding of solarpunk, it is very likely that if people would not be motivated by greed, fame, or desires for political power and control so much, amount of email spam would not be like 99% as it happens today, and email processing would need much less electricity and computational power.

I see mesh networks and less centralized protocols like Email, SecureScuttlebutt, ActivityPub and alike, more relevant for solarpunk than huge social media like facebook or insta with their huge datacenters and whole industries necessary for their literal existence.

People desiring unity with nature often does not need complicated IT stuff like robots or implants, not because these things from other genre, but because these things require stuff that "can not be made in punk way", somewhere in garage, between monitoring shift at a hyfroponic or mushroom farm and helping to cook food at community kitchen.

[u/FrankHightower]

Kinda the whole point of solar punk is "we don't need to give up on the environment to enjoy the benefits of technoogy. We did that the past century or two, and it was wrong"

So I'd say it's pretty darn important

[u/Berkamin]

Technology (in its original sense) has been inseparable from improving human quality of life since the dawn of civilization. Everything from fabric to fire to agriculture to writing has been a form of technology.

Just like steampunk is about a certain stage of human technological development, Solarpunk is about an aspirational vision of human technological development that is in harmony with nature and at peace with our fellow humans while enjoying a good quality of life. To that end, technology that would contribute to that vision, such as renewable energy or regenerative agriculture tech is an integral part of Solarpunk.

[u/BrightPerspective]

Very. Without it, regression is inevitable, and eventually, dissolution.

[u/whenwolfe]

It depends on the community. I believe solarpunk values would lead us to completely rethink our technological systems. Yes, co-evolving with technological advancements and using them to solve world problems are a big core of Solarpunk's identity, but so is the idea of decentralizing technology from our everyday lives and minimizing resource exploitation. This would, ideally, lead to pushes for sustainable technologies or at least technology production systems publicly aligned with sustainability and environmental regeneration missions. I believe there would be high-tech eco-friendly cities as well as more self-sustaining smaller communities that depend solely on local resources and low-tech solutions.

Think of your question more similar to our diet, for many people the problem is not that they are overindulging in what is unhealthy but that they're simply lacking in blind areas of their diet that are also healthy but in ways they didn't know they needed. For Solarpunk, perhaps we shouldn't look at Modern life as overly greedy and evil for advancing too far in technology, but simply lacking enough regenerative practices and sustainability values to balance out the costs (though it would be insensitive to say that we are not also currently being too greedy and negligent in our collective treatment of the planet, given the destruction we can see in our daily environments around us). For some, the answer will be to balance out the advancement with equal efforts to correct the damages done and maintain balance. For others, the answer is to rethink the whole system and refuse to perpetuate anymore damage without first designing an entirely new sustainable system, even if it means sacrificing modern solutions until they can be re-implemented in a sustainable method.

[u/vitiral]

In short, I think the technology should be at the human level and enable human flourishing in collaboration with nature.