166 – Solarpunk and Positive Visions of the Future

[00:00:06] Johnny: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. I’m Johnny McQuade, I’m a software developer at IDEMS, and I’m here with David Stern, the co-director. How are you doing, David?

[00:00:16] David: I am doing well. I’m excited to find out what this is all about.

[00:00:20] Johnny: Yeah, so there was a few things going through my mind listening to a previous episode of the podcast, the conversation you had with Lucie about the agroecological possibilities of solar panels. So this was episode number 155 and you were talking about this recent study that showed that solar panels in a desert environment could actually increase the biodiversity of the immediate environment.

And it ended up having a kind of interesting speculation around what a future world could look like with these kind of oases in the desert, it was almost a kind of sci-fi idea. And there was a couple of things that kind of reminded me of that conversation. And I grew up in the Pennines, which is like a hill range in the middle of northern England. And the landscape is very beautiful, hilly, quite barren moorland on the tops, but it’s punctuated by these big electricity pylons. So if you look out, out of a big landscape in a lot of the UK, there’ll be these big kind of modernist metal electricity pylons that are transporting electricity across the country.

And I’ve always wondered like, we’re so used to seeing them, they’re disappearing to the landscape a bit sometimes, so you don’t really notice them. But I’ve always wondered like how people thought about them at the time they were built because they really changed the face of the countryside. And these days it’s quite hard to get planning permission to do anything that’s gonna ruin people’s view or something.

And I speculated that it was maybe a bit of a different era where people had a positive view of technology where these things were potentially seen as like an exciting technological advancement, improving people’s lives. And it wasn’t seen as an eyesore necessarily. But recently, when I was walking in the Pennines, the view now is a lot more punctuated by wind farms. So you’ll see lots of wind farms on hilltops.

And then something new recently that I started to see is you’ll see solar panels. So there might be like new built estates where every house has solar panels on top. And I was walking in the hills recently and came across this view of wind farms, solar panels, and it filled me with optimism really. It looked like a kind of positive, human effect on the landscape. And it made me think about this idea of “Solarpunk”. I wonder if that’s a phrase you’ve heard before.

[00:02:34] David: No, I don’t think I have.

[00:02:36] Johnny: So it is a science fiction aesthetic. So Solarpunk, the structure of that word is kind of aesthetic taxonomy, like steampunk, which is the kind of Victorian vision of the future based around technology from the Industrial Revolution taken to futuristic extremes. And then there’s cyberpunk, which is another kind of very common one you’ll see at the moment, very popular aesthetic where things like Blade Runner, this kind of hyper capitalist, urban, very technologically advanced world, but they tend to be dark and dystopian.

And Solarpunk is this kind of alternative to that, where it’s an optimistic vision of the future where technology and nature are integrated into people’s lives. So technology is advanced but not in a way that leads to a dystopia. It’s more of a utopia. You know, examples of things you might see in a kind of Solarpunk world would be like small scale farmers working with homemade robots they’ve built to manage their crops, or kind of small communities with wind turbines and water wheels and solar panels directly feeding them with energy and meeting their energy needs.

So technology is highly advanced, but there’s this kind of ramshackle nature to it where things are a bit more hacked together, and I guess like implicitly or otherwise there’s these kind of broadly anarchist social structures of self-government and cooperatives and small holdings and things, that this is the kind of aesthetic that’s painted.

And I guess I just thought it was interesting that we live in a time where so much, media is around post apocalyptic visions of the future or dystopian visions of the future, like the very popular TV shows and things about, everything seems to be post apocalyptic at the moment, and it’s quite rare to have a positive vision of the future, especially one that incorporates technology.

So you might have a vision of the future that is positive, but imagine there’s been some kind of huge cataclysmic event that’s destroyed our technology, and that’s the only way we’ve got to this kind of more, more positive vision. But I think it’s important to have positive visions to the future. And, as a society, we have to look forward and, work in hope to produce something positive.

So I think that conversation you had with Lucie definitely struck me as a version of technology integrated in nature in a way that yeah felt vaguely utopian, really.

[00:04:50] David: It’s interesting you frame this ’cause I actually have come across this issue about science fiction being dystopian as a genuine societal issue where if we cannot imagine positive ways forward, how are we going to achieve them? Is part of what is put forward and a critique to artists in some sense of why can’t, and why aren’t we having an artistic community that is able to take the science and advances and turn it into these imaginations of what these positive directions of growth could be.

This is something which is, it is not about saying why aren’t artists doing this, but why do we have societies which are meaning that artists aren’t doing this? So this is more of a societal sort of question, which I have come across, which I believe is really what you’re articulating. If we are looking at the popular culture and artists in general, it would be great if there was more of a positive spin on what could be possible and what society could aspire to.

And with that in mind, I want to come back to your landscape, the British landscape in this way and how it has changed over time. And I really like that transition from the electricity pylons and the fact that they were perceived as this incredible, positive advance, maybe not universally, but broadly, that this led to this hope for the future as people got access to power, and it created this sort of, this was something which was done at a national level. It created a hope for what a different future could look like with this increased access to technology and how rare it is now to think of that.

So I guess I want to come back to this key starting point of what might these utopian visions look like? And I really like the way that you framed this Solarpunk in terms of these reusable components. And there is work happening towards this. The Fairphone is one of the things at the forefront of my mind, where the point is that the Fairphone at the moment is a small side project compared to the mainstream phones. But it is entirely reusable, you can swap out components and pieces, it’s built to be reusable, it’s built to enable that sort of interchange of different components, even though it’s advanced technology.

So this is, I think, the sort of vision of the future that we could have. And it’s an interesting different vision of the future, where do we need to go through a cataclysmic event for the dynamics to change so that such technologies could become the desirable approach? Do we need to go through a cataclysmic event to be able to get to that change in society where building for these sorts of reusable components, for reusability, for interoperability so that the environment becomes right to enable that to outcompete the more commercial closed sort of software pieces.

And there’s lots of questions around this. The amazing things happening with 3D printers and what you can build with a 3D printer. Again, this means that actually we can imagine things that were just unimaginable not so long ago, and what that means for open technologies in different ways.

But again, the cost of that means that the 3D printer world hasn’t taken off as I would have expected and hoped in low resource environments. Somehow it’s been captured and brought in still to a high resource environment, for reasons which I think are understandable. But it’s really interesting to see when might this shift and could this shift within our current systems. And I don’t have the answers of course, but it is interesting to do that thought experiment.

[00:09:28] Johnny: Yeah, and I think that was one of the reasons why this felt relevant to some of the work we do of trying to make things be customizable and modular in the kind of software we’re building. And also, by not focusing on high resource environments, I suppose the punk part of the phrase Solarpunk is about a kind of DIY attitude of like adapting things to fit your local needs and the needs of the community.

And I think, you know, again, this Solarpunk that I’m interested in is an aesthetic more than a kind of social movement, but it has overlaps with the aesthetic of Afrofuturism, of a kind of imagined a sci-fi that’s coming out of Africa, a lot of Western science fiction might ignore African people and the African diaspora, but even just yeah, putting African people at the heart of science fiction and imagining a future that’s come out of Africa is really exciting.

[00:10:21] David: One of the things, if you think about this idea of science fiction coming out of Africa, which I love as a concept, is that this idea that height of technology might emerge from a continent which is currently disadvantaged. And that’s really exciting to me. But I believe that’s the truth. I believe that there are reasons why societally, the innovation, let’s be very explicit, there was a report, a UN report not long ago about technology coming out of Africa and how innovations, successful innovations in technology coming out of Africa seem to be different, fundamentally, from technologies coming out of the Silicon Valley or Asia in other ways.

And one of the key differences that was articulated in this report, which has stuck with me and which I’ve talked about in previous episodes, is that the successful African technology innovations include human components. They are not taking humans out of the loop, they’re actually creating roles.

And the obvious example of this has been the mobile money where you now go to somewhere like Kenya and the shop, which is everywhere, is a mobile money shop, which is now competing with banks in certain ways in low resource environments. It’s making money move in really important ways, and providing employment locally, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs locally to make little bits of money on the side. It might not be the only thing they do, they might do it alongside running a little shop for other things.

And so it might become part of something more, but it is a source of income, which is very interesting, and fundamentally, I think, different to a lot of tech coming out of the Silicon Valley and other big tech hubs where the extraction technology does is often seem to be replacing people in the context within the technology is working. Whereas the technologies like mobile money are creating local employment and they’re actually bringing money into those local communities as well as extracting money out.

And so it’s doing both. It’s got the fact that you’ve got a centralized player who is the mobile phone company who’s got this, who has now got a good solid business model around it, which is a form of centralization of wealth, an accumulation of wealth. But it is coming alongside the creation of employment and opportunity at a scale which is very different. And it’s not necessarily as clear cut as to whether the role of technology in that context is increasing wealth inequality or decreasing it. It’s shades of gray, which is almost always, in my view, a good thing.

And so the fact that I believe the technologies of the future could be more in that shades of gray where you are actually maybe having things where technology is increasing human interaction more than decreasing it, where humans in the loop become central, that way of designing technology, this is another piece I think to that puzzle.

The thing which I feel is the link to what you’ve put forward as the Solarpunk, and it’s interesting how in the context, there are definitely other contexts where punk would not be seen as building communities, so it’s interesting that this is an interpretation that it can be something which build communities. ’cause in other cases it’s seen as breaking down communities, fighting social structures. Which I’m not saying one is good or the other, but both are needed in different contexts.

But this idea that links, I believe, this Solarpunk with this idea of African emerging science fiction or technologies is the fact that it does seem that if technologies, which are emerging from African context at the moment, and there are multiple hubs, Kenya is a known hub, of course, Nigeria is another hub, Ethiopia in its own way is very different and things are emerging from there, and many other countries as well. So there’s diversity as well and this is also powerful, that you actually have big countries, small countries, all contributing in different ways, but with commonalities to their context, and often commonalities to some of the challenges that are being faced.

So imagining that these more human centered tech could come out is exactly consistent with this idea of actually saying it needs to be able to adapt to different contexts. You need to be able to build it differently in different places. So that ties in, I believe, with your Solarpunk view of what a future could emerge or what it could look like.

[00:15:49] Johnny: Yeah, and I think technology as a driver of societal change is at the core of that. And if technology was being built in ways that served communities and ways that could be adaptive for different communities, that’s something of a building block to a more positive future.

[00:16:09] David: There are people thinking about this. I’ve had to resist becoming part of some of these communities a bit because I’ve been very influenced by them. But fundamentally, what you are describing with Solarpunk relates to hardware. The same principles of this, we’ve coined a phrase, common tech, this idea of having technology which can be built locally. You apply that to the hardware. So if we had common tech, not only for software, but also for hardware, this is what it would do.

And there’s a huge movement of people doing extremely exciting things around this and very interested in this. But it’s expensive. Relatively speaking, you can’t get away from the fact that hardware is expensive. I’m so impressed with what the Fairphone people have done, and broadly what they’ve proved is that well, however you do it, and whatever you are doing, it’s really hard to fight scale. You know, the scale of production, upscaling their production to the levels that they could compete as a big player mobile phone company that everybody hears of alongside Samsung and Apple and so on. Without that scale, you can’t get the economies of scale and without the economies of scale, you can’t be competitive.

So hardware done in these ways is possible, I believe, but it’s expensive, to make that transition is expensive. I believe that if we look at this as a whole, software should be able to outcompete. And actually, if you have these ideas of common tech for software, I believe common tech for hardware will naturally follow. But I don’t know that, and these are hypotheses. I don’t have the capability, I believe, to really dig into the hardware side yet. I’d love to, but it’s a whole different problem and there’s some really exciting work happening.

[00:18:27] Johnny: Thinking about some kind of criticisms of this kind of vision, one has to be wary of kind of tying one’s colors to the mast of saying, this is the philosophy I subscribed to, or something like that. And I think something about this Solarpunk vision that kind of stands out when looking at kind of examples of it is that there is a hint of something post apocalyptic, or it’s possibly that society has collapsed and been rebuilt or something.

And, in a smaller scale way, there’s a sense of maybe being in the shadow of a bigger kind of society in some sense. So what you were saying then about hardware made me think about Cuba and how Cuba famously has a lot of very beautiful old cars that are still running way past their expected lifespans. And there’s a whole culture in Cuba of repairing cars, and obviously it’s out of necessity, trade embargoes and things that meant that the hardware that they’re working with in terms of cars is not up to date.

But from that has emerged a whole culture of repairing things and interchanging parts between things and fixing things up and keeping things running. And that seems to be in line with the kind of Solarpunk vision where looks like there’s robots that might be helping someone around the house or something that look like they’ve been cobbled together or bashed together out of multiple different parts.

And I if that’s a kind of limitation of this aesthetic that that seems to rely on their being potentially still these more traditionally extractive technology companies making these things at scale that can then be cobbled together into kind of new cheaper versions or more like adapted versions, to the extent that it is utopian, something about the vision is still somewhat in the shadow of the kind of extractive consuming.

[00:20:21] David: And this is a really important point, because there’s a lot of places around the world where recycle, repair have gained immense traction. But it’s exactly as you say, it’s on the peripheries of the main system. The real power comes if you could actually have systems change without a dystopian scenario where, for various reasons, society could design for this and it would be desirable at scale. And that challenge of really thinking about this at scale is the really big one.

Let’s come back to this, you’ve mentioned the fact that part of that vision is, it goes down to small holders and it goes down to self reliance and all this sort of thing. The positive power of globalization has been totally lost and overshadowed by the perceived and the actual negatives. Having lived in places where globalization can be and is extremely positive in certain ways, but the powers that are globalizing are not necessarily doing so in ways which are positive, is really difficult to reconcile.

I believe we do need globalization. We need elements of systems which work coherently at scale across the planet in different ways. We don’t want to go back to something where everybody is just tinkering on their own things. We want global supply chain in different ways, but we want them to be serving societies and all societies in more positive ways.

And I think at the moment, this sort of balance between what’s extractive, where is it positive for, how do different value chains positively, negatively affect different places? How do we balance those things? How much is it a sort of trade war? These things are really hard to manage. And I don’t have the answers at all. But I do believe that globalization should be positive.

So I would love that vision of your small holder farmer, I like the idea of small holder farmers, we support them a lot in different contexts, there’s a lot of positivities that can come from small holder farming. So I like the idea that you’re a small holder farmer is actually not at the outskirts of society, but a central part to a global society. And I wonder what that vision would look like, that interconnected role and the role they’re playing.

It’s really interesting, I’ve heard in the UK successful small holder farmers are diversifying away from agriculture. They might have agriculture as part of what they’re doing, but it is the diversification, I think over 50% now of smallholder farmers in the UK that have elements of diversification as part of their standard regular income streams, be this agritourism be this solar energy, other extra sources of income beyond just farm income.

And on the one hand that tells you a lot about the problems in our food chains. And on the other hand, actually this is not necessarily a negative thing. I still remember visiting my sister when she was in South Korea and just for the first time experiencing a society, they got the top floor flat because people didn’t want to be on the penthouse, the top floor flats, because you’re not surrounded by people.

Actually, people liked the urban environment. They wanted to be in the urban environment, and they wanted to keep the rural environments pristine to go and visit them. And so that idea of actually having urban centers with rural tourism locally in positive ways, being part of it, that was the first time I was really exposed to that as a concept, which is very different to the culture that I’ve been aware of in certain ways, where your urban centers and your rural areas are in competition. Whereas in my perception of South Korea, there was this mutual appreciation of the value each brought to the other. Again, these are different ways of imagining the future.

[00:25:19] Johnny: Yeah, and I think something we haven’t really touched on is the climate crisis, which is a big kind of motivation for seeing the relationship between humans, technology and nature in a new way. And I think that’s something that yeah, Solarpunk tries to grapple with of seeing a healthy relationship between those three things and human society in some relationship with nature. As you say in South Korea, that could take the form of really valuing protected nature as a contrast to city life. Or in the kind of Solarpunk vision, it tends to be more integrated of, you’ll see cities which have urban farms and buildings covered in plants and things where things are more integrated with each other.

[00:26:02] David: They’re not necessarily in competition. I mean, we do a lot of work in agroecology and I think I did an episode with Lucie quite a long time ago, which discussed this issue that, actually, if you have a rural environment, and a lot of Africa has this, but not all, where your rural community is actually a large proportion of your population, and so you have a large part of your population living in rural communities. Then the agroecology sort of model is really powerful and very good in terms of actually determining how you build vibrant rural communities.

But there is a vision for the future, which is more urban. And that clash between what should an urban future look like and what should its relationship be to the broader rural community. And is that an extractive relationship? Are there symbiotic relationships which are possible? Should you be having food grown in cities? Yes, absolutely. But what food should be grown in cities and how much? Should cities become self-sufficient? Almost certainly not, because that’s going to be impossible and really it’s not going to be efficient.

There maybe should be certain things which are grown in cities and others shouldn’t be because it would be much more efficient and effective to be able to have this sort of exchange between urban and rural environments. What that looks like as a healthy vision for the future is a really interesting question to try and imagine. The food systems we work with now are so complex, our food travels so far, it isn’t as simple as just saying we should be growing things in urban environments to fill the city that’s just not physically possible, and it’s not sensible to conceive.

Should we be having elements grown within an urban environment? Yes, probably. How should we be having these things valued? What would a sensible food system look like? Can we imagine a world where there are healthy food systems? Even the people who I see at the forefront of working in food systems, I’ve never really seen a coherent vision put forward, which addresses the questions of balancing vibrant rural lives and vibrant urban rural connections.

These are things which people are thinking about and grappling with, but most people I see working in this tend to be reductionist to one or the other. They’re either thinking about the value chains of how you feed the city, or they’re thinking about the vibrant rural communities. Or they’re trying to think of extraction as part of it, or thinking about how urban waste can come back to be able to be part of a nutrient cycle in constructive ways. Those are things which I see people thinking about.

But a really powerful vision of what a healthy food system would be with good urban, rural livelihoods, both valued, both desirable, I haven’t seen. And it would be wonderful if that was put forward in a way which was, which I believe should be possible, but it requires attention to detail, what are the things which would be needed and what are the danger points for this? Because that’s the thing which I think is so subtle.

I’ll give one very concrete example of that. And this is why I was so excited with this research which has shown the potential of solar energy in terms of increasing biodiversity. But one of the things which I found really difficult to reconcile in a UK based food system is urban consumers want consistency in terms of, let’s say the price of fruit and veg. And so your big supermarkets have that and they impose basically your cucumber cost the same all year round. There is still a little bit of seasonality with certain products. But many products you are actually imposing that there shouldn’t be seasonality or seasonal variation of price, because that’s not what the consumers want.

But there has to be seasonal variation in terms of production. And as a consumer, I really appreciate that the price of my fruit and veg that I can get to regularly and that I need to have my five a day that I can plan for in different ways isn’t varying hugely from month to month. But at the same time, I do not see how that can work in terms of giving sensible livelihoods for the farming communities and the power dynamics that’s needed there because they have to have seasonal variation. And if you go to somewhere, like Italy; or other European context, they do have more seasonal variation and more seasonality in terms of their produce.

[00:31:16] Johnny: Yeah, and I think some of that is about kind of education or changing the mindset of urban consumers really. There’s some movements like slow food movement or similar kind of urban organic farming movements where the idea is that that adds richness to a person’s life to understand, to be connected to the seasons and see the seasonality of food. And being, yeah, being connected to where your food comes from isn’t just a kind of compromise we have to make in order to make the food system work, but it’s something that enriches our lives and gives us a healthier relationship to food, both in its production and its consumption.

[00:31:56] David: But the scale at which those movements are happening is so small compared to societal levels. So these are wonderful things which are happening and really challenging problems. And all of this, I would argue, is connected.

[00:32:09] Johnny: Yeah, definitely. And I think, yeah, maybe to wrap things up and come back to what originally got me thinking about this, I think you’re right to say that what was concerning me was the kind of visions of the future that are presented to us and the visions of the future that artists offer in our society.

And I think there’s so many technical and logistical and political problems to solve on the way. But I do think there’s real value in being presented with a hopeful vision of the future which may only be a kind of aesthetic or a feeling or something that can be imagined.

But I think the kind of turning around mentality to, away from thinking that apocalypse is imminent and towards an idea that there could be a life worth living in the future where things are better than they are now, I think is really important and exciting.

[00:33:01] David: I agree, and I love this fact that what you forced us to do in terms of this discussion is to take it from a context, which is alien to most people, desert context in the lowest resource environments on earth, which is the context that Lucie and I were discussing, but saying that these same ideas apply everywhere, that there’s elements of that imagination, of taking a current situation, the technologies that currently exist, and imagining then a future which uses those technologies for societal benefit in ways which are powerful and that powerful vision of the future.

Can we get more articulations of what that could be so that we can inspire people to work towards them? Because it requires a lot of people to make decisions to work towards them. And I think if we can have more visibility on what a positive future could look like, maybe we can actually make progress towards it. Who knows?

[00:34:00] Johnny: Absolutely. Thanks David. It’s been a really interesting conversation.

[00:34:03] David: Thanks.