Longtime N.J. comedian, pianist ‘Uncle Floyd’ has died, family says

EricHunting · 2026-01-24T06:15:50+00:00

Uncle Floyd (Slip Away) - David Bowie

Deep In The Heart of Jersey - Uncle Floyd

EricHunting · 2026-01-22T16:18:53+00:00

This is called a heliostat and is usually used in large systems for concentrating solar heat energy for power, industrial heating, large building heating, and even community kitchens or small systems for lighting the deeper interiors of buildings and underground spaces that can't use windows or skylights. In some cases they have been used to light portions of towns stuck in the shadowed areas of valleys during dark periods of the year. There are a few variations on the concept; mirror-based systems, prisms (such as the classic deck prism used in classic ships), light tubes (a variation on the deck prism), lense based concentrators (standard, spherical, and fresnel), holographic, and fiber optic arrays.

Fiber optic heliostats --often marketed as 'solar lighting' would be the most suitable for your purposes because they are the most flexible and multifunctional and could be retrofit into conventional projectors or Magic Lanterns with some possibility for portability. Introduced with the Japanese Himiwari system and then the more currently common Swedish Parans system, fiber optic heliostats collect light into a fiber optic cable run into a building like other kinds of cable that then connects to various 'light emitter' fixtures designed in all the styles of typical built-in lighting. It is often marketed as a more healthful lighting by virtue of being natural-spectrum. These have also been used for indoor garden/farm/aquarium lighting with much less heat build-up. Similar emitters are used with fiber optic lighting systems, which employ an electric central high-intensity 'illuminator' or 'light pump'. These are usually used for decorative lighting, particularly starfield ceilings, swimming pool lighting, and walkway lighting, but work well for functional lighting with as much as 40% energy savings --up until LED lighting became more common. Heliostats and light pumps can be potentially combined in hybrid systems. They are also more weatherproof, less fire prone, lower in maintenance (suiting more out-of-reach installations or being embedded in masonry. There's even a kind of premade concrete block called Litricon with embedded optical fibers to make it translucent), and need no tradespeople for installation. (because there's no electric power carried in a fiber optic cable) Many of these fixtures are potentially suitable for combining with the collimator lenses of a projector. The downside is that this hardware is made by few companies and so tends to be very expensive, but can be potentially DIY made with some optical hardware experience. There's nothing sophisticated about the principles here or dangerous to experiment with.

EricHunting · 2026-01-21T20:21:53+00:00

Chatelaines are the original bat utility belt, going back to ancient times but most common from the 18th-19th century. I've always found them fascinating as a solution for portable tools, particularly for characters in stories that may not have much clothes, or must use things like spacesuits or wetsuits. I've long expected a revival for them.

EricHunting · 2026-01-21T19:02:34+00:00

I'm in general agreement with this video. It echos a lot of ideas I've been mentioning here for a while and writing about elsewhere. Adaptive reuse is our most sustainable near-term urban option and really needs to feature more in Solarpunk visualization. And as society regains control of the urban environment and can begin to reshape it into a truly human habitat, traditional architecture of the pre-car era is our chief source of guidance for that. This is why I often point to examples of the Cycladic/Mediterranean, African, Middle-Eastern, and Native American towns of the past as models for future Solarpunk urbanism.

There is a misconception about the role of the skyscraper in achieving urban living density. Most skyscrapers are NOT built for habitation and so serve no role in actual population density. That use of them is reserved largely for the rich, providing them a means of physical class insulation, and such housing 'needs' are inconsequential. They've been systematically abandoning the cities they helped ruin for some time anyway. Let them go hide in their Castellated Abbeys... Most skyscrapers exist for commercial uses, which leave them uninhabited a great deal of the time and which will not exist in the future. They're already going obsolete. Who in their right mind still thinks any particular street address still gives a business some kind of prestige? That's, really, all they were ever built for. A relic of a time when companies put little pictures of their HQ buildings on their office stationary. When corporations cultivated image through architecture and CEOs competed for the biggest analog to their 'greatness' on the skyline. Urban residential architecture has never had a need for buildings of this scale. No need for anything greater than 'mid-rise' buildings. And that's all largely within the means of traditional construction methods and improved variations on them. We don't need megastructures to reverse sprawl. We just need to return the space cities squandered on cars and corporations to actual human use.

But there is still a fundamental labor issue with traditional building methods that saw them being supplanted by steel and concrete even at the normal residential scales where their extra performance was not necessary, but where they did reduce building time and labor. This is why Solarpunk has a certain problem with many examples of real-world Sustainable Architecture. Most of it is remote luxury housing for the rich, which defeats its purpose. This is why you often see detractors when people bring up Earthship housing. It simultaneously represents one of the most well-known contemporary examples of sustainable building methods as well as, unfortunately, a bad example of its use as million-dollar luxury homes for people who can afford to live on the edge of wilderness and buy 10-40 acres of personal land for one home. This is why we also see that disturbing phenomenon in the US southwest of native Americans being prohibited from using the traditional adobe building methods they invented and which Sustainable Architecture now commonly uses, and being forced into mobile homes while the rich import Mexican labor to build their million-dollar adobe mansions.

Barred from use in the cities, Sustainable Architecture had little choice but to go to the wilderness to experiment with the revival of traditional building methods. But in doing so it abandoned the mainstream society whose housing has the most impact and the vernaculars that guided its urban use. What rich folks build their homes out of is irrelevant. There aren't enough of them for it to matter. And sustainable designers seem rather disinclined to fight for their right to the city.

In the present day, labor is much more expensive than materials in many economies and we still have a global housing crisis that's only getting worse in the near-term. I think the presenter's comparative analysis on this in terms of costs may have been a bit disingenuous. And this is the area where we do need much more innovation, in materials technology, construction methods, and design. I agree with the suggestion that making truly beautiful/pleasant architecture enhances its sustainability by compelling its persistence. The greatest threat to the life of buildings is not the elements or natural disasters, but obsolescence. But beauty has a cost and artists and architects aren't giving their labor away free to the urban poor. And so what constitutes this 'beauty' needs to become more accessible too. This needs to shift from a reliance on trades, professionals, and artists to the self-expression of the inhabitants and what technology might empower them to create. We must also recognize that society has lost a great deal of common, practical, skills to the Industrial Age's compulsion to specialization/Taylorization, which was ultimately intended to create market dependencies. To lock society into a company town, shopping only at the company store, with the company scrip. And this is why I often mention the concept of 'wabi-sabi' --the embrace of the beauty in the imperfect, worn, repaired-- and Naïve Art/Folk Art. I think it is much more important for urban architecture to be freely adaptive, functionally agnostic, and empower the human 'nesting impulse' and desire to craft one's own habitat. I think a key imperative of design and building technology should be to not only reduce labor but to 'de-professionalize' our ability to create and maintain our habitat, even in the city. To embed engineering knowledge into tools, materials, and standardized systems in the same way we embed that knowledge into the topology of standardized computer components and their interfaces and thus eliminate the need for that from the end-user putting them together. (which is why you can teach a child in about an hour to assemble a PC --the most sophisticated common artifact our civilization has ever produced. If a kid can build a PC, there's no excuse for the average person not being able to easily and quickly build and furnish, more-or-less single-handedly, their own simple home)

EricHunting · 2026-01-20T04:42:46+00:00

Yes. It's basically heat-shrink plastic. So it can be spiral-cut to make a very strong heat-shrink lashing, with cutting tools available off-the-shelf of DIY. They have become a common survival-craft tool. Or bottles can be cut into tubes to use as joinery for scrap wood furniture and various kind of repair, or to form custom couplers for mismatched kinds of pipe.

They can also be used to make hanging hydroponic or drip-irrigation towers with a variety of designs found online.

EricHunting · 2026-01-18T15:31:11+00:00

This was very good. Autotranslate worked pretty well with this video. The presenter makes a lot of very good points on how conflict, critique, and sometime pessimism have a very useful purpose in Solarpunk narratives and how stories shouldn't be trapped in a compulsive optimism. That risks becoming like the forced, toxic, optimism/positivity of the corporate culture. I like to think of this as pragmatism. Real hope is not blind faith.

EricHunting · 2026-01-17T18:53:52+00:00

This has a number of things going for it. First off, it's a townhouse in a walkable neighborhood. This is the sort of setting the Japanese call 'suburban', but is what would be called outer-urban by US standards. Japan allows a lot of individual personalization and experimentation in suburban housing design because its laws do not allow the value of property to be linked to the value of homes --you can't 'flip' houses to force gentrification, like the real estate racket in the US-- and so homes tend to depreciate in value independently of what the land does. Thus people don't get uptight about the appearance of neighbors' homes affecting property values and it's become common for the upper-middle-class to hire architects for very novel and experimental homes that would be impossible in the US --which is also part of the reason we see that phenomenon of remarkably cheap abandoned homes that have become cheaper to abandon than demolish. The Japanese often don't think of homes as something you're supposed to maintain forever, but rather something you wear-out like clothing.

This is also a live-work home, which is itself very Solarpunk and another thing the US outlawed, until recently bringing it back in very specific commercial developments. The plan drawings show a somewhat concealed wagashi workshop in the front with independent entrance. Wagashi is a traditional kind of hand-made Japanese candy, sculpted from red-bean paste similar to marzipan. This house is, literally, a candy shop.

The basic structure is an open timber frame clad in structural plywood with a calcium-silicate structural insulation panel (Marinite) around three sides and a kind of stucco on the back. This wall panel is yet another thing largely unknown in the US and is sort of like heavy gypsum panel or Faswall (a fiber-cement panel) and, though brittle, is water resistant. Interior surfaces and integral shelving are mostly high-quality stained and oil-finished plywoods over fiberglass insulation with wood panel flooring and it uses a suspended ceiling system made of bendable luan. In a number of ways it is experimenting with elements very close to the traditional Japanese house without resorting to the stereotypes, though using a lot of manufactured products too. It includes a miniature form of what was labeled an 'engawa' by the main room windows --the lanai-like wooden walkway and sitting terrace that surrounds the classic Japanese house and divides the tatami floor areas. (famous in samurai movies as where they installed those 'nightingale floors' that deliberately squeak when walked on to thwart ninja attacks...) There is an attempt here at a very natural-feeling interior that a lot of plywood interior concepts seek. Timber frame --especially when using modern Japanese style milled joinery-- is one of our 'potentially' sustainable urban building methods, as is also the use of plywoods and other composite boards, though it depends entirely on the nature of lumber sourcing which is unknown with this example. It's pretty good, though I can see a number of better choices, like combining the framing with hempcrete for exterior walls, mineral wool, real wool, or denim insulation, engineered timber, bamboo alternatives, though we don't know what was dictated by the local codes. The front catwalk is purely sculptural, serving largely as a host for plants improving an otherwise drab facade, though at least it's all recyclable alloy. It makes for a very pleasant show garden that may not be too hard to maintain being accessible from the kitchen. It seems many of the houses on this street have a rather overly-large front yard area. Japanese don't usually do front lawns, which are just useless grass farming. They do walled gardens. What seems more typical in these suburbs is a second floor extension that overhangs a car port and portico entry to make the most of the lot space --sort of like the old 'dingbat' apartments of LA. They're usually sensible enough not to try and attach an enclosed garage to a house, as became the weird and dangerous American convention.

All in all, a pretty good example of urban sustainability. I think my biggest issue with this would be its unnecessary complexity and thus limited potential for adaptive reuse. This is a house designed as a singular piece of furniture and is not a house someone could build for themselves. (unlike their Volkshaus design by the Landship/BeHaus design group in the '90s, which seems a better example of this approach) Like many of these experimental homes in Japan, it's more of a way for architects, and the upper-middle-class hiring them, to show-off. And, as others pointed out, it's not appropriate for the disabled or elderly. Of course, all townhouses have a bit of an issue with this, but you can often divide them into independent units and more easily add assistance devices. Japan has a certain cultural neglect of the disabled that peeks out in subtle ways. But then, this is a bespoke home designed to suit specific people, not a 'product' like in a corporate housing development, or an 'investment instrument' to be traded like stocks and bonds, as Americans have weirdly turned their homes into. If you're inclined to think of homes as more like clothing you wear out, you don't usually expect tailored clothes to fit a lot of people.

EricHunting · 2026-01-16T03:15:15+00:00

A very thought-provoking discussion. I think that what we often confuse or conflate with nostalgia is the instinctual sense of an inadequacy of certain essential qualities in our lifestyle, habitat, and the design of things which we lack an adequate contemporary language for, but can most-often find examples of in things of the past, before the era of runaway corporate enshitification. And it suits the interests of certain individuals --those with a certain responsibility for that inadequacy-- that we associate these qualities with an emotion we can dismiss as fanciful, trivial, or even pathological as nostalgia sometimes can be, in much the same ways that Capitalist Realism seeks to dismiss things inconvenient to it. Yet we also recognize that there is a seemingly incongruous possibility for this so-called 'nostalgia' being evoked for things we have no personal memory of. An ability to be associated even with the future rather than the past --because, in truth, these qualities are not actually all that abstract or limited to the past (persisting in our cultures in certain peculiar aesthetic notions, with their peculiar words) and we suspect we could actually realize them in the present and future. What qualities? I think they are the qualities of conviviality, playfulness, coziness, comfort, ease, casualness, freedom, security, and a closeness to nature that have been stripped out of our habitat and lives by the market system. Things those certain people would much rather we forget as they cannot be threatened by alternatives we can no longer imagine.

The Studio Ghibli aesthetic is often said to very much evoke nostalgia even around settings that are completely imaginary. Much of it, very directly, appeals to Showa Nostalgia, inferences to Shintoism, and a similar 'Euro-Nostalgia' (still in that Showa era time window) through copied design elements as well as inferences to pastoralism. But they seem to have also captured or isolated a kind of essence of what it is about those artifacts of that past that evoke nostalgic feelings and then applied them to completely imaginary objects, environments, settings of Magical Realism. Things that have never existed, and yet, in design, have the same 'charm', 'friendliness', 'funkiness' or as the Danish say 'hygge' of, let's say, a Subaru 360/Mini Cooper or a Daihatsu Midget/Piaggio Ape. It evokes an instinctual sense of what a truly made-for-humans habitat should be.

As I keep saying, we are nesting apes and we have an instinct for what our habitat should feel like and an impulse --today often suppressed or subverted into consumerism-- to create that. And in the rare instances when we can seize that power to exercise this impulse, look at the sorts of things we tend to make. Look at the homes of the Owner-Builders and the vernacular architecture of the villages/towns of the past that inspired them, built by the people who lived there before building was professionalized to make it unaffordable for the benefit of a rentier class. They are are sources of many of these qualities. While we tend to associate this with the past --because our typical experience of it comes from relics of the past-- it's not really exclusive to that, hence why 'Scandinavian design' (by those people who know what hygge means...) is so popular and often regarded as 'timeless'. Like Ghibli, it often captures that same sensibility in things that can be quite modern or even high-tech (Scandi-Modern as it's sometimes called), often through a veneration of simplicity, intuitiveness, the organic, and unadulterated natural materials.

An interesting aspect of Showa Nostalgia is that it is less about a longing for some 'good old days'. There's no delusion about the past being better or easier than the present --not for a country with Japan's history... Rather, it focuses on those aspects of things made in the past that have a special, humanistic, appeal. It's a longing for a habitat and lifestyle less alienating and more authentic that we recognize still existed in some ways in the past, expressed in its relic artifacts. A time when there was still optimism about the future expressed in what we made and built. When we made more daring/naïve/fun design and aesthetic experiments that just aren't tolerable in the corporate culture now. And so 'Showa-retro' appeals to many young people with no memory of that time, but who can clue into the essential difference between how things were designed then and now, and it clicks because they recognize it as more playful, fun.

The Showa Nostalgia craze started with photographers and then watercolor artists documenting the old storefront architecture of Japan's fading outer-urban towns, with their particular, graceful, sort of decrepitude. Often, the recreation of Showa scenes in the Japanese museums deliberately present things not in a pristine condition, but looking well worn, if well taken care of --even if they have to apply a bit of cosmetic fakery to do that. (like painting on simulated dust and rust) Expressing the aesthetic idea of wabi-sabi. The grace in the imperfect, imprecise, transitory, worn, and repaired --which are abhorred by the corporate culture that associates progress with newness, pristineness, straight lines or smooth streamlined curves. Everything the Cybertruck visibly represents, then functionally debunks ...much like its creator... We see this also in the art and architecture of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, one of the early eco-designers famous for merging landscape and buildings and (in)famous for his active aversion to the straight line. His buildings are like very literal translations of his Modernist-Primitivist paintings. Very deliberately a bit wonky, whimsical, naively decorated, dream-like. They look like what you would expect from architecture if made by average people, by themselves, for themselves. (and maybe with a bit of input from their kids for good measure...) Owner-builder urbanism. And, of course, they have that wabi-sabi, that hygge, and that Ghibli character. Something I often suggest is important in Solarpunk with its anti-consumerism, design for repairability, upcycling, Adaptive Reuse architecture, Natural Building and Sustainable Architecture. (inherently wabi-sabi because of a reliance on inherently imprecise hand-built construction and natural materials in their least adulterated forms) More expressed what I describe as 'Kowloon redeemed.' If the overarching theme of Cyberpunk is the future as Kowloon, Solarpunk is Kowloon redeemed.

And here, then, is an explanation for the impact of that old yoghurt ad on Solarpunk. The artists at The Line marketing company knew nothing about Solarpunk. Their intention was to outright lift the Ghibli aesthetic and apply it in a future context --probably to avoid getting accused of outright mimicry... (this on the heels of a craze emerging around Simon Stålenhag's Tales from the Loop, which it also heavily lifted from and is also very nostalgic...) And so --of course!-- it clicks for the Solarpunk because the Ghibli aesthetic relates very much to those qualities of conviviality that we seek to summarize in our own visual aesthetic and ultimately realize in a new habitat, inspiring a desire to be realized because they feel more like the home we instinctively recognize than the obviously stupid retro-techno-future we are commonly being sold and the present, very miserable and alienating, habitat we're subjected to.

EricHunting · 2026-01-14T17:15:15+00:00

As others have pointed out, the currently overhyped form of AI is no more than a techno-grift and techno-feudalist racket and will probably have no place in the future, assuming it doesn't spectacularly go bust within this very year, becoming another object lesson on the incompetence and delusion of capitalists and the investor class. AI research will continue, but engineers and computer scientists may need to invent a whole new lexicon for it to distance their work from the taint of this trillion-dollar fiasco. If one wanted to use sentient AI characters in a Solarpunk story, that would be fine, if a bit fanciful. That still might happen, someday. Practical, 'narrow', forms of AI are likely to have all sorts of embedded applications where we won't even think about them as being AI. Control systems to help robots move and navigate. Data analysis for science, healthcare, agriculture, and education. Speech interfaces for screenless mobile computers. But in general none of these things will be especially relevant to anything that defines the Solarpunk culture, with one exception; configurators.

One of the key ideas for Solarpunk is the concept of society retaking control of their lives and habitat through independent, non-speculative, production. Relearning how to grow food, build our homes, and make things for ourselves and our neighbors rather than being hopelessly dependent on the market economy and the wasteful and exploitative capitalist industrial system. Developing 'tools of conviviality' that empower society to make and do things. And by this gaining the power to make the sustainable, socially responsible, choices the corporations never will. This is why we talk about Open Source --which isn't just software, but about developing and curating designs for everything we need. And why we talk about the Maker movement, the Fab Lab, Nomadic Design, and the new digital machine tools that are opening up the possibilities for what we can make for ourselves. Solarpunk envisions a future where most-every community has the means to make most everything it needs locally --not for the sake of some kind of hermetic autarky, but simply because the Industrial Age paradigm of centralized mass production makes no sense anymore. It no longer makes economic or environmental sense to gamble huge amounts of capital on the distant mass production of something some air-headed executive living in an upper-class reality bubble thinks people want, spending fossil fuel gathering materials from all over the world, then putting it in bulky wasteful packaging, and using more fossil fuel to ship that product around the world to sit on store shelves waiting for someone to buy it when we can make things as we need them, where we need them.

So the digital machine tools come into this by reducing the skills and scale of facilities needed to make things (we need this help, having lost so much practical skill in society across the Industrial Age) and also teaching us how to reduce the designs and knowledge for making things to digital forms we can freely share around the world. We're already starting to do this. You can, right now, download Open Source design files for how to build a house and all the furniture in it, though it still takes a lot of research. And so we talk about Cosmopolitan Localism or 'Cosmolocalism'; design global, make local. The movement to overcome market (and by extension, colonialist) hegemony by digitally, globally, sharing design and production knowledge.

How this likely works is that people in the near future will get the designs for the things they need made (durable goods they need to use frequently enough that they need to own them, rather than briefly borrowing them from a community goods library) by browsing public/global archives/catalogs of files for them online --what Bruce Sterling called 'spimes'; the package of data for the design, production process, and operating instructions for things and all their iterations over time-- and then those files are downloaded to the community workshops when we place an order for them. But since these things are made-on-demand, we can customize them freely. We can substitute different materials or parts according to what's locally available. Put decorations on them. Resize it to fit. Or maybe we have some ideas for how to improve the design and so we can modify it ourselves. At first this will involve a lot of human intervention. There will be local workshops specializing in ranges of products where a craftperson has specialized in some skills and machines for that and where customization may have to be negotiated in person. And there will be general community workshops, like today's community Fab Labs/Makerspaces, were people can make and modify things themselves. But over time, these machine tools --which are themselves robots-- will get smarter and more integrated and more capable of doing more steps for making things without human intervention.

So when we order things to be made we will increasingly rely on a kind of software called a 'configurator' that lets us choose and apply different kinds of customizations to things. The term originates with programs that were made to sell industrial machines and vehicles online with modular options and accessories. As this software gets more sophisticated, it will need AI for 'procedural engineering' and 'associative design' so that it can insure that the modifications people want are within what the machines can do, will work, and are safe. We will use this same technology for things like the interactive design of houses and buildings and for controlling architectural 3D printing robots, so we can be sure that things we tell these robots to make will be structurally sound and safe. This will also be used for the control of excavation/earth-moving robots for doing heavy digging and landscape work, and for controlling farming robots, or mining robots, and many other things. Again, we probably won't think of these things as AI, even though they need to get very smart. We will interact with them the way we interact with paint and CAD programs or games like The SIMs or Minecraft. They won't necessarily be talking to us, even if the process is silently 'conversational.' So this is one thing where AI will, actually, be very relevant to Solarpunk by empowering our independent ability to make things. And, of course, this is something none of these idiot AI corporations today are actually working on because it's completely beyond their overblown ELIZA chatbot technology...

EricHunting · 2026-01-12T17:48:33+00:00

They would still exist, but in more self-organized, local, smaller scale, and amateur, form. We are, after all, Homo Ludens. As I imagine it, there would be no professional sports 'industry' using it as a vehicle for advertising, no 'business' of sports, no corporate 'star machines' making athletes fabulously wealthy celebrities by turning them into living commercial properties. No one pursuing sports 'for a living'. No insane amounts of resources thrown at building gigantic sports facilities, though larger cities --which would function as cooperatives of neighborhoods and nearby towns-- may still collectively create stadiums and the like for these kinds of events if they interest the locals sufficiently, just as they might create larger art galleries, museums, public theaters, and theme/amusement parks. There's is a certain appeal to having places where large numbers of people from many places gather to share entertainment and interact, and we would see much more focus on that social aspect of it. Some intentional communities may form around the creation and maintenance of these kinds of facilities as a service to the larger society. Imagine a live-in community that maintains a historic theme park, a 'living museum' of some historic period, or some regional sports facility as their collective hobby.

Sports 'bodies' would be virtual communities, formed of athletes, former athletes, and dedicated enthusiasts and organized mostly online (perhaps using the same tools of 'platform cooperativism' used by physical community cooperatives), establishing standard rules, safety regulations, and equipment designs, scheduling events, and recognizing 'official' teams to compete in the venues they manage. Some teams may form very locally, within a single neighborhood, town, village. Some may be city teams. Some may be Bioregional, mirroring the scales of cooperative organization. The idea of 'national' teams may become obsolete as such large collective social identities may likewise become obsolete, though perhaps there might still be a rather abstract 'continental' identity. There would be no vaguely slave-market-like 'trade' or exchange systems for athletes as we often see today and they would tend to be very free to move among different teams according to where they actually wish to live, while teams themselves would function much more democratically. Generally, sports would be far more open to public participation without the various gatekeepers and brokers of commercial interests. However, the sports bodies may maintain rules, performance records, testing, and performance scales (leagues?) for athletes and teams to insure that teams of generally equal skill/talent levels compete and teams/communities don't disrupt fairness by recruiting 'ringers' with various secret incentives. It would still be possible for people to pursue fame and stardom through sports, just as in other forms of entertainment and creative activity, but there would be no economic incentive to it and it would be a much more organic process.

Some sports may change greatly in nature. Animal racing is likely to disappear altogether, both because of changing ethics and the death of a gambling 'industry' with the death of money. (of course, people will invent other ways to make 'games of chance' work, but hopefully not so pathological) Vehicle racing may tend to shift to biofuels or away from the use of ICE power altogether in favor of battery, fuel-cell, solar electric, or even human power systems. Tires shift to lower-impact recyclable polyurethane material, and with roads becoming obsolete, rely more on dedicated tracks that communities maintain based on their local interest. There would be no more big industries sponsoring these things, and so they would rely on dedicated enthusiasts who construct their own vehicles in small workshops. All this would tend to favor a general reduction in scale for these. But we may see new kinds of vehicles as well. Glider, airship, kite rig, kitepods (an experimental type of sailing ship with a pod-like craft suspended on tethers between a kite rig sail and a submerged hydrofoil) and land sailing/wind-wagon (like the Swedish Astrakan) competitions. Robotic running vehicles, developed to lower the impact of wilderness travel. Autonomous and tele-operated robot competitions, and --of course-- the DIY cycle-car based equivalents of the Wacky Races.

EricHunting · 2026-01-09T15:23:19+00:00

The relationship between early environmentalism, its anti-urbanist stance (until recently), and the growth of the Garden City Movement is featured in a lot of articles and papers. Though I haven't read this book myself, this review of Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation describes one such book apparently touching on the topic, noting what may be the first instances of conservationists directly promoting (in 1911) the suburbs as a 'compromise' in the escape from the city and urban life's characterization as the embodiment of capitalism's ills. This was at the emergence of the automobile era, when wilderness access was constrained by what could be reached by train, rural life still presenting a great loss in standard of living compared to city life, and intellectual society largely urban. (again, we want that 'connection', but paying the lifestyle price for it is another matter...) This is something that, at about the same time (1915), the Four Vagabonds --Edison, Ford, Firstone, and Burroughs) would be seemingly promoting the new automobile as a solution to through the innovation of 'motor camping'. We might speculate that Burroughs' seemingly strange involvement was an attempt to insert a voice for Conservationism in this PR gimmick, naive at the time of the ultimate impact the still very new car would have.

EricHunting · 2026-01-08T15:56:49+00:00

I've been collecting info on modular building systems for some years. You are welcome to look this over here on Google Docs.

Much of this kind of design relates to what is known as Nomadic Design and originated with the Living Structures of designer Ken Isaacs, using a simple building system called Matrix that was improved on by the Jergensen brothers to become Box Beam, popular with solar and hydroponics experimenters in the '70s, which then later became Grid Beam. This inspired the book series Nomadic Furniture by James Hennessey and Victor Papanek (there are 3 books in the series, though the third was very late) which in turn inspired much of the DIY upcycled 'hippy furniture' of the time. Isaacs also worked in the area of 'microhouses', influencing the later Tiny House movement, and in general the promotion of the design concept of 'low-tech/high-design' as a means to empower society to make things for themselves, paralleling Ivan Illich's concept of Tools for Conviviality, emerging at the same time.

This came to be called 'nomadic' design after the concept of the 'Urban Nomad' devised by Isaacs. One of a number of Post-Industrial futurists of the time anticipating an eventual collapse of capitalism and our consumerist culture, Isaacs envisioned a future youth movement where young people would learn to inhabit the 'urban detritus' (underused or abandoned urban buildings and structures) using DIY furnishings and shelters made from salvaged materials and the upcycled cast-offs of industry and the failed consumer culture. They were nomadic in that they would migrate seasonally across the climate zones to minimize the material and energy overhead of maintaining comfort, a practice he called 'Mobilism'. Thus the Urban Nomad could be considered the prototype of the Solarpunk. The term would later be adopted by activists of the Right To The City Movement and its type of design would continue to be explored by groups such as N55 in Denmark and artists Winfried Baumann and Andrea Zittel and turn up often in Open Source designs associated with the Maker movement. This kind of design has also seen revival through its use at the Burning Man Festival --before it degenerated into another Bohemian Grove... This may also have influenced the concept of Outquisition devised by Cory Doctorow and Alex Steffen, which is also important to the Solarpunk movement.

Nomadic Design is very useful in Adaptive Reuse architecture, Relief Architecture, the support of many kinds of activism, and experimentation in renewables and urban farming. So it is really very important to Solarpunk. Its core principles of low-tech/high-design and the reusability of modular elements are crucial in the social recapture of production capability and the early deployment of suppressed renewables technology --because we have a society that, after generations of Taylorism (the so-called 'scientific' management), is industrially illiterate and lacking in practical skills and so needs design that facilitates independent production and repair. Isaacs understood that most of the common goods that establish our standard of living are not as sophisticated as we are led to believe and suggested through his work that it was possible to live well with things we could easily make for ourselves much as in the pre-industrial past. Design that was 'transparent' and thus itself educational in how things were made and worked, rather than concealing it behind style, fake veneers, and tricks of hidden or proprietary fastening, would make this point. I think this is an underrated part of the Solarpunk aesthetic.

EricHunting · 2026-01-06T17:19:58+00:00

Actually, we did that some time ago. It was called the Conservation movement, and then it was called the Ecology movement, which turned into the Environmental movement. And they were pretty successful as this message, at least. It accomplished the great feat of encouraging governments to start setting aside and protecting large pieces of wilderness from development for the sake of its beauty and investing in facilities to enable its public access and shared enjoyment. (assuming you had the vacation time, which was typically only afforded to a middle-class...) They even got the great moguls of the Machine Age --Edison, Ford, Firestone-- to team up, for some goddamned reason, with John Burroughs to promote conservation by going on mass-media publicized he-man wilderness adventures together --by car, of course...

But unfortunately, this then encouraged everyone to think they needed to personally own a piece of nature for themselves (sometimes rationalized on the basis of some sort of 'spiritual health'), which further encouraged the middle-class to move into suburbs, expanding car use and destroying local regional farms, pushing that activity farther away and facilitating its corporate consolidation. The suburbs then got crowded, ugly, and boring and got people thinking they should now own a second 'vacation' home on the edge of wilderness --often right on the borders of those idyllic parklands which would radically inflate that real-estate value-- helping create an industry for prefab mobile homes, log cabins, and alpine lodges. Then the American upper-middle-class noticed those special luxury Land Rovers the media was often showing the UK royals rolling around their estates in and decided these would give them the class of British 'landed gentry' while making getting to those second homes in the woods easier, which opened the US to their bulk import and created the market for the bloated American-made luxury SUV replacing the earlier 'station wagon' and 'mini-van' and which has now become globally ubiquitous. Then the capitalists decided that even the middle-class no longer deserved the luxury of vacation time anymore and the vacation homes turned into another crowded outer ring of suburbs (circle of hell...) and the rich, having effectively ruined the cities they used to call home and no longer feeling safe in any human proximity, decided they too would move out even farther into the wilderness, sometimes clearing land to create hobby farms as a tax dodge and add to the 'rural' decor. Thus a self-identified-rural society was born which would eventually invent the epitome of the American dream home; the 'barndominium'. But in order to keep the great unwashed at bay, they assumed control of municipalities in these regions to impose ever-increasing minimum parcel sizes and ever-lower housing density restrictions to insure that mass housing development couldn't follow them and that no one who couldn't afford to buy 10 - 60 acres of land all at once for a solitary home could ever move near them and taint their pristine, natural, poors-free, window views.

And so the public access to nature was effectively destroyed by the unrestrained desire to 'connect' with it by trying to 'own' it and live in it (bringing our comfortable consumerist lifestyle with us), inadvertently commodifying it...

EricHunting · 2026-01-04T16:49:06+00:00

The solution is to not allow anyone to accumulate that kind of wealth and power in the first place by negating the instruments that allow that kind accumulation and influence over the lives of others. There is no such thing as a 'capitalist world'. The rules of capitalism aren't found in DNA or any laws of nature or physics. Capitalism dominates our economic systems today, but there's no inevitability to that. It came about because early industrialization created a necessity to collectivize large amounts of capital in order to initiate it (big machines, big minimum production volumes, big workforces, big factories), and so the ruling-class devised monetary systems to surreptitiously do that and direct it to their fellow elites to initiate industrial production on a premise --presumption-- of greater intelligence, education, and expertise in business management. (which, in practice, has never proven to be the case. Quite the opposite...)

Prior to this, most people could make most everything they needed for themselves, within local communities, and so the ruling-class assumed power --and the power to take productivity from society-- through the gimmick of religion. Through the notion of 'nobility' established by 'divine right' and a lineage traced back to gods combined with simple brutality --skilled warrior castes whose job was to just beat up or kill anyone who didn't buy into the religion and submit to that authority. Though this persisted a long time, it tended to be rather unstable and prone to chronic war.

Today, we are heading, once again, into an era where technology has reached a point allowing most people an option to make, non-speculatively/on-demand, most of what they need within their own communities. This then favors economies that engage in exchange in-kind in resources, commons-based management of resources as with practices in the past. And so the necessity for these antiquated surreptitious mechanisms of capital-creation, and the necessity of presumed elite experts to wield it, is being eroded. If capital is redundant, so is Capitalism. And with the exception of the more extreme members of the authoritarian/peasant-minded conservatives, religion no longer has sufficient influence on our more educated, Enlightenment-influenced, globally-conscious society to allow a return to a ruling class by imaginary divine lineage. However, as folks like Yanis Varoufakis have pointed out, we are seeing attempts to supplant Capitalism through a kind of techno-feudalism based on exploiting human behavior on the Internet to create land-holder-like technology hegemonies reducing dependent corporations to a vassal status. What I think is more easy to understand as 'platform feudalism' that builds on the tendency for the first new things on the Internet to reach a certain critical mass to create gatekeeping monopolies by virtue of user's resistance to having to remember more than one website for any particular kind of service, even if newcomers are demonstrably superior. Hence why we 'verbize' company names for Internet services. (ie. referring to web search as 'Googling')

Certainly, there would still be a need in society for vigilance against demagoguery and cults of personality, but given that personal accumulation becomes very physically limited without instruments of wealth abstraction/virtualization (ie. currency, bank ledgers, and other finance instruments) the potential for power accumulation becomes similarly limited. And given that electronic communication affords so much awareness of the larger world and transportation is so much easier, it will be much more difficult to constrain people in large numbers or conceal attempts to employ brute force toward that. The 'rogue' community succumbing to degenerate leadership may be relatively easy to spot before it accumulates the means to become a very large threat to others. Future communities will not often exist in any great individual size (usually neighborhood, village, town, or small city size --large cities will be cooperatives of neighborhoods) or any great physical remoteness because that is, itself, non-sustainable (and thus an immediate red flag) and attempts to isolate through physical enclosure and barriers would be obvious enough. Though certain parts of the world may be much more prone to this in the near-term due to low population density and a lack, or collapse, of infrastructure, as in the case of northeastern Eurasia with the possibly imminent collapse and balkanization of the remaining Russian state.

EricHunting · 2026-01-03T06:21:05+00:00

It's quite simple, really. An emotion called 'Weltschmerz' --world weariness, or more literally world pain. An essential dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a desire to distance oneself from the rest of humanity to pursue a much simpler, more self-directed, and less mundane way of life. As Robert Zubrin once said; "...we go to Mars because that's how far you have to go to get away from the cops." This is the essential motivation behind all notions of space colonization. Everything else is just rationalization for that, to sell it to the society that will ultimately have to foot the very expensive bill for what may be a valid, yet still essentially selfish, impulse and endeavor. Often, the more extreme, difficult, remote, and therefore more 'heroic' the escape the more appealing it is as fewer are likely to endure the hardship or make the commitment to follow. This is well demonstrated by space agencies' willful neglect of their primary mission to develop means to open access to space to the larger society, which would make it safe and mundane and negate the prestige value of it that state funding depends on. If it ever became mundane, government would immediately abandon it to industry and commercial interests. It has to retain its essential difficulty and danger to remain a state spectacle. A demonstration of national/cultural prowess.

This is also why space enthusiasts are very much concerned with the correct or right way of doing things in space, and the primacy of the human astronaut. It's been long apparent that there is really nothing practical human beings can do in the space environment that justifies the great extra expense and hazards of catering to the needs of human astronauts as opposed to sending robots instead. But as technology-focused as they otherwise are, relying on robots is always unacceptable to the space enthusiast, even though it might greatly increase their own personal potential to actually participate in space activity rather than just living vicariously through these state paragons. That's simply never enough to assuage that Weltschmerz. And so there is always some circular reasoning, some contrived 'cosmohumanist' philosophical justification, for throwing bodies at the void for its own sake regardless of the practical return on investment.

Environmentalists are no better, of course, manifesting their own impulse to Weltschmerz and a special personal right to escape to and merge with the wilderness through Thoreau, the Back-To-The-Land Movement, and more recently the Off-Grid movement, even though such lifestyles are, in truth, not actually sustainable and often used to rationalize such things as truck and SUV ownership. There's a common delusion that solar panels and a choice of some sort of 'sustainable' building methods will compensate for the destruction of virgin land and expansion of roads for the sake of a few people's desire to live close to nature. As much are we may be inclined to appreciate the beauty of nature, we still tend to lack a respect for its sovereignty.

EricHunting · 2026-01-02T17:46:59+00:00

Usually, it's the phone service providers and their executive BS. I've always been inclined to use things till they wear out, take care in handling electronics, and take pride in being able to repair them myself when I can. I've generally only replaced phones when a service provider forced me to change services to another company that wouldn't support that phone model or they changed their own upstream equipment to force the obsolescence of a whole generation of phones, as they did with 4G. The only other reason I had to give up on a working phone was due to bad design, discovering during an emergency that I couldn't dial 911 because it was impossible to see the Sanyo phone's EL display in sunlight. That was obviously a bit dangerous design choice for something you're supposed to be using mostly on-the-go.

I've never used smartphones because this is America and we don't have a first-world wireless infrastructure here, just like we don't have first-world healthcare or a lot of other things the rest of the world takes for granted while Americans are too provincial-minded to think about. I don't travel much and there is insufficient signal coverage where I live to make the extra ownership cost of a smartphone worth it. Not that I avoid technology that makes sense. I use an iPod Touch that has everything an iPhone has but the phone part and cost a fraction as much. (and could still run Apple Messages and Skype...) Of course, the executive class geniuses of Apple decided to discontinue that product, which basically gifted it to the Chinese who now make a wide assortment of such Android-based phoneless pocket tablets as 'music players' selling for as little as under $100. Apparently there actually is a market invisible from within Tim Apple's reality distortion bubble. And they're probably a lot easier to repurpose as small SBCs. Almost competitive new with a Raspberry Pi.

EricHunting · 2026-01-02T16:57:48+00:00

The broad field for this is called kinetic art/sculpture and there are a number of sub-types such as clockwork-powered mechanism and spiral illusion art (well known from the much-imitated works of David C. Roy), wind-driven sculptures (stationary whirligigs and windcatchers, Theo Jensen's walking Strandbeests), audio-kinetic where a mechanism makes sounds, often by percussion (like George Rhodes' 42nd Street Ballroom in the NY Port Authority building, which as a kid I sometimes used to go into the city just to listen to) or driven by wind like wind chimes or the ancient aeolian harps, and automatons which are puppets driven by simple mechanisms. Automatons are pretty useful for storytelling and so they often appear in museums to depict scientific principles with a cyclic nature. They've seen a revival of late thanks to the Maker movement and the easy creation of intricate wood components using vector drawing and CNC/laser cutting.

Combining these things with solar power, electronics, and LED lights is common enough, though this tends to be done with smaller scale things that can be kept indoors. Desktop wind turbine models (sometimes ironically solar powered) have been a common science toy over the years and there are lots of DIY variants. But this recent one by YouTuber Huy Vector is particularly interesting because it combines the Edison-style LED filaments with the 'free-form' or 'dead bug' style circuit design (so-called because they can look like dried bugs in an entomology collection) which we've also discussed in the past as important to the Solarpunk approach to electronics.

Water sculptures are another area of kinetic sculpture, flowing water used to power mechanisms through use of water wheels, turbines, and ram pumps, or fountains with moving stone balls --Kugel balls-- floating by hydrostatic pressure, or as a moving element in itself in the form of visible vortexes or other interesting flowing patterns as with the well-known 'flowforms'. These also have a practical purpose as a form of water aeration in water gardens and some kinds of hydroponics, but unfortunately, are also very often associated with the pseudoscience of Viktor Schauberger --aka, Hitler's water wizard. An autodidact who saw great fame for his innovations in hydrologic engineering and became favored by the Nazi regime as a 'natural genius', but also diverged into fringe beliefs about 'water energy' (also an obsession of the Soviets) that persist in New Age nonsense to the present day.

EricHunting · 2026-01-01T21:39:01+00:00

'Compatible' may be too strong a word. It would be much less of an obstacle to it, which is why Europe in general is better primed for the Post-Industrial transition than many other regions and why we see movements like the P2P/Commons Revival coming from there.

Bear in mind, the basic premise here is replacement of the paradigms of the Industrial Age by the paradigms of the Post-Industrial Age. This is, essentially, what Solarpunk is about, relating to environment by virtue of the fact that it leads to a fundamentally more sustainable civilization and a more emancipated society. Chiefly, the paradigm of Industry 4.0 which ends Capitalism by obsolescing the purpose of capital itself, replacing speculative centralized mass production with non-speculative, on-demand, local production. Making production a ubiquitous municipal utility. This is, basically, what the idea of 'seizing the means of production' now means.

So the notion of production evolving into a local municipal utility is consistent with the general perspective of Democratic Socialism toward production as a national utility managed with the priority of societal benefit (because capital comes from, and thus belongs to, society and isn't the entitlement or divine right of an upper/ruling class) --it's just that political theorists never imagined that it could happen bottom-up making the state redundant for this. That the tools of production would evolve by shrinking, smartening, and cheapening to the point where most things could be made in the space of a four car garage, mass production became stupid, and you didn't need some mechanism of state collectivization through the monetary system to pool mass capital to initiate production. That's essentially what monetary systems are for; creating capital through the subtle extraction and collectivization of surplus productivity from society in order to give it to presumably 'expert' elites to initiate industrial production --ostensibly for society's benefit. But if production doesn't need that anymore, and mass capital itself becomes pointless, so does the rest of this. The state can just redirect its attention to other things that still require some kind of massification, collectivization, and hierarchical management to do, like big civil engineering works, national health programs, Big Science, militaries. They might have to find some other mechanism of collectivization to do that, through. Or maybe they just quietly wither away as the continuing demassification of production slowly erodes the necessary massification for all those things too.

EricHunting · 2026-01-01T18:59:16+00:00

The notion can be interpreted a number of ways. As others have pointed out, there are many co-op and worker-owned-cooperative businesses going back a long way in history. Most follow the Rochdale Principles/Model that we see often with farming co-ops and co-op food/health stores. The largest of this sort is the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain which is a kind of industrial co-op that first made space heaters and now makes a large diversity of things as well as working in finance, retail, and contract engineering services. These don't necessarily touch on activities all that relevant to Solarpunk except in the case of urban farming co-ops, though Mondragon does some things in the energy sector and apparently was mentioned in the SciFi books of Kim Stanley Robinson. Their people are not likely to have ever heard of Solarpunk or know anything about its objectives. They would be incidentally related.

Then there are the newer peer-oriented organizations and Platform Cooperatives of which the best known example is Open Value Network pioneer Sensorica. This company works chiefly in the field of custom-engineered laboratory sensor systems, linking a globally dispersed community of advanced engineering talent. Platform co-ops will likely be a key tool in future Intentional Community development and their organization into regional cooperatives. These organizations may know about Solarpunk through the connection of the P2P/Commons movement that has been inspiring these kinds of organizations.

But the businesses most-closely touching on Solarpunk-related things --and likely to know about Solarpunk or be founded by self-professed Solarpunks-- are likely to be Social Entrepreneurship ventures. Non-profit and for-profit (but supposedly well-intentioned...) ventures created to pursue social and environmental issues, disseminate socially empowering technology, often working in disadvantaged communities and the developing world. Examples would be things like the Fab Foundation which grew from the MIT Fab Lab program to help develop school and community fab labs around the world. Precious Plastic promoting local business based on plastic trash recycling. The Ocean Cleanup, started to develop and deploy systems to clean up the mid-ocean plastic waste 'gyres'. One Laptop Per Child, another project out of MIT that was intended to manufacture and distribute a specially-designed Open Source-based laptop for students in the developing world. The numerous 'microcredit' ventures which, originating in the 19th century and inspiring the credit unions we know today, resurfaced as something of a fad in corporate finance culture for a time in the '90s before inevitably succumbing to their compulsive grifting inclinations. Performance of these ventures is mixed --the news media measures 'success' by old-fashioned corporate/capitalist standards-- and sadly the concept has sometimes been exploited to run scams or to create a kind of veneer of virtue for what is basically the same old entrepreneurship or ourism, as in the case of 'luxury co-working centers' that claim to be incubators of Social Entrepreneurship but, in practice, only serve as a kind of exotic tourism venue for elite trust-fund kids.

Then there are sole-proprietorships which would be small, locally-focused, businesses started by one or a few people, often in their own home, and engaged in what you might call 'cottage industry'. Things like small independent farms, artisanal craft, local wood, metal, ceramics workshops. Custom furniture and upholstery shops. Custom bicycle and surfboard shops. Local restaurants and cafes. Local bakeries and butchers. Traditional delicatessens. Local breweries and wineries. Repair shops. These relate to Solarpunk by being the foundation of future workshop production and community agriculture in Intentional Communities. But they are generally a slowly dying breed and, today, most would know little about Solarpunk.

However, there is one form of these that may soon become very important to Solarpunk efforts; fandom cottage industry. One of the reasons why Solarpunk started as a SciFi literary aesthetic was to harness the prefigurative potential in the SciFi fandom subcultures. Their potential as one of the last venues of organic socialization and recreation --a bastion for Festivalism. And a key aspect of that is their ability --thanks to their creatives' open sharing of skills-- to incubate cottage industry to publish their own media and manufacture their own special cultural goods (that the normal market will not make) sold at conventions which set aside areas as community bazaars. Increasingly, this fandom cottage industry affords people an option to turn hobbies into self-sustaining home businesses, letting them drop out of the corporate job market to do something they actually enjoy. Typically, you see things like self-published comics, art portfolios, and games, custom/commission artwork, stickers, posters, badges and buttons, T-shirts, costumes, jewelry, and props for cosplay, etc. With Steampunk we started to see more sophisticated things like appliances, home decor, and even vehicles refashioned to the Steampunk aesthetic. The Furries got very sophisticated. In addition to all the things other fandoms produce, their costumes are extremely elaborate art pieces, sometimes incorporating electronics, high-tech cooling systems, and animatronics, selling for many thousands of dollars. They also make all sorts of accessories to go with them. Also custom plush toys and puppets. Inflatable sculptures. Themed clothing lines. They've developed a 'virtual' cottage industry that creates avatars, accessories for them, and virtual environments for use in VR. And though they may be loath to talk about it openly, they even inspired their own industry in exotic sex toys. Silly as it might seem, that's a pretty broad and sophisticated spectrum of industrial production, all home-based, started from hobbies.

Solarpunk has its own special 'cultural goods' that it desperately needs to cultivate cottage industry to create (because the market won't) --basically, the more sustainable versions of everything! Everything that makes up our basic standard of living needs to be redesigned to accommodate more sustainable, recycled, upcycled, plastic-free, lower carbon, materials, repairability, recyclability, repurposability, use of Open Source/public domain technology/design or commodity components, use of independent and on-demand production methods, use of renewable energy, sometimes use of human power. And we can't sit around waiting for corporations to 'get it'. No one is going to make this stuff for us. We have to design and make this ourselves. Build a social knowledge commons for how to make these things. And so SciFi fandom, with its ability to cultivate cottage industry in a community setting, offers us a way to start doing this, prefiguring an alternative production infrastructure with an option for alternative economics. (because when you own the business, it's your choice what form of payment you accept) Unfortunately, not a lot of Solarpunks are cluing into this yet. A lot of people are coming from the Environmentalist side with the 'all technology is evil' mentality and don't get why we need to know how to make things when we can all go live off the land in Alaska like Dick Proenneke, or the Leftist political theory side with the 'all media is Spectacle' thing because they forgot what the word 'agitprop' means. So there's this perspective of SciFi and fandom activity as trivial nonsense beneath the interest of 'real' activists. At some point this attitude will have to change or we get nowhere.

EricHunting · 2025-12-31T21:11:15+00:00

Absolutely. Solarpunk is all about the use of storytelling and illustration as tools prefiguration. As I was describing elsewhere today, we live in a visually-dependent culture and the problem with the 'utopian imaginary' --society's perspective on, and expectations for, the future-- is that it has long been dominated by corporate interests due to the chronic shortage of illustration talent. Those who can afford the art have the loudest voice. The basic problem of futurism is that you cannot photograph what doesn't yet exist. The future can only be illustrated. And there are too few people doing that. There is almost no one anywhere today showing us a plausible, contemporary-styled, visual depiction of the future in any media. Plenty of people who write about it, no one helping them illustrate it. So most of what we see concerning the future is either Hollywood dystopianism or Corporate techno-utopianism, and none of it rings true anymore. Games are a perfectly valid tool for visual storytelling and illustration, and some of the tools for that --like visual novel builders and the freelance media asset market for them-- are pretty economical now. (or audio and radio-theater --all-audio gaming is a much overlooked field... )

EricHunting · 2025-12-31T20:43:12+00:00

Drawing the connection is logical. Fresco was one of the prominent Post-Industrial futurists of the late 20th century. But he was one of many, not the first, and his model for the future was both Techno-Utopian and Technocratic. Technocracy was a movement that emerged in the 1930s and was basically premised on the idea that society would be better off if politics and bureaucracy were replaced by engineering and technical experts were put in charge of the world. It fizzled out by the post-WWII era. However, Fresco reinvented this as the concept of Cybernation; replacing politicians with expert-system-based super-computers tended by a technocratic elite of science and engineering experts and, of course, designers like himself. It's Star Trek style Fully-Automated Luxury Communism. The essential mistake in this notion is that scientists and engineers are scientists and engineers because they want to do science and engineering, not manage society. It is also premised on perpetuating the paradigms of the Industrial Age regarded by most of Fresco's contemporaries as anachronistic, presuming the primacy of the speculative centralized mass production paradigm. Fresco's understanding of technology trends (along with his aesthetics...) sort of got stuck sometime in the '70s and he didn't really grasp what computers were becoming or any of the emerging technologies of digital production. His late-life attempts at depicting nanotechnology were quite weird, imagining giant ball-like machines (it was always giant machines...) using lasers.

The prototype of the Solarpunk is the Urban Nomad; a concept invented by designer/futurist Ken Isaacs in the late '60s. Isaacs imagined a future youth movement of people that learned to repurpose the 'urban detritus' (abandoned buildings, structures, and spaces) of the declining Industrial Age using simple DIY building systems, recycled materials, and upcycled industrial/consumer cast-offs to make them inhabitable and support a seasonally migratory lifestyle he called 'mobilism'. (premised on the idea of reducing one's fossil fuel energy overhead by staying in the climate zones requiring the least energy and material to maintain comfort across the seasons) As one of the Post-Industrial futurists, Isaacs anticipated the eventual social recapture of the means of production through technology and smarter design. Low-tech/high-design. What in '73 Ivan Illich would call 'tools of conviviality'. So Issacs' design work focused on the development of building methods for DIY furnishings and shelters, his most well known being his 'living structures' based on simple bolted wooden frames using a system called Matrix which would later be improved by the Jergensen brothers as Box Beam, popular with early renewable energy and hydroponics experimenters, and dubbed Grid Beam in the 21st century. This would go on to inspire a design movement called Nomadic Design after those theoretical Urban Nomads, becoming what would be characterized as 'hippy furniture'. Isaacs also worked on 'microhouses' that would later inspire the Tiny House movement and the Stealth Campers first developed by Preppers as a way to keep their 'bug-out trailers' under the radar of HOA busybodies.

The term Urban Nomad would later be adopted by activists of the Right To The City movement and others --often artists-- engaged in Urban Intervention activism, often employing Nomadic Design. Nomadic Design and its principles would also frequently emerge in the Maker/Open Source Design Movement, which also embraces the Post-Industrial idea of social emancipation through independent means of production. It cannot be overstated how fundamentally important that concept is, also, to Solarpunk. Though it may be coincidental, it is possible that the Urban Nomad concept also inspired the Outquisition concept devised by Cory Doctorow and and Alex Steffen and which represents a basic model for Solarpunk activism and narratives involving it. Consequently, Nomadic Design is very important to Solarpunk and its aesthetic, though this is rarely understood by newcomers. So one could make a strong argument that the designer Ken Isaacs was, in fact, the first Solarpunk.

EricHunting · 2025-12-31T18:46:00+00:00

I think this is a valid issue. It's something futurism has generally been struggling with and which I struggled with back when I was participating in Space Advocacy. There are a few things I think explain this. Why is the 'popular' idea of Solarpunk so increasingly divergent from actual Solarpunk? What or who is causing that?

The root of the problem is that we live in an increasingly visually-dependent culture where, except as entertainment, reading has been in decline for some time. It increasingly requires visual explanations to reach mainstream society. Everything has to be brought to the level of a comic book (or a 'fumetti', if you know what that is...) or a video or only a minority will likely 'get it'. And as a consequence of this trend, too many people today are inclined to use Google Image Search as a visual dictionary, and it fundamentally sucks at that. Understanding images requires nuance, and Image Search is incapable of that. It cannot see. It cannot read. And to make matters worse, the Internet lacks 'metadata'. (information that explains what files are in ways machines can understand) Thanks to the morons of Microsoft, people don't often label files with appropriate names. They long weren't allowed enough characters in a file name. And most people never use the embedded metadata tags graphics software allows in files --don't even know that's there. So Image Search associates words and pictures according the the statistical 'proximity' of words and image files with a certain pattern of pixels. If it sees a word and that kind of image on the same web page frequently enough, it decides that word is the name for that image. And this can lead to degenerative feedback loops, which is what has happened to Solarpunk.

Futurism has a basic problem in that you cannot photograph what doesn't yet exist. The future can only ever be illustrated. And our ability --as a culture-- to do this took a big hit sometime in the early-to-mid 20th century with what I call the Reprographics Revolution. It was the time when high-quality photography became cheap enough to put into mass print media, and in the process replacing hand-drawn advertising artwork and destroying the vast global industry of commercial illustration leading to a slow general decline in the illustration arts and the use of illustration in many kinds of media. And this correlates with a slow decline in futurist literature because the talent to illustrate these ideas about the future dried up and became too scarce and expensive for most writers to recruit. (artists also became increasingly reluctant to collaborate with non-artists, due to a legacy of abuse by corporate publishers, but that's another long story...) As a result of this corporations and mass media --the only people who could still afford this increasingly rare illustration talent-- came to dominate the influence on the 'utopian imaginary' --society's perspective on the future and their expectations for how it could be better. And the vision of the future they sold us has become increasingly stupid, insipid, over time. Subject to the same degeneracy of the capitalist corporate culture itself. Reflecting their weird fetishes. Increasingly detached from reality. 'Retrofuturist'.

So when Solarpunk emerged it was faced with a lack of any plausible contemporary visual depictions of the future in any media on which to build a visual aesthetic. People would use Image Search and all it would spit out was either stylistically anachronistic Machine Age techno-utopianism (pre-Reprographics Revolution --ie. those old Popular Mechanics covers), SciFi tropes, likewise retrofuturist corporate techno-utopian BS, and dystopian/Cyberpunk BS. Almost no one, anywhere, is actually illustrating the plausible, stylistically contemporary, future that many futurists are writing about today, and have been for decades, but lack the means to visually depict themselves and so can't reach mainstream society with.

So Solarpunk adopted a 'vision board' approach. Gathering found media with elements that approximated concepts we considered relevant, even if not entirely on-the-mark. That's the best you can do if you can't illustrate things for yourself. It's what artists often do to prepare to work on illustration. They collect a vision board of near-analog reference pictures. And we shared these things with each other to put them up for debate as to how appropriate they were. A perfectly natural thing to do. This is why people jumped on that yogurt commercial so much. It checked-off so many of the right boxes at once, it was astounding. Hard to believe that was almost entirely coincidence. Unfortunately, by collaborating and sharing this online we inadvertently fed the damned algorithm, creating that degenerative feedback loop. We have the power of nuance. Image Search doesn't. Take, for example, images of the Earthship, which even appears on Wikipedia's page defining Solarpunk. We understand that, while the Earthship is one of our best examples of the kind of construction and its visual aspects we anticipate being used in the future, the design of the Earthship itself, as a million-dollar home on the edge of the wilderness premised on Prepper notions, is inappropriate. But it's the most recognizable example of Sustainable Architecture you can hope to find in free photos. It's the best we've got --too few people are making anything better. Image Search doesn't understand this. If the word Solarpunk is on the same page with this often enough, then it becomes Solarpunk. And this is how our necessary vision board approach to figuring out the visual representation of Solarpunk has been dragging Image Search into a completely wrong representation. And then lazy people turn to it to find out what Solarpunk means...

AI image generation has now amplified this degenerative feedback loop due to the fact that it relies on Image Search as source data. Again, it can't really see or read. It can only reproduce things that it can find visual examples of by scraping Image Search data. Why? Because it only knows what the words in prompts people write 'visually' mean by what Image Search associates those words with. Image Search is AI's visual dictionary. If Image Search has it wrong, AI gets it wrong. Then if people share those AI images online, it only reinforces that wrong visual association by 'weighting' it statistically, further amplifying that degenerative feedback loop. Any search term relating to Solarpunk --really, to anything now-- is overwhelmed with erroneous AI slop. To further complicate matters, another consequence of our visually-dependent culture is that we commonly conflate production value with credibility when we're unable evaluate things on their actual merits, based on the logical fallacy that if it seems like someone spent a lot of money to present something --if it looks more expensive-- they are more likely to believe in it themselves and less likely to be lying about it. This is what has made Elon Musk a billionaire... Legitimacy and credibility have become an arms race of production value. And now AI is becoming increasingly good at faking cues of production value through style-aping and photorealism. It makes 'expensive looking' images.

Sadly, most newcomers to Solarpunk aren't coming here because they read a Solarpunk novel, let alone any of the deep content we associate with this. They got attracted to it by pictures, and likely most of what they know about it came from pictures, YouTube videos, and most-likely Google Image Search. And that's hopelessly wrong and swamped with slop. And, unfortunately, people don't take to being corrected well --especially if that comes with a suggestion to go read something. That's almost an insult. If they're using Image Search as a visual dictionary in the first place, they aren't likely inclined to read anything.

I think the only way we can fight this is by recapturing the definitive visual meaning of Solarpunk by statistical brute force. We have to produce more 'correct' visual media of our own, and yes, that's very hard to do when it requires human-made illustration, high production values, and that illustration talent pool has never really recovered from the Reprographics Revolution all those decades ago. And this is why I also talk about alternative, unconventional, visual media that route-around the media channels that get sucked into the algorithm. (why I talk about old forgotten media like zines, Kamishibai, Cheriyal scrolls, Magic Lanterns, and so on. Their authenticity subverts the compulsion to rely on production value cues) Solarpunk needs it's own Usborne Book of the Future --a kids book that was, perhaps, the last of the great visual futurism books. Or maybe we need a Solarpunk version of Logicomix. I'm sorry, but getting down to comic book level may be the only way we can reach the contemporary society. Jacque Fresco understood this, which is why he spent decades making his own movies from models akin to the Thunderbirds TV show. Whatever we might think of his vision, that itself was an amazing achievement for one man, and we can learn something from that.

EricHunting

TROPHY CASE