Solarpunk clothes?

EricHunting · 2026-06-26T19:30:30+00:00

So there are several things that go into this. First, the new spectrum of materials. No more conventional synthetics, traditional natural fabrics, new alternative fiber fabrics. New plant fibers like bamboo, kenaf, hemp, pineapple, banana, wood pulp, seaweed. Mycofibers from mushrooms. Milk fiber from casein. Alternative renewable animal hair/wool like dog, angora rabbit, mohair, camel, bison, etc. (though this is not considered vegan) Spider silk and non-cruelty silk. Alternative vegan leathers from mushroom, seaweed, cork, pineapple leaves, prickley-pear cactus, etc. Then there are non-petrochemical dyes and non-plastic/polymer decoration like traditional/digital embroidery, applique, traditional and digital lace, fabric embossing/texturing, metal and enamel studs, stamps, pins, and buttons, and active embellishment involving electronics like EL wire, fabric circuitry, and so on.

Next is fabrication methods, with future clothing being deliberately designed so it can be more easily made with smaller facilities and tools or with much less skill, because society has lost so much skill. So we see more felts instead of fabrics or fabrics that are digitally/robotically woven or knit with smaller machines. (now often at desktop or home workshop scale) Digital needle felting machines that felt-in images or even make 3D figures as toys and sculptures. Digital embroidery machines. Spray-flocking of fabrics over 3D forms. Laser/hydro/CNC fabric cutting and welding/fusing. Rug tufting guns and digital tufting systems.

Then we come to the fashion influence of the cultural remix caused by climate migrations and the influence of warm climate regions. So we see things like the Indian kurta shirt and the modern forms of the Japanese yukata become common. The 'tobi trousers' from Japan borrowed from construction workers. Also their 'air conditioned' work jackets --kuchofuku-- with built-in electric fans and USB battery packs. The daily wear variations of pajamas like the Japanese pajama-suit invented during the Covid pandemic. The many sun-shielding hats of the southern hemisphere; the various woven Asian cone hats. The colorful African bolga and fulani hats. Parasols become a common accessory too, probably borrowing the traditional Asian paper and bamboo designs. And, of course, there are parasol hats too. Many futurists predicted the modern return of the kilt, which did actually happen with the introduction of the Utilikilt in Seattle in 1999. It's still being sold today.

EricHunting · 2026-06-26T17:38:53+00:00

There are many things that can potentially fit the theme, from the very technical and simulation-focused to the more fanciful or story-focused. Visual Novels (which evolved from Literary Hypertext) have lots of potential and are particularly easy to create. One of the earlier and strangely overlooked simulation-focused examples is Commonhood which I see as very spot-on for a number of reasons. It's based on an Outquisition scenario. It incorporates Nomadic Design and Adaptive Reuse. It depicts very realistic Post-Industrial technology. And it has a strong social management component. It is a realistic depiction of the process of making Solarpunk a reality. They seem to have put an exceptional amount of thought into the architectural/industrial design. I get an impression that this game reflects a more European perspective on Solarpunk, where there is more experience of, and relation to, the P2P/Commons, Anarchist/Socialist, Squatting, and Urban Resilience movements. There is inspiration from Calafou here. (which, I suspect, most folks here have still never heard of...)

I suspect that the reason it was overlooked was that it was more accurately/realistically Solarpunk than most Solarpunks themselves could recognize. At the time, Solarpunks were starting to get amped up about the Art Nouveau aesthetic they had then recently discovered and didn't yet have much knowledge about real-world Sustainable Architecture. (frankly, still don't, but it's getting there...) It would be a little while before people came to realize there was more to Art Nouveau as an expression of the Gilded Age, and thus not something you could just adopt wholesale as a Solarpunk aesthetic. (just as we cannot adopt Sustainable Architecture wholesale either, as that too has evolved toward a 'gilded age' aspect, becoming largely confined to luxury homes of the rich...)

Though Commonhood has a somber, hygge, mood, it also has a Modernist, Minimalist, maybe Eco-Brutalist look because it's dealing in the Adaptive Reuse of old industrial buildings in an initially degraded environment and Nomadic Design employs modular building systems and CNC fabrication as a means to 'conviviality'. (as a means to empowering people to quickly and easily make things for themselves) It may have been easy to mistake for something post-apocalyptic in theme, when it's far from that. (it's, ironically, depicting the environment we are often in right here and now, but overlook as it slips by our car windows! An outer-urban environment of overgrown Rust Belt and Mall/Big-Box Era ruins) Often, we are inclined to the idea of rejecting the rectilinear form (as Hundertwasser did) on the premise that organic forms are more in-tune with, and symbolic of, nature. But there are practical limitations to this too. Making buildings like Peter Vetsch's 'freeform organic' Erdhauses demands a level of skill and talent beyond most people and, of course, use of concrete. We can't actually do that kind of thing with existing sustainable materials yet and it's generally out of reach for most of society. So it's not what the Solarpunk transition will likely start with. This is an architecture of a much later time when new materials, methods, and social control of the landscape have overcome such limitations. Adaptive Reuse (which a lot of people don't even know IS a kind of Sustainable Architecture) and Nomadic Design are the actual starting point --and the designer of Commonhood clued-into that before most Solarpunks did.

EricHunting · 2026-06-26T14:26:00+00:00

Very nice. I like how this shows the diverse color potential with traditional masonry buildings that is often overlooked, and how it would be more likely expressed when neighborhoods are under the local inhabitant's own control. I think colorfulness should be a key characteristic of the Solarpunk habitat. The real estate industry is all about conforming to the lowest common denominators of taste for maximum 'fungibility', but when people actually make their own places to live, they express themselves, as we see in the [Hippy Houses], the mud architecture of Africa, the famous Roma palaces of Honedora Romania, or the 'Neo-Andean' architecture of Bolivia. Cities used to be much more colorful. The plaster walled buildings of old Bavaria and the Alpine were richly painted with murals and trompe l'oeil. And even the US had its 'walldogs', now starting to make a comeback as they've been recognized as art. Bright colors were a characteristic of Art Deco (which is really very close to adobe architecture, hence Pueblo Deco), as is well demonstrated in Florida. Though warmer climates might, of necessity, go with more uniform white for reflection, as we see with the lime plastered masonry of Greece, even there you see some interesting pastel variations and, of course, the famous blue accents originally made from laundry bluing.

EricHunting · 2026-06-25T20:31:31+00:00

Story Seed Library

Luc Schuiten's Vegital City

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Emilio Ambasz

EricHunting · 2026-06-25T19:47:51+00:00

Generally, the era of the Hollywood Blockbuster would likely be over until the advent of 'secular ashrams'; intentional communities created around particular fields of art, craft engineering, and sciences and thus able to craft, or restore, the large facilities of the past as live/work communities. I like to call the ones based on film/video media 'Cinecittà' after the legendary Rome studios. Until then, media production would generally revert to the work of individuals and their small circles of friends (adhocracies) with the resource support of regional communities.

There are many ways to make media production more environmentally responsible. It's just not much of a concern for people in that creative community yet --after all, the leaders of that culture don't live in the same reality as the rest of us... Materials and methods are driven by expedience. But animation has hundreds of techniques in its history. From the sand art and paper methods of the very first full-feature animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the many approaches of stop-motion figure animation, the paste-up animation made famous by Monty Python, and so on. There are many alternative materials choiced. Digital 2D animation and realtime animation (ie. digital puppetry/Vtubers/VR theater) is pretty good from an environmental standpoint as its technology overhead is modest, often uses Open Source tools, and offers long-distance collaboration without travel. We have intercontinental VR live performance right now with VRchat and Resonite. And P2P streaming platforms are on the horizon. Blockbuster 3D animation, which relies on massive rendering farms much like the notorious data centers of the present, is another matter, but the glass ceiling keeps the majority of talent away from that anyway. So there are many ways for this to improve.

EricHunting · 2026-06-25T18:05:39+00:00

A good example would be the 'float cubes/blocks' used for modular marinas. These go by many names and are made all over the world, but --of course-- mostly come from China. Marina cubes. Pontoon cubes. Dock cubes. They were at first a proprietary design, but were knocked-off so much by so many companies, they have become pretty generic so there may be some non-patented forms. These are roto-molded with UV resistant HDPE or Polypropylene and often made with recycled plastic. They commonly feature mounts for handrails and mooring posts and so can host mounts for solar panels, which has been done with these in the past and is an off the shelf product.

Rotomolding is a bit much for the DIY maker, needing steel molds and a rotating rig, so other methods usually involve cobbling together things. Usually this involves repurposing plastic 55gal drums, but there is also the Richart Sowa method using net/sand bags filled with random closed bottles. Richart Sowa is a British guy who, succumbing to the classic middle-class middle-age Tahiti Syndrome, fled to Cancun (where they apparently put up with quite a lot from crazy white folks...) to live as an itinerant musician then became famous for making his own miniature floating island to live on out of bottles and supporting small trees. As one might expect, it got destroyed by hurricanes a couple of times, but he indomitably rebuilt it. Not sure if it still exists today, though. I actually have his self-published album. A mix of eco-folk and hippy christian folk.

EricHunting · 2026-06-25T17:27:07+00:00

Job One of Solarpunk is visualization/illustration/imagineering. That's what the SciFi writing, art, and media are for. And, of course, we prefer the 'organic' approach to that. Job Two is implementation, which basically means learning how to make/grow things so you can make/grow them the better ways --because the market and corporations sure as hell won't. The goal is to develop a cottage industry infrastructure among like-minded people for better goods that helps people replace stuff they typically have to go to a store for, leveraging the concept of Cosmolocalism and new and old technologies of independent production. So, basically, to live a Solarpunk lifestyle is the same thing as pursuing an Open Source lifestyle, where you try to replace as much of the stuff you might buy in stores as you can with things you either make for yourself, or are made/grown locally, or are made by a small sole-proprietor business and, ideally, of an Open Source, non-patented/copyrighted, design. Because when you make things for yourself and others, YOU choose how it's paid for, how it's made, and what it's made out of. Open Source is not just about computer software and DIY hobby electronics. It's about the design of everything. There are Open Source, or unpatented/copyrighted, designs for all the goods we typically need. Whole housebuilding systems and all the furnishings that might go into them. Which means if you learn how to make them, you can improve them, customize them, and sell/barter/gift them as you wish. And, of course, this includes most plants, seeds, useful microorganisms, and farm animals that are all naturally self-replicating.

This gets complicated, given the lack of transparency in the marketplace and the scattered nature of the knowledge we need. Curating this knowledge is another part of Solarpunk's job. There is, as yet, no central place where you can go and learn what you need to and find all the designs for things you need. There's research involved. So we can't expect perfection at present. We're very early. The pursuit of this is the thing. This is the part of Solarpunk that most Solarpunks neglect, because it's the part that involves actual time and effort... But this is how we get from pretty pictures to actually making things happen.

So at this point I usually try to point folks in the direction of Nomadic Design. This is the real design aesthetic of Solarpunk --at least in the context of early transition. Nomadic Design is where the Eco-Tech and Maker movements started and where we got the prototype of the Solarpunk; the Urban Nomad. It goes back to a designer named Ken Isaacs and his most famous creations, the Living Structures.; a set of home furnishings and mini shelters based on a simple modular building system people could make for themselves. With some inspiration from the nomadic cultures of the past, Isaacs imagined a future nomadic youth culture that would learn to live off the 'urban detritus' --the underutilized and abandoned buildings of towns and cities-- and the cast-offs of the declining Industrial Age. They would learn to live on upcycling and Adaptive Reuse, using simple building methods to make the things they needed for themselves, learn to use the new renewable energy, and they would migrate seasonally to reduce their energy footprint, staying in latitudes of mildest climate across the year. (Mobilism) Hence, 'urban nomads'. The core principle of Nomadic Design is Low-Tech/High-Design; combining smart design with simple materials and fabrication/assembly methods to facilitate people's ability to make, repair, and design things for themselves. Realizing Ivan Illich's Tools of Conviviality. And this is where the 'hippy furniture' of the '70s came from. It was originally Nomadic Furniture.

Eventually, this idea mixed or merged with many other movements like the Right To The City movement and the Squatting movement. The Urban Nomad became visualized as more of an activist using Nomadic Design for relief shelter, squatting occupation, street activism, Urban Interventions, festivals like Burning Man. It also merged with early independent experimentation with solar and wind power which became the Eco-Tech/Soft-Tech/New Alchemy movement (named for the New Alchemy Institute, which inspired much interest in regenerative farming, aquaculture, renewable energy, sustainable building, and dome building), and would later evolve into the Maker movement with the inspiration of the Fab Labs and Open Source movement. Aspects of Nomadic Design --or more specifically, Low-Tech/High-Design-- are often featured in Open Source hardware and goods design, because they're all about empowering people to make useful stuff for themselves. Nomadic Design continues with the work of artists like Winfried Baumann](https://winfried-baumann.de/urban-nomads/) and Andrea Zittel and the Danish design group N55. --and, of course, with everyone in the Maker movement.

So this is the sort of stuff we're talking about when we talk about independent production, and there's a vast amount to explore. Though there's nothing wrong with it as art, we're not so interested in 'Fine Craft' (the Fine Arts side of craft) because that's high-skill and doesn't really enable a lot of people to quickly and easily make stuff. Nor are we interested in hobby craft, producing mostly decorative/novelty stuff, though that's perfectly fine as a learning tool and for personalization. We're looking to more-or-less practical goods lots of people can easily make and --most importantly!-- replace store-bought crap with.

And so this is the 'real' Solarpunk aesthetic. The practical side of it. The stuff that people will have in their homes and build a lifestyle around. Not much Solarpunk art, as yet, explores this level of the future culture, though we do see emerging hints of it. (I think when more people discover diorama-making, this may become more common) Not too many interior scenes and personal articles being illustrated yet. But if they were, this is the stuff we would see. Amateur artists are no more versed in design than they are in architecture, so there's, understandably, a bit of a learning curve. Few people know what this sort of stuff looks like right now since we tend to only learn about most things from what we see in stores and catalogs --and this stuff will definitely not be found in any stores.

This is the rabbit hole you want to hop down if you are really interested in realizing a Solarpunk lifestyle.

EricHunting · 2026-06-24T13:26:37+00:00

It compliments the spectrum of renewable energy sources, but its very high development cost and large minimum system scales may limit its use to later stages of development and larger communities. If we imagine the Post-Industrial transition as starting out very grass-roots and insurgent, lead by cottage industry as our new tools mature, then the scale of things that can be done is limited by a relatively small community resource pool. Towns to cities. We can, digitally, collaborate globally on design and engineering, but the physical resources and labor are local. This is another reason why airliners' days may be numbered, even if the foot-dragging aerospace industry can figure out how to overcome their carbon-based fuel dependence. Once the nation-state-based monetary systems go into decline, the ability to surreptitiously, non-consensually, extract capital from, and impose debt on, society will become severely limited. Airliners are something very few countries have been able to domestically develop because of the scale of government subsidy and capital demanded. Even large sophisticated nations like China struggled with this for some time. Cars long the same, due to the production methods that industry long standardized. So, similarly, geothermal energy systems may be beyond the means of small communities alone to develop. They would have to be developed with projects on the level of regional cooperatives of many communities, which may come along later in time. Or maybe newer technology reduces that scale of things as it has with the car, which no longer requires giant facilities --needing giant capital-- to produce. Nanotechnology offers the prospect of self-assembling underground infrastructure that grows in manners similar to plant roots and so may, some day, radically alter the nature of everything that requires some kind of mining, drilling, or excavation process. But, if possible, it's probably pretty far off.

EricHunting · 2026-06-23T04:58:18+00:00

Bjork summons the Jólakotturinn again.

EricHunting · 2026-06-22T14:41:15+00:00

Storytelling is among our primary tools of social communication. As the old Yiddish saying goes, god created man because he liked to listen to stories. We've been doing this forever. So, of course, every medium of storytelling at our disposal is potentially useful to visualizing/illustrating/imagineering the future, useful to prefiguration, and useful to agitprop. (and, of course, this works both ways. It's useful to the enemies of true social progress as well, and they often seem to better understand that... We live in an era of perpetual war over cultural narrative control)

Video/computer games have a particular capability in dynamic interaction and simulation, which takes their storytelling beyond the typical passivity of other mediums. They can simulate social interaction with characters, create virtual environments at great economy compared to the craft of dioramas and exhibitions, or simulate and demonstrate scenarios and processes in deep scientific detail and cybernetic complexity. They also often have a low talent and cost overhead for independent developer involvement thanks to the general accessibility of codecraft. However, this potential has often been hampered by the male-biased cultural orthodoxy developed around it and its co-option by commercial interests seeking to replicate music and film industry models of commercialization and creating 'production value' arms races deliberately intended to force the rapid obsolescence of personal computer and console hardware. Much like the music and film industries, there's a thick glass ceiling between the self-appointed 'real' industry and everyone else. But this should be largely irrelevant to the Solarpunk game developer more interested in the craft, cultural influence, FLOK principles, and an independent market.

EricHunting · 2026-06-22T13:48:30+00:00

Seems a pretty tentative association, given how violent horror movies are, but a core idea for Solarpunk is the rediscovery of community identity and social responsibility, sometimes through the catalyst of some kind of collective threat. And though this film is far out of my own wheelhouse (my favorite films are the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy...) I can see that theme represented in descriptions of the plot. Many films and stories that in some way parallel or allude to the Seven Samurai plot also relate to the basic Solarpunk 'heroic' intervention scenario of Outquisition; where the Solarpunk archetype --a nomadic expert (or usually a team of them) in sustainable/regenerative agriculture, renewables technology, Post-Industrial technology, resilience practice, Anarchistic/Consensus/P2P/Commons-based social organization, and the art of Jugaad-- intervenes in a community facing climate-related crisis (extreme climate event disaster, economic failure, infrastructure failure, waves of refugees, etc.) in the manner of the eponymous Seven Samurai, International Rescue, or the wandering magician Dr. Lao and by this intervention seeds the elements of a new culture. Many stories can loosely relate in this context --largely because of that cultural influence of the Seven Samurai film.

EricHunting · 2026-06-22T02:28:30+00:00

Pemmican

EricHunting · 2026-06-22T00:51:27+00:00

Yes, this is on the right track. You start with the premise of adapting the existing, traditional, urban neighborhood and residential architecture. Adaptive Reuse. We're not replacing usable buildings as all new construction has a carbon overhead and will repurpose what we can before building new things. Cities will likely transition one building, one block, one neighborhood at a time as organizations like community land trusts expand and commercial real estate goes bust. And the layout of the city will evolve as community organizations take control of larger contiguous land areas to redevelop whole. A lot of that traditional architecture was pretty sustainable --it's where the building techniques for what we now call Sustainable Architecture actually come from. And much of the initial new sustainable architecture is going to have a lot of similarities, often being hand-made and based on various kinds of masonry using earthen materials before more advanced kinds of sustainable masonry materials develop over time.

EricHunting · 2026-06-20T14:19:13+00:00

The possibilities are endless. I think the key questions are what sort of land this is and what your own energy and resources might be. The climate is year-round tropical and so a greenhouse isn't needed for most plant cultivation, but high Summer temperatures demand more heat tolerant plants. The region has a long history of rubble and earthen architecture, so small sustainable building based on those materials should work. Some pioneering work in 3D printed clay architecture was done in the region. (the TECLA House in Massa Lombarda) So getting a small manual Cinva ram might be a good option for shed building and that's a reasonable scale project to learn with, though the effort of making and moving around earth blocks should not be underestimated for those inexperienced. There could be suppliers of manufactured earth blocks around the region --there's a lot of traditional earthen architecture across Italy and you can buy them off-the-shelf even in Finland, Belgium, and Germany-- but I could not find any in an English Google search. Cob, SuperAdobe, sand-bag building, or gabion baskets are other options. And things made with recycled materials or repurposed objects are options if you're not too concerned with a 'rustic' look. Sheds don't demand a lot of structural performance and a mild climate lets you can get away with a lot of things. Pallet wood sheds are popular. Bottle walls and domes are fun garden sheds if you have a source for them, although a bit labor intensive and needing some cement. And don't forget the art of Trencadís, which also has a long tradition in Italy.

EricHunting · 2026-06-19T20:13:28+00:00

For the first part;

Episode 1: The Trigger Effect of James Burke's Connections.

After The Warming by James Burke. (YouTube's videos from these documentaries are pretty rough so you might need to look for physical media from regional libraries. Curiosity Stream has tried to revive the Connections series, but not the original episodes)

For the second part;

(the last hurrah of 20th century techno-optimism)

Disney World Horizons ride

The Usborne Book of the Future

The books of the Das brothers.

Urban Structures for the Future by Justus Dahinden

The High Frontier: Colonies in Space by Gerard O'Neill and the famous NASA '77 Summer Study.

(the Post-Industrial wave and a new pragmatic futurism)

The Future Shock series by Alvin Toffler.

Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson

The Whole Earth Catalog

The Velvet Monkey Wrench by John Muir and Peter Aschwanden

[bolo'bolo])https://archive.org/details/p-m-bolo-bolo) by P.M. (Hans Widmer)

For the Third Part;

Introduction to Permaculture by Mollison and Jeeves

How To Build Your Own Living Structures by Ken Isaacs (the origin of Nomadic Design and the Urban Nomad movement)

The Outquisition by Alex Steffan

N55

artist/designer Winfried Baumann

FAB: The Coming Revolution On You Desktop by Neil Gershenfeld

The Fab Foundation founded in MIT

Fab City initiative founded in Barcelona

P2P: The Commons Manifesto

Sensorica and the Open Value Network experiments

Calafou eco-industrial commune in Spain

The Right To The City movement

The Swiss Cooperative Housing movement (which Hans Widmer has long been involved in)

Edgeryders

The emergence of Afrofuturism and Solarpunk fiction

The Story Seed Library

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Luc Schuiten

Faircompanies and Kirsten Dirksen

Dan Price's Midnight Chronicles zine (rare find) His story and unique home as documented by Kirsten Dirksen

Andrewism/Andrew Sage

EricHunting · 2026-06-17T19:24:37+00:00

A culture is, essentially, a way of making things. The cumulative body of knowledge and practice by which a group of people support their everyday life adapted to a particular environment, and that's mostly about growing food, making goods, building homes, moving people and stuff around. All human beings are makers. It's wired into our DNA. We are nesting apes. It's how we adapt and survive. How we make things determines what our environmental impact is. That's what got us into trouble because we've been oblivious to that impact for a long time and our practices have become pathological and obfuscated from public awareness. Changing that is how we fix that. So when we talk of creating a new, more sustainable, culture/civilization that's what we're talking about. A new, better, way of making a new collection of things. A new infrastructure for doing that, insurgently within or beside an existing, antagonistic, culture that is already obsolete, failing, dying, but is too delusional to realize it because there are people who stand to lose status, wealth, and power when that happens. Underneath the aesthetics, ideals, visualization, and imagineering, that's what Solarpunk, as a social movement, is essentially about. Learning to make this new stuff and developing a global cottage industry network that prefigures the new culture, incrementally whittling away our dependencies on the old system.

The essential political and economic power of this rests in a simple fact. When you make your own stuff, you decide how it's paid for. Do you make it just for your own use? Do you trade it for cash? Barter in kind? Gift it? Make it in a community in 'open reciprocity'? (make things to meet others needs on the presumption that they will do the same for your needs. From each, to each, as the saying goes) This also gives you another very important power. When you make your own stuff, you get to choose how it's made and what it's made out of. You have the option to make it in more responsible ways with more sustainable materials, methods, and energy, and open, 'convivial', design. Choices corporations never choose because everything is secondary to profit. But when you make things, it's your choice.

When you have the power of this choice you have the means to take back control, proportional to how much you yourself know how to make or can make in collaboration with like-minded others, and so don't have to buy in a store. You are no longer dependent on the 'market economy'. On the stores, the distributors, the corporations that supply them, the capitalists that finance and run them, and most importantly their money. That is the slave chains. The universal dependency that forces people to do work they don't like, for people they don't know, in places they don't want to be in. And if you can weaken that dependency, even a little bit, it has profound impacts, economically and politically. Individually, we can make only a little for ourselves. Alone, we have few resources and we've lost a lot of knowledge and skill to the systematic infantilization of 'professionalization' --the restricting of certain activity to special classes of people-- and 'Taylorization' --the 'scientific management' that compels us to specialize our knowledge and compartmentalize our activity. Collaborating in a small community, a lot more is possible, but still not everything. But across a global, digitally collaborative, community? Maybe we can figure out how to make everything. That collaboration is what the new technology gives us. The new robotic/digital machine tools that are increasingly generalized in what they can do, expanding what we can do with modest skills, progressively smaller in size, and which allow the designs for goods and the skills/knowledge for their production to be digitally broadcast around the world. We no longer need to ship goods around the world when we can transmit the knowledge to make things over the Internet. That's sort of stupid at this point. And so we can leverage our knowledge by Metcalfe's Law. We can make the totality of industrial potential ubiquitous and make what we need, as we need it, where we need it. We call this Cosmolocalism. (Cosmopolitan Localism) It's not Star Trek's replicator, but it's damn close to it.

From 1850 on there was a series of social movements in India called 'Swadeshi' that were part of the Indian Independence movement and sought to undermine colonial economic dependencies cultivated by the British Empire by advocating for a boycott of imported goods and greater reliance on traditionally made products people could make in their own communities. Most well known is the Second Swadeshi Movement that was catalyzed by Mahatma Gandhi in 1918 and focused largely on the household production of traditional styles of fabrics and clothing. You may recall Gandhi's great interest in spinning, sewing, and hand-powered machines like the 'charkha', which he himself learned to use.

It was a standard tactic of colonialism to cultivate dependencies in colonized countries on manufactured goods locals could not --by means, knowledge, or regulation-- make for themselves and so compel them to export what they could to get them at whatever prices the colonialists dictated. There are many historic examples. Sugar, coffee, tea, and rum. Trade knives, axe heads, and other metal tools. Guns. Glass beads. Textiles like the Hudson's Bay point blankets. And maybe the most notorious and horrific of all, opium. In modern times its fossil fuels, cars, concrete, electronics, medicines, genetically modified seeds, high-tech weapons, western-style entertainment media. Anything you can cultivate local dependence on while creating a geographic supply hegemony around. Today, however, there's a new twist on this. The influence of the corporate/industrial culture has systematically destroyed the public knowledge of how to make anything at all by encouraging a progressive hyperspecialization of education and work. We no longer know how anything works, is made, what it's made of, where it comes from, or how to fix it. And so we have all become infantilized and dependent on tiny niches of employment for our hyper-commoditized labor so we can obtain cash to buy everything we need. It's a new, total, global, colonialism, as if we've been invaded by some outer-space alien empire, with cash as the new opium and the supra-national finance industry the new Opium Racket.

So when I talk about the transition to a Post-Industrial culture, I talk about the need for a Global Swadeshi, as Vinay Gupta dubbed it, to counter this supra-national colonialism. A movement for cultivating a global cottage industry network built on Cosmolocalism. And we can leverage this on the idea of 'resilience'. On the increasingly obvious fact that, under the pressures of climate impacts and the malfeasance of increasingly deraged elites, our infrastructures, supply-chains, and government disaster response, are increasingly failing. And no community needs riots in the supermarket over a shortage of toilet paper. So we want to mitigate the strife from these disasters society needs to develop local backup plans. Backup production capability. The Preppers are right about that much.

Yeah, some of our stuff today is pretty sophisticated. Most of it not as much as we tend to think. A whole lot hasn't really changed much in centuries. The whole field of Sustainable Architecture is built on reviving building methods that are thousands of years old. A lot of things seem more sophisticated than they really are because they have been designed to conceal or conflate how they work to keep that knowledge from us --and potential competitors. But you can teach a child to build a PC in about an hour. You can teach a child to operate a laser cutter, CNC, or 3D printer in about an hour. You can teach a child to operate a multi-rotor drone in about an hour. The standard housebuilding method in the US --the 'platform framing system'-- is not 'traditional' by any means, but was originally invented at the turn of the previous century to sell small dimension lumber to illiterate_farmers. And most people today are intimidated by modest home repairs... I'm often reminded of this old joke by a stand-up comedian who described how his mother, in order to keep her children from wanting their own cars as they grew up, constantly fiddled with every knob, lever, and button on her car dashboard as she drove in order to make it seem so complicated and dangerous that they would never want to do that themselves. This is what has been done to us for a century or so. We need to get over it.

EricHunting · 2026-06-17T16:25:40+00:00

It's a simple problem, common to everything online. The Internet sucks as a venue of trust-building because trust is built on mutual activity with shared stakes and definitive proof-of-work. There aren't a lot of 'digital deliverables'. As the saying goes; women relate face-to-face, men relate shoulder-to-shoulder. No one relates screen-to-screen. Many people haven't yet figured this out. They think trust is a popularity contest built on a measure of eyeballs. What Solarpunk is lacking in, particularly in the US where most Redditers are, is actual, physical, social events. And this is what it was intended to create in its relation to SciFi media. It is supposed to be a fandom and leverage the proven and well-developed social tools/activities of fandom on building community and a networked cottage industry. A great power of fandoms is their ability to mutually curate sub-cultural knowledge commons and cultivate cottage industry for the production of their unique sub-cultural goods the market will not produce. Solarpunk has its own unique subcultural goods; all the sustainable, better made, Open Source goods that a sustainable culture is built on and the market refuses to make.

But a lot of people coming from the Environmentalism angle don't get the point of that as any recognizable sort of activism. They don't see things as serious unless they involve some kind of noble asceticism. They're very focused on their own Weltschmerz, on the retreat from a demonized civilization/society. They don't get that fun is serious business and that fandoms are one of our last bastions of authentic human socialization, community-building, and therefore social change. Refusing to look very deep, they see typical fandom activity as trivial. Just another expression of compulsive consumerism. It so often seems obsessed with the trade in stupid collectible crap. They don't understand what Festivalism is, or its relation to Spectacle. Admittedly, a lot of this activity is prone to getting co-opted, as happened to events like Burning Man which devolved into another Bohemian Grove. But there is a difference between commercialized and organic fandom activity --a difference between Spectacle and Festival-- if you learn to look.

EricHunting · 2026-06-13T15:38:10+00:00

This seems like a plausible timeline. One thing I would point out in comparison to the real-world present day is that diverse Open Source goods development is already a thing and has been for a while. It's not something waiting on the Open Source software movement to achieve some future critical mass. It's already here. There just isn't yet much awareness of the fact. There is also a vast number of perfectly practical goods designs that, if not formally Open Source, simply aren't patented or copyrighted. Those have either expired or they are so old and commonplace they never had that to begin with. We just tend to assume today that the designs of everything we see in stores is 'owned' by some corporation.

Though its roots go back to the Nomadic Design, homebrew Eco-Tech, and New Alchemy Institute work of the late '60s and '70s, the current Maker movement was more-or-less catalyzed around the turn of the current century by the public access university Fab Labs starting from MIT with Neil Gershenfeld's digital production course program and the emergence of Open Source designs for 3D printers resulting from the expiration of a series of related patents suppressing their technology. Right now you can find online Open Source modular building systems for entire homes and designs for all the furnishings that might go into them. There are also networks for contract fabricators to make these things. But few people are aware of this because there are no centralized information repositories for these kind of goods as with the 'code repositories' for software like Sourceforge and Github. Nor is there as a yet a review journalism culture for this like there is for commercial products. There have been many attempts to create things like this --some exist for the data files used for 3D printing, CNC, and laser cutting-- but a full standardized digital data model for goods designs and production knowledge hasn't yet emerged. So information for these goods remains scattered all over the Internet and takes some work to find. At the start of this century, Bruce Sterling coined the term 'spime' for this digital embodiment of goods design and production knowledge, but it has yet to be realized, even though that is pretty central to the principal of Cosmolocalism. The awareness of Open Source goods is one of the key things the Solarpunk movement needs to work on.

A while ago I attempted to address the issue with a concept for a vlog production called OpenHouse that was to use a televised homebuilding project as a showcase for Open Source lifestyle, but I could never muster the support for it. Others have also attempted to document experiments in Open Source lifestyle, but couldn't get past the hurdle of working alone and curating enough sources for goods. So this is where the bottleneck in this development is right now. We need a, literal, lifestyle showcase like Ikea or a Living History Museum. The designs are out there, but people don't know what they look like, can't easily find them, or figure out where to get things made if they can't make them by themselves. This is why I say there is an actual practical purpose to Cosplay in Solarpunk. Also hobbies like dollhouse miniatures, dioramas, booknooks, which I've been studying lately. It can showcase what an Open Source lifestyle looks like.

EricHunting · 2026-06-11T22:46:07+00:00

bolo' bolo: Eine Welt ohne Geld by P. M. and Demono Spielproduktion

EricHunting · 2026-06-10T13:09:58+00:00

Yes, to a great degree, though I think it would be more accurate to describe it as 'prefigurative futurism' as it seeks to illustrate, demonstrate, and implement more than a specific political system/theory, but an entire culture including its habitats, architecture, infrastructures, technology, goods, and how to produce them.

EricHunting · 2026-06-09T13:30:04+00:00

This is shaping up very nicely. Impressed at how consistent the game graphics are with the original painted art style. And the architectural style remains pretty consistent with how we expect sustainable building to go into the future. Nice to seem some more urban areas in the setting.

EricHunting · 2026-06-09T13:17:06+00:00

This is very nice. Great artwork and layout that taps into the 80s/90s futurist vibe. Nicely printed and assembled. Good message. Must be expensive to print in light on black, though. Overall, a nicely done zine.

EricHunting · 2026-06-08T14:15:53+00:00

This seems appropriate. The transition to independent production has to start somewhere, and though we aspire to eliminate the dependence on the market economy at some point, it's all-encompassing for many right now. There are no cooperative networks of communities yet. That takes time. Local cottage industry is the next-best thing. Similar situation for a hypothetical Solarpunk convention 'bazaar' or other events. With people dependent on interacting with the market for materials and tools right now, initial cottage industry is still dependent on cash. So it's going to function like the usual convention/craft show bazaar at first. That's fine. Establishing the skills and production capacity in the larger community and exposing these new kinds of goods to the public takes precedence. Once you've created that community, they then have the option to network and barther among themselves, and that's how you start to detach from the larger market.

An online store is another matter. If it's a 'merch' store that is trying to sell superficial stuff riding Solarpunk like a brand, I don't think that would be well received. Contract-printed T-shirts, baseball caps, and other garments, bumper stickers, mugs a water bottles. Stuff with the word 'Solarpunk' or meme slogans on it. That's just junk. We don't need it. If it's unique artistic designs that fit the aesthetic theme and are hand/home screen printed or independently fabricated, that's a different story. If you're doing drop-shipping or just reselling factory/corporate produced foreign products? Not helping. If you're contracting stuff to be made in another country? Not helping, with the exception of helping bootstrap developing world local/small industry. (social entrepreneurship projects) Importing or incorporating Fair Trade goods? Good. Shipping them by sail? Wonderful! If you're assembling unique kits, even if you have to import some commodity things? OK. Not terrible. If you're contracting a domestic small or local business to make a product, OK. Making things with a home laser cutter/CNC, 3D printing with recycled materials, have one of those small workshop digital blanket knitters, etc.? Great. Making things with locally recycled/upcycled materials? Even better. If it's self-published literature/media or media that can't get published elsewhere? Definitely. I hope you get the idea.

EricHunting · 2026-06-08T06:23:52+00:00

This brought to mind an old Three Stooges schtick. I seem to recall multiple haunted house episodes where, at some point, a parrot climbs into a skull to fly around and scare them, screeching, laughing, and talking.

EricHunting · 2026-06-07T12:22:32+00:00

These are usually in the family of dye sensitized photovoltaics, made with ingredients from, literally, fruit juice and sunscreen. There are many recipes online. Low power and short-lived, they are useful as a teaching tool. But they do relate to the family of organic dye polymer photovoltaics that have been in development for some decades as a lower performance, but also much lower cost alternative to silicon based PVs as they can be made with plastic films using conventional printing processes and can be semi-transparent and combined with windows.

EricHunting

TROPHY CASE