The Politics and Poetics of Solarpunk / Rhys Williams

Transcript

all right hello it's so good to see so many of you here today so um my name is Rhys Williams and I'm quite alien to this space I think it's not something uh that I would normally be speaking at and it's been a kind of interesting experience so far listening to the talks getting to know everyone thinking about how what I would normally do might speak to what you're doing uh here at ethereum so what I normally do is I work on sustainable and just Futures but I do it from the perspective of narrative and Poetics Aesthetics and politics so what I mean by that is I think about how we

tell stories I think about the language that we use and the form of the narratives I think about how we represent them what they look like and then the politics comes in because all of that stuff frames the world in a certain way they say the world is this way humans are like this nature is like this and the relationships between those things are in this particular kind of way so they say how things are and they make claims about how things could be right now the world is just kind of out there and the future doesn't exist yet neither of them are meaningful in any real sense it's us that brings me link to them and to our actions through narrative Poetics

and Aesthetics right these things are meaning making machines if you want to think of them that way and the kind of meanings that we make are where the politics of all of these stories live so I want to talk about solar punk in these terms what does solar Punk mean to the ethereum community you're busy building the future okay but what kind of future are you building I get the sense that you're looking for I read somewhere someone calling it a kind of shelling point right something for you all to gravitate towards aim for and I get the impression that solo Punk is a kind of plug and play uh goal or vision for the ethereum community it seems to

sit well with ethereum and there's a number of kind of overlaps that I've noticed in the way that solar Punk talks about itself and the way that ethereum communities talk about themselves right there's a sense in which they both provide hope and agency which is something that we all need in today's kind of permanent crisis world right we need to feel like we can do something that will make a difference and we need to feel that sense of agency they also share an interest in transparency and I think that's kind of fascinating right and I'll come back to that in more detail later they also are interested in coordinating collectively rather than as kind of selfish rational individuals right the neoliberal model uh and in ethereum this comes out in things like Dows and smart

contracts and the ethos of decentralization and then finally there is a hope I think this kind of sustainable future Vision hope where technology and the environment can be integrated and harmonious rather than separated and antagonistic right so these are the kind of overlaps I think now I suspect as I said that the heart of solar Punk's resonance for the ethereum community lies in this idea of transparency really briefly in both of them solar pangan ethereum the hope is for a kind of transparent and harmonious future they both Define their agency as having the means to build that future the

collective coordination that we're talked about is facilitated by that transparency the making harmonious or transparent of human power relations and the relationships between technology and nature in these Futures essentially disappear because they become harmonious right they become clarified transparent they almost cease to exist and what are smart contracts and Dows and other kind of ethereum attempts to resolve coordination problems if not attempts to make relations transparent free from Distortion or manipulation free from power in a sense free from politics and instead of messy political relationships you can just have clean

and clear algorithmic stable functioning transactions so solar Punk seems to map well onto what ethereum wants to do right but what is solar Punk it's not a blueprint it's not a plan it's not a kind of clear aim where you can just sort of solve for it right it's a genre it's a set of narratives a set of Aesthetics and it carries a kind of emotional charge through the kind of World building that it does right through the worlds that it posits and the words that it imagines and as I said narratives and Aesthetics are powerful things they govern how we see the world and ourselves and they give meaning to it all so they shape

what we think is normal possible valuable but they also make some things Disappear Completely right they make us notice some things they bring some things to the foreground and then they push other things to the background so solar panch Aesthetics in the same vein make certain things like Harmony between nature and technology or transparency in human relations seem possible in this sense solar Punk is a promising genre a sociologist might call it a promissory narrative right it rises to the moment of Crisis it answers a need that we have and it binds its promises to technological changes particular kinds

of technological changes right it paints a beautiful picture of a world that will come about only if we adopt certain ways of being and certain Technologies now it's not an advertising vehicle it's not a PR front but it can be used as one it sees technological change as a driver for bringing about its utopian Futures okay and that's really key so solar Punk is a promising genre how does it promise how does it make its promises to us firstly the way it looks okay Aesthetics the way it looks now it exists on a spectrum from Tiny Hobbit houses right all the way to like shiny kind of futuristic techno cities but in all of

them across the whole Spectrum there's loads of greenery front and center this is a very basic point right there's lots and lots of nature in solar Punk whether it's a super urbanized version or a more of a kind of cottagey version right there's tons of greenery now the critique Frederick Jameson would call this an imaginary resolution to a real contradiction and I want you to remember that phrase it's important okay an imaginary resolution to a real contradiction what that means is that it brings together two things in the imagination that in reality do not coexist harmoniously on the one hand Urban settings human settlements at scale the various

infrastructures of extraction production distribution and so on that make that human life possible that make it what it is that mate realize it in the world and on the other hand natural ecosystems solar Punk just kind of jams these together aesthetically in the way that it looks right and it presents us with this imaginary resolution of them coexisting side by side and harmoniously when in fact they are you know contradictory in real life the next way it makes its promises is through lightness now there's a tradition in aesthetic philosophy of thinking through this idea of luster now luster is a nice word for

glow or light or shining or reflection okay usually it's either reflected light or some kind of sense of an inner light right inner beauty now examples from sort of medieval philosophy onwards you know this is the beauty of the untarnished soul of the blinding goodness of Christ of morality of the Saints the blinding light of God the illumination of the light of reason the enlightenment right this is a a kind of Trope with a very long history and solar Punk Aesthetics is all about luster it's all about glowing shining bright things solar advertising by the same uh kind of remit and you know renewable Futures in

general are full of gleaming brilliant sunshine and light again this is like a basic point right but beyond just looking nice this does something quite specific it unifies think of the sun shining over a gleaming City this gleam binds together all the different things It Shines on and it suggests Harmony where there is in fact lots of different often conflicting elements and systems snow has a similar effect right dazzling hiding uniting purifying covering over all the garbage and complications that you have in a normal City so that when you wake up on that kind of fresh snow morning what you see is Harmony and beauty and unity the reflection rather than the thing itself

right the stuff that it's covering and the and things of lightness as in brightness slips into another kind of lightness which is to say weightlessness solar Punk casts into relief the quality of weightlessness with which renewable Futures and solar power in particular is associated images of solar futures from any Source corporate to activists tend to display Solar Technologies in a bright clean green setting now this obvious pragmatic reasons for this right the main one being that like a gloomy solar future wouldn't be particularly persuasive or seductive okay if anyone's seen Blade Runner 2049 they're kind of opening shot of the like masses of solar

powered Fields under the Gloom you know it's dystopian and horrible and so on but these solar Punk images are suggestive of a kind of New Dawn right of a new spring of fresh beginnings and they're attractive and part of that that attraction is tied to the idea of weightlessness because they offer us the chance to forget what came before to absolve ourselves of our own environmentally damaging history or at least to cut ourselves off from it right to have this new Fresh Start so lightness is a kind of weightlessness that comes with Absolution and freedom from responsibility freedom from having

to deal with the complex reality of the present and all its historical burdens and realities and we can see the links here I hope to the to the kind of ideas of transparency that both solar Punk and ethereum dream of right it's a hope ultimately of a clean break with the past and the present and of just getting rid of all the messiness of Social and power relationships that are the that are the direct and necessary product of having to mediate Between Difference now yesterday um I was speaking to someone um from the kind of ethereum community and you know they were wonderful they were full of Hope full of kind of happiness and the key dream I think that drove their engagement with the ethereum

community was this sense that everything is broken and we're going to build something to replace it something that works right and that everything is so big isn't it it's everything it's like all the systems that govern the way that we live they're all broken and here we're going to be building something that replaces it and you know again I'm coming back to this idea this hope that I think infuses solar Punk and ethereum of transparency right getting rid of all that messiness and all that power relationship and just having this direct and necessary kind of simple relationship between things a kind of getting rid of mediation now this lightness

is also a trojan horse for technologies that claim to be socially just or sustainable presenting themselves as light right light in the sense of goodness and Beauty but also light in the sense of weightless of leaving no footprint on the Earth now solar is the ultimate light technology here and I would just kind of expand on this as an example but it applies to renewable Technologies in general it has this image of having no connection to the Earth right no consequences no waste no fuel no weight ultimately but that obviously isn't the reality right solar production Upstream it has to be made and it's made in

incredibly intensive temperatures it's made in sterile lab-like conditions large-scale factories toxic chemicals there's extraction there's production there's Rare Earth minerals there's all of the ugly geopolitics that goes with that there's the fact that solar panels are currently so excitingly cheap because the vast majority of them are made in China where there is very poor environmental and labor regulation laws right there's all of these issues with uh solar panels Upstream then there are the kind of sacrifice zones that will be produced by them so we're talking about a kind of neocolonialism here where large-scale areas of various deserts will you know be covered in solar panels and then the question becomes who does

the energy go to right and there's already talk of large swedes of North Africa becoming a battery for Europe right and you can see these old historical patterns repeating themselves just under the guise of a new clean kind of Technology right sustainability as a kind of cover for colonialism and then Downstream you know solar panel PVS they have around a 30-year lifespan a lot of them are going to start coming offline quite soon they're very hard to recycle they're toxic so to repeat the key point the conflicts the politics in the relationships between humans and the natural world and between humans and each other only appear to be dissolved in these visions of solar Punk Futures

in these visions of renewable Futures they're not resolved they just take on a different shape so how does solar Punk promise again one more thing the narratives themselves they promise to resolve conflict between two opposing forces you can see right it's always about resolving conflict narratively what they do is you have in a Solo Punk story quite often you have two opposing sides right and what happens is that the conflict between those two opposing forces is resolved by the production in the story of a protagonist a character a

hero and that hero is a hybrid of the two sides okay so the the hero the hybrid that partakes of both sides of the conflict in some way they act as a mediator right they bring them together and they solve the conflict they are in their kind of body a resolution to that conflict right and just like lightness just like weightlessness these protagonists are an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction yeah just bringing them together and making them the same thing without having to actually find a way to mediate between these two conflicting sides in all their real complexity instead of working out the necessary political means we just get rid of it yeah we just make it

disappear and here again there's this idea of doing away with the need to mediate between different actors whether those actors are industry and nature or different communities or different political organizations or just people with different desires and hopes whatever we always return to this idea of transparency it's a Dream It's a dream of living without friction or confusion it's a dream of perfect communication it's a dream of message with no noise right it's a dream of perfectly functioning systems smoothness lack of friction lack of resistance in my terms I would say that it's the removal of

politics in favor of a technocracy solving political problems with technological solutions right but they're not Solutions they're power grabs they strip the people involved in this particular situation in any particular situation of their engagement with and power over the very processes of how they live their lives right it removes their political agency rather than granting them political agency and it does the same thing in terms of how it approaches the natural world okay so transparency in solar punk in terms of Nature and technology is not about living with the natural world but rather a dream of perfectly managing that world

now this idea has a history and some of you might be familiar with it right we can call it for brevity's sake the history of spaceship earth in the 1960s and 70s many thinkers perhaps the most famous of them being Buckminster Fuller used the spaceship to offer a blueprint of a self-contained and self-sustained Earthly environment it was a whole thing that grew out of the kind of 60s sort of hippie counterculture movement but also married to that cybernetics moment right of Norbert Weiner and the growth of kind of personal Computing and so on and what they proposed was a circulatory natural technological system largely autonomous to be run maintained and optimized

through techno-scientific expertise and rational management notice the complete lack or absence of politics in this picture right experts managing stuff there's no dispute there's no disagreement there's no debate as Richard brottigan the famous kind of poet from this era put it in 1967 and you might recognize the final line of this from an Adam Curtis documentary I like to think it has to be of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined Back To Nature returned to our mammal brothers and sisters and all watched over by Machines of Loving Grace a cybernetic ecology this is a precedent

of solar Punk it's an ecological narrative imaginary sustained by early personal Computing Pioneers people like Stuart brand of the whole earth catalog and now the long now Foundation it's a movement that would certainly be considered the Precedence of web 3 and its communities and not just because of the Computing stuff or the making the world a better place stuff but also the harmony with nature stuff as well right it's got history web 3 adopting solar Punk as its dream as it's ideal as its kind of guiding narrative is a sort of return in that sense where digital technology is again being married to a utopian

ideal of ecological balance and community but then I know the idea of doing away with mediation is imaginary right and this is the imaginary of solar Punk and potentially some of ethereum's vision too right and that's kind of what I want to flag today there is difference in the world and things rub up against each other and cause friction to present them as harmonious requires not looking too closely at how those systems interact or it requires replacing the logic of one of those elements with the logic of the other one which is known as colonization right so solar Punk usurping the natural and

political systems through technological kind of innovation swapping out the systems that we rely on the like the ecological natural systems that we rely on for water food air and so on swapping those out for infrastructural systems making technology the ground for nature and we manage nature in that way and so we resolve the contradictions between the two things because the two different things no longer exist right they've become one thing and nature is the one that loses in that sense the one which is usurped right or which is now having to depend upon a kind of more fundamental layer which is

infrastructural or technological notice in the Solar Punk images that you always see the cities have the trees growing on them right the cities have the trees growing on them so these technological utopian narratives these hopes and dreams they have a long history longer even than the 70s cybernetic ecology moment so in the 1970s James Kerry and John quirk two kind of academics they made this beautiful argument right where essentially they proposed that new

technologies from the Industrial Revolution onwards were always seen as vehicles of moral as well as material progress things will get better materially because of the tech but also we will get better as people as a society as a culture because of the tech okay and this promise always always comes with these four particular categories okay a new birth of community decentralization ecological balance and social harmony now the first thing I would say is that the repetition the consistency of these promises are engaging to us because we live in a particular we being quite a narrow we in

this case right Western kind of Enlightenment society and so on we live in a narrow sort of history in which we have felt for a very long time that we have lost Community decent um the capacity for decentralization right things are too centralized we've lost ecological balance and we've lost social harmony we've been struggling with this for ages the first uh known piece of written literature the Epic of Gilgamesh is a Story 4 000 years old at this point which talks about deforestation right and it talks about the collapse of order within the city we've had these concerns since forever and these concerns are precisely the ones which are answered by

these utopian narratives that's why the utopian narratives have such a purchase on us because they speak to these deep sort of almost unspoken concerns and worries that we have but because they're technological utopian narratives they promise to return us to this kind of Garden of Eden state right where we have Harmony and community and so on and so forth but they promise it through greater investment in technology there's a contradiction there right there's the contradiction there and solar Punk is not a new story in that sense it's a new skin on a very old story so notice what's at stake here what is promised and desired is a new set of relationships what we want is community

decentralization ecological balance and social harmony we don't want the tech we want that stuff that's what we want right that's that's the hook that's the promise that's the desire it's not about the tech it's about the relationships and humans for the most part especially urbanized humans have felt out of sync with each other and nature for a very long time and the utopian promise of the tech in this regard has never lived up to its claims every single one that Kerry and Quirk talk about in that article right they make these promises I mean look where we are that's what happened right so what is actually at stake here it seems is the social relations not the technology

what we desire is the social relations not the technology the idea that the technology itself in and of itself will bring about these shifts these utopian promises is false it's the social relations the way that we ourselves organize our politics that determine the shape of the technology and the infrastructure not the other way around and here's the key Point okay the Betrayal of each Utopian technological moment the moment when the tech arrives and all the good stuff that was promised doesn't arrive the Betrayal comes when the technology emerges mapped

onto pre-existing Tendencies to centralization and domination and resource extraction and profiteering and it acts to extend them rather than disrupt them narratives of Promise like solar Punk especially when tied to the technological Novelties of things like web3 promise us a break from our bad past and our present and they articulate a better future right and it's attractive and a lot of us are rightly seduced by it I'm seduced by it but let's think about that word articulate for a second right they articulate a better future

articulate can mean on the one hand to say clearly and distinctly I'm articulating right now but on the other hand articulation means to join right one thing articulates with another thing to join to Joint to bring together now solar Punk does a powerful job of talking speaking articulating a better future but it does not do much to join us to one to make that joint when I was doing a bit of research for this talk I found obviously other people who were talking about ethereum and solar Punk and so on and I found this one talk that was you know very relevant

and in it the speaker made the claim that ethereum is solar Punk ethereum is not solar Punk okay can we get rid of that idea please what I want us to take seriously is that solar Punk is ethereum what's the difference okay in the same way that alesso's talk yesterday showed us that solar Punk is permaculture ethereum is a real practice and infrastructure being built now in the present moment it's a thing that is being brought into existence solar Punk Futures are just empty containers the content of any solar Punk future will ultimately come from what ethereum

becomes amongst other things right but what ethereum becomes and makes of the world and not the other way around saying that ethereum is solar Punk is PR it's articulating in the sense of speaking right but talking about a nice future while busy being like it's talking about a nice future while being busy actually making a different future it's the same old same old that we started with right utopian Promises of Technology but when it emerges it will be mapped onto the same old social relations and the same thing will happen again or we can take seriously the way that ethereum is made in the present takes

seriously how it makes the future in the present how it joins the present to the Future how it brings about a particular future how it brings it into being ethereum could be the substance of solar Punk it can be the means of joining to a solar Punk future and giving it its content and form right solar Punk is meaningless in a sense ethereum is the thing however it turns out that will give it meaning that will tell us what it means that will bring it into being in that sense so my pitch today is to say what you're doing whether you like it or not is

deeply political the infrastructures you build have politics core did in this case into their very bones so I urge you to take that political responsibility seriously and to do that the focus should not be on building the tech for some harmonious imaginary future but on building the social relationships in the present that will shape the tech that you produce so that its infrastructure is an infrastructure of a harmonious future okay remember Technologies embody the social relations that they emerge from they concretize them they make them stronger and more durable and they reproduce them so the choice is Which social relations

you have an opportunity to make a different world but to actually do that you have to do it from within a community that is itself an image and a seed of that better world who you work with why you work what is actually needed allow these questions to guide you I would suggest you want to grow you want to scale so take seriously how you scale with whom who do you bring with you what kind of relationships do you grow what kind of politics do you make concrete through your scaling because there is another side to solar Punk not the pretty pictures or the hopeful

stories but the communities of people who are actually living a difference right now many if not most probably don't call themselves solar Punk might never have heard of it wouldn't care about it if they did because they don't need an imaginary future to make them feel good about what they're doing in the present they are right now living and breathing the bones of that future co-ops food sovereignty groups microgrid communities anti-fossil fuel activists anti-racist groups anti-colonial groups local councils all of these things organizations who care for the world and for each other and who are trying to

build in the ruins of our current crises something more durable something more sustainable something more democratic all of these people and all of these organizations need scaling they need strengthening and they need rolling out to the world and if ethereum can do that then it should because otherwise what's the point thanks [Applause] perfect

um hi thank you so much for the talk my question is you were talking about uh getting to a solar Punk future through Technologies or maybe also other means and what do you think about um getting to a slow Punk future with consuming less than we are actually doing now is it is it in enhanced in in your thoughts or like how to actually get to this maybe yeah economical state that won't be um focused on the economic growth but more on yeah maybe just a stability or maybe even decrease thank you yeah thanks great question um so this is an attack conference right so I I wanted to talk about the

possibilities of technology and how to kind of Orient it in the best possible way but in answer to your question uh I think consuming less I think generally downgrading I think all of these things are key they're vital of course they are right we can have as many electric cars as we want and so on it's a culture shift that needs to happen absolutely my concern with technological utopianism and I mentioned some of the leading components in the talk is this kind of equal modernism idea right where we can have our cake and eat it we can grow but we can decouple that economic growth

from environmental uh impacts and that idea of decoupling our economic growth which is you know in this world a direct correlative to like human happiness and well-being and so on and so forth the idea that you can kind of kind of decouple that from uh uh our impact on the environment this is the weightlessness that I was talking about in solar Punk it's imaginary right you you can't have you can't decouple what you will have is a different kind of coupling and you know depending on the kinds of things that we use and the kinds of ways that they scale those decouplings will be more or less rapacious and destructive and destructive and there will be more

or less sacrifice zones and different kinds of communities will suffer as a result in for the benefit of other kinds of communities and all of that stuff yeah absolutely there's a whole thread of solar Punk which is very low Tech right I I don't know how feasible it is that the entire world will voluntarily shift to that right I don't see degrowth as having absent some kind of awful crisis where everyone changes their minds right because they have to um I don't see that as being a particularly appealing narrative to the people who are currently benefiting from the system

so I'm interested in what I said at the end I suppose I'm interested in taking the ways that I see movements like technological movements things which currently have a lot of capital and political power flowing towards them actors who have much greater agency than me and you right are like pouring resources into particular things and I suppose I'm interested in the possibilities of reorienting those things as much as possible it's not a solution it's not gonna like take down capitalism or whatever but it feels like something that I can do

um rather than you know telling everyone to just stop doing everything and hoping that they listen any more questions hey hey you mentioned that the hope of solar Punk Works in part as a unification for the ethereum community and I wonder if you also believe or what's your take on uh Outsiders of the community is it like primarily a unification for existing members or is it also functioning as an onboarding mechanism for Outsiders

yeah an onboarding mechanism yeah that's a nice way of putting it um I I think solar Punk is wonderful at enrolling people or onboarding them if you like yeah I think it's um I think it's a really good PR machine to use a language that I'm not very fond of um I think that people are attracted by it seduced by it and I think it's you know five years ago I encountered solar Punk and it was at the time a small genre some stories on the internet and now look right I'm in Prague giving a talk about it it's grown a lot and I think more power to it for that I think it's a great mechanism for

getting people to imagine they can do something better all I'm trying to do is point out that it's not as simple or as clear as it might seem and that actually the work is not to work towards some imaginary Harmony because that will never happen the work is to do something in the present which takes seriously the fact that we will always have conflict between us and each other between nature and humans and to try and work out the best possible way of resolving that because that's real work right that's like actual work um

I like the vision as an inspiring hopeful agency giving thing but once we're in we need to do the real work right yeah for questions thank you thanks so much everyone [Applause] [Music] foreign