Is a robotic mower really an example of how to go solarpunk?
On one hand, you want to be a resilient off-grid solarpunk freed from the yoke of your increasingly-unreliable power company. On the other, you’d still like to enjoy creature comforts both at home and when you’re on the road. It’s a problem EcoFlow understands: the company is showing off a new Whole Home Backup Solution, which ties in to its existing Delta Pro batteries. But that’s less interesting to me than the gizmos which are joining the ecosystem at today’s show. That includes Blade, a robotic lawnmower looking more like an RC car…
Ecoflow boosts its off-grid smart home with a robotic mower | Engadget
SolarPunk is very much about making use of already existing technology – and, indeed, the robot lawn-mower already exists: The amount of technology in a solarpunk society : solarpunk and Solarpunk and Technology: A Necessary Relationship? – Solarpunk Magazine
But SolarPunk is also about freeing ourselves from an over-reliance on ‘the yoke of an increasingly-consumerist society’: What is solarpunk and can it help save the planet? – BBC News
Here’s something from last week’s Wired magazine:
Science fiction is full of stories branded as “hopepunk” or “solarpunk,” many of which tell delightful, positive stories, often without engaging in the realities of why we need that hope in the first place.
I’ve started calling these kinds of calls for positive thinking “hopewashing.” Like greenwashing and pinkwashing, hopewashing offers a way for corporations and people with power to make it seem like they’re making the world a better, more hopeful place, while in reality they’re doing the opposite. “We’re using hope like this palliative coping mechanism to allow us to avoid confronting difficult truths and to avoid perhaps moving our own ourselves to action,” says Liz Neeley, a science communicator and founder of the firm Liminal.
When entities like Wells Fargo ask you for hope, they are asking for obedience. For trust, and complacency. To sit still and wait for the future to arrive on the backs of their lovely, highly produced advertisements and beautiful websites.
The Case Against Hopewashing | WIRED
And here’s something from the Resilience magazine:
If Hope might look Solarpunk, she is already a target for greenwashing and other forms of cooptation.
Expropriation attempts are already well underway. Recently, the US company Chobani, hired The Line animation firm to produce the solarpunk-inspired ‘Dear Alice’ commercial. The video essay channel Waffle To The Left’s response to this brazen attempt to co-opt a post-capitalist vision into an advertisement for a dairy company was to take a stand by taking back the Solarpunk vision, and the video itself, to its radical roots.
Waffle to the Left states, “Dear Alice is one of the most beautiful depictions of an ecological future I had seen, except for one glaring thing: it was an advertisement for a dairy company, and my solarpunk vision doesn’t have either of those things. Neither is compatible with the ‘degrowth’ economic model outlined by people like Jason Hickel, nor with the ethic of an ecological society described by social ecologists like Murray Bookchin.”