Non-fiction Punk
We’re living in the Cyberpunk Future that we were promised in the 1980s. I know everyone associates cyberpunk with a different aesthetic - and that’s a trap. Mega-corporations control substantial parts of our lives, and the protections offered by an increasingly hostile to citizens government are being diluted or willfully ignored. Everyone is a gig worker now, a contractor without protections, glued to tech that is both designed to break and that we are obligated to have to participate in society. No phone? No job. No computer? How do you get anything done?
Our things are listening to us and giving us ads for more things. Your identity is data that everyone seems to have - what you wear, what you eat, where you go, who you hang with, your sexuality, your preferences in every single fucking thing. And that information is sold like currency.
We are the products being passed around in our society.
Solarpunk is being tossed around like a fashionable answer to the horrors of today - but isn’t that the logical response to the cyberpunk reality that we are inheriting?
I say they can and should be the same thing. How do we take back ourselves from the data-space that owns us? We must:
Repair our things
Recycle-hack new items
Open-source material necessities
Expand our green-spaces
Reject hi-tech, high energy solutions for low energy problems
Begin the reclamation of discarded raw materials
Recenter the focus of every civic policy: health and environment at the core of every law.
This list is not exhaustive. I am tired of people treating the visions of tomorrow as fictions that exist only to create a pleasing fantasy aesthetic. There is still time to put the brakes on global climate change. There is still time to pry ourselves away from the mega-corps, from an increasingly hostile government, from imperialism, from colonialism.
