Research

Quotes are from the book Queering Anarchism.

Queer theory, in particular, can often be dense and obscure, seemingly meant to be read (or at least understood) only by those in the academy who are willing to spend long hours reading (and rereading) it. But the essays in this volume communicate complexity without obfuscation, many of them drawing on real-life, concrete organizing experiences to elucidate the challenges to fixed categories and to binary thinking that have traditionally characterized queer theory. At the same time, they highlight the difficulties posed for an activism that attempts to move forward without re-inscribing those same binaries in the name of challenging them.

Metronormativity is pervasive—it’s the normative, standard idea that somehow rural culture and rural people are backward, conservative, and intolerant, and that the only way to live with freedom is to leave the countryside for highly connected urban oases. Metronormativity fuels the notion that the internet, technology, and media literacy will somehow “save” or “educate” rural people, either by allowing them to experience the broader world, offering new livelihoods, or reducing misinformation.

In Shandong Province, I asked one thief why they decided to steal from the government. As if I were missing the obvious, they responded, “Well, clearly I would never steal from other villagers and none of the villagers would steal from me. We all know each other. Once in a while, we’ll take vegetables from each other’s gardens. But anything of value, I’d steal from someone I don’t know!”

And the government would deserve it, to be honest. (This would apply to many governments, more than just the Chinese government, as they're all complicit in hoarding wealth and resources.)

The easy argument is that the world is moving faster, becoming more controlled because of the internet and mobile devices. But the gravity of acceleration is not inevitable. The way we experience time has changed; the kind of critical wonder we hold toward objects has collapsed. My great-uncle once sat in amazement looking at the new Japanese-made TV we bought him, at how crisp the image was, and how remarkable it was that so much complex circuitry could fit inside a thin screen. He now looks up from his smartphone occasionally, complaining how slow his phone is at opening apps.

Hardin’s original essay in 1968 used the example of the medieval commons, a place where peasants grazed their cows. According to Hardin, the ungoverned nature of the commons led to overgrazing, which is why the commons had to eventually be enclosed and privatized. Yet Hardin was also wrong about this history—the commons model had actually thrived in Europe for hundreds of years. The mismanagement of the commons by peasants was a lie, an excuse made up by powerful landowners who wanted to seize and control these spaces.

The same is often applicable to the quality of goods/services, which is also brought up. The quality of food, for example, was less of an issue prior to different forms of centralisation; companies demanded that people do things for as little as possible (squeezing them), and this in turn impacted the quality of those goods/services (making them worse).

Which then led to yet another round of 'tightening' and centralisation of those goods/services, which just keeps causing the cycle to get worse.

We trust all sorts of technical systems every day without having to read their code. The software that flies our planes, runs our city trains. Like a lot of emerging technologies, blockchain is beholden only to its makers, and to a handful of well-funded companies. The conventional answer to this is to suggest government regulation of software, as is the case with airplane and train software. Yet the political ethos of blockchain is precisely about taking power away from a central authority like the government. And deep down, I find that sentiment admirable. However, blockchain has yet to answer the question: If it takes power away from a central authority, can it truly put power back in the hands of the people, and not just a select group of people? Will it serve as an infrastructure that amplifies trust, rather than increasing both mistrust and a singular reliance on technical infrastructure? Will it provide ways to materially organize and enrich a community, rather than further accelerating financial systems that serve a select few? Can the community expand and diversify itself, so that it does not reproduce the system of power and patriarchy that it is attempting to dismantle?

By creating a system based on the assumption that humans are destructive and selfish, you only end up making those assumptions reality: a self-fulfilling prophecy. It serves as a reminder of the physical, material relationships that bind our world together.

YEP.

There is some debate about whether blockchain and crypto are here to stay, whether the technology is actually able to do all the things it says it will do. I think of the melamine-milk scandal, and whether blockchain would have helped in that situation. The contamination came from farmers, driven by economic pressures. Blockchain wouldn’t have helped prevent falsification, but it would have made the milk more expensive. Under authoritarianism, which benefits from holding expertise within its realm of power, and under an economic system that thrives off inequality in creating a market, of course blockchain is here to stay. It creates another layer of inequality, another incentive to make food a commodity.

According to Jianhu, the first case of ASF [African swine flu] in China was in a backyard pork operation, one of the many midsize pork farms with fewer than a hundred pigs. Ninety-eight percent of the pork farms in China have fewer than fifty animals, and these small to midsize farms account for about a third of pork production in China. These highly decentralized farms make government oversight difficult. There is also enormous pressure for these farms to keep up with the market price for pork, and to maintain steady production. The government was finding ASF a convenient excuse to eradicate these small farms, making way for centralized, industrial-scale operations.

See previous comment about the commons and centralisation/quality.

We created the ASF epidemic, says Jianhu, out of the quest for cheap pork. One of the ways to ensure cheap pork is to lower the cost of feeding pigs. Xiangyang village’s pigs were fed cooked grains and beans fit for human consumption. ASF has been transferred through industrial pig swill.

Later explanation that industrial pig swill includes treated food waste that often includes pork, which means that they're effectively feeding pigs to pigs.

Since 2009, in Lushan, Zhejiang, NetEase has been perfecting the art of raising pigs under Weiyang, its new agricultural products division. The farm in Lushan has the precision of an electronics factory and the feeling of the world’s most sterile, meticulous resort. On this farm, pigs live an optimized life, with an optimal amount of exercise and an optimal swill mix. They even listen to a soothing soundtrack, carefully designed for stress relief. This music is beneficial for us, as pork eaters. Stress before slaughter can alter a pig’s metabolism, increasing cortisol and resulting in what’s known in the industry as “DFD” (dark, firm, dry) meat. Weiyang pork is now available online and at special Weiyang retail stores scattered across China’s software capital, Hangzhou.

More than a lone founder’s quest for pork purity or sheer novelty, NetEase’s foray into the food space is a clever business move. As Matilda mentioned to me in Shanghai, information about food is central to food safety. This makes industrialized farming, including modern pig farming, an information business, with a focus on scaling trust. NetEase Weiyang declares itself to be combining “internet thinking and modern agriculture.” And part of internet thinking involves farming at a scale and degree of precision possible in software—a level of control over every microscopic variable along the way, such as pig stress levels. Weiyang’s entire approach is crudely transparent—food, like engineers, can be a pipeline and sourcing issue, solved through increased vertical integration. NetEase has set up numerous massive online open courses (MOOCs) to create a population of skilled workers for recruiting directly into their company, addressing the existing shortage of skilled high-tech workers. Similarly, Weiyang skips the step of working with sources, instead creating its own source of high-quality pork, further eliminating any point of failure.

All of this is just beyond bizarre to me, especially as someone who grew up on a dairy farm.

The logic is striking. A demand for pork drives industrialized farming of pigs, which increases disease transmission. The constant emergence of diseases drives the implementation of new technologies like AI pork farming. These technologies go on to make pork cheap, driving even more availability and demand, as people start to believe pork is a necessary part of their diet. AI is not the balm to any problem—it is just one piece of the ever-hungry quest for scale.

I see the myth of automation replacing humans as yet another attempt by those in power to sharply define the boundaries of what being human means, elevating AI to a form of power that seems to have a righteous, natural force in our lives. This myth defines being human as simply being a rational, efficient worker. The fear instilled by these radical proponents of AI is ominous and forceful, and it implies an inevitability written by those in charge—leaders in the tech world, owners of companies that are building this scary AI. The same fear of automation drives a public discourse that glints with a subterfuge: that being human is the only thing that makes us special.

The desire for a controlled world arises from an inability to honor the unknown. “Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas”; we think that “the brain alone will set us free,” wrote the poet Audre Lorde in 1977. As a writer and activist, Lorde experienced firsthand the connection between the personal and the political, asking us to question the historically conditioned ways we have been taught to understand the world. “The white fathers told us: ‘I think, therefore I am,’” she says, referring to the Enlightenment-era philosophers who dissected knowledge as a technical, mechanical pursuit, rather than seeing forms of knowing as a reservoir of opacity, felt and lived through poetry. She asks us to move beyond dichotomies of rational versus emotional ways of knowing, for “rationality is not unnecessary … I don’t see feel/think as a dichotomy.” Beyond binaries, it is the place of poetry, “that back place, where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings for something different and beyond what is now called possible, to which our analysis and understanding can only build roads.” Poetry is a place of power within each of us, and poetry is “the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.”

On the ground, the bulk of AI research is being carried out by large companies like Alibaba. The realm of AI ethics and public discourse is saturated and funded by those same companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Baidu, and corporations directly manipulate the creation of ethical frameworks. It takes millions of dollars to create AI models like ET Agricultural Brain, and an enormous amount of computation time and data labeling. The economics of these technical requirements concentrate control over these models in a handful of companies. The broader AI industry requires a massive amount of data, and subsequently, companies advocate for lax government restrictions on collecting data. Until the makers and builders of AI solve the material realities of the technology, AI will be stuck in a downward spiral, as a tool to optimize life, shaping it into a closed system. Without questioning the intrinsic faith held in prediction, or the political economies of building algorithms, the field of AI ethics and algorithmic fairness will remain mere fodder for dinner party conversations among the rich.

For ET Agricultural Brain, so much labor goes into making the models: not just the labor of engineers at Alibaba, but also the labor of those who create the training data. Farmers examining training data and labeling the pig in the images as sick or healthy. Entire swaths of Guiyang designated as “digital towns,” where young rural migrants sit and generate training data for AI, clicking on images, tagging animals and objects. Despite stories of AI replacing humans, AI still desperately needs us. . That is the reality of work and labor. For more than twenty-five years, my mother woke up at 4:00 a.m. and drove to her job as a university cafeteria worker outside Boston. She used to have a deep commitment to her job, and it gave her a sense of fulfillment. It felt good to feed stressed-out college students who weren’t taking care of themselves. She and her coworkers were trusted by management, given breaks and autonomy on the job. . Over the past ten years, her feelings of fulfillment have drastically turned. The school optimized her work with arbitrary, quantitative metrics. As a result of this optimization process, there’s less autonomy, fewer breaks, and new, bizarre working schedules. My mother feels little connection to her job now. My mother’s is the kind of job that some people think robots should take over, that should be optimized and automated. After all, she would supposedly get more free time and fulfillment in life. The irony is, she stopped feeling fulfilled when her workplace became optimized, her work stripped of meaning, turned into mere labor.

I ask Sun Wei his opinion about the equalizing effects of technology, if a technical position like his is liberating and will allow him to do anything he wants in the future. These equalizing effects are pervasive throughout the technology and development world, the stories of “technology transforming lives” tiresome in their ubiquity. Projects like the failed One Laptop per Child, by Nicholas Negroponte, or the Hole in the Wall project exude this techno-optimistic belief—if you can give a laptop to a child or put a computer in an Indian slum, children will teach themselves linear algebra and become the next Bill Gates. We now know this is a myth inflated by a hype cycle. A whole support system of teachers, peers, and family is a stronger influence than a laptop or computer screen. But part of me—the American part of me—wants to believe the narrative about individualistic passion overcoming everything, including a lack of formal schooling or connections.

It would be nice if we could toss the formal schooling, honestly.

The word “innovation” is laden with baggage. It gives rise to a whole industry built on conferences, media, and thought leadership. It’s not clear what exactly innovation is, but whatever it is, there is apparently a paucity of this golden resource everywhere except Silicon Valley. . In English, “innovation” was not always regarded as positively as it is now. Its original form in Latin means “to renew, to introduce something as new,” perhaps subliminally acknowledging that the category “entirely new” is difficult to define. The word “innovation” was derogatory in the age of monarchs, as it referred to political and economic change that could bring down empires, threatening the status of kings and elites. But slowly, throughout the Industrial Revolution, the phrase began to be seen as more positive when engineering culture took shape. In the early 1900s, Thorstien Veblen advocated the idea that technology was the output, the product of a group of male workers he termed “engineers.” And while engineers worked to create technology, it was the company owners, the grand industrialists, who reaped the profits of innovation. . Contemporary innovation in the United States and China appears to strengthen rather than threaten the political and economic order of the world. Riffling through recent coverage on innovation shows the most innovative products appear to be varying forms of management through technology—managing people, cars, take-out orders, or goods. Our modern-day monarchs, corporations and CEOs, are unthreatened by innovation. It begs the question: If innovation is so disruptive, why would it be embraced by people with so much to lose?

For both this young analyst and my VC friend, innovation still seems to carry a lot of assumptions. Why does the new, the novel, always require a certain amount of addiction to an app? If failure is so important for innovation, why are we only confronted with stories of technology’s successes, rather than stories of its spectacular technical failures? If embracing failure is the prerequisite for innovation, who has the privilege of failing?

Membership in the Rice Harmony Cooperative has been growing every year, and this is no small feat in modern China, where individualism is increasing and the memory of previously disastrous attempts at collectivization by the government remains. Yet the cooperative structure centers the community as the locus of decision-making, creating a collective investment that is resilient under the strain of strong personalities and politics. This is not an easy process to navigate, with cooperative members needing to resolve conflict rather than walk away from it. As a shanzhai endeavor, actions cannot be singular and individual. Xinghai and Qiu spend planting seasons in their own fields, and alongside other farmers, providing technical advice and negotiating interpersonal conflict.

Explained in the text: Shanzhai literally means "mountain stronghold," but it is a reference to knock-offs (because people in those mountain villages couldn't afford name brands or official products).

I wander through the paddies, past the Frankenstein machines, past the piles of rice straw used as organic fertilizer. If innovation casts the spell of capitalism, in this mountain stronghold, I see shanzhai as a verb, used to cast a different kind of spell. To shanzhai. To turn protocols into practices that bind us together rather than centralize authority. To turn back the worship of scale and renew our commitments to care. I think back to the words I heard when I was a kid, the other magical phrase, Made in China, and the dismissive tone in the man’s voice. Barometers of success and innovation are invented by those with money, turning engagement into the surface-level interactions of informed users, rather than the deeper actions that tackle structural, social change by invested citizens willing to hold long village meetings. Entire entrepreneurship programs exist, funded by VCs, designed to foster what VCs see as the core values of innovation. Instead of continuing to accept success and innovation as empty containers, I propose new measures, understanding our world through shanzhai, through the ability to care, maintain, renew, and deepen commitments.

This is definitely an aspect of the world I would love to see supported.

Like China’s food and language, urban villages have an enormous amount of regional variation. What is common across all urban villages is that they are home to those on the fringes of city life—nannies, housekeepers, construction workers, delivery drivers. In Shenzhen, urban villages have played a key part in the city’s rise, nurturing new inventors with brash ideas and informal economies. Yet because of the socioeconomic status of the population residing in urban villages, these areas are deemed dangerous by upper-middle-class urbanites. The term that upper-middle-class Chinese people use to describe this population is “low-quality” (disuzhi, 低素质). Strangely, the upper-middle class seems to have no qualms about the low-quality population traveling to wealthier parts, watching over their children and cleaning their homes.

Though they don't often reside in 'urban villages', many people reside in suburbs and outside of the cities in which they do the same work. They live on the fringes of the city, in the cheaper areas, working for the wealthy who look down upon them; the wealthy see those areas as either worthless or dangerous (or both), yet they don't care that they rely upon these people. The contradiction doesn't connect for them.

To be fair, I feel this in my work. I'm from a rural background and have made cities my home, working with the children of upper-middle-class people. They have no qualms about me teaching their kids, but they are still happy to talk about me (and people like me) as if I have no value.

All this information sits in a database, a hulking engineering marvel that underpins so much of our modern world. Databases allow people to read, write, update, and destroy data in a fairly dependable way. They also require the people who build databases to form strong opinions about the world and the way it’s structured. For example, the attributes of a user on a platform are dictated by columns an engineer defines in the database. Different databases have different logics for the way data must be formatted, which in turn shapes the way we have come to encode the world. In the case of Real Population Platform, Xiaoli tells me the hardest part is data compatibility. . “To be honest, many of the recent upgrades in Guiyang have been a headache.” Xiaoli looks at me, and then suddenly asks, “It is true that Americans each have a number that allows them to be tracked? But that there is only one database that has that number? The social benefits number?” It takes me a second to realize that he means social security numbers. After all, it’s not immediately obvious to me that a social security number tracks us. But it does, as any American can attest to: the social security number and credit score follows us, it dictates if we get loans, if we can access credit, and if we can access housing. And while we give our social security number out somewhat casually, research has shown the ways credit scores, attached to our social security numbers, exacerbate deeply entrenched inequality in the United States. For an individual, it’s an innocuous number, but on a large scale, it forms a hulking system.

The commercial runs, with sound effects, on repeat, every minute. Standing in front of the screen, abetted by the occasional coo and glitter effects behind her, the Megvii spokeswoman I talk to makes it very clear: Megvii doesn’t store any data, it just makes the algorithm. It is innocent, she says. What governments and companies do with it is up to them. The engineers show up every day and just do their job. . The Megvii algorithms break down bodies and life into numbers, measurements, and parts. This kind of thinking is not new—many of us have been locked into it for hundreds of years, while grasping at an elusive, atomic sense of identity. Looking at the engineers at their desks, it can be easy to judge their ethics, to question why they continue to show up every day when Skynet videos play on loop next door. Yet, like most desk-based jobs these days, the ethical boundary becomes defined by awareness. When you have been made accustomed to solving problems by breaking them down into parts, how could you see the larger picture to know whether you’re doing harm? The world is certainly complex, but doesn’t it feel good helping law enforcement make the world safer? Why shouldn’t you trust that your work is being used by policy makers who know what they are doing?

Megvii (Face++) is one of the beautification programs and identification algorithms.

The "just do their job" is so ubiquitous that, one day, we need people to realise they do not need to simply do their job. But it's hard to get people to understand how the work they're doing is harmful, especially when it's couched as something as simple as "a beautification tool" on WeChat or a filter on TikTok or whatever people want to call them.

At some point, we need to recognise that people are using these tools (across the globe) to harm and/or control us. They're using them to create programs that allow us to "securely" access our social benefits; they're using them to determine who is allowed to go where and how.

And while it sounds like fear-mongering, we should be concerned. It's not "just doing your job" after a while.

Inner Mongolia was my friend’s home province. The trip was his attempt for us to see the grasslands of the region—instead, it ended up being a tiring journey on buses and trains, a requiem for the last parts of nomadic Mongolian life. We drove from a copper mine to a coal mine outside of Hulunbuir, watching straggly sheep herds in the waning grassland. He’s ethnically Mongolian, but his family ended up on the Chinese side of the border during the split between independent Mongolia and Inner Mongolia as a territory of China. As an ethnic minority in China, he has a fraught relationship to the government. Early assimilationist policies, alongside forced resettlement of nomadic Mongolian herders into Han Chinese–built cities, has led to an erasure of Mongolian language and culture in the region. Mining, an industry exalted by the national government, is desecrating pastureland—these tensions were crystallized in a series of 2011 protests after a Han Chinese miner ran over a Mongolian herder.

This whole section is incredibly sad, particularly as it details their friend's life and how he is trapped with a criminal record from brash behaviour when he was a teen (which is entangled in his ethnic minority status).

Yet as a tactic of policing, surveillance has always been crucial in making criminality throughout history, drawing a line between those on the so-called right and wrong sides of society. And this line drawing is enabled by distilling life into arbitrary parts: class, race, gender, with the line of criminality itself constantly shifting throughout time, serving political-economic crises. “Crime went up; crime came down; we cracked down,” writes the scholar Ruth Gilmore.

There is another side to data, illuminated once we understand constructions of fear in our day-to-day lives. “Can data ever know who we really are?” asks the policy researcher and activist Zara Rahman. For my friend and many others, the data on a past crime remains committed to his record. And while his life changes—he becomes a friend, a husband, a doting father, an artist, an uncle—all the data points about his past remain static. Data cannot truly represent the full spectrum of life. It remains a thin slice of the world. There is always some kind of bias built in. Yet we imagine numbers to mean something, and this creates a common tendency that the statistician Philip B. Stark calls “quantifauxcation”: the attempt to assign numbers or quantify phenomenon, as if quantitative data can offer certainty. Some strategies for quantifauxcation, says Stark, include saying things people want to believe, and adding opaque complexity to models, since complexity has become conflated with accuracy.

Why didn’t Xiao Niu stay in Guangzhou? “City life is not designed to keep you there,” he says. “If you earn RMB 3,000 or 4,000 a month, that’s great money, sure, but city residents spend more than that just on rent. You can’t build a life off that.” Sometimes we play the game or the game plays us. And so Xiao Niu took the money he’d earned and returned home to the mountains of Guizhou, determined not to be played by the game. It at least was enough money to do things like improve his parents’ house and buy his dad a printer. . Part of tackling poverty means being able to measure and map it. There are disputes among experts in the field of international development on how to do this, especially on how to measure poverty in communities that rely on farming. Defining household assets is one method, but with farms, depending on the season when you take the measurements, assets will change before and after harvest season. Another method is quantifying household disposable income—the ability to purchase. It’s these on-the-ground variations, compounded into larger macro-economic figures, that lead to claims that global poverty is getting much better, or much worse. Yet these claims do not answer how people become poor in the first place, and, if we have found the key to eradicating poverty, why it still exists. . However you quantify it, the facts laid bare are these: Shangdiping and other places in rural China have higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy rates than cities. Education access is lower. And the entrenched poverty of China persists in its remote, rural, ethnic minority regions such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Ningxia, Guizhou, and Yunnan.

RMB 3,000 to 4,000 is equal to roughly USD $460 to 620.

To note, the rent that I paid when living in Shanghai (which was cheaper than most of my friends)? Was RMB 7,000, which is a little bit under USD $1,100. A lot of my Chinese co-workers were severely underpaid (especially in comparison to every single white person working in the school); they might have pulled in half of my salary (RMB 22,000 - almost USD $3,400), working as teachers in the same school.

So keep that in mind.

But it's also worth pointing out that none of these poverty-measuring tools are consistent. The EU measures it based on percentage, some organisations measure China's "raising people out of poverty" based on people living on more than $1.90/day, etc. It's also interesting to note that the people determining levels of poverty are the same people who are responsible for many people being impoverished in the first place.

Funny that.

“Alibaba sucks us dry,” he says. “It sucks the blood out of us, and it will suck the blood out of this village. As sellers, all our money is kept in Alipay because that’s how buyers send money. At the drop of a pin they can demand a refund, and because of the escrow service, the money gets sent back to them, even if I’ve shipped the order already. Or maybe they don’t like the material, they think it’s cheap. But we have to keep on making worse-quality stuff. How are we supposed to keep prices low and also compete with others? The government thinks it’s great and keeps doing things like building roads, putting in broadband. And Alibaba uses all this infrastructure for free, relies on us to make decisions on lowering the quality of goods. But what happens next? There’s only so much cutting corners we can do. There’s only so many ads we can buy, lies about the products we can say. What happens when this system fails?”

Refusal and purchasing to support are both cruel optimism, providing a false sense of control. It’s that same sense of control that makes shopping so pleasurable. In a world that is so interconnected, with problems at a scale I cannot comprehend—climate change, plastics in the ocean, e-waste, political instability from globalization—the trick of shopping is that it makes me feel like I am doing something about those problems. I am asserting my agency, this agency that I am promised as an American. My small choice to either buy or not buy exerts control over the world as I want to see it—as I imagine it, maybe more eco-friendly, more sustainable.

The proliferation of MLMs [multi-level marketing schemes] can be easily blamed on social media and technology, just like the spread of misinformation, bizarre health advice, or selfie culture. Yet the reality is more complicated. Social media and online community certainly play a part in accelerating information, as well as in decreasing the barrier of accessing content. But these online interactions are a manifestation of broader socioeconomic conditions. With one of the worst, most error-prone health-care systems in the developed world, why wouldn’t you seek out online health advice or alternative explanations for illness in the United States? With deepening job insecurity and the elusiveness of the American Dream, why wouldn’t you at least try joining an MLM to sell online?

The popular Chinese press likes to fan the flames of Kuaishou’s impact on rural society. For example: Zheng Tao, a rural youth who left his village for factory work in a city. A loser on the margins of urban life, he moved back home and became a livestream celebrity, making money from adoring fans. Other similar success stories have encouraged millions of youth to search for money and fame online. Chinese livestream’s popularity echoes the same desires of American livestream, whether it’s groups behind pearl parties or niche YouTube stars. The desire for community, for companionship, and, mostly, for monetizing emotions has never been stronger.

A movement coalesced around Peppa Pig, crystalizing a careless nihilism and rejection of mainstream values. Like in so many other countries, consumption has become the sacred value of daily life in China. The narrow path laid out by authority figures and parents is to get good grades to go to a good school, go to a good school to get a good job, and with a good job, shop, have kids, and shop some more. Instead of abiding by this prescribed life, shehui ren have no desire to enter the competitive whirl of school and employment; they see through the expectations of society. And the government sees this kind of nihilism as troubling, both socially and economically.

In Lee Edelman’s book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, he provokes readers to think about a set of impossible politics, a theory of failure. While conventional politics are defined as the push and pull between the left and right, he insists that most of us end up creating a culture where political action is premised on the illusory figure of “the Child.” The call to act is haunted by the specter of “our children,” whether it is a future of environmental destruction or a disorderly future without “traditional values.” We are always trying to live for the child that does not yet exist, fixing the world for our children who do, impressing our expectations on their desires. These political visions draw upon fears of decline or loss of control, on an innate need to crave a future—some kind of story or meaning that motivates us to keep living. This same need is the reason why we get stuck in a cycle of chasing after the future, a future that never appears as perfect as we imagined it to be.

I think of my parents, my grandparents. My grandmother and her nightmares, how the last few years of her life were marked by her confronting the depth of her past, despite having lived for the future in her youth. My mother’s insistence on a better life, as she defined it, full of expectations for her children’s future that neither my sister nor I was able to fulfill. Her fingertips, cracked and dry from working, saving for a life that she felt was not hers. Why do I work long days to dutifully pay off the five-figure student debt I have, the debt I took on in fantasizing about a better life? Even if I paid off the debt, would the debt-free future that awaited me be as perfect as I imagine?

I stare into the darkness that shifts with occasional washes of light. I cannot bring myself to see the honeyed visions of a comfortable future. Instead, I see the intrinsic truth of living as one of difficulty, the constant effluent of change. Without a future, I must give myself over to the present, to undertaking the work that must be done.

I continue to stare. The present stares back. The present moment promises nothing—it only demands. It demands building the communities that shift culture, that allow interbeing to thrive. It demands the work of awareness and care, instead of the tools of efficiency and scale. It demands seeing individual freedom as nothing more than a way for all of us to be oppressed. Most of all, the present demands the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting. Through the present moment I see the glimmers of liberation embedded in the work we must do at this time. Because what else can we do?

Quotes from the intro:

Freire also did not hesitate to demonstrate his “just ire” by denouncing the critical posture of many facile liberals and some so-called critical educators who often find refuge in the academy by hiding their addiction to obscene consumerism, while at the same time attacking in their written discourses the market theology of neoliberalism. Too often, these facile liberals and so-called critical educators’ tastes and ways of being in the world and with the world remain, according to Freire, wedded to the very neoliberal market solutions that they denounce at the level of written critical discourse. In their day-to-day practices, these facile liberals and so-called critical educators often betray the action required by praxis by fossilizing their purported political project into an obscure discursive criticality that begs to move beyond the always “postponed arrival” of action – that is, action designed to transform the current perniciousness of the neoliberal Godification of the market into new democratic structures that lead to equity, equality, and authentic democratic practices. In other words, many facile liberals and so-called critical educators boast of their leftist credentials by wearing their proclaimed Marxism on their sleeve (usually only expressed in written discourse or in the safety of the academy) and, sometimes, feel the urge to further boast that, for example, their radicalism beyond Marx’s proposals to the degree that they are authentically more Maoist in their political orientation – a posture they believe to be even more radical. As a consequence, leftist labels in the academy become appropriated, exoticized political and cultural currency where to be a Marxist-in-residence in the ivory tower bestows status but is little more than a chic brand – in reality, the epitome of consumerism sustained by transactions occurring in a merely symbolic register of names and labels that are otherwise vacuous in substance. In essence, the academic branding of “Marxist” by some critical educators turns ethical and political action into a spectacle, and leftist viewpoints into de facto commodities. As commodities, these self-ascribed “radical” positions and labels are emptied out of their progressive content to the extent that they are decoupled from principled action – a decoupling that remains fundamental in the reproduction of the market theology of neoliberalism where collective social engagement based on critical thinking is discouraged and zealous cutthroat competition is rewarded. The insidious process of decoupling critical discourse and action legitimizes not “walking the talk”: it affords the proclaimed Marxist-in-residence the opportunity, for instance, to claim to be antiracist while turning antiracism into a lifeless cliché that does not provide pedagogical spaces to critique white supremacist ideologies. In this process, their progressive stances are often co-opted, mobilized only to the degree that they denounce racism at the level of written critical discourse, all the while reaping privileges from the cemented institutional racism which they, willfully, refuse to acknowledge and engage in action to dismantle.

Works mentioned: Ecotopia (1975) by Ernest Callenbach; Pacific Edge (1990) by Kim Stanley Robinson; The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) by Starhawk; "Speechless Love (2017) by Yilun Fan; "The Boston Hearth Project" (2017) by T.X. Watson; "Camping with City Boy" (2018) by Jerri Jerreat; "Once Upon a Time in a World" (2018) by Antonio Luiz M. C. Costa; "The Right Side of History" (2017) by Jane Rawson; "Xibalba Dreams of the West" (2018) by Andre S. Silva; "Dust" (2017) by Daniel José Older; Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers by Sarena Ulibarri; Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-speculation by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland; Suncatcher: Seven Days in the Sky by Alia Gee

Quotes from this article:

For those aware of this information, and of the fact that we are not on track to limit our warming to 1.5°C, it can feel as though the clock is ticking and we are willfully ignoring it.

I think it's worth acknowledging that it doesn't just feel like we're "wilfully ignoring it." We most certainly are because the people who can do something refuse to, which highlights the need to get away from this form of government as soon as possible.

And it's not that the shift will immediately fix things, but we need to make it possible for people and communities to make decisions because politicians actively reject the responsibility.

The contrast between the action-inspiring energy which comes from the IPCC’s report and the sheer immobility of our response mimics the energy of someone who knows they ought to stop procrastinating, but continues to do so regardless. How better to describe anxiety than energy in an actionless body? Thus, the contradiction between the idea that we ought to act, and the fact that we are not doing so, produces a special kind of anxiety.

I think we need to be more clear: People are acting and they are doing what they can. In fact, many (especially Indigenous people) are doing so in the face of violent oppression, such as enduring police brutality for protesting harmful oil pipelines.

So this is less like a person procrastinating and knowing they shouldn't and more like a bunch of us trying to do what we can and being met with inaction by those who "control" everything. This is an important understanding to have because, much like the recycling campaigns of the 1970s through to now, it is wrongfully placing the blame on people when it is companies and corporations doing the majority of the polluting.

This is an important distinction to make.

If we surpass 2°C of warming within the century, there will be some alive who will be able to recall a time when there was hope of averting climate disaster.

For the record, this is already happening. We could've averted this long ago, but ExxonMobil sat on their report from the 1970s. The fact that we could (and should) change has been well documented throughout my own lifetime, so we already know of "a time when there was hope of averting climate disaster." (I think this intro would benefit from a little historiography to provide better contextualisation for the climate crisis.)

How do we move toward a future that we cannot imagine? Inspired by this problem, there is a unique task which accompanies fighting climate change: imagining what the world looks like in which we do succeed. Without direction, we cannot make demands. Without an image of what a changed world looks like, where does hope lie? If we persist in thinking that positive change is impossible, we will prove ourselves right. If we are to commit ourselves to consequential change, we need a positive vision.

This is actually beautiful.

Though I do take issue with the belief that we can't move toward a future that we can't imagine, but I think that it's because we need to become better at imagining possibilities. Also, if we know what the world looks like now, I don't understand why we want to keep it that way just because we don't have "an image of what a changed world looks like" in our heads.

Not so much in viewing things through the negative but just being able to go "This sucks, but it can be better."

Solarpunk is a genre of ecologically-oriented speculative fiction characterized both by its aesthetic and its underlying socio-political vision (Sylva, 2015).

Pointedly, solarpunk has no commitment to “low tech” as such (as, for example, anarcho-primitivism does), but rather rejects technologies which are not in harmony with the environment. Indeed, many solarpunk stories imagine clever, high tech yet low carbon solutions to environmental problems (see Grzyb & Sparks, 2017).

However, it is the notion of solarpunk as forward-looking, counter-dystopian, and hopeful which persists most clearly in the descriptions of the genre (Grzyb, 2017; Ulibarri, 2018a).

“Solar” is meant to evoke light, both the broad daylight in which life happens, and also the tone of the narrative.

“Solar” is itself a reference to solar energy, from photovoltaic cells to passive heating—clean, sustainable, renewable energies with minimal carbon footprint. In the darkness of climate anxiety, solarpunk is a beam of hope showing the way toward a livable future. “Punk” evokes the rebellious and countercultural aspects of the genre. Fundamentally, solarpunk imagines an overturning of the status quo—challenging ecological and social injustices. Punk has a long history of anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, and anti-capitalist thought. Solarpunk proudly carries this tradition into the twenty-first century. “Punk” also evokes individuality, although not individualism. By aligning with the marginalized, solarpunk resists the stifling taboos which promote uniformity. By depicting empowered, autonomous communities, neither the sameness of Soviet brutalism nor the false diversity of fifteen different potato-chip brands persist in a solarpunk world. Rather, communities are able to decide their own dress, speech, architecture, life-style, etc.

Aesthetically, solarpunk is heavily influenced by Afrofuturism, retrofuturism, and various strains of utopianism. From Afrofuturism, solarpunk takes an orientation toward diverse cultural forms (where the present, especially in the West, tends toward mass-cultural homogeneity), and acute concern for issues of racial and gender equality (see Goh, 2018).

I think it needs to be made more clear that Afrofuturism isn't simply a range of diversity across multiple intersections. Most specifically, a common defining feature of Afrofuturism is the centering of Black people from the diaspora, from Africa, etc. telling their stories from their perspective. It's not simply "diverse cultures" (even though Afrofuturist texts frequently include that); it's specifically about the stories (and experiences) of Black people.

(This article about Black women's work in Afrofuturism is pretty cool.)

Unique and diverse architecture and clothing, often reflective of cultures denigrated by Western hegemony, are elements of a solarpunk aesthetic with their roots in Afrofuturism.

This is true, but not all books or stories set in "multicultural societies" or including cultures "denigrated by Western hegemony" are part of Afrofuturism. (That doesn't make them less valid, but I think a non-Black creator would recognise their work isn't Afrofuturist just because it includes Black people.)

I don't take issue with saying that solarpunk includes or has inspirations from Afrofuturism, but I do take a lot of issue with not incorporating texts by Black people when discussing this. It's fine that you added other texts showing diversity of characters, but you really ought to have found something. (Nnedi Okorafor's Zarah the Windseeker could possibly have fit well as an example for a lot of the setting, even with the magical realism within the text.)

As speculative fiction concerned with ecological harmony, solarpunk stories often take place in worlds with a past (or a collapsing present), like our own, of mass consumerism, environmental degradation, and colonial exploitation that the characters must deal with (Ulibarri, 2018a). This, too, grounds similarities between Afrofuturism and solarpunk, with an in-universe or thematic reckoning with these injustices.

Yet solarpunk also shares a lineage with retrofuturism, in more ways than one. It is worth mentioning that retrofuturism was once simply futurism, until that future failed to arrive. What the people of the 1950’s imagined the future would look like is, quite often, the essence of retrofuturism. Similarly, solarpunk can be described as (one vision for) what the optimists of our time imagine the future to be. However, the stakes are much higher here. Adapting a phrase from Joel Kovel (2014), the future will be solarpunk, or there will be no future. Many of the aspects of the futures imagined in the 50’s, because they never arrived, can still persist in solarpunk futures: monorails, dominantly glass architecture fused with greenery, etc. Much of retrofuturism is rejected by solarpunk: all things nuclear (both family and energy), the reliance on individual transportation (i.e., cars), and the glorification of consumerist culture.

I find it interesting how much of retrofuturism is actually rejected by solarpunk, and that the rejection of a lot of that is actually a bigger inspiration for the genre (in this regards).

Also, the nuclear family is a garbage concept.

One of the greatest influences on solarpunk is the utopian tradition: it imagines what the future can be, beyond what it is today. In this sense, it shares much with the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, perhaps the most oft-mentioned influence on the solarpunk genre (Heer, 2015; Ulibarri, 2018b).

This is a good way of highlighting an example of what you're talking about and showing how it bridges toward solarpunk. (The mentioned story is The Dispossessed, which is very utopian and wonderful.)

It is utopian, yes, but does not simply wish away its problems. It contains an critical reflection on what a society espousing economic and gender equality looks like—utopian, but not perfect. This notion of an “ambiguous utopia” is also something that solarpunk shares. A shift in relation to the environment, and even the socio-economic system, does not ameliorate all of the conflict in the human condition.

We honestly need more stories that deal with this.

With its concern for ecological harmony, solarpunk is often defined by its sustainable architecture—indeed, the solarpunk-architecture movement is well-established in concept-art.

Mentions Bosco Verticale in Milan as an example of real-life inspiration for what buildings in solarpunk cities can look like. I agree and think that we could be including plants in many more of our urban designs, especially as they can help offset the temperatures we're currently facing. But more than just "including" plants, we need to ensure that it's possible for people to decide which plants to grow. While having a building covered in trees and shrubs is nice, we really need to provide spaces for community gardens everywhere.

(One of the modern problems with Bosco Verticale, however, is that it's a building for the wealthy, with starting prices in the early millions and a penthouse that had been valued at $17.5 million.)

In imagining a sustainable world, solarpunk emphasizes sustainable materials and an efficient use of renewable resources.

Where solarpunk depicts urban settings, surfaces might be covered in plants (ideally crops) or solar panels. Both of these components reduce carbon consumption through a combination of passive cooling, renewable energy, and locally-sourcing food. Buildings may be constructed mainly from glass, as this enables passive heating and lighting and can also accommodate “solarglass” (Goh, 2018, p. 115): translucent, stained-glass-esque solar panels.

Solarglass is honestly amazing, and we genuinely need to incorporate more building-integrated photovoltaics.

The solarpunk aesthetic is not limited to the architectural. Natural colors, bright greens and blues, along with flowers of all kinds, often adorn the bodies of those living in a solarpunk world. Clothing reflects diverse cultural origins, or is homemade (or homemended) rather than mass produced. Musically, anything upbeat or acoustic can be solarpunk, especially if it is hopeful, ecological, counter-hegemonic, etc.

One strength of solarpunk is its insistence upon promoting and including the voices of those who are so often excluded in the present.

While solarpunk is described here as an aesthetic, it is just as substantially a vision of the society of the future. By engaging issues related to the environment, urbanism, and representation, solarpunk stories—implicitly or explicitly—take positions on political issues. The growing awareness of the relationship between overproduction, hyper-consumption, and economic growth on one hand, and environmental degradation on the other encourages people to recognize capitalism and environmental harmony cannot coexist (Klein, 2014). With its utopian influences, it thus makes sense for many solarpunk stories to take place in a post-capitalist world, or to contain explicitly anti-capitalist elements (Hudson, 2015). When it comes to the environment, the infinite growth on which capitalism depends becomes an enemy rather than an ally. Where the logic of capitalism centers on growth at all costs, solarpunk fits much better with an ethic of compassion and temperance in economics.

Wherever growth is fueled by environmental degradation, domestic and international exploitation, or a disregard for the well-being of humans or animals, solarpunk rejects growth. The rejection of infinite growth opens up the possibilities of an unconditional income (in kind or in cash), of ten-hour work weeks, and an approach to economics which generally puts people before profits. A solarpunk world might be lighter than our own because its people are not crushed by the demands of the corporate world and are free from the alienation of modern life. In a sense, the compassion which marks a solarpunk world is inherently antithetical to the logic of capitalism—for example, it is hard to imagine homelessness in a solarpunk world. Solarpunk, recalling the “punk” in its name, encourages depictions of autonomous communities (often urban) with non-hierarchical organization (Solarpunk Anarchist, 2018).

Building from real-life examples, these take the form of urban-garden communes and energy co-ops, recognizing the relationship between community control of resources and environmental harmony. Incorporating the insights of social ecology, solarpunk tends to reflect an ethos that “the very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human” (Bookchin, 1982, p. 1).

The vision of solarpunk is one which mirrors the growing sense that the issues of climate change and environmental degradation are interrelated with all other social issues. When imagining the future, is there any reason to imagine a future with such massive technological and cultural change while preserving old prejudices? Given the inherently political nature of environmental justice—especially its anticapitalist elements—it often becomes impossible to imagine progress in one sphere without extending it to others.

Yes! Because:

Three issues that solarpunk is particularly well-suited to address, to be discussed here, are: environmental racism, ability and disability, and representation. To say that solarpunk can “address” these issues is to say that it offers a depiction of a future where these concerns are recognized and then tackled by the communities affected by them.

Environmental racism:

In particular, this often occurs at the intersection of racialized housing and urban planning, where environmental hazards are relocated away from wealthier, primarily white neighborhoods toward poorer communities of color. Because these communities often lack the institutional power of white neighborhoods, hazards such as factories or waste facilities will often be constructed near these communities. The utopian and architectural background of solarpunk infuses an imminent concern for urban planning, particularly the distribution of access to resources and/or exposure to hazards. High-quality, safe, and clean-energy public transportation is a mainstay of the worlds solarpunk evokes.

Other topics addressed include food access and food deserts (solved through gardens built into infrastructure, added onto existing buildings, or in empty plots of land).

Thus, in the Global North solarpunk may manifest as a detechnologization, as a transition away from an addiction to fossil-fuels or amenities such as air-conditioning and always-on electricity.

And:

In the Global South, however, solarpunk might appear as (ecologically and economically) sustainable industrialization, brought on by some combination of reparations for colonialism, debt-reversal, and monetary compensation for the disproportionate impacts of global warming (Islam & Winkel, 2017).

Solarpunk demands the reorganization of an entire lived-space, which allows for the integration of questions of accessibility at the level of the basic structure of society.

And:

The rejection of the automobile means there must be robust accessibility accommodations on public transportation for people with visual impairments and mobility-related disabilities. These are the requirements of any just society, not simply a solarpunk one, but they are made solarpunk by the fact that they additionally intertwine with the vision of eco-harmony.

It's also worth noting that single-person transport should be made available, but we need to think about how to do this. It's not merely about everyone having electric cars, but there are times where single-person transport needs to be thought about (along with placement of clinics, hospitals, etc).

Few genres have as one of their core principles the topic of representation (Afrofuturism being a notable exception), yet if any do, solarpunk is one of them.

I'm not so sure that I see Afrofuturism having the core principle of "representation" because I do not think it seeks to represent. Perhaps this may be out of boundaries for me, but I see it far more as centering Black people within their creations than as merely representing them.

I feel "representation" is the one category that I bristle at because of how co-opted it has become. This isn't to say that it's not important, but the way representation is used seems to be neglecting authenticity. (And that's what I think genres like Afrofuturism actually have.)

Solarpunk, as a genre imminently concerned with justice, makes representation central to its structure and message—representation of various levels of mental and physical ability, of various genders, races, and sexualities.

Personally, I think we need to go beyond representation and recognise that these characters should always exist within our stories (as they exist within our world). Representation keeps leading us to tokenism and stereotypical inclusion; we need something beyond that, with a range of characters who have different personalities. We need authenticity, not merely representation.

Solarpunk can (and definitely should) do that.

For young people today, there is a persistent and creeping threat. This threat is, paradoxically, not climate change, but climate grief. That is, a well-organized and conscious society could quite easily address the issue of climate change in the next few decades—by transitioning to all renewable energy, dramatically cutting down on consumption, and shifting away from an economic system that glorifies limitless growth. However, a society which believes that climate change is inevitable—that “things cannot be otherwise”—is a doomed society.

We are definitely living in a "do as little as possible" society, and that is infuriating. I feel like another threat (in addition to "climate grief") is perpetual rage.

Sustainability education seeks, among other things, to encourage the “development of knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes necessary for transitioning to a more sustainable and just society for all” (Evans, 2019, p. 11). That this could be considered the mission-statement of solarpunk itself is no accident.

And:

Indeed, the promise of prefigurative fiction is not simply that it may predict the future, but that it will produce it.

This is a virtue which can be brought out either through reading solarpunk fiction or writing it—indeed, writing solarpunk demands that students consider what aspects of the socio-economic structure contribute to environmental harm and imagine how they can be overcome or improved.

Fiction can teach us what the future might be by showing us that, against the “trickery and deceit” which makes it difficult to imagine a better world, things really can change. Fiction offers understandings of the world (or its possible future) which are novel, which have never been expressed before. In this sense, fiction offers a new vocabulary in which to understand the present and the future.