More power to sponsors putting their money behind hopeful futures. I was recently at a conference where the speaker compared this future visioning with that of blade runner. She was was almost posing it as, why not be hopeful? Theres more to gain and it's more challenging.
It's hard to take that seriously as a vision of the future. As an expression of values and aesthetics completely untethered from reality, sure. It makes a great yogurt commercial.
But realistically, as something to strive for? So much of the technology in it is essentially magic, but there's just enough physical labor to romanticize. It's pretty obvious the physical labor is optional and voluntary. In other words, it's a group of people hanging out in an automated agricultural facility that has been designed to allow them to LARP as old-time farmers.
I mean, either that or the technology just happened, coincidentally, to need exactly an enjoyable and healthy amount of labor to keep it going, and the labor just happened to take the outward form of a romanticized relationship to the land and nature.
But that's too much of a coincidence to take seriously, and the alternative is that the human labor isn't necessary to produce the food, and the humans' place in the process was designed to be enjoyable for them and also not to be compulsory. If the people aren't needed there, presumably they aren't confined to the premises and forced to act out an unnecessary and antiquated form of labor. They come and go, and when nobody is there, the automation takes over. So it's basically farming as glamping. (Glarming?) The people in this vision could drop everything tomorrow and go to a spa, without any consequences for whoever depends on the output of this farm.
Maybe it is actually a sequel to The Matrix. Humans rebelled in the Garden of Eden world because it was too nice, the 90’s world has slightly too much tedious office work, so the next world they made has slightly more fulfilling busywork for the humans.
>It's hard to take that seriously as a vision of the future
I don't think it is really, it's escapism fundamentally. There's a lot of "cozy" aesthetics like this going around, "Cottagecore"[1] is related cousin, Stardew Valley and games like that embraced the pastoral aesthetics, I think you could also even count lofi music in this.
Solarpunk did explicitly start as an activist movement so I think it really does need to ask itself some questions, first I'd pose is how a Solarpunk community defends itself against some less solarpunky and benevolent people. It's a particular irony that defense, rapidly gaining importance in the world, is not exactly suited to be powered by solarpanels
Actually, when you watch the trench warfare in Ukraine a bit, a lot of the bunkers and frontline drone teams run of basically large power banks (eco flow & similar) powering their starlink terminals, running their computers and charging drone batteries.
Those power banks are then charged by various means, from generators (noisy & having a significant heat signature so need to be far from anything importannt) to solar panels (quite big, reflected light might give off their position but are possibly harder to easily destroy remotely than a single generator).
