• Zaros@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Since plastic was already everywhere, we collected it, made it white and covered huge areas with it to reflect more sunlight. Great idea, didn’t backfire at all.

  • neonred@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Maaan, I just don’t understand that comic; somebody care to explain?

    Is Death disappointed because the green guy is not interested in his own grave but more about the future achievements and what society did in the meantime? Or the disrespect for having lived 90 years? Is that the correlation to Solar Punk?

    Because I excluded some things already:

    • someone dug a grave for him, so someone is/was alive and cared enough to do so and even knew his birthday
    • snow is cold so it cannot be fallout; some hyphotesized below
    • wind turbines are still turning and are not damaged or worn down
    • Deuces@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I think you’re looking too deep. The ghost of Christmas future shows you how unimportant you are, but the character doesn’t care since the world is better than expected.

      • neonred@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Then why is the ghost disappointed/confused in the last panel, if his mission was to show how unimportant the green guy is and then the green guy does exactly that by marvelling about the future and not about the self-importance.

        And maybe one of the downvoters can exlain it all to me when they’re so dismissive?

        • technomad@slrpnk.net
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          11 months ago

          If we’re being pedantic here, how can you tell the ‘ghost’ is ‘disappointed/confused’?

          • neonred@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Fair. How do you interpret the mimics of something that has no face?

            So I took the approach of “looks emotionless at green guy” as in “is unsure about what to make of this situation” and therefore “is confused / thinking about an approach”.

            His pointing finger is also pointing lower than in the panel before, as in “loses tension” as in “is not pointing anymore but just left in the previous position” therefore the mental focus changed from pointing at / highlighting something to a different aspect, which, in combination with the first paragraph, makes me interpret the panel as “confused / distracted”

            • technomad@slrpnk.net
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              11 months ago

              Good catch on the finger difference. That’s a subtle detail. I’d say your interpretation is a good one, albeit subjective because of the part about being “emotionless.” Intuition and inference are not absolutes, and at this point I’m really just being difficult for the sake of the argument. :P

              (Notice in the first panel that two of the green guy’s fingers are orange? What’s up with that?)

              • neonred@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Yeah, I noticed that, it’s not too uncommon for these small errors to sneak in ¯\(ツ)/¯ but the intention of the comic should work

      • meyotch@slrpnk.net
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        11 months ago

        No way am I defending the Gates foundation, but isn’t solar punk a form of techno-optimism? It’s definitely more of an appropriate-technology ethos, but solar punk to me depends inherently on the graceful application of technology to actually serve the needs of all.

        • Rozaŭtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          11 months ago

          No, when I say techno-optimism is the opposite of solarpunk, I mean it.

          Techno-optimism is based on the view that there will always be some lone genius that eventually invents a miracle solution thanks to the invisible hand of capitalism.

          Solarpunk is based on anti-capitalism, anarchism and the view that we already have all we need to solve the climate crisis, there’s no need to sit down and wait for a billionaire to save us with his AI-powered blockchain fried air.

          • meyotch@slrpnk.net
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            11 months ago

            Use of technology is inherent in the world-view of solar punk. Solarpunks don’t advocate for a return to hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Instead we advocate for ANY political changes needed to achieve the social and environmental ends we envision. Sorry, the anarchists don’t get to own Solarpunk. There are good ideas in those camps and I advocate we adopt them. Any acceptable definition of Solarpunk is going to need to be a bit more expansive, otherwise we fall prey to the leftist trap of a circular firing squad.

            Bottom-up solutions whatever they are will still be based on technology.

            • Rozaŭtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              11 months ago

              I never said solarpunk should reject technology entirely and advocate for primitivism.

              Nor that is equal to anarchism, just based on it.

      • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

        Solar Punk and Kurtzgesat are both heavily associated with the transhumanist community, so no I don’t think that’s accurate.

        • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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          11 months ago

          This is simply wrong, there is very little overlap between the transhumanist community and Solarpunk, and Kurzgesagt is primarily associated the mainstream European ideas and has been primarily funded by the German government.

          • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 months ago

            very little overlap between the transhumanist community and Solarpunk

            Ok, so I guess my friend group contains the intersection between the two nearly-disjoint communities. Good to know.

            The philosophy behind Solarpunk is essentially a codified rebranding of the leftmost-half of the Transhumanist movement. I know because I’ve explicitly identified myself as a transhumanist for over a decade; I’m comfortable with the community and have been immersed in the philosophy since. It’s probably not a coincidence that the aesthetic of Solarpunk is nearly identical to one that I’ve been cultivating in my world building even prior to becoming a transhumanist.

            Solarpunk is Transhumanism, or at least a branch of it. If you hate transhumanism, you hate Solarpunk.

            • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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              11 months ago

              No it is not. Solarpunk is rather broadly defined and intentionally vague so that it allows building broad coalitions, which might also include transhumanists at the fringes, but the core idea and origin of Solarpunk has very little to do with transhumanism.

              The overlap of imagery is indeed often seen as problematic, but there is a relative scarcity of Solarpunk imagery and those that exist have usually borrowed from existing prior-art which often includes (authoritarian) techno-optimist and sometimes transhumanist visions.

              • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                11 months ago

                P.sure you’re the first anti-transhumanist I’ve ever encountered in the Solarpunk community, and that appears to largely stem from a great deal of ignorance about the philosophy.

                The fundamental question of transhumanism is what it means to be a person. Some say that it’s what it is to be “human” but such consider humanity and personhood to be synonymous. Solarpunk doesn’t grapple with this question; instead, it uses the answers that transhumanists tend to give as a core to build off of. Transhumanism is a way of thinking about humans, technology, nature, and how we interact with each other. A really good art piece for introducing this idea to people is Landsailor by Vienna Teng. Every piece of technology we make, be it a mobile phone, a quern, cattle, nuclear weapons, or prosthetics are extentions of ourselves. They’re all products of artifice that we collectively use to affect our environment, ourselves, and each other. Consider the devices we’re using to communicate: these allow for crude but potentially rapid telepathy over vast distances, and augment our minds to the point of superhuman ability. You’re probably thinking “no it’s just a phone/computer/tablet, that’s stupid, my mind uses it; it’s not a part of me” but that fails to consider the changes your mind undergoes when using the device. Set aside the brand-new functions like making calls and you’re still left with the fact that you’re offloading years or decades of memories onto a device as well as computing power. When you do math several parts of your brain communicate with other parts to do the calculations piecemeal. So, when you’re punching numbers into your calculator, that’s essentially just a cruder mechanism for doing the exact same thing; one part of your mind asking another part to perform a task to accomplish a larger goal. What’s really fascinating is that this is backed up by neurology; when humans use a tool, our brains process the information as if it was a part of our actual bodies. Just as is true of a human and their engineered tools, so is also true of humanity and our environment. Our infrastructure: plumbing, vast sky scrapers, villages in the countryside, farmland, food banks, tended woods, steam pipes, hospitals, the internet, all of these augment humanity as a whole or subpopulations thereof. As outlined in Yudkowsky’s essay: Transhumanism as simplified humanism Transhumanism seeks to preserve and improve the lives of everyone it can. It is fundamentally about using technology to perform acts of altruism for its own sake. It’s about what’s practical and possible and bringing the first closer to the second without compromising on anything we don’t need to. We can have enough food, water, and power for 10,000,000,000 and have a beautiful environment and have a society more equal than any in history. Yes, that will mean that things will need to change, yes that means we need better sustainability, yes that means we need to work for decades engineering new, innovative, and unintuitve solutions, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it. So we have a philosophy that advocates for using technology to engineer our environment to be more sustainable and allow for a better society for all people, meanwhile compromising on nothing and being optimistic about the future if we work together. What does that sound like to you?

                Solarpunk eschews the stereotypical transhumanist aesthetics in favor of a synthesis of a richer natural aesthetic, but transhumanist philosophy is fundamentally aesthetic-neutral. This is something that I think confuses people, and probably why you personally regard the two as fundamentally opposite. All you see are robots in one frame, trees in the other, and think “these are opposites” but transhumanism and Solarpunk are fundamentally about what you don’t see. You don’t see that the robot has a human brain inside that’s only able to live because of a full-body prosthetic. You don’t see that the trees are biologically engineered to give unnaturally nutritious fruit. As a side note this is why I don’t consider people like ol’musky transhumanists; he wants weird robots and brain implants because it looks futur-y, not because he’s grappled with the pros and cons of the solutions for decades and determined that this is the best way to help people. He’s a sham who pretends to know what he’s talking about after looking at a cool photo instead of honestly engaging with the philosophy he pretends to advocate. I am reminded of him through my interactions with you.

                • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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                  11 months ago

                  You are arguing against a strawman. I never said that I am anti-transhumanist.

                  But at the core Solarpunk has quite different values to transhumanism. Technology (while useful) is largely irrelevant to Solarpunk. And it actively escews the typical transhumanist narrative (that you basically repeat) that technology innovation will safe or transform humanity for the better.

                  Solarpunk isn’t anti-technological innovation but it recognizes that we already have all the technology we would need to live a sustainable and "worth living” life, the problem is rather how we use the technology. Solarpunk is also deeply anti-capitalist, which is something that can not be said about transhumanism.

                  And last but not least, you paint a very rosy picture of transhumanism, but in the history of it major proponents advocated for terrible ideas like eugenics and like it or not, but people like Elon Musk do fit into the transhumanist definition.

                  So while I think Solarpunk and Transhumanism has some small overlap at the fringes, it is extremely misleading to group them together like you do.

    • AlolanYoda@mander.xyz
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      11 months ago

      Man, I loved that video when it came out but reading the comments and watching the video essays replying to this video is just depressing. I still have hope that we will be able to turn it around, but that video used to be what I sent everyone who was down due to climate issues, and now I can’t send it to people in good conscience.

      • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        You mean the channel that uses Gigachad unironically, uses scant sources, and only highly viewed videos are contrarian hit pieces on Kurzgesagt?

        You should probably take it with a grain of salt when the only people you see pushing such a channel are a bunch of sketchy pessimists pushing apathy. It was made because they knew they’d have easy views giving every one of those glass hall empty types another reason to mope because they want everyone else to be just as miserable as them.

        Lemmy isn’t exactly known for being a website who sees the world through the lens of reality though lol.

        The hot takes here and amount of fingers you see shoved in ears despite every source saying otherwise is staggering at times.

        I mean Jesus, look at the comic everyone is commenting on. Look for any piece of light hearted fun on this site and watch it devolve instantly by a bunch of propagandists and people who take themselves too serious pretending like they aren’t on mainstream social media or a link aggregating site that’s essentially copying reddit but refused to acknowledge where they came from. It’s just so silly sometimes when you poke fun at it lol.