S2E3: “Punk’s Not Dead: The Solarpunk Movement and the Internet”
2025-10-09 29 min
Description & Show Notes
In the third episode of the series Fergal Lenehan and Luisa Conti, from the Centre for Digital Interculturality Studies, talk to Mareike Schütt, a lecturer and PhD scholar at the University of Jena in Germany. The conversation touches on the subject of Mereike’s PhD research, namely the Solarpunk movement – what this is, where it can be found, how Mareike is researching it and, indeed, if it can really be termed a movement at all.
So, how does the Solarpunk ‘movement’ relate to the scholarly area of Intercultural Communications, and how do Solarpunks imagine the future of the Internet?
Listen to find out!
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For more on the work of Mareike Schütt, see: https://www.gw.uni-jena.de/28237/mareike-schuett
Transcript
It all started in the late 2000s and early 2010s. People in different parts of the world started wondering whether, in the face of climate change and other global challenges, our future really had to be doomed. After all, when listening to the news, reading science fiction, watching a blockbuster movie, we are often confronted with stories of apocalypse, of disaster and catastrophe. And some people just didn't want to give up. So for example, Adam Flynn, one of the early voices of solarpunk, wrote in 2014: “We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial and despair.” And that pretty much sums it up. Now what solarpunks do is ask themselves, what does an environmentally and socially just future look like and how can we get there?
They try to find practical solutions to the environmental and social problems we have today. And the movement wants to bring technology and nature together with a focus on renewable energy. And they show up in all kinds of art like literature, paintings, architecture, fashion, and game design. And it's really an invitation to think beyond structures we already know and to design social systems that focus on sustainability, mutual support, and resilience. So in a nutshell, solarpunk is all about hopeful people who are dreaming of better futures that are sustainable and just. And then they are working together, sharing their ideas, and finding ways to make those dreams a reality to make them come true.
Okay, so that's very interesting. So solarpunk is about sort of a positive utopian idea of the future as sort of a reaction to the apocalyptic ideas which have been in circulation for a long time. Do they actually call themselves solarpunks or was the name given to them from outside? I suppose that would be one question or how does that work? Well, it's a name that came up in different places of the world. There was an anthology published in 2012 in Brazil that focused on ecological futures, but they were rather dystopian in comparison with other solarpunk stories from today. And then other people, for example, from the US started thinking about, okay,
Thinking about sustainable futures, would there be a name for it? We have cyberpunk, we have steampunk, there's all those little subgenres that are very interesting to look at. And so different people were kind of like toying with this idea of creating a new genre called solarpunk. So it is a name they gave themselves pretty much, but then of course there's a lot of publications, novels that are from earlier days, the 20th century maybe. And they of course had no idea what solarpunk might be in the future, but their works would still be called solarpunk now. So it really depends. So Mareike, I would like to make sure that I understood. So solarpunk is kind of solar because of the idea of renewable energy sustainability in general. Yeah, so like it's a metaphor for sustainability, if I'm right. You can confirm.
And then the punk is this freedom of trying things out, of being creative. Is that right, do I understand the name right? Yes, definitely. Solar also could be a symbol of hope, right? Sun as a symbol of hope. And punk pretty much also means resistance. So they want to resist to the current systems we have today, mainly capitalism, also colonialism, and think beyond those structures, those systems, those processes we have established now. OK, thank you. Chapter 3: Research on Solarpunk OK, so you're doing a PhD and your research is centred on solarpunk. It sounds like solarpunk is sort of a vast collection of different ideas in different places. So what have you actually been looking at? What sort of sources have been central or?
When you're doing your PhD at home and it's about solarpunk, what actually do you do? That is a good question. Well, I've mostly been reading blog posts and also discussions threads on Reddit, for example. I have also been looking at a ton of Tumblr feeds. I've been watching YouTube videos and looking through Facebook pages. Most of solarpunk really does happen online, which makes it easily accessible, but also hard to track. And there's no list of central solarpunk works you should have a look at. There's also a couple of zines and anthologies that are central to the movement, so of course I read those. The body of solarpunk literature has really been growing in the past years. There are more and more novels and comics now being published in the name of solarpunk. There's also some board games, coloring books, a computer game from Germany that's actually published this year in 2025.
And also academia has started paying attention to solarpunk. So since 2019, I would say, there has been a growing number of papers on, for example, solarpunk literature, technology, also in more like in general solarpunk utopias. So maybe I'm wondering, can it become a mass movement, first of all, and is it something that is now very much in the Western or in the North, Global North, how we want to call it? Or do you think, or it is already something maybe born in the Global South or is spreading there? So I would like to know more about that.
Well, you could say that it was born in Brazil due to that very first anthology published there in 2012. But most of solarpunk did emerge from the US, Canada, Europe also. There's a strong base in Spain, Italy, also Germany. So the Global South is included and they really try to be very inclusive. There's certain anthologies that focus on, for example, authors from Southeast Asia. But it is a challenge, I suppose. But there's also close ties to other literature movements, such as Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurism that also work with the idea of, OK, what would a future look like that actually does include
us, I'm saying this right now, like from their perspective. So what would a future look like that actually includes us? Because a lot of science fiction actually does not include, talk about or show indigenous people or people from or living on the African continent. So they really try to include as many perspectives as possible. But of course, it's also kind of a luxury to actually be able to think about possible futures, to spend time and energy on a project like that. So that might explain why it's bigger in certain areas of the world. But it is becoming bigger, for example, in Latin America as well. And whether it could become a mass movement, I don't know.
Cyberfiction, cyberpunk, is rather popular. It's a bigger part of main culture, so to say. And I think through games such as the solarpunk game that's supposed to be published on Steam, which is of course a major platform, it could contribute to it becoming more mainstream, more popular, more known. But it's an open question, I would say. Or maybe it'll become a mass movement after this podcast. Yes, definitely. Hundreds of thousands of people will listen to it. OK, so it sounds like solarpunk is still something that's actually emerging, that's still something that's taking form. Would that be correct? Yes, definitely. It's really been growing the past couple of years. I mean, it really did.
start to grow or become bigger in 2014 -15, so it's still rather new, right? So it's been barely 10 years and it is growing still and it's raising more and more attention. Chapter 4: How do Solarpunks Imagine the Future? Okay, cool. Then, yeah, so this podcast series is about internet futures as we already talked about at the start. So, yeah, the obvious question here is how do solarpunks, how do they imagine the future of the internet? Do they radically reimagine it? I would imagine they do. Or how do they answer this question? Well, it's interesting because, for example, in solarpunk fiction, the internet is actually barely mentioned at all. Characters will sometimes maybe take out some kind of communication device to check their messages, but that's pretty much it. So solarpunk futures aren't as focused on technology in general as, for example, cyberpunk ones would be. And technology only exists in so far as that it is a part of the solution.
And it's more part of the background setting. The stories focus more on living in harmony with nature, a multi-species existence of mutual respect. Yeah, but that being said, solarpunks have engaged in heated discussions and fascinating projects concerning a better internet. And when it comes to a hopeful version of the solarpunk internet, there's a lot of variety and opinions from the solarpunk world. Some say in the solarpunk future, there would be no internet at all, and there should be no internet at all, while others envision a very different and very immersive development of the internet as we know it today. They would say that it would be a bio-based internet as a planetary symbiose. But most ideas for a solarpunk internet can actually be placed somewhere in the middle of those extremes, and they would still be a part of a colorful spectrum.
They would describe an optional, potentially meaningful addition to life that is sustainable and socially managed. This can include different forms of implementation regarding its local or global dimension, for example, as well as its level of immersion. And most visions of a solarpunk internet contain a certain series of elements. Of course, our internet would be based on sustainable energy production. And it would also encourage sustainable energy consumption, for example, by reducing the bandwidth use. In the early days of the internet, we had smaller and low-power websites, usually self -hosted, that mostly relied on text content. And now, the most popular websites are hosted by big corporations that also play a ton of video ads, right?
So just hosting those kind of websites takes a whole lot of energy. And one simple solarpunk idea would maybe be to have a solar powered website that simply goes offline once the battery's out. Interesting. And the solarpunk thinkers who imagine a future without any internet, where do they imagine the internet going then? How do they imagine that? Is this a fully thought out idea or is it just sort of how does this work? I think this is not a fully developed idea. It would be a far away future, right? Because it would concern a society that would be radically different from ours today. Be radically different, yeah. Maybe electricity production would have become a problem or something along those lines. Okay, interesting. Yeah, because you were saying about the idea of having much more text content, but at the same time we're producing more and more videos and...
new generation, but also our generation ourselves. Now we get used less, more and more to videos and to audio and video communication and less and less to read. And I see that in schools that reading became really a real task, a hard task for children. And as I said, for us it's kind of the same slowly. So I'm wondering if this idea of a text content can be really a good one. And also I'm thinking about the fact that actually I have the feeling we are going more in the direction of having no screen at all. So more about audio. So maybe that could be more a possibility of having maybe less megabyte through audio than video, but at the same time, not going back to text because I think it implies normal agent skills that we are losing somehow.
That is a good point. Obviously people love their video content nowadays, especially on social media like YouTube or TikTok. And I'm sure even in a solarpunk future, we would still have videos, be able to use them and share them with other people online. But in a solarpunk future, like in an ideal world, from a solarpunk point of view, there would be no commercial video content anymore, which of course is a big part of the video content that is online. And we maybe might also not rely anymore on central streaming services for our entertainment, but could rely again more on locally produced art and share local copies of already purchased or free content, rather than continue with our endless downloading of video content.
And I do like the audio idea, it doesn't have to be text obviously. That's obviously very meta here since we're doing a podcast. Is the anti-capitalist idea actually central then to solarpunk and is it sort of stronger than the other ideas or how would you weight that or is it difficult to say? I don't know. It sounds as if it is. Well, a lot of solarpunks would say capitalism is one of the problems, it's like the root of our problems. So in a solarpunk future we just could not have a capitalist society anymore because of the destruction of nature and the overuse of resources we have connected with that system. So rethinking the internet would mean, actually implies rethinking the system. You cannot think of the… Definitely, it would have to be...
It would have to be all free and accessible, like a lot of open-source community work. Platforms would be socially developed and managed, so platform cooperativism would be a big topic, probably. Yeah, and also we would have to organize our data traffic more locally, so that might also be an option to have maybe a crowdsourced data center in our community that we have influence on, and so to avoid to have our data travel around the world to really remote data centers we don't have any control over.
Chapter 5: Solar Punk and Platforms Okay, very good. So you mentioned platform cooperativism, cooperativism, sorry. Mareike, obviously platforms is something that people who investigate the internet is central basically to what we do. The platforms are the architecture of the internet. How does solarpunk relate to alternative social media then and the need for alternative platforms? Well, corporate social media is also something many solarpunks would call a part of the problem. And a solarpunk internet would be without the kind of social media that rely on collecting personal data for commercial interests. So exploring alternatives to those established commercial social media platforms is a natural first step really when thinking about a better future of the internet. Many solarpunks are fans of the so-called Fediverse that includes platforms such as Mastodon, PeerTube and Pixelfed.
You can host your own instance there, but still communicate with other instances. So you get rid of this dominance really of one big corporation having all the control. And it's a first step really forward from relying on just a few central servers, right? And a lot of solarpunks have been very active in the open source community surrounding one particular alternative social media platform called Scuttlebutt. Okay, Scuttlebutt, okay. That's a funny name. Do you want to tell us something about that? Sure. It is a funny name and actually has a really cool story behind it because Scuttlebutt is what they used to call or sometimes still do call, I actually don't know, a water barrel on a ship. So it's where sailors would go to have a drink and have a yarn, right? Like to talk, chat. So it's basically a metaphor for gossip, right? Gossip exchange.
And that has also a technological explanation because Scuttlebutt is based on a so -called gossip peer-to-peer protocol. So it's about peer-to-peer communication, a mechanism in which nodes periodically exchange state information about themselves and about other nodes they know about. It's similar to what is also used in blockchain technology, actually. Okay. Okay, interesting. So solarpunks basically, they're not just ideas people. They're also practical people in that sense. Yes, and it's usually a very value-based approach. Also Scuttlebutt has central values they try to build everything on, for example, the whole system is designed around natural interaction, which means that they would ask themselves, how do we actually in real life communicate with each other?
Like, no technology involved. And of course, we would focus on local connections first because it's connecting to people who are actually there, like close to us, and then we'd maybe also go to a pub to have the opportunity to connect with people that live somewhere else, travelers so to say. And they also implement this way of thinking to the platform by enabling you to connect to local people first, right? So it's local connections first. And by going to a pub, they actually do call it a pub, you are able to connect to others worldwide through common interests, topics you want to talk about. Okay.
Chapter 6 Solarpunk and Interculturality Okay, interesting. Yeah, so Mareike, your research is actually based in the area of intercultural communications and your PhD is in intercultural communications. Yeah, how does solarpunk relate to interculturality then? Are you arguing basically that intercultural communications require an ethical, sustainable base and that there isn't something that's neutral but needs to be rethought in a certain manner? Or I suppose how does the whole thing relate to interculturality is my question. Well, absolutely the field of intercultural communications is the foundation for my research. And solarpunk is a product of the global network society. So its post-digital trans-cultural characteristics really shine through. Solarpunk has its origins in Brazil, as already mentioned before. It has a strong base in the US, in Italy, in Spain, also in Germany. There's some close ties to other literature movements.
And Solapunk is just a very diverse group in general with members hailing from all sorts of backgrounds, also professionally. Many are fiction authors, literary scholars, while others are engineers or IT specialists. Some are climate activists. Some would call themselves social anarchists. Others are artists or designers. There's just really many different cultural contexts that sort of come together in solarpunk and make up this very colorful and diverse world of Solapunk. And in the solarpunk Manifesto from 2019, it's said that there's actually no single right way to do solarpunk, and this openness to diverse perspectives and strategies is central to the movement really. It also means that there's not one solarpunk future to strive towards, and they're aware of the fact that one future vision might be right for some, a different future vision for others. So it's about a multiplicity of possible futures that have certain values in common, such as ecological and social justice.
And so, yeah, in this case of solarpunk, we definitely see a value-based approach of communication. People are building connections across the world based on a shared set of values, right? And because of the ethical considerations that have been at the core of the movement from the very beginning, solarpunk encourages intercultural communication as it contributes to mutual understanding and global cooperation. So, yeah, I would argue that for intercultural communication to be effective in the long term, in the long run, you do need an ethical foundation, I'd say, to build on. That might include, just in general, being open to different backgrounds and perspectives and respecting them.
Okay, so we should all become solarpunks. We don't have to. But yeah, we could. That would be actually a question. How can we become solarpunk? I mean, how can we recognize or be part of officially of this movement? How does it work? What are the main platforms or there is a logo you can bring with you and show it to spread it around? That would be interesting. But before you tell me something about that, I would like to say something about this idea because it sounds to me that actually the solarpunk movement is trying to find ways to cope with this complexity. And
with this challenging complexity, which we have to cope with in society. And that means it is a way of kind of performing intercultural competence, finding ways to perform intercultural competence in the sense of this competence you need to cope with unfamiliarity, uncertainty and complexity in general. Sorry, can you repeat your question? What was the question, Luisa? That wasn't a question, it was just a reflection, because saying and presenting solarpunk in relation to interculturality, intercultural communication, in relation to its global origin, its global reach and also about multiplicity of perspectives. And I would add to it the fact that actually solapunk in its perspective, in its work, in its multifaceted work
is trying to perform what I would understand as intercultural competence. It is the competence of finding ways to cope in a constructive way with this complexity, with unfamiliarity, uncertainty. It's a way of finding out the way to reach that, not just through obviously small interaction and actions, but also on a macro level, if we succeed to create channels where we can walk into and create something, a reality which is safe for everyone. Yeah, I agree, definitely. So solarpunk utopianism as a type of realization of intercultural competence in that sense. That's what you mean, Luisa, is it? Yeah.
Yeah, that's a very, very interesting, very, very interesting thought, I think, definitely. Yeah, so best of luck with your continuing research then, Mareike. Chapter 7: How to Find Out About Solarpunk? And maybe we can give at the end, kind of an outlook. How can we, are there any platforms we can look at? Is there any logo we can take over? Do you have some publications maybe on the topic? So something to look more because I'm absolutely interested and curious now more than ever, and I think I'm not the only one. Well, there's of course no official way to sign up for the movement, because there is no such thing as the one solarpunk movement. There's like different groups worldwide that connect with each other, but also exchange with each other on a local level maybe.
But as most of solarpunk does happen online, it's really very easy to find different, very interesting articles that give different perspectives on the movement, on the genre and the anthologies that might be a very easy and also, well, a nice access point to the movement because they offer you different views on what a solarpunk future might look like. There's many different anthologies that were published mostly from the US, but that do include authors from all over the world.
There’s one called Solarpunk Winters, there's another one focusing on Solarpunk Summers, one focusing on living in the city. So if you just look them up online, you'll find pretty much an anthology that's probably up to your taste. Okay. Then of course, in a few years, we'll have your book as well on solarpunk, your dissertation as a monograph. We look forward to that in a couple of years. Then, yeah, then thank you very much, Mareike, for coming and talking to us. It was fascinating to learn about the solarpunk movement, and it's also refreshing to get sort of a positive perspective on the future, to be honest, because, yeah, in our daily lives, we encounter such terrible things, and we have been for a while now. Thank you very much also from my side. Bye.
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