electrir airplanes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4PE9uATJA

high-urban solarpunk vibes (trigger warning: may contain elon)

is there a name for that flavor of solarpunk? (verses the slightly gritty DIY / walkaway / offgrid flavor?)

yeah, I also got more "green capitalism" vibes from this. I won't fight against this over the status-quo, but that's a lower bar to set :P

Almost spit my coffee out when I read the trigger warning. It's fair though.

yeah stuff like this

That's actually a real place... in Singapore airport...! I've been there. It looks amazing but what the photograph doesn't capture is the smell of the chlorine (used to prevent unsightly algae growing all over those skylights...)

The scifi dystopian trope is always that not everything is dystopian, where the elites live is leafy and green.

I'm sorry to say that my boat is not actually as sustainable as it looks. It's really a plastic boat (with the soul of a wooden boat) but it's based on traditional designs that are built entirely using natural fibers by a sustenance economy. That said, I've been thinking it would actually be more solarpunk to make the boat entirely of plastic. Plastic is an amazing wonder-material. If you had it in sheets you could weld it into a boat. Also the sails and ropes are plastic fibers...

Bruce Sterling, ever plugged into various futures, wrote a lot about stuff adjacent to this during the tail end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s (in and around his novel Islands In The Net, which, like Schizmatrix, has a bunch of pieces of short fiction that couldn't be rammed into the novel proper). It's a book sort of about globalized capitalism and how globalization creates its own exclusion zones -- and how those exclusion zones, cut off from conventional flows of mass-produced goods (and conventional flows of institutionalized knowledge about manufacturing that themselves embed ideology -- what Deleuze & Guattari call 'royal science') end up producing new kinds of technologies built around the kinds of knowledge the conventional/royal flows exclude. In Islands In The Net this is mostly genetic engineering and media piracy, but in his spin-off story Green Days In Brunei (in his short fiction collection Crystal Express) it's about repurposing discarded and obsoleted consumer items (trash & what we'd now call e-waste) toward innovative forms of reuse in a substantially more communal society.

Sterling is very interested in the power of states (even small ones), so when he thought of these exclusion zones from global capitalism, he conceptualized them as an evolution of small third-world authoritarian states -- Green Days in Brunei takes place in a Borneo that, post-revolution, has re-vested political power in their ancient royal line and taken steps to exclude foreign cultural influence, while Islands In The Net takes place largely in Grenada and Singapore -- as an anarchist, I think it's reasonable to expect groups of people who already live together and have formed a shared culture to 'exit' with or without state backing (and often without forming anything like a state).

Anyway, I thought to mention it because Islands In The Net begins with a greenwashed corporate compound in Texas and Green Days In Brunei ends with obsolete industrial machinery building a fleet of traditional-style catamarans out of plastic waste.

green days in brunei also features plywood multihulls