more thoughts on "utopias"
I hate the Vibes of "utopia" "city of the future" "green cities" concepts, as detailed here.
most of the images on wikimedia for "utopia" that were the kind of thing I was talking about... were AI generated. which I think says something about the hollowness of the aesthetic and lack of meaning, context, actual thought.
found this one though:
"A Bird's Eye View of a Community, as proposed by Robert Owen Esq.re is respectfully dedicated to the following classes of society: To the Landowners, as being the only means whereby their Estates can be rendered permanently productive, and their Rents secure. To the Capitalists, as offering the safest speculation, and most gratifying ways of investing their surplus Capital, without risk of failure. To the Clergy, and Instructors of Mankind, as the only and speedy means of bringing about that great desideratum they have so much at heart, namely, the suppression of Vice & Error, by the removal of the causes of Crime (Ignorance & Poverty), the dissemination of Truth, & the establishment of Virtue. To the industrious Wealth Producers, as affording the only arrangements, whereby they can secure their true and rightful position in Society, and the just & honest participation in the Wealth created by their talents and industry. And lastly, to the Government of the British Empire, shewing the arrangements, whereby the duties of Government may be rendered safe, easy, and delightful, instead of as heretofore, being one of danger, difficulty, error, confusion and disatisfaction. N.B. for further details consult the Works of Owen, Thompson, Combe, Morgan &c. Sold with a woodengraving of the same scene."
ah...,
so as was I saying...,
and thinking more on this topic, I think another underlying thorn-in-my-side is the fact this white shiny greentech future clicks in so well with the highly destructive nature of capitalism.
I'm not the first person to balk at the enthusiasm around greentech. See, a major contributor to the harms of fossil fuels and such is that we use a lot of power to make bullshit. Fast fashion, crypto mining, genAI, random plastic toys that break, devices that break due to planned obsolescence, unnecessarily huge cars... the list is interminable. There is also an insistence to make everything "smart", as in electrified and WiFi-ed, even when that's more of a problem than a benefit. and our lives are so fast and hectic because we're expected to be nose-to-the-grindstone in order to keep the BullShit Machine running, that power-hungry appliances and modes of transport become necessary to function.
and swapping to solar, and the shiny white greentech utopia, don't do anything about this aspect. Their promise is: all the same consumerism you love, all the factories and working-hours spent making fragile useless bullshit, except it runs on solar this time.
this is Disastrous.
Renewable tech doesn't appear out of thin air. It's still made of stuff we mine up from the ground and built in factories. If we want to meet our energy "needs" (as quantified currently) with renewables, we're going to disembowel the earth and destroy landscapes and cultures.
See:
here
here
here
here
here
and here.
plus the economic forces that cause things to be easily broken, difficult to repair, and owned by a company and not the community that uses them, those forces remain intact in a swap to sustainability. Rent extraction, enshittification, putting necessary features behind a paywall, requiring a WiFi connection ... these things are all part and parcel of greentech.
See here.
when I see these greentech utopian concepts, there is no allusion to any kind of degrowth, to a slowing down, to a redirecting-of-power towards the essentials and finding low-energy ways of meeting needs. And they're concept illustrations, they should have that stuff if they want it to be considered part of the vision.
I don't want SolarCorp to be able to remotely shut off the power to my house via my WiFi-connected solar panels cause someone caught a whiff of my anti-corporate stance. You get it?
...
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