There are many factors that affect employee engagement: job fit, company culture and manager/employee relationship to name a few. When I reflect on my own career and the times I felt more or less engaged, I wonder if the widespread lack of employee satisfaction has more to do with a deeper disconnect between the DNA of a corporation and the DNA of a human being.
The fabric of what makes humans happy is at odds with the very reason that many businesses exist. If that is not a recipe for active disengagement, I don’t know what is.”
In 2003, I threw away my #television set and never got another one. It wasn’t broken, I just sensed I was wasting my life. I wanted to do the living. Not watch other people pretend to. I never took up #Netflix and chill. Nothing of the sort. I switched to reading #books creating #art projects, volunteering at #nonprofits, and enjoying lots of #quiet time. One of the best decisions I ever made. Now, weeing people ditch big social media, reminds me of the day I made that choice.
Solarpunk as an idea, a literary genre, an aesthetic, and a movement is relatively still small, new, and still starting to build out a cohesive idea of what exactly it is. But as things grow so do the ideas and ideals that flock to the ideas of a greener, more hopeful future. From being involved with the community and looking out and observing the landscape, we are starting to see distinct approaches and ideas revolving around what solarpunk is, and different approaches and tactics to build a better world. But what does building a better world really mean? One person’s utopia, take for instance billionaire Peter Theil’s utopia would look like absolute hell to most people. We have to look at the means, the ends, the goals of what people want to achieve, and if those goals and methods are detrimental to – or counter to – the ideas central to solarpunk.
Solarpunk as a concept has many ideas, some will lead to liberatory egalitarian societies, others will copy the old ideas and create a stratified technofudalist world. What will we choose?
In general, there are two large paths growing in the community at the moment.
People who view solarpunk as a fundamental questioning of our current systems of capitalism, hierarchy, domination, and exploitation – who seek to live in a world where we face climate change head on. By stopping the use of fossil fuels and moving to renewable energy. While also questioning methods of growth, and the exploitation that would require a perpetually growing renewable energy society, instead focusing on justice for all people. In general, building an egalitarian, horizontal society that moves away from old systems of oppression and attempts to live in symbiosis with the planet.
People who view solarpunk as an aesthetic vehicle to move away from the current monetary system and to attempt to create markets and systems that are detached from nation-states. To use alternative currencies and markets to directly fund projects, those funds never being able to be stopped by state regulation or interference. Some with more socialist views may use cryptocurrencies as a method of exchange, and create a universal basic income based in these tokens. With the goal of decoupling society from current monetary systems and either using a market to address needs, or using tokens as a means of exchange between people.
One of these will lead to a fundamentally different world. Power and social dynamics, gender norms, and how we interact with each other and the planet being at the center of the social change needed to reach a post-capitalist future. Moving away from market based economies to a post-scarcity world based in mutual aid, and symbiosis with nature.
The other will continue the baseline structure that capitalism uses as a method of exploitation. That is markets and currency exchange. Those with already existing money entering into these markets can manipulate their way into controlling them. The actions of the economy only replacing fiat currency with cryptocurrency. The social inequity and issues we face now not addressed, but managed by market forces. Greener futures may be built by those who control the supply of tokens, which will lead to a stratified society of those who have the means, and those who are able to build better places for themselves, at the exclusion of others. The economic system requiring massively inefficient systems to run blockchain technology, even if they run off renewables, there is always a price for constant growth. And a social cost that will more than likely be ignored by market forces like it is today.
You may be thinking that assertion is harsh but I want to show how, cryptocurrencies are counterintuitive to building a better world. At best they might lead to a green growth neoliberal society where renewables are used, and climate change is met with economic forces. At worst, it will lead to a technofudalist society, where those who accumulate wealth are able to make kingdoms of their own, becoming defacto states, while also not changing the foundations of the social and political inequities we have in our world today.
Zach Perlman 