Technology as crystallized community
Posted on Tue 23 July 2024 in misc • 5 min read
For a few years now, I've been analyzing how technology is represented in fiction and popular culture. I not only mean specific technologies or devices, but also the core concept of what technology is in a given genre, world or story. To illustrate with an example:
In most modern action and superhero movies, technology is always a weapon. We don't see widely-spread infrastructure, we rarely see plot-related neutral technologies, but we see a lot of new threats coming from tech, be it androids, satellites, laser weapons and other McGuffins. It is usually also an artifact, a prototype, something one-of-a-kind that cannot be replicated, or it will lose its plot relevancy. Wakanda cannot revolutionize African electrical grids with Vibranium the same way Iron Man doesn’t replace oil and coal worldwide.
On the other hand, in cyberpunk and dystopian futures, technology is either a means of oppression or rebellion. This time it's usually evil governmental/corporate infrastructure oppressing people, or some disruptive gadgets used by anarchist protagonists. Staying out of the conflict (or imagining a parallel infrastructure outside of it) is impossible in this genre. You cannot tell a story of a local historian updating Wikipedia in cyberpunk.
Given that, what perspective could we take on technology in Solarpunk, an optimistic genre striving to paint a better world in the face of Climate Catastrophe?
Previously, I defined Solarpunk tech as empowering infrastructure, given the context of not only having a cool cybernetic arm, but also a place to service it - and a whole ecosystem of parts to maintain it. Seeing it this way allows you to be aware of your technological context, your ecological footprint and so on.
But that's not enough, because within this framework you could still tell very individualistic and tech-obsessed stories about lone wolfs, preppers who don't care about other people and treat nature just as tools.
Over the years, I arrived at a different, more poetic, but also more comprehensive definition:
Technology in Solarpunk is a crystallized community.
It's not just about devices or infrastructure, green energy inventions and sustainable repairs. We can see technology as a series of choices a community makes, shaping itself. The way its members communicate with each other, how they resolve conflicts, how often and where they meet and what tools and infrastructure they use in order to accomplish these feats.
In previous centuries, these were rituals and slowly forming traditions, whether official or unwritten. With the advent of technology (especially the easily-modifiable software) these choices can be codified into something more tangible, a technological shell around a community: the sum of its digital tools, calendars, voting platforms and networks.
If we allow ourselves to train our eyes to see our culture and communities driving the shape of technology, and not the other way around, painting a better world might come much easier. We don't need to be stuck in solutionist narratives of waiting for another tech-savior, but instead are free to codify our decisions in the tools we will use.
Taking this perspective effectively vaccinates us against some potential narrative threats, like the technosolutionism propagated by a lot of web3 communities. Knowing that each group will have their own needs, preferences and traditions, we can understand that we cannot just accept one solution for all its problems, no matter how foundational and mathematical it sounds. We can start seeing cracks in DAOs and Blockchains, designed as solutions looking for problems. We start asking questions about our particular needs not being met by the tools we are offered.
Instead, seeing technology as a product of community promotes thinking about a variety of distributed tools fitting different groups, standardized only in how they communicate with each other. A library, local theater and the firefighting unit might have very different organizational requirements, but it would be great to get updates from all of them equally just as easily.
The same goes for more “high-tech” solutions: one community member with a brain implant can be an exceptional story, but if we want to support more of them, we probably have some traditions and infrastructure ready! No one at school expects kids with hearing aids to be there on the Maintenance Day, and the availability of HRT is discussed on the Town Hall meetings on the same conditions as insulin.
Whether we choose to describe those traditions and technologies using the language of any indigenous communities or any other modern model, we should be conscious of putting the members and their relations in the center. No organizational methodology has any value if it doesn’t meet the requirements of a group.
With that perspective, we can describe communities in our stories in a new way, observing their growth with the decisions they make and the tools they choose. What changed when the role-playing group moved from Frank’s basement to the local library? Did moving away from Facebook change how the local activists organized protests and who joined them?
Looking at it from the other side, there is a story behind every rule a community has and every (technological or not) tool it uses. We never bring food to the meeting since the goulash incident. The yellow board? It’s used to advertise the new member proposals at least two weeks before they’re admitted, so that everyone, online or not, can discuss their candidacy.
I hope that looking at communities and technology through this lens allows more writers to freely explore Solarpunk. We aren’t limited only to the tropes, tools and hieroglyphs we already know – and to paint a better future, we will need a vast array of new perspectives at the world around us!
If you're interested in an example of a short Solarpunk fiction which uses the narrative device presented above, feel free to check out The Year Without Sunshine by Naomi Kritzer, a winner of the Nebula Award for the best novelette. Without spoiling much, I really appreciate how the bicycles in the story become a defining feature of the community and help them go through the hardest of times.
Huge thanks to Clockwork for a sanity check and editing help!