this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Cyberpunk

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What is Cyberpunk?

Cyberpunk is a science-fiction sub-genre dealing with the integration of society and technology in dystopian settings. Often referred to as “low-life and high tech,” Cyberpunk stories deal with outsiders (punks) who fight against the oppressors in society (usually mega corporations that control everything) via technological means (cyber). If the punks aren’t actively fighting against a megacorp, they’re still dealing with living in a world completely dependent on high technology.

Cyberpunk characteristics include:

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[Movie] 2067 - a time travel movie that starts in a cyberpunk world and ends in a solarpunk world (lemmy.zip)
submitted 8 months ago by Hammerjack to c/cyberpunk
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It's a bit of a spoiler to say the movie ends with a solarpunk world, but that's like saying "there's a happy ending" is a spoiler. You know they're going to resolve the conflict, it's finding how they get there that's the interesting part.

Also, I do like how a cyberpunk world is basically presented as the worst possible scenario and a solarpunk world is considered the best possible scenario. Personally, that's the only way solarpunk makes sense to me, as a "and they lived happily ever after" world. Solarpunk, to me, feels like an ideal, an end goal. It isn't a setting for a book/movie in my opinion since if there was conflict, I don't think it'd be considered solarpunk. But that's all my ignorant opinion, I'm no expert on solarpunk.

Anyway, this is primarily a time travel movie that spends most of its time in a desolate wasteland future trying to fix the cyberpunk present. I just like how it included both cyberpunk and solarpunk visuals. I should probably point out the bottom-half of the poster isn't my idea of a solarpunk world, that's the desolate wasteland future part of the movie.

I had originally watched this on Hulu and I know it had been available on Amazon Prime, but it seems the corporate overlords aren't interested in streaming this movie this month so it's only available on Hoopla right now. Oh, and here's a trailer.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'll have to check this out it sounds really cool!

I'd say solarpunk isn't incompatible with conflict - though some people in solarpunk spaces have also said that so you're definitely not alone. I think it's important to note that solarpunk is aspirational but it's not (or at least I don't think it usually is or should be) utopian.

In fact, I've been helping with a solarpunk TTRPG that started as a cyberpunk game where the original group playing it kept revising the setting to make it more optimistic. Even when everyone has their basic needs met, there's still intellectual espionage, theft of rare items, crimes of passion, and mayhem created by people trolling.

In general I think a solarpunk society is going to have many of the conflicts any human civilization tends to see. By working on fundamental inequalities and striving to provide safety nets and stability, we can remove a lot of motivations for crimes, but there’ll always be people who’ll try to cheat others, take harmful shortcuts, or commit crimes for reasons other than necessity. Serial killers spring to mind. Even within a fairly equal society you may have people who feel they could have had more, that they’ve been cheated out of a birthright of millionaire-hood or some good-old-days existence, real or imagined.

Depending on the setting there may also be groups outside solarpunk communities. People who ascribe to old world values, who prioritize extraction and hoarding of resources, who push their externalities like waste onto others or their environment.

For the solarpunk stuff I make, I see it as a pretty postapoclyptic setting, focused mostly on people rebuilding in a better way, so I don’t think it’s a stretch to say bandits and accelerationist survivalists would still be around on the fringes. There's room for conflict with them, but also just with the challenges of rebuilding and over how best to go about it. IRL environmental movements are full of disagreements over which tradeoffs to accept.

I think narrative conflicts also encompass things I wouldn't really call conflicts in other contexts, so there's probably some room there for other story options.

I will say it's more difficult, writing solarpunk stuff, not least because you're trying to write an aspirational setting so you have to do more research and be willing to stand by whatever solutions come with your setting.

[–] Hammerjack 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for clarifying! And yeah, in my ignorant opinion it seems the only conflict would arise from either a non-solarpunk world striving to become solarpunk or a solarpunk world striving to remain solarpunk. In both scenarios, solarpunk still seems to be the ideal and not so much the setting. That's in contrast to a cyberpunk world where the setting itself is in conflict, with fighting to survive and warring megacorporations.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I don't think a society is ever really 'complete' (I think improving it is a neverending process with a lot of backsliding, failures, and arguing involved) but to the extent that it can be, I'd say solarpunk includes the path there, as much as or more than the 'finished product'. At least in the stuff I've read. The societies tend to be realistically flawed, even if they're doing some stuff better than we are now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I saw it a while back. Pretty meh. I give it two shrugs up.