On solarpunk and writing

This week – which was btw my last week ever at UTC – I did a small writing workshop about solarpunk.

Originally it was just about getting some credits to catch up the ones I missed by being a mediocre student but it turned out to be amazing. Win-win.

The speakers and people who helped us during the week were are equally super great and I wanna thank them. I’m specifically thinking about Stéphane, Guillaume and Yann.

Also thanks to Louis for doing this with me. You can read his blog post about this week here.

About Solarpunk

I wasn’t really familiar with the concept of Solarpunk before the workshop so maybe you aren’t either. As Wikipedia puts it:

Solarpunk is a literary, artistic, and social movement, close to the hopepunk movement, that envisions and works toward actualizing a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community. The “solar” represents solar energy as a renewable energy source and an optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism, while the “punk” refers to do it yourself and the countercultural, post-capitalist, and sometimes decolonial aspects of creating such a future.

Or you can think of it as the absolute opposite of Cyberpunk. A future of technology degrowth and social progress that’s desirable and harmless.

What I like about the genre is the way it shows that alternatives could exist in a time where the consensus is that we’re doomed and that capitalism is a machine that cannot be stopped. Exactly what Mark Fisher talks about in Capitalist Realism. To be honest, even after this week, I find it hard to believe that we can achieve this kind of society without some kind of collapse (sorry Guillaume) – but it definitely helped me wrap my head around the possibility.

Also, I feel like it’s really hard to make something that’s NOT corny when you have the constraints of making something that’s desirable – which goes to show how much we’re immersed in stories that are always dark. I don’t know if it’s human nature or whatever to be more drawn to tragedies but yeah that’s just what I observed.

About writing

I struggle so much writing. I haven’t wrote since my high school days and since the dawn of LLMs I feel like I’ve lost any ability to write properly. Even writing this I feel like shit but yeah I gotta do it if I wanna get better. There are two things I’d say:

I’ve been having these thoughts for a long time but this workshop definitely helped me STARTING. I wouldn’t have ever posted on this blog if it wasn’t for it.

And it is also due to the way this workshop was taught. The people organizing this truly believe in Solarpunk and it shows: as little hierarchy as possible, everyone working with everyone, no pressure to write something good or to write this much words or that much page, no final grade, no mold to fit in, etc.

It honestly felt so good to work just the way that I want, without any pressure. I really feel like the entire school curriculum should be like this. Since my kindergarten days, I’ve always been obedient, did what the teachers said to get good grades. I feel like it completely killed my creativity and now I struggle with my imagination. It feels like I’m learning to let my creativity speak just now, at 22 years old. I can get that grades are necessary to identify good students from not-so-good ones for competitive curriculums, but man, at what cost?

My short story

So yeah, these were my two cents on the subject. I did my best to write something interesting but I’m really not used to the exercise.

Here’s my short story, in French : Bufo