LewisMumford

"Dylan Mulvin’s ‘Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In’ invites the reader to consider the ways in which representation through proxies, often viewed as an arbitrary scientific or technical process of prima facie neutrality, may provide empirical examples of the influence of ideology, best demonstrated when the purpose or meaning behind a proxy becomes obsolete or problematic as priorities and attitudes change over time."

>Can you qualify this statement a bit more? I don't really agree here. The Matrix doesn't even appear in this list

It's obviously going to be somewhat subjective, but if take film critics or scholars words to have any weight since they are constantly comparing these things, The Matrix and Blade Runner are almost always at the top of 'Most Influential Sci-fi Movies of All Time' lists. e.g.

Empire: 1. BR 4. Matrix https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/best-sci-fi-mov...

Screenrant: 1. Matrix 4. BR https://screenrant.com/most-influential-sci-fi-movies-of-all...

Vogue: Not ranked but both are in the top 10 https://www.vogue.com/article/most-influential-sci-fi-films

Cultural ifluence doesn't equal financial success. (There are tons of best seller books out there that sell far more than classics ever have, but are forgotten about almost immediately after). The impact both films have had on popular culture is gigantic. Think of all the movies, TV shows, and cartoons that parodied or copied their styles. There's tons of scholarship out there on it too, but still it's always going to be somewhat subjective.

But yeah I somewhat agree that cyberpunk style was starting to die out in the early 2000s, I just think it had a revival recently due to the fact that certain elements of cyberpunk really came to fruition in recent years. https://bluelabyrinths.com/2018/12/05/cyberpunk-1-0-visions-...

Fair enough!

The fact that the two most inflential sci fi movies of all time are both cyberpunk tells you all you need to know. Even the fact they decided to make a modern CP2077, and how hyped it was, shows how much cultural force the genre still has. Neuromancer and Snow Crash are two of the best selling SF books of all time. Facebook literally named their new company Meta so they could push the 'metaverse' which was coined in Snow Crash... The list is endless honestly. Saying it's not as popular as Marvel means basically nothing. Superheroes are like modern day capitalist myths at this point. The whole purpose of those movies is to sell.

Absolutely. Having an ideal to fight for and a vision of a better future are both necessary to move beyond the current system.

Totally disagree. Solarpunk is providing an out for the future that cyberpunk warns us about. Hoplessness is endemic amongst the young people in Western socities at the moment. A hopeful vision for the future is something necessary to pervade the public consciousness and create a better future in reality. It honestly happened with cyberpunk already. The aesthetic was taken up subconsciously by designers and engineers and actualised into reality. The same could happen for solarpunk.

> there’s a -punk there, and not just because it’s become a trendy suffix. There’s an oppositional quality to solarpunk, but it’s an opposition that begins with infrastructure as a form of resistance.”

> Green, sustainable infrastructure as a form of resistance. Technical systems decoupled from the ‘authoritarian technics’ that Mumford warns us about. The embracing of the natural and the technical. This idea is where the solarpunk vision really comes into its own.

Seems to be mentioned in the article why there's a punk suffix. I think it fits. This kind of thinking is inherently subversive to the power structures in place in our societies today.

B. Fuller is a legend and revolutionary in a lot of ways. Have you read any Sloterdijk? He takes a lot of his ideas on and applies them more strictly to philosophy.

Underground and generally unpopular aesthetic? Really? Biggest sci-fi movie of the 80s? Blade Runner. Biggest sci-fi movie of the 90s? The Matrix. And these aren't just the biggest sci-fi movies, they were huge cultural phenomena when they came out. They definitely transcended the genre. Following those kinds of things the cyberpunk aesthetic became so ingrained in reality we barely even see it anymore. Screens of adverts plaster every new city centre. Even the term 'cyberspace' and other internet slang literally came from cyberpunk novels. All of that is mentioned in the cyberpunk articles. But the point is it's outdated and we need to work beyond it and create something new which can have a similar influence on the future.

To me it feels absolutely anti corporate, even if that twee cartoon was a from a corporate ad. Solarpunk is about conceptualising new ways to invent the future. It's not kitsch like steampunk. It seems like the early days of a movement that could become extremely influential, and I think pushing that idea forward could lead to positive things in the future. Let's reserve our cynicism for things that need it and push these ideas as far as they can go.

It was literally a speculative design. These things happen a lot in architecture. They lay the way for future projects even if they themselves will never be built. They are rebuilding the roof exactly as it was...

It didn't say anything about advocating. It was a vision of the future that cam true in a lot of senses. But now it's run out of steam. It seems dated. New visions of the future are necessary, and solarpunk is one of them. That's the point.

The lived environment isn't sufficient to catalyse political change, as seen in Singapore, but it's definitely a start. Projecting a better future is the first step in making it into reality. If these ideas start to pervade the public consciousness, engineers and designers will start integrating them into their projects and this could be politically subversive in and of itself.

Tbf the 2.0 aspect was almost purely aesthetic, but saying that in that article there is a specific mention of things like phones and other tech that's so ingrained in the society in way that wouldn't have been imaginable in the 80s during the OG cyberpunk period.

It's to distinguish from technology which has more of a specific philosophical meaning. Technics can refer to practice (e.g. techniques) as well as objects.

Absolutely. Any future requires speculation and imagination before practical application. Both go hand in hand.