this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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What is not solarpunk about longtermism and techno-optimism?
Techno-optimism means thinking that a technological solution will fix our issues. As solarpunks we, for example, are critical of a lot of tech uses and a lot of incentives that do not allow the best tech to emerge just by being “better tech” like a tech optimist would think. Check out Californian ideology stuff.
About longtermism: basically it’s caring less about the suffering of today thinking about working towards better condition for the people of tomorrow. In a stupid simple way: giving 10€ to research for fusion instead of using them to feed a child for one month because people will suffer anyway and the faster we arrive at the fusion the less people will suffer.
That said, I don’t think kurzgesagt is that much tech optimist, it’s just a channel that focuses on harder sciences so it’s easier to focus on “can this technology work” more than “can this policy work”
For the longtermism part, some video ye lol
I was about the fully agree with you and still upvoted your comment but their perspective on climate politics is very techno optimistic and actively anti-degrowth and against trying out new ways to organize our society. It's one thing to focus on technological solutions but they also talk against other ways to solve things. Watch the video in my first comment for a deep dive into it.
It’s about probability… Like an AI will have the same bias as the data it’s trained on, only talking about data and trends when talking about politics shows us the most probable stuff without taking into account the very good solutions.
Basically what I’m saying is: kurzgesagt it’s not a politics channel but a science one. They take data and read it for us. At most they are being a bit reactionary, but I wouldn’t say techno optimist :/
We want to aim to solarpunk society for sure but that doesn’t mean we have to ignore that it’s slow, hard and the actual trend is different.
BIG P.S. I must say for transparency that I still haven’t watched today’s video