Bulletin 1 Introduction

Setting the scene

「 Anja Groten, Sylvie van Wijk 」

This first edition of the H&D Bulletin evolved in the period leading up to the H&D Summer Camp “Hopepunk: Reknitting Collective Infrastructures,” taking place from 17th to 27th of July 2023 at the campsite Het Wilde Weg in Sint-Oederode, The Netherlands. H&D has the opportunity to take over the entire campsite for the duration of the Summer Camp. We are excited to take good care of the place while its owners are taking a break.

“Hopepunk: Reknitting Collective Infrastructures” responds to the widespread onset feeling of anxiety, uncertainty and dread caused by geopolitical tensions, climate crisis and asymmetric distribution of wealth, power, and everyday resources, as accelerated by turbo-capitalist innovation and planetary-scale computing. The campsite will become our test site for reimagining and reknitting arbitrary boundaries between work, play, leisure, maintenance and care, that is, for managing “the meanwhile within damaged life’s perdurance.”

Along with thirty co-habitants we embark on an adventure of learning, making and living together, and work towards holistic and intersectional ways of practicing sustainability and regeneration (technically, socially, ecologically, economically, culturally).

“It takes a village…”

Hope, to us, is political and is rooted in generosity and reciprocity. It means collectively imagining and putting into practice economies of care – humble forms of exchange, that take others into account, that understand regeneration as non-negotiable, that resist greed and artificial scarcity, that refuse gate-keeping of resources, extraction and privatization.

Setting up a temporary H&D village is our attempt to imagine what is not yet there, or to put it in the words of physicist and feminist scholar Karen Barad, it is a Gedankenexperiment. Such thought experiments are imaginative, reflective, concrete, and consequential. According to Barad, 'Gedankenexperiments’ are pedagogical devices. They are non-material eventualities, however, they do matter in material ways.

We will be experimenting with solar technologies, solar-cooking and food preservation, community forming through life action role play, in situ coding, gymnastics, repurposing electronics and (food) waste, tracing water histories of the past and the current local water, building electric circuits of organic materials, and more.

Refusal

At this site we enter into an immersive experiment of living and working together, self-organizing experience-based learning and tool-sharing as a political practice and mode of refusal. On the one hand, this refusal is about resisting linearity, efficiency and a progress-based understanding of earthly co-existence. On the other hand, it is also about resisting despair and refusing to accept the status quo we refer to the “punk” in Hopepunk (or akin genres such as Solar-, Cyber-, Cypher, and Steampunk) – the countercultural, oppositional aspect of exercising hope. That is, hope does not operate at the expense of active resistance. Being hopeful is about taking the liberty to orient towards something that sets in the future, that is not there yet, like the warm illumination of a horizon charged with possibility, it pulls us into the future.

Solarpolitics

In her book Solar Politics Oxana Timofeeva describes the sun as a comrade in kind who gives without asking in return. She explores the question: what would a socio-political economy, informed and fuelled by the sun, look like?

The sun, as the biggest source of energy within our solar system, provides us with an excess of free energy that cannot be exhausted or contained. It is a common. It cannot be privatized. Could an economy solely fuelled by the sun be one defined by gift, solidarity and altruism? Could a shift from a capitalist to such a solar (powered) economy be a Copernican transformation? Similar to how the discovery of the sun as the core of our universe, changed the perception of us earthly inhabitants and ultimately our relationship with our environment to be less human-centric, could a sun-based economy equally recalibrate our ways of living together with the earth?

The sun in Solarpunk is often depicted as “a super-abundant resource that can (in theory) provide for all and solar is in this sense equated with optimism, but also with a political ambition to envision and build a harmonious future powered by clean energy”. The genre of Solarpunk has been acting as an orientation guide for H&D’s activities in the two years. The science fiction literary genre and art movement envisioned techno-futures in which humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary problems with the help of technology. Yet, as Georgia Kareola describes in Solarpunk & Web3, the specifics of these imaginaries “vary depending on the politics of the dreamer” After all, the “sunlight does not fall on everyone equally.” In a similar sense, technology is not accessible to everyone equally.

 

Hopeful pragmatism

The intergenerational Solarpunk workshops we developed in 2022 showed us that the optimistic outlook embodied by the genre provides interesting tangents and tensions when combined with hands-on practical approaches. Can oppressive regimes, such as capitalism, authoritarianism, sexism, racism, and ableism be undone by solar power? It seems unlikely. Perhaps the core of punk futures lies in the DIY and DIT mentality – our capacity for generating pragmatic hopefulness.

We’d hope such pragmatic hopefulness leads us to overcome the dystopias as well as the nostalgia of Cyber / Steam / Cypherpunk without creating a totalizing image of a harmonious utopian society (as is sometimes the case in the Solarpunk genre). What should not be forgotten is the injustices embedded in (solar) technology and the ways that climate change affects people “differently, unevenly, and disproportionately,”

In a time of simultaneous and exponential increase of digital dependency and environmental exhaustion, we, as a collective of hackers, designers, artists, and educators intertwined with and interested in technology, find it important to answer the following question(s):

How can we build, repair, maintain and manage our technologies to allow for the continuous operation of global communication and information sharing while prevailing forms of digital dependencies are injurious to human and non-human life? How do we organise ourselves to this end? 

These questions, and their possible answers, are at the heart of the political and aesthetic movements such as Solarpunk, Hopepunk and also more recently Permacomputing, to which Timofeeva’s text seems intimately related. All describe speculative scenarios about the full transition to renewable energies, which take on board a movement towards sustainability in inter-human interactions as well: 

“Solarpunk runs starkly in opposition to the political and economic forces of late-stage capitalism by demanding a non-hierarchical, diverse, decentralised yet integrated world. A world with worker co-operatives, tool shares, maker spaces, and common-pool resources.” (Andrewism, 2022) 

The contributions in this edition attempt to imagine, articulate, visualize and draw into the future a hope-based society through the use of community-based tool-building and use, active engagement of the imagination for possible futures and the production of small-scale prototypes to this end. 

 

References:

• Andrewism - Why this gives me hope for the future  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3aauiR9M88  (2022)
• Oxfama Timoteefa, Solar Politics (2022)
• Williams, R., (2019) “‘This Shining Confluence of Magic and Technology’: Solarpunk, Energy Imaginaries, and the Infrastructures of Solarity”, Open Library of Humanities 5(1), 60. https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4597/
• “What might degrowth computing look like?” https://criticaledtech.com/2022/04/08/what-might-degrowth-computing-look-like/
• Isabelle Stengers “In Catastrophic Times” (…)
• Georgia Kareola “Solarpunk & Web3” https://zine.zora.co/solarpunk-web3-kareola
• “The Wickerman”
• “Land of Freedom” Ken Loach
• 2 articles of Juliette …
• Ursula K. Le Guin “The Dispossessed” (1974)
• Ursula K. Le Guin “Left hand of darkness” (1969)
• “Solarpunk” & the Pedagogical Value of Utopia http://www.susted.com/wordpress/content/solarpunk-the-pedagogical-value-of-utopia_2020_05/
• Lauren Berlant “Infrastructures for troubling times”
• Karen Barad “Meeting the Universe Halfway”
• Instead of planned obsolescence, permacomputing practices planned longevity, reuse and repair of existing technology and approaches waste as a resource. https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html