(2024-05-31) Rao Of Mangoes And Solar Panels

Venkatesh Rao: Of Mangoes and Solar Panels. Over lunch in Singapore yesterday, my friend Sam Chua offered a brilliant definition of punk that I think nails the problem with solarpunk as currently constructed. Sam’s definition is simple and in my opinion correct: punk is technology without technocracy.

the idea of solarpunk as currently constructed is wrong, and we need to reconstruct it correctly

solar panels are technocratic, and mangoes are punk, and the tropical-equatorial belt is where “solar” really comes into its own.

After my last trip to Singapore/India, in September last year, I wrote a newsletter issue titled Sweating Solarpunk.

I’m even less happy with the way the term is typically used than I was 8 months ago.

As currently used, solarpunk gestures at a solar that’s nothing like the connotations I have for the adjective, and there is very little punk to it.

If you’re from this region, the idea of the sun is inseparable from the idea of rain

Anyhow, this is my intuitive idea of solar, which is why I’m now convinced solarpunk is defined wrong. Stupidly, badly wrong. In terms of a sun construed as a servile entity domesticated by solar panels, and constructed in authoritarian-instrumental ways that are actively hostile to the punk spirit.

I suspect the way it is usually defined (mostly implicitly), solarpunk is an idea made up by people who have typically never experienced the sun’s power in all its terrifying intensity the way people in tropical and equatorial regions do almost all the time.

Here in the tropics, the sun is an angry god most of the year. It is still a god though, responsible for all the wealth and flourishing, either directly, or via the torrential rains it induces seasonally

produce two bountiful harvests a year, and enough wealth in the form of textiles and spices that it drove all of pre-modern Europe into a centuries-long frenzy of acquisitive conquest.

And in the form of mangoes.

I had fresh, in-season mangoes for the first time in decades, and damn, I’d forgotten how spectacular they taste and how radically underwhelming mangoes in American grocery stores are

Solarpunk as currently understood is a bit like mangoes from American grocery stores, a weak echo of what mangoes can be at their divine best.

The mango at its best makes the sweltering and scorching worth it.

The mango embodies all the reasons I think solarpunk should be appropriated (or reappropriated, rather) from the polyannish crowd, mostly based in temperate latitudes, that currently claims it.

The visual palette, to the extent it plays a role, should evoke burning and tropical-storming, not temperate-nice-day kindergarten drawings.

But the load-bearing senses should be all the other senses. Solarpunk should be about intense heat, torrential rains, the smell of petrichor, and the taste of fine mangoes, before it is about any visual elements.

Solarpunk can still feature solar panels and everything they signify, but to make solar panels the motif of the idea is a mistake. Solarpunk should be about mangoes that are as divine as an angry god can make them

The motif of mangoes suggests that engaging the idea of sun in a richer way doesn’t mean the vision needs to shift from broadly optimistic to dystopian.

A truer solarpunk, rooted in a truer sense of both solar and punk, ought to offer optimism in the face of the full, unbridled power of the word solar, as seen in tropical and equatorial latitudes

Which brings me to that other word in the formulation, punk. In a deep sense, mangoes are punk in a way solar panels are not. Why?

To return to Sam’s definition, a futurism that constructs solar in terms of solar panel, even metonymically, is essentially technocratic, which makes it the opposite of punk. It is a stereotypically high-modernist move to reduce a reality as powerful as the sun to its most industrial-scale domesticated technological motif

A futurism that constructs solar by centering mango, on the other hand, feels very punk to me, for reasons that are probably not obvious to people not from this region.

Yes, solar panels belong somewhere in the picture, but they’re not the star of the story. They’re not the stakes. They may be key to making the future possible, but are not the key to why the future is worth making possible.
Mangoes represents what is worth fighting for