this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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Solarpunk
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I think steampunk and most other aesthetic styles with -punk suffixes are better counterexamples, but cyberpunk is definitely punk. It depicts a dystopian future as a warning and rebels against it. The bad guys are always the tech megacorp inc. and so on. Then this core message went over peoples heads and you get all the aesthetic styles without actual punk in them. Solarpunk has a very strong social aspect to it (the punk and the anarchism) to differentiate it from greenwashing realestate development visualizations (building but with plants on it).
Yes, i agree with you and @queermunist@lemmy.ml that the message of cyberpunk is anarchist, but my point was that the society it describes is not.
I guess it should be the societies it describes, cuz there definitely are different ways of organizing described in cyberpunk worlds, and some of them are anarchist or close to it. But since the most recurrent and prevalent system i know is the corpo one, i knowingly narrow it down to this one.
Cyberpunk depicts a dystopia that assumes capitalism essentially 'won', but how punks at the bottom of society can still resist it and use the system's technology that enabled so much oppression and exploitation against itself.
Solarpunk instead depicts a utopia where capitalism lost to the punks, and how society would be organized from that anti-authoritarian eco-anarchist perspective.