AEMarling

fast & furious & bicycles

We outlive capitalism. In our solarpunk future, San Francisco is neon green with sustainable abundance. Climate refugees build new communities in skyscrapers once cluttered with cubicles. But not everyone wants to live in the city of fog-kissed gardens.

A family of survivalists kept to themselves, within rewilded lands. It’s a hard and isolated life, and one of their sons chooses to run away. In San Francisco, he finds new friends, even falls in love with a competitive bicyclist. She introduces him to a club of speed demons, who trick out e-bikes to race up the city’s legendary hills and careen down again even faster.

When armored trucks roll in bristling with rifles, the survivalists expect to kidnap their son amidst a confusion of explosions and a hellfire of bullets. They don’t reckon on the recklessness of his new chosen family. The bicycle gang will go to any length to protect him and at any electrified speed.

Last month I released my solarpunk ebook for some emergency hope. At last you can get your hands on the paperback. Discover Neon Riders on Barnes and Noble.

Oakland Critical Mass rolls through the First Friday street festival every month, where I do projection activism. These bicyclists inspired my solarpunk novel, Neon Riders.

You can find the ebook on this indie site and the paperback on Barnes and Noble.

The projected art is by Jordan Johnson

I’m racing-downhill excited to announce the release of my latest solarpunk novel, Neon Riders. You can discover the ebook on this indie site. It will be findable on other channels eventually.

The illustration is by Neville Dsouza.

Let me know if you have suggestions for short phrases that could excite people enough to investigate solarpunk.

I’m designing a solarpunk city for my next novel and am exploring my options for streetlights. On the one hand, light pollution harms wildlife and humans. It also uses energy. On the other, well-lit streets increase the perception of safety. This is not to say good lighting prevents crime. If anything, it facilitates it. Further, you would expect crime to be less in a solarpunk city that prioritizes mutual aid, minimizes wealth disparity, and fights toxic masculinity. However, we should not discount the feeling of danger from darkness.

Personally, I’m male presenting, actively seek out dangerous situations, and have a high tolerance for horror movies. My first inclination is that streetlights should go. That said, once I got caught out at night in the woods. I was immediately terrified. And I had my phone light with me. In short, if a city is not lit, I suspect few people would venture out at night.

1- Mostly Dark-

A city could remove all street lights. People would instead rely on personal lighting: head lamps and flashlights. This would be more efficient and less harmful. Curbs and other critical areas could be marked (not illuminated) by glow-in-the-dark paint or bioluminescent algae or plants. There would be some light from open windows.

2- Lightly Lit-

Streetlights with caps that aim light downward, wavelengths skew into the redder side of the spectrum, and the minimum illumination required to see. Amber light is less harmful. Brighter lights create more shadows. An example of a city using this minimal approach is Canberra, as light pollution would jeopardize local observatories.

3- Cinderella Lighting -

Bright streetlights switch off at a specific time, such as midnight. This would allow people to enjoy some nighttime hours, while leaving others to more natural darkness. This is the scenario I used in my previous solarpunk novels.

Do let me know your preference and awesome ideas.

In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.


AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.

All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!

Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.

Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.

People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.

Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.

Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.

Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions---things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis---while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.

This is a projection in Oakland. You can find the original art here.

The way-back machine found a March 2023 Reddit post by Aaron Bushnell where he said, “I’ve realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imagining a better world than I am. I follow YouTubers like Andrewism that fill my head with concrete images of free, post-scarcity communities, and it makes me so much more prepared to reject things about the current world, because I’ve imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now.”

If you care to see the full quote, you can check @tinythunders on Twitter or Andrewism’s YouTube Channel, the community tab.

In short, US residents need to shut it down before Genocide Joe escalates us to World War III.

I projected this and so much more on (formerly) Twitter HQ in San Francisco. You can see then are sign that used to show the company name.