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alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

I'm proud to present my #review of #kimStanleyRobinson 's #theMinistryForTheFuture : alxd.org/ministry-for-the-futu

Be warned, it's a #longRead !

After three long years of struggling with the book and analyzing it I finally put my thoughts into a coherent blogpost. I never expected the Ministry to be #solarpunk , but I hoped that it will paint a future to look forward to.

#books #literature #climateFiction #climate #future #futurism #sustainability #blockchain #globalSouth #carbonCoin #parody

20 March at 14:54 | Open on writing.exchange
36 comments
Lynn

@alxd I started but did not finish Ministry. I may give it another go. One KSR novel that I would say is solarpunk is Pacific Edge, though at the time I read it I was not aware of solarpunk and I don’t think the concept existed when he wrote it.

20 March at 15:29 | Open on mastodon.social
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@londubh I didn't really want "The Ministry..." to be Solarpunk, as in - there's too little space in such a huge book to look at particular communities. But I did want it not to be technosolutionist. I wanted it not to be blind to the Global South. I wanted it not to create an AI-generated, Blockchain-based religion to support a Shadow Government.

20 March at 15:35 | Open on writing.exchange
toddmedema

@alxd thank you so much for writing this! I knew something didn't quite sit with me with the book, this helps put words to it :)

20 March at 17:13 | Open on techhub.social
Brian Marick

@alxd @jmeowmeow I found /Ministry/ somewhat disappointing, but I interpreted it rather differently: it undercut itself, but not as parody, more as tragedy.

I take it that he thinks the bottom-up communal approach you approve of in the imaginary /Sustainability/ *won’t work*. You might argue that he’s wrong to assume it would fail, but that’s a different argument than the one you’re making. (1/7)

21 March at 15:10 | Open on mstdn.social
Brian Marick

KSR’s project was to figure out what might work. Part of that was India going unilateral, which I take to be his prediction about the most *likely* action the developing world will take. I think he thinks that India – both government and terrorist organization – is *right*. They are responding in an appropriate way given how the world is. (2/7)

21 March at 15:10 | Open on mstdn.social
Brian Marick

However, he also believes that won’t work either. You’re right that it’s rather glaring that they down planes, seed the atmosphere, and everyone shrugs. I suspect he *has* to handwave away the developed world’s most likely reaction because it would inevitably lead to climate catastrophe. It would be another “global war on terror” that would divert attention from the real problems, solidify existing powers, and we’d all go down fighting (against the wrong thing). (3/7)

21 March at 15:10 | Open on mstdn.social
Brian Marick

That given, the only solution is to somehow subvert the same systems that cause the problem. Use the enemy’s momentum against itself. Use the tools that caused the problem to solve the problem.

That KSR’s solution feels deus ex machina, road to Damascus, Eureka!, Sidney Harris “and then a miracle occurs” cartoon — I think that’s fundamentally because he realizes the solution he’s been backed into as most plausible won’t work either. (4/7)
21 March at 15:10 | Open on mstdn.social
Brian Marick

He *wants* a solution – he’s a lover of the world, been doing ecologically-tinged fiction forever. Not permitting himself to write a bleakly pessimistic, dystopian novel like /The Sheep Look Up/ (similar in many ways, down to ecological terrorists, but which ends with the problems unsolved and the world spiraling down), he came up with the most likely solution he could see. He’s a sad figure because his best path forward is ludicrously unlikely, but his only alternative is despair. (5/7)

21 March at 15:10 | Open on mstdn.social
Brian Marick

The end of /The Sheep Look Up/:

Opening the door to the visiting doctor, all set to apologize for the flour on her hands – she had been baking – Mrs. Byrne sniffed. Smoke! And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire!

"We ought to call the brigade!” she exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”

“The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. "It’s from America. The wind’s blowing that way.” (6/7)

21 March at 15:10 | Open on mstdn.social
Brian Marick

NEXT YEAR [the preceding pages cover December to November]

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.”
– Milton, “Lycidas” (7/7)

21 March at 15:10 | Open on mstdn.social
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@marick I could almost agree with KSR's intention here if not for how much he misrepresents the Global South and the grassroots.

Okay, the "bottom-up" might not work in itself, but why completely erase it and show Frank as the only one with agency in the refugee camps?

Why is the only non-white, non-Northerner character with a name and a speaking role a terrorist / black ops specialist?

If KSR just wanted to have "another way", he could have not ridiculed people doing work right now.

21 March at 15:19 | Open on writing.exchange
Brian Marick

@alxd You’re probably right. I don’t have any personal knowledge of how refugees behave. (My paternal aunts and my grandmother were refugees from Poland after WWII – they walked about 1000km from north of Warsaw to near Stuttgart. However, I was too young to ask them about the experience. My father was in an Allied prisoner of war camp, which I don’t think is very comparable. His stories depicted everyone as being passive – head down, trying to get along.)

21 March at 23:22 | Open on mstdn.social
Brian Marick

@alxd Will just add that my memory of the Frank character is that he was portrayed as more of a doofus than anything else, throughout his character arc. I never felt he was portrayed positively. In interactions with refugees, I imagine them rolling their eyes and trying to edge him out of the way. Less a “white savior” than “oh god, another loser who thinks he’s a white savior”. But I might have been reading something into it that wasn’t there.

21 March at 23:26 | Open on mstdn.social
Brian Marick replied to Brian

@alxd I can say that I found the “only non-white, non-Northerner character” an admirable one. Way more so than Frank. Somewhat more so than Mary (?). But that could be more me than what was written on the page. I am by nature inclined to “tear it all down”. It would be interesting to see what my wife thought of the different characters, as she is much more of a Mary type: incredibly patient in chivvying people to do what needs to be done.

21 March at 23:32 | Open on mstdn.social
Adam Greenfield

@alxd I just can’t take a book seriously which proposes central bankers and cryptocurrency as the sovereign solution to our troubles, you know?

22 March at 10:51 | Open on social.coop
mycorrhiza

@adamgreenfield @alxd still have that book (which I picked up at a speaking event with Stan) sitting on my to-read pile. I fully expect it to frustrate me, and your review only suggests that my expectations are properly calibrated.

I did hear the man himself explain his world-view — and I don’t share it! I suspect some combination of age and class position explain the gap. There’s this whole crop of writers, 10-30 years older than me (Stan is a bonafide Boomer) who seem to share many of my values, but have more faith in institutions (and less faith in regular folk) than me.

@adamgreenfield @alxd still have that book (which I picked up at a speaking event with Stan) sitting on my to-read pile. I fully expect it to frustrate me, and your review only suggests that my expectations are properly calibrated.

I did hear the man himself explain his world-view — and I don’t share it! I suspect some combination of age and class position explain the gap. There’s this whole crop of writers, 10-30 years older than me (Stan is a bonafide Boomer) who seem to share many of my values,...

22 March at 11:20 | Open on post.lurk.org
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@mycorrhiza @adamgreenfield if you are yet to read it, can I ask you a favor?

Could you please count the Zurich chapters and the number of recommended cafes and candy shops along with the streets and how to get there?

I just... can't.

22 March at 11:21 | Open on writing.exchange
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@adamgreenfield I spoke with some Carbon Reward people and I can imagine a book discussing that, but that would be an economic epic focused on changes in daily life and how different corporations try to game the system. I also can imagine showing the bureaucrats as heroes fighting to preserve the spirit of the solution, hunting the cheaters.

The problem is, KSR is not even attempting that. For him the Blockchain Just Fixes Capitalism.

That's the heart of the plot.

22 March at 11:24 | Open on writing.exchange
Adam Greenfield

@alxd Oh, it is known. I felt it incumbent on me to read it twice, while writing “Lifehouse” – I kept wanting to believe he’d identified some nuanced angle that prevented it from being that exactly. Nope. It was that exactly.

22 March at 11:43 | Open on social.coop
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@adamgreenfield I'm curious of that intellectual angle. A lot of criticism of my review say that "I'm asking for some grassroots fairy-tale", while I really wanted to express that I want to focus on things more >detailed< than a single, top-down solution.

Ada Palmer wrote about the dirty futures of hard work ( beforewegoblog.com/purity-and- ) and I'm under impression that a lot of other writers just want the solutions to be clean; mechanistic; elegant, without checking in with the reality.

@adamgreenfield I'm curious of that intellectual angle. A lot of criticism of my review say that "I'm asking for some grassroots fairy-tale", while I really wanted to express that I want to focus on things more >detailed< than a single, top-down solution.

Ada Palmer wrote about the dirty futures of hard work ( beforewegoblog.com/purity-and- ) and I'm under impression that a lot of other writers just want the solutions to be clean; mechanistic; elegant, without...

22 March at 11:46 | Open on writing.exchange
Adam Greenfield

@alxd That has not *generally* been Stan’s jam, which is why MFTF was so very disappointing.

22 March at 11:49 | Open on social.coop
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@adamgreenfield honestly speaking, I don't know if "The Ministry of Sustainability" is doable as a single book; looking at all the angles and levels of the changes needed. I could imagine it as a series, maybe even as some mega-anthology from multiple authors?

My take on solarpunk and climate fiction is to first see the uncomfortable things we don't want to see, so I could "cover" some activism, hard open data problems and so on, but would ask someone else to tackle the scientific parts.

22 March at 11:53 | Open on writing.exchange
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@adamgreenfield one way or another, I think that striving for a Single Climate Masterpiece might always pull us in the direction of too elegant, too pure, ignoring some really important parts of the world and problems to come.

That also means that "consuming" climate fiction might be different, potentially harder than reading science fiction, since the reader would need to do a lot more emotional and intellectual work.

22 March at 11:54 | Open on writing.exchange
Alberto Cottica

@alxd @adamgreenfield in KSR's defense, he has disavowed "blockchain" since. I find it interesting that the "central bank-issued, negative carbon-backed digital currency" has happened, except for the carbon part. At least that is my reading of the digital euro: ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_eur

22 March at 11:59 | Open on mastodon.green
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@alberto_cottica @adamgreenfield

okay, not joking, I apologize for the annoying question, but -

Do you have any >source< on KSR disavowing Blockchain?

Apparently he says that a lot around the world, but he is never recorded / he never says it clearly in his writing.

The Chain is just such a vital part of the book's plot, that I have no idea how it could work without it as a Magical Technology.

22 March at 12:02 | Open on writing.exchange
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@alberto_cottica @adamgreenfield regarding the digital currency, I do admit that I know too little about it to comment on either technically, economically or societally. I will get back to you when I read more on it :)

22 March at 12:04 | Open on writing.exchange
Alberto Cottica replied to alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@alxd @adamgreenfield noo, nothing magical. It's just a slow database, and everything you can do with it you can do without it. The currency KSR imagined IMHO would work just as well with a regular secure database. Or maybe it would not, but that would be because of non-obvious monetary economics spillovers. I know little about this stuff, but I am a professional economist, so I do know a little, and cannot find any obvious inconsistencies.

22 March at 12:15 | Open on mastodon.green
Adam Greenfield replied to alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@alxd @alberto_cottica If you’ll forgive me, I can recommend the cryptocurrency and blockchain chapters of my 2017 “Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life.” They hold up surprisingly well.

22 March at 12:23 | Open on social.coop
Alberto Cottica
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts replied to Alberto

@alberto_cottica @adamgreenfield if you ever remember the interview, I'll owe you coffee ;) I tried searching for it, but all the problems he describes with tech in the Ministry are very... non-committal.

As in - he doesn't notice that without Blockchain the plot of the Ministry jus doesn't work. It's not that "ah, the cars should have flown lower", it's... the whole premise is just broken.

22 March at 12:12 | Open on writing.exchange
Alberto Cottica replied to alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@alxd you owe me a coffee!
"In the list of mistakes I’ve become aware of making in Ministry, using the word blockchain is prominent. I should have said 'encrypted digital money,' or even just 'digital encryption.' " Source is the Crooked Timber seminar: crookedtimber.org/2021/05/14/r
@adamgreenfield

22 March at 12:44 | Open on mastodon.green
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts replied to Alberto

@alberto_cottica @adamgreenfield thank you so much, I do owe you coffee ;)

I think I remembered it right then, he's backtracking on the terminology, not the solutionism / magical thinking itself.

22 March at 12:46 | Open on writing.exchange
Alberto Cottica replied to alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@alxd hmm... I will have to disagree here nothing magical about digital currencies. And one of the central banks depicted in Ministry has the rollout of a digital form of cash on schedule right now. But I'll still take you up on coffee! :-) @adamgreenfield

22 March at 13:21 | Open on mastodon.green
will stedden

@alxd thank you! I've had so many people recommend this to me and never picked it up. Now I'm wondering whether they were recommending to dissuade my worldview or whether they are so far removed from thoughts of the future they can't tell the difference.

22 March at 11:37 | Open on sigmoid.social
alxd ✏️ solarpunk prompts

@bonkerfield I find that a lot of people who unironically recommended me the Ministry want to feel that what they know is enough, that either technosolutionism or some other model of the world they have will be all that is needed to solve the Climate.

They don't want to ask themselves the harder questions.

22 March at 11:39 | Open on writing.exchange
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