This is draft is being co-written with an AI, an anon and the people of Floristic. It’s been shared here as we learn and build in public.
What do you see when you close your eyes and imagine the future? Do you picture a bleak, dark world ravaged by climate change and war? Or do you envision a brighter tomorrow, where science and technology have solved our biggest problems? Whichever vision of the future you choose to believe in, it's important to remember that it's just that – a vision. We can't let our dreams blind us to reality, and we need to be prepared for whatever comes our way. That's why it's so critical to stress test our visions of the future, to see if they hold up under pressure and if potential dangers are associated with them.
Eclipsepunk aims to explore the limits of solarpunk narratives by continuously testing them in creative scenarios. This includes collaborative storytelling and worldbuilding tools like Design Fiction, indie ttRPGs, and other forms of future studies such as art projects or installations with interactive components for exploring potential futures through creativity. These exercises help us imagine what could happen if we take our ideas too far; there may be negative outcomes that need consideration when designing these imagined realities.
In this article, we will explore introductions to solarpunk and its optimism, lunarpunk and the divide, and finally, eclipsepunk, how it works and why give it a try.
The Sun and the Moon
“*Science fiction is a speculative exercise. By speculating on possible futures, sci-fi expands the space of possibilities. Crypto is an extreme kind of sci-fi because as well as offering a vision of the future it also provides the tools to make that future possible.”
*Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle
Solarpunk is a movement that imagines bright, fair, sustainable futures built on renewable energy sources. It's a hopeful vision for a better tomorrow, one in which we work together to create a more equitable and environmentally-friendly world. It's crucial that we continue to imagine better futures, even if they may not be perfect. Our dreams and visions inspire us to take action and work towards making them a reality.
Lunarpunk, on the other hand, understands that while striving for brighter futures is important, we'll never get there if we don't also face the darker aspects of reality. It's a vision informed by the dark side of human nature, one that doesn't shy away from the potential for conflict and hardship. It's not enough to simply imagine a utopia – we need to find ways to make it resilient in the face of challenges and problems. We need to be prepared for hardships, even as we hope for the best.
Eclipses
*Garden City Movement was an architectural movement in the early 1900s that aimed to integrate wilderness elements into cities. The city designs were pretty impressive. Basically, an attempt at being solarpunk before we learned how nature works (do we even get it now?). By the 1950s, Garden Cities had become Suburbia.
When you lament the grassy blasted hellscape that is modern American suburbs, you're looking at 70s years of the collapse of the first attempt at what becomes solarpunk, in architecture, landscape design, and city planning.*
Eclipsepunk is a third way – a middle ground between the optimism of solarpunk and the cynicism of lunarpunk. Eclipsepunk envisions a future where we have the tools and knowledge to deal with both the best and worst-case scenarios. It's a future where we're prepared for anything and where we can build resilience into our systems so that we can bounce back from whatever comes our way.
Eclipsepunk has three stages, and each step can be named in different ways according to the participants’ lexicon:
Stage 1
Have fun while building worlds, context and repertoire stories
For the first stage, we focus on worldbuilding. We create an immersive and cohesive tone and setting with other aspects to make it believable and valuable for the different stages. Storytellers can explore solo or collaborate by creating stories from scratch within their worlds. Stories that can then either expand existing narratives and translate one culture's lore or adopt fantastic and unbelievable settings as a mean for exploring specific questions that wouldn't be as tractable otherwise. Most importantly, our goal here isn't to create fantastic tales or convince you of anything. Instead, we aim to put our imaginations, shared dreams and concerns on the table. This stage is about having fun and exercising our creativity to pave the way for what comes next.
Stage 2
Break stories: up, down, apart.
The second stage is where we apply frameworks to push stories and their context to their limits. As those limits get broken, we have the chance to use real-world risk management tools like risk heat maps and risk control self-assessments. This stage aims to understand tensions, pitfalls, and patterns more objectively by mixing new and previous stories with risk frameworks on different scales of the system. The more context stories, the better understanding of the system, its patterns, and existing tensions.
Stage 3
Sharing is caring
Finally, in the third stage, we focus on memetics - or how information spreads through communities. This stage is about developing strategies for communicating our findings in a way that is convincing and inspiring others to take action. We want Eclipsepunk to be more than just an exercise - we want it to be a tool for systemic transformation rather than a research methodology. The lessons learned from the previous stages are looped back into the original group by the participants to create change, prototype ideas, reframe the original stories and potentially ‘write a new ending’.