In considering the concept of Solar punk, Cottage Core and 5th generation warfare, I will explore this idea through the lens of my time spent living in a tiny home community in the depths of a pine forest in Canada. Being birthed in the throes of the industrial era (let’s call this realpolitik or “hard power”) and adhering to a capitalist mindset began to grow weary on me as I paid my increasingly exorbitant rent one month. As someone who always considers adjacent possibilities, I knew I had seek an alternative. I purchased an old American fifth wheel trailer and parked up on a private hops farm, far away from regular life and flushing toilets. Perhaps we were unconsciously seeking symbiosis or as Telihard phrases it, we were “developing our planetary mind where Earth finds it soul”.
“we need to postpone the end of the world.” The ethos of breaking the exponential growth cycle of greed and a society increasingly attached to the oblongs in their hand weighed heavily on me. I needed the tactile. To literally chop wood, carry water from a aquifer and navigate prolific snow fall. I had to check that I was human and that there was an alternate visionary narrative to lifestyles I’d previously existed in. What I didn’t realise was that I had wandered into what some may coin as a cottage core fantasy world. I was unsure how I’d Alice’d down this rabbit hole but as soon as I landed, it was all I could see. My reality, an intricate web of Algorithms, threw me into an artisanal slash van life echo chamber, perhaps the Matrix still had me but some frame this divergence as an actionable stance in the Noosphere ideology or Noopolotik (“soft power”). But we didn’t invent this way of living, so whose conceptual arsenal were we onboarding?
To dodge the noose lain by the boomers, I consorted societies other mind, the online hive presence that tendrils and splinters down every fathomable corridor and beyond. The interconnected mediated sphere illuminated societies and groups that I sought assimilation with. The #vanlife #foraging and #tinyhome visions fuelled my grounded van life existence in our created realm dubbed, ‘Tiny Town”. “Virtual communities are social aggregations” and through this portal, I could rapidly onboard vital information such as which wood stove would sufficiently heat my square footage and how to patch trailer roofs. In essence we were living a speculated future in the solar punk playbook, we were renegotiating how we interacted with time and it was something I could comprehend. Time spent in the vege patch or collecting oyster mushrooms equated to food. Other people in Tiny town were working online to negate the need to travel to work or were monetising their day to day activities of tiny home construction through online tutorials. This construction of a new construct was in many ways “political commentary to what was going on in that moment.”
The sentiment in the above post, is from a friend who is also dancing with the ideas of alternate futures for society. “Solar punk is described as an uprising of hope against the daily despair these times bring…called to inspire ethical-political actions through an eco-futuristic aesthetic” (Solar punk Anarchist, 2016). These ideologies being enacted in ‘tiny town’ and by many folk in an ever growing community that I belonged to, proliferated the idea that we could indeed rekindle our connection to the planet and ultimately to ourselves as a species. In essence we had to know that culturally, as any species on Earth desires, continue. But in a manner that wasn’t thwarted with apocalyptic destruction.
We were aboard our own Nebuchadnezzar, or so it felt. Having an awareness that, “we are threatened by the ecological catastrophe we have unleashed – climate change, special extinction, as well as futuristic technologies – AI, drones – that may be weaponised and used in Global conflicts”(Pinchbeck, Rokhlin 2019) leads to an acknowledgement of 5th generation warfare. So have the online paradigm of Cottagecore which plays into the concepts of Solarpunk’s and the Noospheres concepts of “expanding our knowledge to live within our planetary potential” which dictates that we must negotiate the beast we created. The Internet and the artificial. If my journey in ‘Tiny town’ taught me anything, it’s that we cannot go back, we are enmeshed in technology and its potentiality for harm or good is down to the story we chose to follow and the reach of our imagination.
I digress back to 5th generation warfare as I consider the above photo of my old neighbour Kai, as a retreat from our technologically convoluted times. This modern warfare isn’t played out in traditional battlefields, it is staged in the single greatest commodity of our time, our minds. Which has manifested into an organism beyond the squishy thing between our ears. As Casey Flemmings alleges in the video below,’ the most exploitable device on the planet is the human mind’ and that by participating in the internet, we are engaged in cyber warfare. As exhilarating and exhausting as my time living a divergent lifestyle was, the sheer fact that I had access to hive mind knowledge, to provide the frame work for this ideology is something that could be switched off or disrupted at any moment as not everyone on the planet is striving for some the same future, so who’s story wins? As my tutor Travis notes, by simply engaging with apps like TikTok, we are unwittingly complicit to the erosion of our time through these attention mining constructs. The cost of this is yet to be measured.
For science, here is some AI constructed rhetoric curtesy of Inferkit. But hey, if this is what the machines think, then I’m in. What matters now is how we utilise the information around us in shaping our future and protecting the autonomy of the cyber space limb we have all grown collectively. In an ironic twist of fate, our social media presence was the undoing of our wonderland, ‘Tiny town’. Our collective gushing about our beautiful woodland paradise caught the eye of council and whilst we were able to exist in our tenuous tenure for some time, they eventually fined the owner for unlawful structures on his property and we were flung back into the grid. We had sold ourselves out.
Just as unbridled nature will organically proliferate under the right circumstances so does humanity’s ability to operate in this vein. Solar punks return to a futuristic harmony is a vision that impregnates our mind with another avenue for a future that doesn’t have to look like Altered carbon.
Jane BAMBI Drew 
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