Something that solarpunk / ecopunk / terrapunk / solar gothic / indigenous futurisms / afrofurturism does that fucking love is being able to imagine a framing for open source community tinkering that solves problems in ways that are protected from exploitation.
I was subscribed to Robot magazine as a kid, the trade periodical for adults, because prosthetics fascinated me. We are a species that fundamentally wants to help the people, and we'll tinker up cool stuff with and for them to do it! And everybody uses body modifying technology; eyeglasses are the go to example, but sunglasses, gloves, footgear, blankets, swimming goggles, flippers, camping chairs. We all have physical limitations we seek to transcend, and for some people that's walking, and others it's feeling chilly.
But I got fed up with DARPA buying/bullying/eminent domaining cool shit and locking it away for 15+ years. I'm tired of MBAs coming in and harnessing the techies, tinkers, and geeks like we're a fucking power source. I went to school to be an electron microscopist; a jogger safety sonic device we tinkered on became the LRAD. Personal helicopters, robot dogs, brain chips that help the blind see and the paraplegic move their exoskeleton, robots that are learning to speak, and to even understand a larger *fraction* of what they're saying, self driving electric cars, flying hoverbots, household android friends, virtual reality, lab-grown cuisine, a planetary artificial hivemind, computer glasses... THEY ALL SHOULD HAVE BEEN SO COOL. And instead they're fodder for one of my other blogs, @near-future-cyberpunk-paranoia
With all of this human endeavor, we could have been closer to Eutopia. Not U-topia, Greek for No-place, but Eu-topia. A good place. A fine place. A place where we're kinda okay.
We get to be angry about that. The perversion of the promethean spirit, the tinker geeks shoved into the locker of the psychopathic tech industry and its funding, the government/military contract. We should do something about it.
And some people do! Right to repair, FOSS, open source, hacklabs, maker spaces... Integrating that tinkering with an equal footing and dignity for ancestral technologies - I hold that every engineering major should spend a year in a history of science and industry focusing on the premodern era to stop wasting time starting from scratch rather than refining - and you have something special.
And sometimes we call that thing solarpunk.
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