The Solarpunk Revolution Is Inevitable

The contradictions of our current economic and political system are forcing a deeper conversation within society about the broader purpose of our economy and our institutions. Not because anyone in power wants that conversation, most would prefer we never have it, but because the contradictions are becoming too loud to ignore, and artificial intelligence is turning up the volume.

AI makes the conversation inevitable because it accelerates every contradiction at once. You can watch it happening in real time. The data centers rising across the landscape like cathedrals to a god of pure efficiency. The techno-utopians in Silicon Valley bragging, openly, about how much of the workforce they intend to replace, how much leaner, faster, more profitable the economy will become once the humans are out of the way. They speak of this as liberation. What they are describing is the dissolution of the social contract.

Because that efficiency gain comes at a cost they never put on the balance sheet: basic social cohesion, and a functioning middle class. And when you remove those two things, you do not get a sleeker version of the world we have. You get something much older. You get a feudal society, a ruling class on one side, and on the other a population of dependents who are no longer needed as workers and are therefore no longer in a position to ask for anything. People who comply not because they consent, but because labor has run out of leverage against the worst excesses of capital.

The Bargain That Built the Social Contract

For most of the industrial era, working people held a card they could play. It was not a strong hand. But it was a hand. Capital needed labor. You could not run the mill, the line, the mine, or the warehouse without human beings showing up to do the work. That necessity, the simple fact that the owners could not produce profit without workers, gave workers a bargaining position. And from that bargaining position, through more than a century of struggle, they extracted nearly everything we now think of as the markers of a decent society.

It is worth saying plainly what was won, because we have come to treat these things as if they were simply properties of the natural order. The two-day weekend. The eight-hour day. Public education. The end of child labor. Workplace safety laws. The right to organize, to bargain collectively, to strike. The very idea that a person who works should be able to live.

None of it was given. All of it was taken, won by people who organized at enormous personal risk. The textile workers and the miners who struck and were beaten and sometimes killed for it by corporate mercenaries and national militaries. The Catholic Workers and the radicals and the ordinary people who, during the brutal early decades of the industrial revolution, refuted the notion that human beings were simply inputs to be consumed. They built protections out of nothing but solidarity and the leverage that came from being necessary.

That’s the crucial word. Necessary. The whole architecture of workers’ rights rests on a single load-bearing fact: that capital could not do without labor, and so labor could make demands.

That load-bearing fact is now being removed.

The bargaining position has been eroding for decades, through offshoring, through automation, through the systematic dismantling of the unions that once gave it institutional form. But AI represents something categorically different from the previous waves. It’s not relocating the work to cheaper hands. It’s making the hands unnecessary. And once you no longer need workers to generate profit, the entire basis on which working people could demand anything simply dissolves.

We are watching the final erosion of a bargaining position that took a century of blood and sweat and sacrifice to build. And the people doing the eroding understand exactly what they are doing.

The Logic of Capital Has No Country

I know that some people do not want to believe there are men who genuinely think of other human beings as resource, as what one of them has called “zero marginal product” humans, people whose labor is worth nothing and who are therefore, in the cold ledger of the system, worth nothing. Curtis Yarvin has said as much, and he is not an outlier so much as an unusually honest narrator of a logic that is otherwise kept politely quiet.

This is nothing more and nothing less than the logic of capital. It is the same logic that moved American manufacturing to China. There was no malice in it and no patriotism either, there simply was no national identity in the decision, no loyalty to a people or a place. There was only loyalty to capital and the maximization of profit. If the workers cost less somewhere else, the work goes somewhere else. If the workers can be dispensed with entirely, they will be.

So whether we like it or not, there are people who think this way, and they are not on the margins. They are operating the core machinery of the economy through technology and through finance. And those groups have quietly and decisively taken over our governments. We no longer have labor unions with anything like the power they once held. The countervailing force has been neutralized.

Which is why it can feel like a one-way train ride to a destination no one chose: a future in which most people are not employed and are not needed to be employed, in which the people who own things will own everything, and everyone else will own nothing.

The Strange Coalition

Here the story gets more interesting than the standard leftist critique allows.

Because this realization, that something has gone fundamentally wrong with an economy organized entirely around capital, does not belong to the left alone. It is quietly bringing together people who are supposed to be enemies.

Consider Tucker Carlson, of all people, who once said that if capitalism is the thing that produces endless strip malls, then he is not a capitalist. That is a striking admission from a figure of the populist right. He holds a fairly traditionalist vision of what beauty is and what an economy is for, a vision many progressives would not share in its particulars. But notice what he is actually saying: that the economy should serve some human and aesthetic and communal end beyond profit, and that if it does not, it has failed, regardless of how much it produces.

On the right, this shows up as an America First nationalism with a deep instinct toward economic relocalization: bring the work home, rebuild the town, make things again. On the left, there is a long and honorable tradition of cooperativism and mutual aid that wants more or less the same material outcome from an entirely different set of premises. The two camps would describe their goals in incompatible language. But look at what they are pointing toward, and the convergence is unmistakable.

This is the unintended consequence of the rise of artificial intelligence in the late stage of a late-stage system. Most of the productive economy has already gone abroad, which means American workers are even more exposed to layoffs and automation, with nothing to fall back on. The pressure is no longer hitting one ideological camp. It’s hitting everyone simultaneously.

The Fatal Flaw

Capitalism has a drive to create as much profit as possible. That’s its foundational engine, but the engine has a flaw built into its design: there is a social contract underneath the whole thing, and the system depends on that contract while doing everything in its power to violate it.

Society can only function if, in some fundamental way, we are all consenting to it. And a great deal of that consent has historically flowed through participation, through the workplace, through our role in the economy, through our stake in a democracy we believed was at least partly ours. We consented to the system because the system, however imperfectly, returned something to us. A wage. A place. A future for our children.

Withdraw both halves of that bargain, make the economy feel rigged and the democracy feel captured, so that both come to be seen as fundamentally illegitimate, and you do not get permanent docile compliance. You get an uprising. Eventually. Inevitably.

The ownership class knows this. You can read their awareness in what they choose to report and what they choose to bury.

When the first Amazon warehouse fires were set, they were reported as news. But once more of them began to catch fire, the reporting quietly changed. They stopped calling them what they were and started calling them electrical fires, because the first person who set one had made the meaning unmistakably explicit. The message was simple and devastating: there was supposed to be a social contract. If I work forty hours a week, I should be able to own a home, raise a family, and send my kid to college.

That was once possible in America, for some people, for some stretch of time. It is not possible now for most. And the people at the top understand that this broken promise is combustible, in the most literal sense.

So they are making preparations. This is why the surveillance state is being installed with such urgency. It is why Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, can muse openly that data centers may need to be defended by autonomous weapons. They are not paranoid. They have simply done the math. They understand that once workers have no leverage, the consent that held the system together evaporates, and they have no intention of restoring the bargain. They feel no responsibility for the social contract at all.

There was a time when elites were at least held accountable by the crude mechanisms of their era, a king you despised could, in the last resort, be overthrown. What is being built now is something with no such release valve: a bureaucratic totalitarianism, digitally enabled, woven from AI and mass surveillance, deliberately installed so that control can be maintained after everyone has been laid off and made dependent on the system. The cage is being assembled with the hope we won’t notice until its too late.

Refuse The Doomer’s Temptation

Faced with all of this, many thoughtful people arrive at despair. They conclude it is inevitable, and they respond accordingly: build a bunker, buy land in Costa Rica, withdraw into private survival and let the world burn. This is the Doomer’s posture: clear sight without agency, recognition that curdles into retreat.

I understand the temptation. But I find myself holding a strange and stubborn kind of hope, a hope that looks unflinchingly at the machine without losing sight of humanity’s innate beauty. It’s not the hope that expects paradise. It’s closer to what I have elsewhere called post-tragic protopian audacity, hope that has passed all the way through disillusionment and come out the other side, not consoled by illusions and not crushed by despair, but choosing to take responsibility for a more beautiful world without any guarantee of success.

My hope rests on a wager about human beings: that there is something innately good in us, and that this something will not finally consent to its own erasure.

I felt it the other night, of all places, in the back of an Uber on my way to visit my mother. I got to talking with the woman driving, and what came through was something I now hear almost everywhere: a tightening. A constriction. The sense of working more and more for less and less, of having been quietly sold out by a contract you never agreed to renegotiate. She felt it. I feel it. Almost everyone I talk to feels it now, spending 50-70% more at the gas station and grocery store, money they already didn’t have to spare.

But underneath the constriction, this woman’s love for humanity, love for her daughter, her belief in us was still there. What people actually want turns out to be astonishingly simple, and astonishingly shared across the political divide. Progressives and conservatives, when you strip away the slogans, want more or less the same things. A healthy place to raise children. The freedom to express who you are. The ability to earn a living wage doing something dignified. The means to support the people you love and to show up for your community.

That’s the whole of it. That’s what nearly everyone wants. And it’s precisely what the emerging order cannot provide.

The Beauty in the Tragedy

The elites have convinced themselves they can do without labor entirely, that they can construct a genuinely feudal society in which the ownership class holds everything, the rest of us hold nothing, and we are housed, perhaps, in some perpetually surveilled concrete box engineered to keep us compliant. That’s the future they are building toward.

But I do not believe human beings will accept it. The beauty in the tragedy is this: the very force that is constricting us is the force that makes our liberation inevitable. The pressure that is squeezing the life out of communities, the surveillance and control being installed in a last-ditch effort to extract everything possible from a dying planet, that same pressure is generating the conditions under which deep societal change stops being a dream and becomes a necessity.

I admit, I could be wrong. Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable, and that adaptability cuts both ways. We have a long and well-documented capacity to go along with monstrous things. Hannah Arendt named it the banality of evil, the way atrocity gets metabolized into ordinary paperwork by people who have simply stopped asking what they are doing. I do not assume we will rise. I only observe that the constriction is reaching a breaking point, and that what happens at a breaking point is not predetermined.

This is why I reach for the word solarpunk. Solarpunk is the audacity to imagine that the future could be beautiful. Where cyberpunk extrapolated our worst trajectory, corporate feudalism under perpetual surveillance, solarpunk insists on the other branch: communities living well within living systems, abundance generated from the bottom up rather than hoarded at the top, technology in service of life rather than escape from it. Above all, solarpunk is a positive image of the future, and a positive image of the future is exactly the thing we have been quietly deprived of.

A Captured Imagination

I have come to suspect that the reactive, purely deconstructive character of the contemporary left was, at least in part, cultivated, that the progressive imagination was steered, deliberately or structurally, into a posture where it could critique and dismantle but never quite propose. Where it could name what was wrong with power but never build a compelling vision of what should replace it.

You can see the residue of this everywhere. Identity politics as practiced today, the demand for a more diversified board of directors at an extractive corporation, is not the equity or the justice the left once fought for. It is a kind of denaturing, a degradation of a tradition that, in the 1960s, still carried an actual positive image of the future. Somewhere along the way the dream was replaced with a critique, and a critique cannot lead anyone anywhere.

Solarpunk is the refusal of that trap. It’s what I’ve come to think of as a transpolitical revolutionary imagination. Instead of being kept at one another’s throats over guns and immigration and the whole inventory of wedge issues, the very issues that keep us divided while the machinery of capital operates smoothly through both major parties, it asks a different question entirely. Not who do we blame? but what could we build?

It asks us to step into the positive imagination of a future that is genuinely abundant, where everyone has what they need, but not through the centralized, coercive machinery of state communism. Through local, regenerative economies. Through the patient construction of the world we want, in the places where we actually live.

We Do Not Need to Capture the State

This is where the revolutionary movements of the previous two centuries went catastrophically wrong.

We do not need to capture the state in order to build the future. The belief that we must, that transformation runs through the seizure of central power, has itself been one of the great obstacles to genuine transformation.

This, I would argue, is what rendered twentieth-century communism ineffectual and finally monstrous. It assumed that a dictatorship of the proletariat had to seize the state. But the act of seizing the state corrupts the very thing you set out to create, because the state is, by its nature, a form of power-over, authoritarian power, concentrated and enforced from above. You cannot build a society of mutual flourishing using an instrument designed for domination. The tool reshapes the hand that wields it.

What we actually need is what Sophia Life calls power-with, a relational power that grows alignment through consensual influence. We need to build what organizers call dual power, parallel institutions that meet real human needs directly, outside and alongside the failing system, without asking the failing system for permission. This is much closer to what the Black Panther Party understood when they ran free breakfast programs and community clinics: not a demand made of power, but the direct provision of the thing people needed, which is itself a kind of sovereignty.

Build the alternative until the old system becomes obsolete. Not overthrow, but underthrow, the patient construction of something so much more alive that people simply migrate toward it.

The Solidarity We Can No Longer Postpone

To do any of this, we have to move past the ideologies that were laid out for us, the ones that have kept us fighting each other instead of recognizing our shared condition.

We should be clear-eyed that this division has often been engineered. There is well-documented historical evidence that racialized politics were deployed during the original industrial revolution precisely to prevent solidarity, to pit white workers against black workers, to fracture any coalition before it could form, and so to protect the original titans of industry from the organized power of the people they exploited. The tactic is old, it is documented, and it has worked again and again.

We do not have the luxury of trying and failing, one more time, to build genuine solidarity across these manufactured lines. The stakes are too high and the window too narrow.

But I think the very forces closing that window may also be forcing the solidarity. Consider the shape of the emerging ownership class. It is no longer the diffuse capitalism of a thousand factory owners. It is a small handful of companies that own the means of computation, the AI firms and the surveillance firms, the Thiel companies and the Musk companies, consolidating into what is fairly described as the final authoritarian phase of late-stage capitalism: a techno-authoritarian fusion of private tech power and state power. The data centers proliferating across the country. The increasingly undisguised merger of the tech sector and the government.

And that consolidation is doing something its architects did not intend. It is creating a common antagonist visible from both ends of the political spectrum. People are leaving MAGA as they watch Donald Trump appear in the Epstein files and then move to bury them, derisively labeled as Israel First due to his shameless alignment with the warmongering Greater Israel project. People on the left have been pushing back since 2016 with many more having been radicalized by the genocide in Gaza. And the strange truth is that these far-right and far-left refugees from the official narrative have far more in common than either has with the consolidating center of power. They want the same things. Human dignity. Autonomy. Work that is dignified and that supports a community. A place worth raising children in.

When It Bursts

Something is going to give. The tightening cannot continue indefinitely; constriction always finds its limit. There will be some conflagration, some spark. It might be the data centers, it might be the next escalation of universal surveillance layered on top of the apparatus already in place, the integrated government databases and the Flock cameras already watching. I cannot tell you what the spark will be. I can only tell you that the pressure is real and the rupture is coming.

And when it bursts, it will cleave in one of two directions.

It can cleave toward the totalitarian outcome, the one in which we mount no defense, offer no alternative, and simply succumb to the surveillance state because we never imagined anything else was possible. This is the future that wins by default if our imagination remains captured, if we stay locked in the ideological battles of the twentieth century while the twenty-first is decided without us.

Or it can cleave the other way. We can let go of those inherited struggles, recognize one another across the manufactured divide, and come together around a positive image of the future that does not fit cleanly into any of the old political boxes, because it is not about left or right at all. It is about holistic quality of life and community sovereignty. It is about whether the places we live can become places worth living in.

I believe there’s something fundamental in the human spirit that can rise to this occasion. I can’t prove it. It’s a wager, but it’s the only move that opens any future worth having.

The forces bearing down on us appear inescapable, and in their current form they may well be. But the same pressure that is being used to surveil and control and extract could become the catalyst for a different kind of uprising entirely, one that does not seize the state but renders it irrelevant, that does not overthrow the old world but quietly outgrows it, that throws off the shackles of the last century’s divisions and steps, at last, into the positive imagination of the future.

The solarpunk revolution is inevitable. Not because that future is guaranteed but because the contradictions can no longer hold, the rupture is coming, and on the far side of it lies a choice that the human spirit, I believe, has already made.

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