Hi, I’m working on a collection of resources to make writing solarpunk and other aspirational fiction easier. The idea is to put together premade chunks of writer-level research and collections of solarpunk ideas and links on different topics that might come up in worldbuilding.
If you want to see the other pages (which tend to be more link-heavy) you can find them here:
Someone on Mastodon asked if we had a page on how work would change in solarpunk settings and it’s a topic I have some thoughts on so I put a draft together.
The current draft of the page on work is here:
wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:solarpunk_work
Basically what I’d like to know is what does your ideal outcome look like? If we were able to start fixing things today and never stop, what does work in this future look like to you? I’ve written up my version but if I’ve missed something or gotten something wrong I’d very much like to know.
If there is anything you’d recommend I read or include, I’d love to check it out.
At the very least I can promise I’ll try to show your ideas well in my own fiction, but hopefully this resource will spread them a little further into stories that inspire others.
rowinxavier@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Think about what people who don’t have to work now do and apply it, or alternatively think about what people do in their down time.
My partner paints and does various other types of art. They are disabled and we live in Australia so they have a support payment, meaning they don’t have to work for money. They have made some awesome art that I really love and they do it because they want to. There is no time pressure, not external motivation, it is purely intrinsic motivation that drives their behaviour.
I on the other hand have done a bunch of different jobs in which I have made things like in IT where I put together servers and replaced aging infrastructure. The stress of the external time pressures and so on took away a good fraction of the joy of it. In my home lab I have some cool things I have played around with and I genuinely enjoy them, but that is my own stuff with my own money and time, so the joy is there in full.
If I were considering how things would happen in a solar punk future it would not be jobs, it would not be something you are incentivised to do, it would be something you do because you want to, so hours would likely be less and you would likely have multiple fairly different things. I personally would probably cook, garden, care for kids and disabled people, do cool stuff with computers, and learn about genetic engineering and associated cool science stuff. None of those would be 40+ hours a week, but I would have periods of getting stuck into a project and spending a lot of time for a couple of weeks on one thing while reducing the time for the rest.
This all rides on automation taking care of most of the labour requiring tasks. I would still cook because I enjoy it, even though a machine could do it just as well with no effort from me. I would learn about things out of interest, not utility.
lucullus@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
In some solarpunk shortstories, that I read with a bookclub recently, there are still kinda jobs. Probably there will always be some undesired things to be done by humans (too complicated or too resource intensive to automate). Basically the stories (I think it was in “Halfway to better” by Susan Kaye Quinn) outlined two kinds of jobs:
These stories have a heavy focus on achieving things for the community as a whole. Work both as self expression and service to others. That sounds quite appealing to me. It shows a way for a highly technologised society, without going the monopolised power route of Cyberpunk.
Adjacent to that: In “Always coming home” by Le Guin the outlined society (which is more of the low tech variant of Solarpunk) has a nice quirk. The people choose their profession and the results that you produce are yours. But being rich has a totally different meaning for them. Only the one, who gives much of his or her overproduction to the community (through communal resource fund for example) is considered rich (connotated positively from both the individual and communal side). The one who, who hoards is considered poor. So there are still jobs, and the society absolutely expects you to work. Though because everyone is contributing according to their abilities to communal life and funds, nobody suffers due to inability to work.
JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
The community chores category is really interesting! Do you remember what kinds of work would fall into that? Or have any in mind?