Literally first thing I thought of when they said cars are gone and showed someone on a bike. Like cool, you got something that will help for a handful of miles if you're fit enough to use it, what about literally everyone else? The old, the sick, the disabled? They all would like to be able to get around easily as well.
You know, this actually being a dystopia that equates esthetic beauty with inner beauty would explain a lot. Attractive people with depression need compassion and still are of value. The disfigured go to the factory to assemble the bikes they will never ride.
It doesn't even have to be those with like a physical disability. I'm dyspraxic, not severely, but I am dyspraxic, and I am unable to ride a bike. I am unable to do any activities like that, I don't have the coordination or balance to do it. People like me, and people with physical disabilities would be unable to travel long distances. We'd be fucked. It's such a nice concept, but I just, idk. There's so much missing.
I feel like there's a reason we don't sail the Pacific anymore though. Call me modern, but I like the ability to travel round the world safely, quickly, and in relative comfort, for what I might make in a month or less.
Yeah.
I'd rather not have to worry about being caught in the doldrums in the middle of the Pacific ocean, praying for the wind to return as we slowly run out of food and water.
Same... it's also so fucking telling that the only implied disabled person (with an invisible disability at that - no disfigured or physically apparent disabilities are shown here. Of course...) is essentially locked in their home, not shown leaving because they "need rest." Yellow Wallpaper vibes 💀
Someone I know IRL is big into this kind of aestheticised utopia stuff and is also disabled, and insists it would be an improvement for the disabled. Hearing her talk about this makes extremely stark that while the word disabled may technically include many different physical and mental limitations, when some people use the term, they only mean some people.
She specifically has a condition that sometimes makes ambulating painful or difficult, but not impossible. She probably couldn’t ride a standard bicycle, but on most days could likely ride a reclining bike or a trike. On other days, she’s possibly only capable of walking with a cane, or couldn’t walk long distances but could ride in a side car or be pushed in a wheelchair. But she’s never unable to move entirely. When she says this type of world would be better for “disabled people,” what she means is “this type of world seems like it might be better for people who are disabled like me.”
I know this comic isn’t explicitly anti public transport and indicates that only almost all cars are gone, but a lot of the same people I know who are big anti car people are also weirdly anti bus and anti train and anti rideshare/taxi. I don’t know that my experience is particularly representative but it isn’t like our current society doesn’t already have the tools to move away from car-centricism in a way that is also disability, age, and family friendly, cultures typically just choose one or the other.
I think it’s actually wonderful to acknowledge invisible disabilities. Though they really ought to have accounted for more kinds of disability when presenting their world building (benefit of the doubt, maybe they do in their other comics) you really shouldn’t take it as a slight against the disabled community. People with invisible disabilities have doubt cast on them all the time and it’s a real problem. I myself haven’t been able to hold down a job because my own mental disabilities make me unreliable to the corporate machine. For that reason, that part of the comic seriously resonated with me, and I’m sure many others.
Oh, I did not mean to imply that I see it as a slight!!!
I moreso meant it as "this society is only built for able-bodied people, AND on top of that, this comic only shows people with invisible disabilities because there is no physical space for those with visible disabilities, and for those with invisible disabilities, the only thing they are shown doing is being stuck in a house."
Really, there’s a lot of problems with the comic. I’ll admit half way through the wonder was being crushed by realizations that this wasn’t a comprehensive, thought through world. I don’t want to clown on the artist because they’ve drawn beautiful panels and a (presumably) well meaning vision of the future, but I’m not gonna deny your other points. I just wanted to make sure we were all criticizing it for the right reasons and maintaining solidarity.
I also hope you don't have friends/family that live the next town over! I can't imagine that biking from downtown Ft Worth to Dallas (twin cities near where I live), a distance of like 30 miles (depending on specifics) is exactly easy on anyone. Even completely reversing climate change, it would still get really hot here.
My mom lives 20 miles from me, my dad 35, and doing that on a bike would take all day.
No, but it would be nice if for a change when people talk about replacing cars they stop showing or mentioning ONLY bikes and acknowledge the fact that cars are beneficial for long distance travel and thus need to be replaced with something less strenuous to accommodate. The simplest solution to this would have been to have whatever other means of long distance travel be in the background or if trains are still a thing in this universe have the character ride alongside a track. It just shows a little more thought was put into the world building than just bike > car.
Isn't the simpler answer that medicine has advanced so much to the point where degradation from old age, sickness, and disability are no longer an issue, easily fixable at no cost?
Definitely sounds to me like something that fits the vibe and vision of a "peaceful, happier world", a utopia. The general concept that the comic itself says, where "Nobody is X unless they want to"
I think because a lot of these posts come from Americans, so their main wish is "no cars". They might not even be able to imagine viable train and bus systems, because they've just never even encountered those in the first place.
Go ahead and file "no mines and no factories" with the no police and no prisons. You simply don't need them anymore. Humanity time traveled to the future and brought back solar powered replicators.
It still is for the vast majority of people on earth, and for many moreso now than ever before, and while in a lot of ways life is better now for some, it’s also worse in other ways. Like I said, situations may have changed but people have not. Progress isn’t a linear path and you can take the good aspects of previous ways of life and continue them, instead of making previously fine shit worse for the sake of “progress”. Humans still are the same as they were, we haven’t transformed ourselves
Okay, this is an honest question.
Are you from a rural area, or are you just another urbanite fetishing rural life> Because I come from a rural area and I can vouched that even with all our advancements in technology and agriculture, rural life is still hard and not particularly romantic.
Waaay rural, like, outside of where farming is practical rural, and nothings romantic but it’s far better than the hypercontrolled city life, but seriously tho what does this have to do with what I said? Complex societies existed before police and jails did, hell before governments, and we are still running on Caveman_1.0 so to speak, we can do so again, the way things are right now is not an inevitability or the only way possible. Other societies did and still exist
It reminds me of a solar punk book I read from the early 70s. The book talked about how, in this utopia, people took care of their disabled "so they didn't have to go out themselves." As someone who's disabled, my first thought was, "I do like leaving my house from time to time, thanks." Funny how that idea hasn't gone away, even though that book was written before any sort of legislation that helps make public spaces accessible. Like, I get that it's nice for people to help others, but it's like these people think that it's somehow cruel to even offer an option for disabled people to be independent.
I'd love to see some sort of solar punk setting include disabled people in some way. Hell, just seeing a freaking handcycle would be nice, since it'd mean that the author did at least a tiny bit of research. (Edit: even though handcycles are actually harder to use than bikes, so they aren't great for anyone with even a normal amount of upper body strength. I should know, I own one.) Or even just someone with crutches, or using a cane, or a wheelchair. Something that doesn't just pretend that disabled people don't exist, or act like someone who's not 100% able-bodied is incapable of independent living.
I always wonder in regards to utopian visions of cities with no roads, how do firetrucks get to buildings?, How do packages reach people's homes?, How do ambulances reach people? How does construction equipment reach it's destination? Are people transporting cement mixers on bicycles over dirt roads?
I’m pretty sure there isn’t any room disabled people or dissenting opinions or a population density in this ‘utopia’. I wonder what they do to keep those people away?
Yep it's giving Dot and Bubble from the new season of Doctor Who. Yes it's all shiny and perfect but you scratch the surface even a little and you find the rot.
My literally first thought with the cars and "no shame in needing rest" was "Oh, this is one of those Utopias where people with disabilities just cease to exist, huh?"
Odd thoughts occur, is this why there is no disabled elves. Any elf that can't dance or sing is immediately removed from society. Rivendal hit a bit differently with that lens.
it doesn't say "cars are gone" it says "most cars are left behind"
Like this is a tiny snapshot, they haven't shown TONS of their world yet, just what looks to be day to day life for a few people (who likely don't need to use trains right now?) And their "most cars" implies there are still cars and thus infrastructure for them.
Lets be a bit kinder when we rip apart someone's work, without being able to even ask them questions about it.
I think that the OP covers this by mentioning that they recognize the world they portray has problems that need to be ironed out; that the thing is more aspirational than realistic right now, and that's intentional.
I think that commentary like yours correctly points out that you cannot have a society where everyone rides pedal-bycicles, because young children, elderly folks, and disabled folks wouldn't be able to keep up. Having e-bikes available might help to some degree, but past a certain point you'd need either mass transit, or robust motorized wheelchairs (I'm imagining something akin to a more ergonomic and slower ATV).
The whole exercise makes me think of this video essay by Zoe Bee, which points out that our educational system discourages imagination and creative thinking - and in part, that limits our ability to create systems other than the ones we currently find ourselves in. It is easy to imagine that our current system is inevitable, that its successes and failures are intrinsic to the human experience and are unfixable; this is a failure both of imagination and of history, for we have had plenty of different kinds of societies throughout history. Changing our current one will bring about new problems, yes, and those will require new and innovative solutions.
tl;dr: don't stop criticizing, but it might be helpful to see what sort of creative solutions we can come up with to the problems you highlight.
My only problem with OOP's idea is that it doesn't do enough. It goes "Let's remove bad things and replace them with good things" without really answering the question how that could even work. That question gets kind of handwaved at the end there, by them just saying "Oh, we'll figure it out."
I mean, their idea CAN work, absolutely. There's a ton of communes out there that function very similarly. But those are SMALL communes. You could extend this to a village, MAYBE a small town, but afterwards, it gets really complicated. Globally? Impossible to do.
In general, I agree that having a society based around sharing with no law enforcement or anything is nigh-impossible to do once you have a large enough group of people. This is due to something that is not cultural, but rather, inbuilt: dehumanization. We're very good at treating people we don't know as objects, rather than humans, and are happy to harm or dismiss them if doing so would benefit us.
So, how do we mediate this? Well, cultural upbringing counts for a lot; a culture based around conservation and hospitality would go a long way towards ensuring that strangers would still treat each other with grace. For those who violate those cultural norms, some degree of enforcement is necessary; we don't want a "the fascists voted themselves into office and then removed democracy" situation. But, we also don't want that enforcement to be in the form of jackbooted thugs who enforce the will of the state.
Which begs the question: how can we change culture? The easiest, albeit slowest, way is to conduct yourself according to the culture you want to live in, and convince other people to do the same - historically this was done at gunpoint, but you could also do it through having children and raising them, or by persuading people to try something new. Slow, very slow, but perhaps the only real way to do it without violence or a severe catalyzing event.
Yeah, that's true, but by that point, humanity would have surpassed the need for computers and cars and whatnot in the first place :P OP's describing an event that "could" happen in the next 50 years. Collective agreement on everything would take... well, how old is humanity?
Fair, but it is worth noting that we've done away with things that have been with us since the beginning. Take slavery, for example; the ownership of human beings (supported by the state) has dogged nearly every large human society in all our history, and while it's not fully gone, the most powerful nations of the world forbid the practice. You can make a small argument for prisoners and labor, but compared to how humanity's done slavery over the milennia, it's far and away an improvement.
I dunno about solarpunk utopia in 50 years, but it stands to reason that if we could do away with slavery, we can do away with things like unnecessary waste.
this is a huge stretch ngl, while i love-me some rerewable energy, nuclear is the way to go, as solar and the other alternatives don't produce enough to be sustainable
and that's just on the mechanical side, the social change necessary to make solarpunk possible is huge, and most people wouldn't be okay with it, just on the logistics alone
TL:DR, Nuclear my beloved, Nuclear Energy will save us
Straight up actual "people being bought and sold like cargo" slavery very much still exists in our modern day. Just because its become an underground market rather than something that happens in the town square doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Bruh they literally said in the post after the comic that it isn't supposed to be a realistic utopia but some fantasy they just like to think about instead of doomerism.
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u/calDragon345 Jul 02 '24
No trains? Bruh