Hopeful and Just Futures Across Scales: Situated Solar Relations: Rethinking Scale for the Renewable Energy Age / Solar Media Collective, Concordia University, Tio’tia:Ke (Montréal), Canada, May 11, 2023

In the face of global climate destruction and ecological collapse, many have witnessed—and perhaps grown numb to—the repeated failures of governments and industries to organize a meaningful transition toward more sustainable social and economic formations. Against the troubling concern that the "novelty" and "impact" of techno-solutions have lost all meaning, the Solar Media Collective asks who or what dictates the scales at which change is made visible, meaningful, useful, and sustainable. In other words, we ask: where should we look for the hopeful gestures that define our future worlds, and how can we resourcefully resist and model alternative pathways to Big Tech's ever-grander "solutions" to the climate crisis?1 On May 11, 2023, the Solar Media Collective—a student-run research-creation group affiliated with Concordia University in Tio'tia:ke (Montréal)—ran a day-long symposium on the multiscalar dimensions of just and hopeful energy transitions.2 Taking inspiration from the transnational Solar Protocol network's exploration into the techniques and affordances of solar-powered computer networking, we asked how, when, and where social, political, technical, and cultural protocols surrounding renewable energy and the production and disposal of digital technologies can be developed to encourage diverse designs and scales of deployment for sustainable innovations and practices. By exploring these themes through a series of roundtable discussions with invited guests, we attempted to imbue the word "sustainability" with new meaning and reclaim it from corporate optimization rhetoric.Situated Solar Relations: Rethinking Scale for the Renewable Energy Age challenged the sitelessness of large-scale initiatives by asking what might happen if situated solar relations were to become the primary protagonist of research, production, and outreach. Across three roundtables, an interactive workshop, and a showcase of some of our functional prototypes, the symposium addressed creative practices as a mode of future building. Roundtable discussions approached the question of how to build a just solar future through multiple angles: art, literature, and aesthetics; ludic interactions; and social, political, and economic transformations. Rather than taking for granted the principle of "scaling up" that requires sustainability to be replicable and expandable into universal and precise sets of standardized models, we argue instead for the necessity of having (non)scalable, situated, and evolving relationships with the sun.3 In other words, we turn to process rather than product, hope rather than despair, and careful research rather than extractive data practices.Relations of scale are at the heart of these dichotomies. Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky have recently argued that power lies in the way things appear to be "true, natural and good," which is determined and reproduced on a homogeneous scale by specific interest groups.4 Intervening against extractive, energy-intensive, and polluting practices therefore requires multiple contextualized and situated knowledges of the processes at play, which in turn requires an understanding of the scales within which energy and waste-defining relationships occur.5 They write:Scale here is about the specific processes and relationships that matter in a given context. It is not about relative size, nor continuity, but the disjuncture between different sets of relationalities, whether it be at the planetary, governmental, industrial, or molecular levels.7 Power, they explain, is the reproduction of order in one scale (planetary industrial production, for example), while it disrupts order at others (community or molecular processes).8 In order to disentangle these overlapping but incommensurable scales and to counteract the epistemic grip some have over the others, the authors suggest that it is important to find creative ways to defamiliarize waste (and in our case energy), interrupting the reproduction of what is considered the "norm." As such, considering the many situated meanings and practices of energy production, consumption, and wasting implies decentering our analysis from central perspectives. By decentering those systems whose conditions of existence rely on the creation of sacrifice zones, we create space for intervening, and for changing the norm. For us, these spaces are utopian.Few concepts are as maligned as hope. Sustaining hopeful imaginaries of the future amidst the backdrop of the ever-increasing rate of extreme weather events and accelerating rate of extinction, rising inequalities and inflationary pressures, and the growing automation and securitization of state and corporate power apparatuses is easier said than done. Thankfully, artistic, literary, and design practices have carried the torch and sketched out what we refer to here as an aesthetics of hopeful futures, which spans an array of genres from Solarpunk, Hopepunk, and Carepunk to Transfeminist Techno-Imaginaries, Cyborg Aesthetics, and beyond. Our symposium centered these genres' contributions as a way of guiding our technical, economic, and political discussions away from cynicism or "capitalist realism" and toward an iterative, collective imagining of the different scales at which hopeful futures might come to fruition—a way of keeping the future "open" as a "space for imagining, creating, planning, or deliberating" and a new way of conceptualizing sustainability.9When premised on Big Tech's economic imperative, the term "sustainability" threatens to become a buzzword that designates for-profit resource control and management practices that demand an ensemble of data-derived models, measurements, and assessments that are themselves energy-hungry. Sheena Wilson argues that sustainability has become just another way to "sustain capitalism."10 Similarly, echoing long-standing critiques of technological determinism, media scholar Mél Hogan has critiqued the "eternal promise of incremental innovation" that purports to offer rapidly scalable techno-solutions to the problem of species extinction and resource depletion."11 They argue that this so-called partnership with nature indulges corporate growth and perpetuates the logics of consumption, revealing capitalism's profoundly contradictory relationship to nature.12If, as we argue, a shift toward a more sustainable and egalitarian future requires wide-reaching changes to our everyday lives—contrary to the longstanding "business as usual, only cleaner" approach of government and industry's "ecological modernization" and "clean/green growth" discourses—then we need to establish meaningful cultural frameworks for shaping those futures in creative and egalitarian directions.13 In other words, to build a sustainable future, we need a cultural framework or "aesthetics of hope" that helps shift our future imaginaries away from questionable promises of techno-solutions and toward a more democratized set of norms and socioeconomic formations. We need to reimagine our relationships with one another and with the other-than-human, whether biological, chemical, mineral, or machine.While these above-mentioned genres do not in themselves equate to social movements, we contend that the imaginaries and aesthetics they help create and disseminate are key to nourishing sustainable social processes of future- (and utopia-) building. Writing on progressive social movements, Angelika Bammer argues that these groups face difficulties in their ability to sustain "the very principle on which they are predicated, namely the idea of the future as a possibility rather than as a preset goal."14 The ability to treat utopia as a process and not as a predictable endpoint that can simply be achieved before moving onto something new is key to understanding utopia-building as a realistic, actionable stance toward the future. Jill Dolan similarly advocates for "thinking of utopia as processual, as an index to the possible, to the 'what if,' rather than a more restrictive, finite image of the 'what should be.'"15This processual approach was at the heart of our decision to begin the symposium with a roundtable on the collective imagination for climate action, horizons of possibility, and creative modes of intervention. This first roundtable brought together artists, art curators, a local bookstore owner, academics, and Solarpunk podcasters to reflect on Solarpunk imaginaries and speculative fiction, using creativity as a method. Through a series of book recommendations, Montréal's SAGA Bookstore owner Mathieu Lauzon-Disco introduced the audience to Hopepunk, a genre that evokes themes of fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges. Discussions touched on the need for artists, crafters, writers, and those from creative disciplines to be actively included in conversations with (social) scientists, engineers, community organizers, and technologists at all stages of development in order to collaboratively shape the processes of future-building through creative practices, diverse future imaginaries, and simple trial and error—learning from one another along the way while ensuring that meaningful knowledge integrations, cross-cultural perspectives, and principles of care underlie these processes at all times. Doing so not only loosens the grip of self-proclaimed "future experts,"16 corporate/governmental "strategic foresight" analysis,17 and algorithmic prediction/risk mitigation systems18 on the shaping of our collective future but also democratizes future-building and allows for a greater dispersion of "futures literacy" among different individuals and communities.19 This, in our view, would bring sustainability efforts closer in-line with what Laurence Davis calls a "grounded utopia," one that is "rooted in deep respect for the experiences and perspectives of ordinary people."20Utopia is driven by hope. While a "Capital-U" Utopia itself is too narrow a term when used in the sense of an all-encompassing, homogenizing vision of the future—and also fails to account for power and difference (that is to say, from what standpoints is the envisioning process practiced and what gets lost on the way?)—hope can be understood as a principle that underpins day-to-day practices, coalition building, collective action, and the articulation of desires. This approach resonates with Ernst Bloch's idea of a concrete utopia as one that recognizes a range of real possibilities for a material world that is always in a state of process, rather than an abstract utopia that remains in the realm of fantasy.21 What matters here is not wishful but willful thinking—thought informed and supported by ongoing actions directed toward a real possibility of what might become. Hope, then, is action-oriented; it reaffirms struggles for justice and seeks to build a better world across scales.In their proposition of an interdisciplinary notion of "radical hope in revolting times," Mosley et al. argue that there are four pathways along which particularly members of oppressed groups can experience hope, both individually or collectively: (1) understanding the history of oppression and resistance; (2) embracing ancestral pride; (3) envisioning possibilities; and (4) creating meaning and purpose.22 In this conceptualization, hope is thought across time as it is simultaneously tied to past, present, and future.Taking a hopeful approach to uncertain futures is also diametrically opposed to surrendering to climate anxiety. In fact, this approach can even serve as a panacea to the traumatic climate despair in which many of us have grown up. Without wanting to delegitimize the actual panic and fear that many people feel in relation to the new reality of increased rates of extreme weather events and ecological breakdown, it is important to pause and think about the debilitating effects of such anxiety. Sarah Jaquette Ray (2021) notes with discomfort that climate anxiety increasingly converges with white fragility. Now that they're acutely affected, those who are privileged in terms of race and class are suddenly paying attention to the climate crisis; however, tending to anxiety can take up space, time, and resources that would be better spent on concrete work conducted in solidarity with those who are—and have long been—suffering the most from climate breakdown. In Ray's words, "exhaustion, anger, hope—the effects of oppression and resistance are not unique to this climate moment. What is unique is that people who had been insulated from oppression are now waking up to the prospect of their own unlivable future."23This line of thinking resonates with what Kim Q. Hall proposes in reference to "queer crip feminist eco-futures": embracing hope for imagining a future that is not only inhabitable and livable, but also radically inclusive.24 Hall writes,Circling back to the symposium, our roundtables looked beyond the "large" or "small" scale alternatives of sustainability frameworks, engaging with perspectives from science, industry, and community organizations to highlight actual ongoing efforts to minimize the impacts of extractive and industrial processes. Situated Solar Relations explored the democratic potential of tinkering and experimenting with materials and building technical literacy as hopeful future-oriented actions, rather than accepting black-boxed technologies presented as "solutions" on their own.One roundtable focused on building solar relations and developing energy and waste system transitions at different scales. The discussion foregrounded what different scales of meaningful sustainable action might look like, asking questions about challenges and possibilities in light of institutional and structural constraints. The day's discussions progressed from imagining the future of critical energy and waste research to exploring the need to find new definitions for energy itself. We also interrogated the modalities of data collection with respect to designing more sustainable production and waste management practices.Local, community-based initiatives are central to this work. In another roundtable, Kara Stone shared her Solar Server project, a solar-powered web server made to host ephemeral, low-carbon videogames that invite us to reconsider the environmental cost of entertainment.26 Stone and the other panelists reminded us that games, much like art and literature, can also drive energy justice transitions and instantiate a more equally distributed world. Participants not only addressed transformative thematics, they also acknowledged the emergence of modified (or modded) hardware that resists the culture of waste, disposability, and planned obsolescence. As panelists argued, modded hardware reclaims older consoles, slowing us down in an age of constant rapid technological advancement.More than simply talking about these projects, we also come into these conversations having begun this work ourselves. After a series of learning-by-doing workshops facilitated by Solar Media Collective member lee wilkins at the Milieux Institute's markerspace, we set up our own low-tech, solar-powered server which we now use to engage the public in discussion about energy futures. On the streets of downtown Montréal or at the Open Hardware Summit, interested passersby can connect their own device to a local area network (LAN) and access a low-power text-based game called "Life of a Solar Panel," which is stored on a Raspberry Pi computer.27 Through its spontaneous "pop-up" style appearance, the server and the game foster community-building around shared conversations about climate, technology, energy, and most importantly, desired solar futures. While these projects operate on a small scale, they serve as a hopeful proof-of-concept for a radical rethinking of networked interaction.If utopia's goal is merely to imagine an end to climate breakdown, then we can certainly indulge in daydreams that every new technological "innovation" is the answer to the world's many problems. But, if the goal is to create a better world through the forward-looking transformation of the present, then we require clear principles of justice for the many, not the privileged few.28 We need designs that center the wellbeing of those affected by climate change and technologies, while also being able to reject proprietary technological fixes as false solutions (as the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies reminded us at the symposium's workshop, "not all tech shall exist").29 And we need each other. In José Esteban Muñoz words, "concrete utopias can also be daydream-like, but they are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many."30