So there are a few topics that came up lately that I think would be nice to discuss with members of this community.
Basically this is part of writing a Code of Conduct for our instance and I think we need to talk about some specific type of posts:
Doomers
Naturally the themes discussed in our communities are attracting a lot of climate doomer comments and I would say we also have a significant number of “recovering doomers” here as community members.
Earlier this week I considered closing the /c/collapse community on SRLPNK, because it is not actively moderated and attracts a lot of these types, even though ex_06 (who asked me to have their account re-activated, but not as an admin) originally intended it to be more of a psychological self-help group for people trying to get to terms with the likely loss of many things that defined their life so far.
While the typical doomer could probably need some psychological support, they are usually still in a stage of grief that makes them lash out and not engage in a constructive exchange how to make the best of the current difficult situation we sadly find ourselves in.
Mostly I have been doing temporary bans for such doomers to cool down and not spread their doom and gloom endlessly in our communities, but I think we need to come up with a common idea how to deal with this better.
Discussing civil disobedience
aka Direct Action or the other man’s “Eco Terrorist” (yeah right…).
Obviously this is a topic many climate activists find themselves more and more confronted with and you might already be involved with a group engaged in such actions of civil disobedience. And lets not forget about the punk in Solarpunk either :)
However, obviously this is a public web-site and thus easily monitored by law-enforcement and other people that might be interested in reporting such discussions to the local authorities. Thus to protect this service and also our users from themselves we can’t really allow planning discussions with specific targets or generally calls for action against specific persons to happen here out in the open (or in the semi-public direct messages).
Obviously, we can never condone violence against persons, but aside from that please be careful with discussing climate activism on the clear-web and rather use fully end to end encrypted means with people you can trust!
However this has obviously a large grey area and people might have stronger views on what should and should not be discussed here.
Absolute Vegans
Vegans are obviously welcome on SLRPNK and I think we can all agree that strongly reducing the consumption of animal products is a worthy goal.
However, there are some very opinionated (online) Vegans / animal rights activists that (intentionally or not) are indistinguishable from trolls and generally very toxic to deal with. Please don’t feel personally attacked by this, but I think we need to come up with something regarding this in our code of conduct.
So these were the three topics I had in my mind lately, but feel free to discuss others as well.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on this!
Hey there. New member, freshly registered.
I would say that the biggest threat to a solarpunk community like this one is greenwashing. More specifically, I’m thinking about techno-solutionism - a devious form of magical thinking that lets us think that tech is going to solve everything.
It is okay to share news about the latest technological advancement, to marvel at the ever lowering price of solar energy. But if it leads people to think that we can just replace fossil with another energy source and keep our societies and economic structures as is, this is toxic.
And I get that if you get enthusiastic about some tech and post it here, but then someone starts raining on your parade in the comment section, that person could easily be disqualified as a doomer.
How can we foster a sane debate about technology in this community ? Honestly I don’t know, but I’m eager to try!
All the best,
Could not agree more! I’m also fairly new. I think the most constructive possible way to do so might be to try to brainstorm how to apply the technology in a non-capitalist (non-statist), mutual aid context? Admittedly, lots of times, that seems far-fetched.
That could be an approach, but as a leftist I would argue that leftist ideologies are not necessarily ecology-friendly. For example the soviet economy was not capitalist but very extractivist and destructive nonetheless.
I like the notion of conviviality as defined by Ivan Illich. A technique is convivial if it serves humankind and not a small elite. It is convivial if I can choose to live without it …
I think the key here is authoritarianism. Authoritarian leftism is not eco-friendly at all.
You have some more right wing ideologies that are eco-friendly like geolibertarianism.
That’s very well put. People tend to cling to the ideas of silver bullets, and that’s, more often than not, detrimental to climate goals and tends to just slow things down.