Envisioning futures: Cyberpunk & Solarpunk
Techno-utopianism may have been born in the Enlightenment. I wasn’t there. But I was there when it was reborn on a stage in 2007.
When Steve Jobs held up a slab of glass and declared the future had arrived, many of us believed that more technology meant more progress. The equation felt obvious: more connectivity, more intelligence, more devices—therefore more human flourishing.
It feels less obvious now.
Quietly, two genres of science fiction have long challenged that assumption: cyberpunk and solarpunk.
Cyberpunk imagines a world where technological capacity outruns ethical development. The cities glow. The networks span the globe. Intelligence is everywhere—synthetic, augmented, embedded. And yet the social fabric collapses. Power concentrates. Progress is equated with acceleration without direction. A techno-libertarian wet-dream, an average person’s nightmare. Total emancipation available for a few credits.
Solarpunk imagines something else entirely. Not a rejection of technology, but a reorientation of it. Technology becomes quieter, more embedded, less extractive. The real transformation is social: cooperation replaces domination, systems are designed for resilience rather than profit, and progress is measured by ecological integration and mutual flourishing rather than output.
“Social development” should not be equated to productivity. It is the evolution of our species toward cooperation and balance rather than exploitation. Toward ethical maturity rather than raw capacity. In that sense, a society may be technologically advanced yet very primitive.
Cyberpunk shows us the endpoint of technological solutionism: when every problem becomes an engineering problem, and none are treated as moral ones. It is not that technology fails. It succeeds spectacularly. What fails is our ability to govern its direction.
Solarpunk is harder to imagine because it requires a leap not in machinery, but in character. It demands that we believe ethical evolution is possible. If we simply extrapolate current trajectories—optimization, extraction, scale. The future looks less like a garden and more like an infinite landfill with Wi-Fi.
Where some see a global village in which even the most remote farmer is connected, others see an expanding layer of digital sediment: servers humming, devices discarded, attention harvested, ecosystems strained by the weight of our networks.
Perhaps the real question is not how advanced our tools will become, but whether our capacity for cooperation will evolve fast enough to deserve them.