#solarpunk clothes
i also see a lot of solarpunks like “sew all your own clothes! factories are bad!”
i don’t get why a factory that runs entirely off solar power would be bad. factories are what allow us to make plenty of food for our population, clothe our entire population, etc. the means of production isn’t necessarily evil. thats not to say it doesnt need to be rethought but seriously, your theoretical solarpunk societies tend to have absolutely no means of production.
just get rid of emissions and make packaging more eco-friendly (check out these cool biodegradable packaging concepts, for example)
zero-emission solar factories for solarpunk is good.
maybe reducing the amount of factories for things like clothes is good (to maybe help revitalize the garment industry and create more jobs?) but… still…Clothes mostly aren’t made mechanically in factories – they’re made in sweatshops, because handling fabric and thread is still beyond our ability to mechanize affordably.
The question of where clothes should come from is a super complicated one, and definitely deserves a lot of sophisticated attention. But at our current technological level, mechanized factories aren’t an option.
Another issue with factories is that mass production of uniform parts is inherently wasteful: T-shirts that come in 5 sizes produced in enough surplus to always be available means we always make more T-shirts than are actually needed, that virtually all T-shirts use a bit more fabric than is needed, and because all T-shirts are slightly mis-fit, they wear poorly and need to be replaced more often than tailored clothes would be.
Making your own clothes isn’t necessarily always an option either: it’s a huge investment of time, and while it doesn’t take a huge amount of skill to make better clothes than you can get off the rack, it’s still a non-trivial investment in experimentation and learning.
I recommend Charles Stross’s blog post “The revolution will not be hand-stitched,” for an in-depth exploration of possibilities for a future of mechanized clothing construction. But on shorter timescales the answer to “How do we stop relying so heavily on sweatshops” has to be, at least in part, “Make some of our own clothes or make clothes within the community.”
Theoretical solarpunk societies usually trend, not toward “no means of production” as you put it, but toward distributed means of production: gift economies, widespread 3D printing, skillshares, etc. A lot of stuff either already doesn’t, or won’t for much longer, need to be industrialized: for example, anything made of plastic that can afford to be wrong on the scale of micrometers. (Think Command Hooks.) Or anything that can be produced in small batches given known chemical processes. (Think the sticky parts of Command Hooks.) As long as the amount of time it takes to make something is equal to or less than the length of time it would take to order it on Amazon Prime, we mostly don’t need to already have thousands of them on shelves in stores all across the country.
Centralized factories also mean environmental costs for transporting goods. It’s possible for this to be the most environmentally economical approach, but under the current circumstances, it never is: trucks and planes emit a lot of carbon, and trucking does a lot of long-term damage to our infrastructure. Whenever something’s manufactured in small batches in walking distance of the place it’s needed, we save on that.
Factories are a solution to the problem of providing sufficient resources given limitations that are less and less relevant: custom machines are less and less necessary, specialized knowledge is less and less specialized, and we become aware of new reasons just about every day that generalized solutions to individual life problems are often harmful as much as they’re helpful.
We likely couldn’t have gotten to where we are globally without factories. That means both things like the internet (which I’m strongly in favor of) and things like global climate change (which is, like, the opposite of the internet in terms of how I feel about things). Whether we should or shouldn’t have done all the stuff that’s already happened is a moot point, but we can choose to find better ways to solve the problems that we’ve solved in crude, generalized ways in the past.
