There’s a person from the solar punk lemmy posting in there about how the american flag stands for freedom and equality for all and I can’t help but cringe at how much they’re not living up to the “punk” part with their bullshit nationalism lmao
An aesthetic that developed from rebellion against unjust hierarchies in society. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
No but like, using “-punk” as a suffix denotes an aesthetic that is based on imagining a society built around a core aspect, generally an energy source. Like, steampunk is all cooper and big buttons, dieselpunk is all dark steel and plastics, and solarpunk is contemporary utopian urban design with a lot of green space
The relationship to the anarchist punk movement is almost nonexistent remote
If I’m not mistaken btw
Edit : it comes from “cyberpunk” which definitely has punk vibes
Yeah, it got its start that way, but at the end of the day, if you picked out 5 self-described punks, you’re liable to get a bunch of really disjointed political beliefs
The punk scene has been divorced from its origins and is mainly just set dressing for a kind of aimless, plaintive rebellion
Not to say that there aren’t any punks out there who aren’t cool, just that like a lot of other movements its been reduced to a commodity
An aesthetic under capitalism is like a culturally distributed type of brand. Punk used to have more common and distinct cultural signifiers, but capitalism forces us to abandon those in favor of aesthetic ones. Aesthetics are easy to recognize, to sell, and to consume. So that’s what survives. This doesn’t change anything about the history of punk and what it used to mean to be punk. It also has a queer history as well as a leftist one.
There is still plenty of DIY underground punk mostly done by leftists and there’s a worldwide network of bands, traveling kids, people operating venues or community centre’s etc. It’s just really underground and inaccessible. Pink belongs to the punks. It still exists, you just aren’t necessarily part of it.
You don’t even need to leave the conventional AmLit canon to make a joke of that many times over. I know that you know this, of course, but other people sometimes benefit from these references being posted.
They’ve always been eager to tell me that the “punk” specifically signifies carryover from the steampunk aesthetic. (e: this was back on reddit.)
They act like this is a defense for why they are such bootlickers, but it seems to me it sounds like they’re telling on themselves.
Cyberpunks should have rioted when steampunk originally appropriated “punk” from cyberpunk in the 80s for aesthetic purposes. Instead we ended up with the world’s richest man fanboying over the biggest cyberpunk release in a decade, which marketed itself with the star power of a murderous-pig lover.
Is this the world we wanted?? We really gotta start stepping up!
Whatever you can say about cyberpunk, for a good chunk af time before becoming mainstream it does advocated for the leftist ideas. While steampunk was always just a bling over XIX century colonialism advocacy brought back from the anus of history to the forefront of internet.
Most compound words with punk as the suffix are super duper not punk. If it’s two separate words it’s probably not poser or nerd shit. Thisbinclude cyberpunk.
This is exactly what I was getting at in this comment when I say that too much of the root dna of “punk” has been removed such that it becomes transformatively different to the point that the -punk suffix no longer applies.
