The doomscroll
It’s a Tuesday night in 2025 and someone is sitting in their kitchen at 11:47 PM scrolling through cyberpunk aesthetic videos on TikTok. Neon Tokyo skylines. Rain on chrome. Disposable bodies. Megacorporations that run governments. A girl with cybernetic eyes selling kidneys for noodles. The videos are gorgeous and they all communicate the same thing: the future is a horror show but at least it’s a stylish horror show. The viewer has been scrolling for 90 minutes and feels something specific that the algorithm wants them to feel, which is “this is what’s coming and there’s nothing you can do.” They put the phone down. They feel worse.
Across the same internet, on a different feed, someone else is scrolling through solarpunk illustrator portfolios. Lush vertical gardens climbing art-nouveau buildings. Wind turbines as kinetic sculptures. Bikes and trams and gondolas. Children playing in pollinator gardens with public food forests in the background. The viewer feels something different: this is a future I would actually want to live in.
Two genres, two aesthetics, two futures. Both are imaginative bets on what the next forty years look like. They are not equally true. They are not equally likely. But they’re both available, which is the whole point.
What cyberpunk represented
Cyberpunk crystallized in the early 1980s in works by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and the broader Mirrorshades anthology. The future it imagined: corporations run everything. The state has hollowed out into a contract enforcer for capital. Technology is invasive, ubiquitous, and serves the powerful. Streets are dirty and dangerous. The protagonists are hackers, mercenaries, and outcasts — people working the system from the cracks because the system has no real legitimate ladder anyone can climb anymore.
This was a prescient genre. The 1980s and 90s did not actually become Blade Runner, but a lot of the trajectory cyberpunk identified came true: corporate dominance, surveillance capitalism, the gig economy, the security state, the privatization of public infrastructure, the use of “innovation” as cover for extraction. Cyberpunk’s “warning” function was real. The genre saw something and said it loudly enough to land.
What solarpunk represents
Solarpunk crystallized in the 2010s (the term coined 2008, the aesthetic exploding around 2014). The future it imagines: humans have figured out how to live within ecological limits. Renewable energy and biological abundance are normal. The commons matter again. Local communities have meaningful agency. Technology serves life rather than capital. Beauty is non-negotiable.
Solarpunk is not a “warning genre” the way cyberpunk was. It’s a “permission genre.” It says: this future is possible, you are allowed to imagine it, you are allowed to want it, you are allowed to build toward it. The political work of solarpunk is to refuse the inevitability narrative that cyberpunk accidentally helped install.
The philosophical difference
The two genres disagree about three things:
What technology is for. Cyberpunk: tech serves capital, surveils citizens, enables extraction. Solarpunk: tech serves life, enables commons, distributes power. Same technologies appear in both — AI, biotech, networks, automation — with very different ownership structures and uses.
Who has agency. Cyberpunk: small groups of hackers and outsiders work the cracks of a system they can’t change. Solarpunk: communities collectively build alternatives, often locally, sometimes globally federated. Power is participatory rather than evaded.
What “punk” means. Both genres claim punk in their names. Cyberpunk’s punk is reactive — resisting an overwhelming system. Solarpunk’s punk is constructive — building the alternative, not just resisting the dominant. Both are punk; they’re different operations.
The aesthetic difference
Cyberpunk visual vocabulary: night, neon, rain, chrome, density, vertical megacities, smog, body modification, asymmetric loud fashion, isolation. Color palette: black, neon pink, electric blue, sodium-vapor orange. Mood: lonely, anxious, sublime.
Solarpunk visual vocabulary: golden hour, plants, water, art nouveau curves, vernacular materials, integrated public spaces, communal gatherings, transit, layered green. Color palette: green, gold, terracotta, sky blue, warm earth tones. Mood: bright, communal, abundant.
Neither is just an aesthetic. Each visual language carries political content. Cyberpunk’s chrome-and-neon palette argues for the inevitability of techno-capitalism. Solarpunk’s plants-and-gold palette argues for the possibility of plenty.
Why both genres mattered when they did
Cyberpunk arrived just as the Reagan-Thatcher economic order was crystallizing. Its warning landed for a generation watching the welfare state get dismantled and corporate power consolidate. Cyberpunk did the imaginative work of describing what that trajectory would feel like 30 years later. People listened.
Solarpunk is arriving just as the climate crisis is becoming undeniable and as the failures of growth-driven capitalism become impossible to ignore. Its task is to do for the 2020s and 2030s what cyberpunk did for the 1980s and 1990s: give people a vocabulary to imagine a different future. Whether it succeeds depends partly on the genre, mostly on the broader political and ecological circumstances. But its function is the same: imagination as preparation.
Why we need solarpunk now
The cultural absence of plausible positive futures is itself a political problem. If every imagined tomorrow is either bleakly dystopian (cyberpunk) or smug corporate greenwashing (“clean coal” branding), the future people actually fight for will be one of those two. Solarpunk is trying to fill the gap — not by pretending the climate crisis isn’t real, but by imagining what it looks like to work through it.
The future is being chosen now, daily, in policy decisions, in infrastructure investments, in cultural attitudes, in books and films and videos people consume. The future is not on rails. There is no inevitable cyberpunk and no inevitable solarpunk. There is a contest, in real time, over which vision people can imagine vividly enough to fight for. Both genres are fictional. Both fictions affect what gets built.
FAQs
Can you like both genres aesthetically?
Of course. Most solarpunks grew up loving cyberpunk and still love its visual energy. The criticism is structural, not aesthetic.
Is cyberpunk inherently right-wing or capitalist?
No. Many cyberpunk authors were leftist (Gibson is no fan of corporate power). The genre’s politics are critical of corporate dominance, not endorsing it. The criticism is that cyberpunk’s structure (small protagonists working the cracks of overwhelming systems) doesn’t model collective change.
Is solarpunk just naive?
Some critics argue yes. Better solarpunk writers (KSR, Le Guin, Doctorow) include real conflict, real scarcity, real political struggle. The genre at its weakest can be wish-fulfillment; at its strongest it’s serious political imagination.
What about steampunk? Dieselpunk?
Adjacent aesthetic genres rooted in alternative histories rather than near futures. Less politically loaded than solarpunk or cyberpunk.
Is there hopepunk?
Coined by Alexandra Rowland in 2017 as a broader umbrella for optimistic-but-not-naive genre fiction. Overlaps with solarpunk; less specifically environmental.
Can solarpunk and cyberpunk coexist in the same story?
Yes — some of the most interesting recent fiction sits at the intersection, exploring what happens when commons-based, ecologically-sane communities exist inside or beside corporate dystopias. Walkaway (Doctorow) is a good example.
The landing
The cyberpunk doomscroll viewer and the solarpunk illustrator viewer are looking at the same internet on the same Tuesday night. They are also choosing, in some small way, which future they’re going to spend their attention on, which future they’ll mention to friends, which future they’ll see in their dreams. Imagination is not destiny. But it’s a primary input to destiny. Solarpunk is not predicting the future; it’s making sure a particular future is imaginable enough to be possible. The opposite genre had its turn doing the same thing for a different decade. This one is ours. Pick a future. Imagine it vividly. Then build it.