Lunarpunk

Description

Paul J. Dylan-Ennis:

"Lunarpunk also pre-exists its Web3 form, but in a much more obscure and niche sense as a mystical brand of solarpunk. It was also very nature-oriented, but a little more pagan and witchy. Think psy-trance festival in a small college town. I have not been able to uncover any substantive politics associated with pre-Web3 lunarpunk.

The lunarpunk critique of solarpunk first bubbled up in privacy advocate, DarkFi developer and CoinDesk alumna Rachel-Rose O’Leary’s quasi-manifesto “Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle,” which put forward her radical, lunarpunk ideology.

O’Leary presents solarpunk as the naive sibling, who means well but lacks the rugged life experience of the lunarpunk adventurer, who has seen the enemy up close. Meanwhile, back at home, their hippie friend has spent his summer blissfully listening to techno on a terrace in some sun-kissed European city (possibly Barcelona). They have probably joined a decentralized autonomous organization.

...

The deeper critique is that solarpunk contains inherently statist tendencies and impulses that are dangerous. The idea here is that the solarpunk interest in building Web3 identity-based systems is intrinsically statist because it follows the Western rationalist logic of Gestell – slowly turning people into documented stock, controllable with bureaucracy.

O’Leary also contrasts solarpunk with the more solemn work lunarpunks are doing in preparation for an oncoming privacy war by building an anonymity-preserving blockchain called DarkFi. This war felt theoretical until recently, but has taken on a greater seriousness since the Tornado Cash sanction by the U.S. Treasury Department.

Lunarpunks see crypto’s clashes with the state as inevitable. O’Leary contrasts this with solarpunks’ denial about this conflict and desire to ignore the ultimate bearish scenario where retail and venture capitalists flee at first sight of the state’s ugly side. Underlying all this is the idea that the solarpunks, with their taste for transparent systems-building, will have effectively built their own prison."

(https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/09/20/what-are-solarpunk-and-lunarpunk-anyway/?)