Technofeudalism and Integrated Capabilities
Defining the Solarpunk Self, Part 19
Also available on YouTube and Spotify.
Recap:
The purpose of this series of essays is to create a map to guide you toward your own definition of the solarpunk self. While each essay is written to stand on its own, together they constitute a full picture that is important to see in its entirety. As with all of my essays, I apply theory to my own life and experience, but I end the essay with principles for application to your own situation. So, if you like this essay, which is the nineteenth, then consider starting at the beginning with Solarpunk Selves and Sexual Ethics.
To help orient you, understand that solarpunk societies require solarpunk selves who can create them. Such selves must be understood as relational, or created out of their relations with others. According to Anderson, Levinas and Beauvoir separately believed that sexual relations are exemplary of the ethical.1 As such, if we want to understand what the solarpunk self is, we can use sexual relations as a case study for defining the solarpunk self through developing sexual citizenship. Hirsch and Khan define the sexual citizen as one capable of sexual self-determination and of respecting the same in others.2 This will obviously make the most sense if you’ve seen the entire picture, but you’ll get a hang on things with this essay.
Essay:
In essay 18, we discussed how caring people create caring cultures that create caring institutions that create caring people and cultures. In this essay I want to focus more on the purpose of caring cultures and some of the obstacles that currently exist.
Vervaeke has made the point that the person-making function of culture is that we are taught to face up to the reality of the culture we find ourselves in.3 Rather than person-making function, I will instead be referring to [citizen]-making. To be a person is to have been afforded specific rights to self-determination within your society. To be a citizen, is to have the capability to exercise that self-determination and to respect the same in others within a particular domain. In a healthy society, we’re all persons, but we cannot all be citizens in every domain.
Think about it. What does it mean to exercise self-determination in the politics of fracking when I know absolutely nothing about that?
I may have the right to self-determine in the sense that I can engage in debates, vote for policies and politicians, etc., etc., but if I know nothing about that topic, I cannot really respect the right of another to self-determine. If I ignorantly vote for a policy that destroys a distant town’s water supply, then I have robbed those people of self-determination without necessarily affecting my own. That’s why liquid democracy is one idea for preserving citizenship, where I delegate my voting rights on a specific topic to a person I trust to have the education to exercise my citizenship.4
Obviously liquid democracy is a very deep topic, but a limitation relevant to us here is in whether or not I or the person I delegate to have the care necessary to truly consider the rights to self-determination of those distantly affected by some decision. This is clearly why we want a caring enough culture that is centered on fellowship between different kinds of citizens. Vervaeke and I may have slightly different meanings of fellowship, but he claims that fellowship is an incredible force for [citizen]-making.3
Freinacht’s fellowship, or Gemeinschaft, is the cultivation of care and camaraderie with others, be them close family members, friends, acquaintances in communities like Church, co-workers, or strangers.5
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vervaeke claims our society is unable to perform its [citizen]-making function because we’re more concerned with making a small number of people hyper-rich.3 In their three separate books, Stein, Kershner, and Brown all discuss how the education system works to essentially make us better cogs in the machine of capitalism.6,7,8 Effectively, our education is no longer about making good people, but about making good money. Where in that can be found even a trace of fellowship for its own sake?
Clearly these discussions raise important questions to consider when it comes to fellowship and citizenship. If I can’t care about the lives of people simply because they live in a distant town, then my capability to be ethical is tantamount to an infant who needs keys jangled in their face to pay attention.
We can see very clearly how important the capability to care is when it comes to citizenship as self-determination and respecting the right of the same in others. As with that infant, we have to understand how the emergence of new capabilities works. The emergence of walking is an example of how integrated complexity can open up a new worldspace. Let’s unpack that statement.
An infant who cannot walk still has the abdominal strength to hold themselves upright, they have the ability to coordinate their limbs enough to crawl around, and if held above a treadmill, they can move their legs as if they were walking on their own. All of these complex capabilities are available for an infant, but their inability to walk is due to a lack of integration. They can’t do all of them at the same time in a coordinated fashion well enough to actually walk. Once they’re integrated the infant can walk.
Once the infant can walk, they open up an entirely new worldspace, meaning that the world is suddenly different due to this new way of participating in the world. A crawling infant is confined to a certain environment given how their crawling limits their access to that environment.
Let’s use an obstacle course as an analogy. This obstacle course is clearly inaccessible to a crawling infant, but even to the walking toddler and to many adults. It takes a certain level of skill with a certain set of capabilities in order for a person to have access to obstacle courses as a specific kind of worldspace. It takes walking, running, jumping, climbing, crawling, and a whole host of other athletic capabilities that are only possible once walking is a possibility. In other words, the capability of walking was the first step in opening up a range of capabilities that gave a person greater and greater access to the new worldspace of obstacle courses.
Reality is composed of many kinds of obstacle courses. The new capabilities that we attain in our development as a citizen determine our access to those obstacle courses, to the worldspaces. Incredibly however, is to think about how our capabilities don’t merely give us access to worldspaces that already exist. They also give us access to the creation of entirely new worldspaces that shape our capabilities.
For example, if a specific obstacle course is centered on jumping and ducking, then that obstacle course is going to train the integration of those very different capabilities. At first, we suck because we’re so busy preparing for and recovering from a jump that we don’t duck in time to the oncoming object. With time however, we integrate the skill at jumping and then immediately ducking well enough that the obstacle course is not only winnable, but not challenging enough to interest us.
Similarly, the worldspaces of society force us to develop skill in certain capabilities and then integrate those capabilities in a way that can limit other capabilities. Consider the infant who is a master of crawling relative to the adult who can walk far better than any infant, but is absolutely abysmal at crawling. The new capability of walking depended on the coordination of limbs that the infant learned while mastering crawling, but once the infant could walk, crawling is quickly left behind.
Due to the structure of modern society, walking is simply more effective than crawling. Many adults who walk well find it difficult to crawl. So, point being, the shape of a worldspace can cripple a once mastered capability simply because it isn’t necessary.
Let’s move to the worldspace of technofeudalist capitalism, the integrated capabilities it demands, and the crippled capabilities that are left behind merely because they aren’t effective or acceptable within the worldspace.9
Firstly though, the idea of “technofeudalism” is very important, and one that is undertheorized in this essay. I hope to go deeper into that after this series, but understanding technofeudalist subjectivity is definitely a worthwhile pursuit if any of you would like to take that up on your own.
In such a worldspace we are motivated to become ruggedly individualistic, agentic in terms of pursuing our own self-interested goals, hyper-rational in exclusion of emotions, and uncaring of how our success creates negative externalities on other people and communities. We’re also forced to become aggressively hyper-competitive, and obsessed with wealth as a means of access to images of the good-life offered in media owned by the already wealthy who profit most off of the average person’s obsession with wealth and materialistic status icons.8,10
That’s merely a surface level taste of the variety of capabilities that are required to achieve success within such an environment. Again, think about how these capabilities are forced into a highly integrated state given how this obstacle course trains us to use them together. Think about how, just like with the integration of several capabilities for walking, these capabilities open us to a new worldspace. Think, finally, about how these integrated capabilities limit the kind of world we can imagine or create.11
Ideologies such as Red Pill misuse evolutionary psychology to justify these integrated capabilities as the natural way of things. It’s simply our genetic destiny to be hyper-competitive, opportunistic status seekers, and, given that, it is also our genetic destiny to live in dominator hierarchies based on wealth-accrual.
From this perspective, how could we ever even envision something like solarpunk with its focus on egalitarianism? That seems impossible for human beings with genetics such as ours, and yet we’re completely blind to how our understanding of our evolutionary heritage is limited by how we’ve been shaped by the worldspace we find ourselves in.
Obviously I don’t want to strawman evolutionary psychology. It is, ironically, Red Pill who are justifying their worldview with a strawman of evopsych.12,13,14 However, the point that’s important to recognize is that none of these capabilities are unnatural. Evolution has made us capable of becoming hyper-competitive just as it made us capable of learning how to walk.
If we were trapped in caves that were a few feet in height than most of us would never learn to walk because we’d never need to. What we can’t do is use evopsych research on such humans in such an environment as justification for the inevitability of those capabilities. That analogy may seem ridiculous. No human in such a situation could make such a mistake. Yet, that’s exactly what we do in our own society.
Evolution has given us the capability to develop such integrated capabilities, but it has also given us many other capabilities that could be integrated and developed in a new worldspace, such as cross-cultural care and egalitarianism. This new worldspace would also limit and constrain the very capabilities that make technofeudalism possible.
While this may all seem so radically idealistic as to be impossible, we have to remember how radically idealistic our current society seems to people alive only 200 hundred years ago.6 Take a moment to look around you and see what the world actually looks like. We have a school system that educates nearly every child. We have medical, transportation, communication, agricultural, and economic infrastructure the likes of which no other civilization has ever seen. We’ve gone to the moon and have created AI that can generate lifelike videos.
Like holy fuck. That’s insane. That’s incredible.
What’s far more fantastical than envisioning solarpunk is imagining that the best we can do for humanity is what we’re currently doing. That speaks to a deeply misanthropic ideal for humans to aspire to.15 Can we not do better? This is what we’ll continue to explore in the next essay, Social Status and Creepy Men (link will be added).
Principles for Application:
1. Each essay I write has this section. Sometimes multiple essays’ will build on each other, other times they’ll be self-contained. In previous essays you’ve selected some domain of citizenship, be it sexual relations and masculinity as I did, your own gender, a previous or current religious affiliation, a political party, or anything you find intrinsically interesting. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk in the domain of your interest.
2. In your domain of citizenship, what capabilities are necessary? Do you have these capabilities?
3. Brainstorm ways you can develop those capabilities.
4. Consider the capabilities that your domain limits. How has your domain actually prevented you from developing citizenship in other domains or even in the domain itself?
Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
References:
1 – Anderson, E. (2019). From Existential Alterity to Ethical Reciprocity: Beauvoir?s Alternative to Levinas. Continental Philosophy Review, 52(2), 171–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9459-3
2 – Hirsch, J. S., & Khan, S. (2020). Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. WW Norton.
3 – John Vervaeke’s Lectern (Director). (2023, June 9). After Socrates: Episode 24 - Why This? Why Now? [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNuwBQUzctM
4 – Liquid democracy. (2026). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Liquid_democracy&oldid=1335097205
5 – Freinacht, H. (2019). Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two. Metamoderna ApS.
6 – Stein, Z. (2019). Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society. Bright Alliance.
7 – Kershner, B. (2021). Understanding Educational Complexity: Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st Century Leadership. Brill.
8 – Brown, W. (2017). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books.
9 – Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House.
10 – O’Neill, R. (2018). Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy. Polity.
11 – Fisher, M. (2022). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zer0 Books.
12 – Alexander. “Rollo Tomassi vs Evolutionary Psychology - Date Psychology,” July 23, 2024. https://datepsychology.com/rollo-tomassi-vs-evolutionary-psychology/.
13 – Bachaud, Louis, and Sarah E. Johns. “The Use and Misuse of Evolutionary Psychology in Online Manosphere Communities: The Case of Female Mating Strategies.” Evolutionary Human Sciences 5 (August 30, 2023): e28. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2023.22.
14 – Botto, Matteo, and Lucas and Gottzén. “Swallowing and Spitting out the Red Pill: Young Men, Vulnerability, and Radicalization Pathways in the Manosphere.” Journal of Gender Studies 33, no. 5 (July 3, 2024): 596–608. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2023.2260318.
15 – Lakoff, G. (20). Philosophy In The Flesh. Basic Books.