Hopeful and Just Futures Across Scale

In the face of global climate destruction and ecological collapse, many have witnessed—and perhaps grown numb to—the repeated failures of governments and industries to organize a meaningful transition toward more sustainable social and economic formations. Against the troubling concern that the "novelty" and "impact" of techno-solutions have lost all meaning, the Solar Media Collective asks who or what dictates the scales at which change is made visible, meaningful, useful, and sustainable. In other words, we ask: where should we look for the hopeful gestures that define our future worlds, and how can we resourcefully resist and model alternative pathways to Big Tech's ever-grander "solutions" to the climate crisis? ¹On May 11, 2023, the Solar Media Collective—a student-run research-creation group affiliated with Concordia University in Tio'tia:ke (Montréal)—ran a day-long symposium on the multiscalar dimensions of just and hopeful energy transitions. ²Taking inspiration from the transnational Solar Protocol network's exploration into the techniques and affordances of solar-powered computer networking, we asked how, when, and where social, political, technical, and cultural protocols surrounding renewable energy and the production and disposal of digital technologies can be developed to encourage diverse designs and scales of deployment for sustainable innovations and practices. By exploring these themes through a series of roundtable discussions with invited guests, we attempted to imbue the word "sustainability" with new meaning and reclaim it from corporate optimization rhetoric.

Situated Solar Relations: Rethinking Scale for the Renewable Energy Agechallenged the sitelessness of large-scale initiatives by asking what might happen if situatedsolar relations were to become the primary protagonist of research, production, and outreach. Across three roundtables, an interactive workshop, and a showcase of some of our functional prototypes, the symposium addressed creative practices as a mode of future building. Roundtable discussions approached the question of how to build a just solar future through multiple angles: art, literature, and aesthetics; ludic interactions; and social, political, and economic transformations. Rather than taking for granted the principle of "scaling up" that requires sustainability to be replicable and expandable into universal and precise sets of standardized models, we argue instead for the necessity of having (non)scalable, situated, and evolving relationships with the sun. ³In other words, we turn to process rather than product, hope rather than despair, and careful research rather than extractive data practices.

Relations of scale are at the heart of these dichotomies. Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky have recently argued that power lies in the way things appear to be "true, natural and good," which is determined and reproduced on a homogeneous scale by specific interest groups. ⁴Intervening against extractive, energy-intensive, and polluting practices therefore requires multiple contextualized and situated knowledges of the processes at play, which in turn requires an understanding of the scales within which energy and waste-defining relationships occur. ⁵They write:

Problems arise when one situated way of knowing disavows its context, becomes dominant to the exclusion of other ways of knowing, or thinks it accounts for all forms of discards. The effect of such monolithic approaches to knowledge can be termed "scalar mismatch," where one instance is taken to be the whole phenomenon, or where one perspective is assumed to work in all cases. ⁶

Scale here is about the specific processes and relationships that matter in a given context. It is not about relative size, nor continuity, but the disjuncture between different sets of relationalities, whether it be at the planetary, governmental, industrial, or molecular levels. ⁷Power, they explain, is the reproduction of order in one scale (planetary industrial production, for example), while it disrupts order at others (community or molecular processes). ⁸In order to disentangle these overlapping but incommensurable scales and to counteract the epistemic grip some have over the others, the authors suggest that it is important to find creative ways...