Solarpunk, the soul Green IT never had
Green IT gives us the metrics. Solarpunk gives us the reason to care about them. On measurement, motivation, and imagining sustainable tech that looks good.
In 2022, I burned out. I’d been building systems for years, and somewhere in the accumulation of sprints and scaling decisions, I’d lost the thread of why any of it mattered.
What followed was a few Workaway years: strangers’ farms, shared kitchens, and a first-hand experience with permaculture in the south of France. I spent a month learning to read a landscape — water retention, soil biology, the logic of a food forest. And somewhere on that hillside, I started thinking about software differently.
Back online, trying to map permaculture principles onto technology, I kept running into one word: Solarpunk.
What is Solarpunk?
Solarpunk is a speculative fiction movement that imagines technology in harmony with nature — renewable energy, degrowth, community ownership, repair culture. The term emerged from an anonymous blog post around 2008 and spread through Tumblr aesthetics in the 2010s: rooftop gardens, solar panels woven into architecture, cities designed for people rather than cars.
It’s not anti-technology. Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot novellas are a good entry point: small communities, deliberate tech, enough. “What does a sustainable civilisation look like, and can it be beautiful?” That’s the Solarpunk question.
It’s also not naive. It takes the climate crisis seriously enough to imagine surviving it well, rather than just surviving it.
What Green IT gets right — and wrong
Green IT, meanwhile, has been getting measurably better at being measurable. The Green Software Foundation, backed by Google, Microsoft, and Accenture, has produced the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) standard, now an ISO specification (21031:2024). The Sustainable Web Manifesto has nearly 5,000 signatories. The internet, if it were a country, would be the world’s fourth largest polluter. We have the numbers.
What we don’t have is a story.
Green IT is framed as compliance, cost reduction, and risk management. These are legitimate framings. But they don’t inspire anyone to change how they think about building software. They don’t generate culture.
And culture is exactly what the Jevons Paradox demands. As hardware becomes more energy-efficient, consumption rises to fill the gap. More LLM models, more inference, more always-on services. Per-unit efficiency in data centres keeps improving; total consumption keeps climbing anyway. Measurement without motivation isn’t enough.
Where they meet
Solar Protocol is the clearest example I know of Solarpunk applied to the web. It’s a network of solar-powered servers distributed globally. DNS routes each request to whichever node has the most sunlight right now. When battery reserves drop, pages shed their images. When all nodes are depleted, the site goes offline.
A fully functional website that embraces its own limits. Energy is visible, not hidden.
The Sustainable Web Manifesto’s six commitments include two that quietly reach beyond measurement: Honest (no dark patterns, genuine user data control) and Regenerative (supporting economies that benefit people and planet). Those two aren’t about performance budgets. They’re about values. That’s Solarpunk bleeding in.
The practical overlap looks like this:
- Repair culture → software that keeps old hardware useful; APIs that don’t demand the latest client
- Local-first → fewer round-trips, less centralisation, data that lives where the person does
- Open commons → open standards, shared infrastructure, avoiding lock-in
- The “enough” principle → build smaller, do less, better
That last one is the one I return to most. The “humble” Microservice Architecture, for example, solves real problems at real scale. For most projects however, they add infrastructure requirements that don’t pay for themselves. The lean alternative is rarely the flashy choice. It’s just the right one.
A small vote
I didn’t build Novatum because I had a market thesis. I built it because permaculture gave me a framework: observe first, intervene minimally, design for resilience — and I wanted to see what that looked like applied to software consulting.
Green IT gives you the metrics. Solarpunk gives you the reason to care about them. Neither is sufficient alone.
Next time you’re choosing between the bloated dependency and the lean alternative, between the microservice and the monolith, between the always-on service and the one that knows when to rest — consider which future you’re voting for.
The numbers already know the right answer. The question is whether the story does too.