“Smaller, cuter, weirder, fluttery”: Filtered for the #Breezepunk Future

I’m stealing Matt Webb’s “filtered for” format here – for a bunch of more or less loosely connected items that I want to post, associate and log as much for myself as to share.

And – I’ll admit – to remove the friction from posting something without having a strong thread or thesis to connect them.

I’ve pre-ordered “No miracles needed” by Mark Jacobson – which I’m looking forward to reading in February. Found out about it through this Guardian post a week or so ago.

The good news below from Simon Evans seems to support Prof Jacobson’s hypothesis…

Breezepunk has been knocking around in my head since Tobias mentioned it on this podcast…

Here’s the transcript of the video (transcribed by machine, of course) of Tobias describing the invention by scientists/engineers at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore – of a very small scale, low power way of harnessing wind energy:

“I found this sort of approach really interesting but mostly I like the small scale of it yes I like the fact that it’s you know it’s something that you could imagine just proliferating as a standard component that’s attached to sort of Street Furniture or things around the house or whatever it is you might put them on your windowsill because they’re quite small and they just generate like enough power to make a sensor work or a light or something and yeah it’s this this alternative future to the big powerful set piece green Energy Future that’s obviously being pushed and should continue to be pushed because that’s competing against the big Power and the fossil fuel future but I like this idea of like the smaller cuter weirder fluttery imagine it’s quite fluttery yeah so yeah so this is this is Breeze Punk everybody…”

I like the idea of it being a standard component – a lego. A breezeblock?

Breezepunk breezeblock?

My sketching went from something initially much more like a bug hotel or one of those bricks that bees are meant to nest in, there’s something like a fractal Unite D’Habitation happening in the final sketch.

I also like #Breezepunk a lot – very Chobani Cinematic Universe.

I would like it to become… a thing. I suppose that’s why I’m writing this.

Used to be how you made things become things.

It’s probably not how you do it now, you need a much larger coordinated cultural footprint across various short-form streaming formats to make a dent in the embedding space of the LLMs.

Mind you, that’s not the same as making it ‘real’ or even ‘realish’ now is it.

A bit vogue-ish perhaps, to prove a point I asked ChatGPT what it knew about Breezepunk.

It took a while, but… it tried to turn into the altogether less satisfying “windpunk”

I like making the cursor blink on ChatGPT.

The longer the better. I think it means you’re onto something.

Or maybe that’s just my Bartle-type showing again.

The production design of the recent adaptation of William Gibson’s The Peripheral seemed “fluttery” – particularly in it’s depiction of the post-jackpot London timeline.

Or perhaps the aesthetic is much more one of ‘filigree‘.

There’s heaviness and lightness being expressed as power by the various factions in their architecture, fashion, gadgets.

It’s an overt expression of that power being wielded via nanotechnology – assemblers, disassemblers constructing and deconstructing huge edifices at will.

From Vincenzo Natali’s concept art for The Peripheral series

Solid melting into air.

Into the breeze.

Punk.

2 thoughts on ““Smaller, cuter, weirder, fluttery”: Filtered for the #Breezepunk Future

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.