A heuristic for how freedom-friendly your urbanism aesthetic is:

If you draw an image of a city with your urbanism aesthetic, and then replace a random building with a McDonalds, how much worse does it become?

Lunarpunk clearly beats solarpunk on this dimension.

As cinematic aesthetic sure, but for utopian ideals no. Solarpunk/hopepunk is an intentional exploration of humanity where things get better, not worse. A McDonalds has no place in many people’s ideas of utopian futures.

Is capitalist brand friendliness more free? It depends on what who we’re freeing to do what.

building the new web things. mono-koto.com

I generally oppose any ideology whose vision of a good future is one where the quantity of a bad thing is reduced to exactly zero.

If the vision isn't robust to imperfections then it ends up being authoritarian even if the original intentions are beautiful.

I personally want one bad thing: a suffering child in a dank basement in Omelas.

Builder of things. Dir of Product Research @ Polygon; x: Flow, Augur;

Yes, I can actually write code.

Hint: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas