I like to use the analogy of dreaming and painting when I think about movements.

The painter

The painter wants to communicate with himself or an audience through a language culture. The language culture is the medium in which something is communicated. Languages has strengths and weaknesses based on what is deemed as important by the language users. Based on the language culture, some ideas will be easier to communicate, whilst other ideas will be harder. The language culture is what set’s the framing before an idea is being shaped.

Particularily we can say that the architect has a different language culture than a farmer. Their awareness is different. So if you have the language culture of the architect, you can paint something that the farmer might not able able to fully appreciate.

In a farement context, we can say that the language culture is democratic confederalism or solar punk.

The painter has an idea which is the cloud, and expresses something in the given language culture. Using the juggling language culture, one can say “doing a windmill while doing siteswap 531”. The cloud is an abstract idea that the painter want to realize.

The cloud in democratic confederalism could be “mining away asphalt to give space for gardening” or “collaborative work”.

From the cloud we can sketch the structure. With juggling it would be to get the conceptual understand the internal workings of a “windmill while doing siteswap 531”. With “mining away asphalt to give space for gardeninig”, it would be understanding how to do it safely, with as little conflict as possible. Sketching is the skeleton which we can put meat upon.

After sketching comes painting which is where we take all the research and describes a story that takes in all the elements. With “mining away the asphalt to give space for gardening” it would be do perhaps, make a short story of how the neighborhood came to concent about mining up majority of the asphalt to plant valuable foods.

Dream

Dreaming is like painting. You start from a language culture, make a cloud, sketch and paint. By working on all steps, we make distant utopias become real in our heads.

In particular, it is the painting process that makes stuff feel real. It is when we can read books or watch movies in vivid details and realism, that it feels real.

The thing about dreams is that the bigger and more vivid they are, the more people are going to feel invested in them. It shows that somebody put in the effort in making something they believed in, or at least that’s what it seems like.

Dragments and dreaming

A dragment is the attempt to drag a dream into reality. It is to realize a dream.

It’s easier to drag vivid dreams into reality, because then it has become reality in our minds. It’s like taking a painting and saying: “I want my town to be like this”. And then coordinate with neighbors about the vision.

Analysis of cyberpunk

We can see this in cyberpunk. A lot of people has invested louds of time painting a future where humans and technology goes together. Some are utopias and some are distopias, but they agree that this is the future. They paint cyberpunk wonders, and changes how we interact with society. Their worlds are painted forth in details such that their world feels real.

By making it real in our heads, technology companies can use these stories to drag elements of them into reality.

Cyberpunk can therefore be described as a dragment.

Analysis of Solarpunk

When we see beautiful towns filled with small scale energy production, gardening, childrens playing, a sailboat in the distance, we can’t help but feel like we want to be there.

By doing this, we sow a seed into somebodies head, that it is possible to move away from the machine, because how else would that town exist?

dream drag analogy

The dream drag analogy makes us appreciate the role of culture in dragging for a better future.