The Future Will Be Built Quietly
So step away from the noise
I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.
The future won’t be saved by billionaires. It won’t be burned down by nihilists either.
It won’t arrive in a keynote, a startup deck, or a last-minute miracle. And it won’t look like the glossy renders we’ve been sold—cities of glass and frictionless abundance, humming along while someone else does the thinking.
If anything, the future—the real one—will be built quietly.
By people who opted out early.
By people who learned to live well with less.
By people who stopped confusing speed with progress, scale with care, and growth with health.
This isn’t a manifesto for dropping out of society. It’s a refusal to keep pretending that the default trajectory makes sense.
We Were Promised a Future. We Got a Treadmill.
Most of us feel it now, even if we don’t yet have language for it.
We’re surrounded by tools designed to save time, yet time feels scarcer than ever. We’re promised convenience, yet our lives feel more brittle. We’re told this is the best system imaginable, while quietly absorbing the message that exhaustion is the price of admission.
The dominant story says the future belongs to:
Bigger systems
Faster growth
Smarter algorithms
Fewer hands, more control
But at the edges—away from the spotlight—a different imagination has been forming.
Not a single movement. Not a brand. More like a constellation.
Solarpunk. Lunarpunk. Glitch. Straight edge. Degrowth. Low-tech. Care ethics. Repair culture.
None of these fully agree with one another. But they all share a refusal of the same lie: that the way we’re living now is the only way forward.
Solarpunk: Refusing Doom
Solarpunk starts with a dangerous idea: optimism.
Not the empty optimism of “everything will work out,” but the stubborn kind—the belief that humans can still choose to build systems that serve life rather than extract from it.
Solarpunk imagines:
Energy that’s local and renewable
Food grown close to where people live
Tools that can be repaired, not replaced
Communities that share instead of hoard
It’s not anti-technology. It’s anti-careless technology.
What matters isn’t whether something is high-tech or low-tech, but whether it deepens dependency—or builds resilience.
Solarpunk says: We don’t need permission to live well together.
Glitch: Refusing the Smooth Lie
If solarpunk is the garden, glitch is the cracked pavement where weeds break through.
Glitch culture doesn’t trust systems that look too clean. It understands that seamlessness often hides extraction, surveillance, and control.
Where the official future is frictionless, glitch insists on friction. Where platforms optimize, glitch interrupts. Where power smooths over harm, glitch exposes the seams.
This isn’t chaos for chaos’ sake. It’s a form of literacy.
Glitch says: If the system looks perfect, look closer.
Lunarpunk: Refusing the Colonization of the Inner World
Then there’s the quieter rebellion—the one that happens at night.
Lunarpunk pushes back against productivity culture, against the idea that every moment must be optimized, monetized, or shared.
It values:
Rest
Ritual
Slowness
Emotional intelligence
Care work
Not everything worth doing scales. Not everything meaningful needs metrics.
Lunarpunk reminds us that no external system can be healed if the inner one remains exhausted and hollow.
Straight Edge, Reimagined: Refusing Excess as Identity
I’ve been thinking a lot about “straight edge” lately—not as subculture cosplay, but as a modern ethical stance.
Not:
No fun
No pleasure
No joy
But:
No exploitation
No debt slavery
No numbing ourselves to survive a system we secretly hate
Clarity becomes an act of resistance. Attention becomes a commons to protect. The body becomes something to steward, not burn through.
Discipline stops being punishment and starts becoming freedom.
Low-Tech Isn’t Backward. It’s Durable.
One of the quiet threads tying all of this together is a renewed respect for appropriate technology.
Not the newest thing. The right thing.
Tools that:
Can be fixed without specialists
Fail gracefully instead of catastrophically
Serve human rhythms instead of replacing them
A sailboat instead of a floating data center. A notebook instead of an attention machine. A tool you understand over one that understands you.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s systems thinking.
Complexity without resilience collapses. Every time.
What Emerges When You Put This Together
This isn’t about joining a subculture. It’s about synthesizing a way of living.
A life that:
Builds small, durable systems instead of chasing scale
Centers care over control
Values beauty, but not spectacle
Chooses enough over more
Refuses despair without pretending everything is fine
The future won’t look dramatic when it arrives. It won’t announce itself.
It will look like people growing food, fixing things, teaching their kids real skills, sharing tools, resting when tired, and saying no to things that once felt inevitable.
It will be built by people who remembered that living well is not a luxury—it’s a responsibility.
Quietly. Patiently. Together.
Teague, you just renewed my hope for the future. ❤️