I think a bunch of cottagecore creators have talked about how the fantasy is the cottagecore life but without the labour. Add to the idea that the aesthetics come straight from America during slavery (or Europe when the rich had servants), and there’s a pretty straight line between cottage core and who is mysteriously supposed to be doing this labour. At the very least, the idea of cosplaying rural life while servants actually do the labour has been part of the fabric of cottagecore.

Having said that, it’s an aesthetic (unlike Solarpunk which is meant to be a movement), and there are plenty of folk who are into the aesthetic and just like knitting and so on.

Cottagecore -> what if my entire life was based around routines of dainty activities, while the help does all the hard labor?

Yes. Its a fantasy of (specifically white) privilege, with style cues/motifs.

From the wikipage:

In British English, the term cottage typically denotes a small, cosy building. During English Feudalism, cottages housed cotters (peasant labourers), who served their manorial lord.[6] The term now describes many kinds of small houses of rustic or traditional style.

Cottagecore is a fantasy of being the wife of an American plantation owner, (or I guess maybe a single/unmarried girlboss plantation owner) but with the setting transposed to England, where the required slavery/servitude to make this any kind of plausible has a slightly less ugly veneer of class or posh or whatnot over it.

None of it works without an inherently brutal class structure.

Its the Disneyification of being a plantation owner.

Its literally laughably obviously a power/status fantasy escapism. Its barely any different from ‘I wish I was an actual princess.’

You wouldn’t have had one person living in an actual cottage, you’d have had 8-12, they’d be cotters, and they’d be doing 12 to 16 hours of manual labor a day.

Cottagecore is where the lord and lady downsize from their nearby manor, move into one of the cottages of their serfs, because it is more quaint! … and then the cotters I guess just sleep in tents outside of the cottage or are otherwise invisible or are ghosts that can till the fields or something.

Its a nostalgia that then gentrifies that nostalgia’s version of a low income neighborhood.

Again, it is hilarious how un self aware one has to be somehow not notice the amount of privilege this all just presumes.

This is what happens when elitist white liberal women try to imagine an idealized living -> they completely disregard the labor and power relations of material reality, and invent a remixed version of plantations, with all the ugly parts ignored or denied, and then spend most of the time focusing on making up basically performative etiquettes to define the lifestyle.

I am so fucking sick of Tumblrinas.

That’s a flawed comparison, we’re scientiffically far more advanced now, i dontthink it would be that big of a setback. We’d only change the way society operates. And if you complement the renewable technologies and fossils as bridge technologies correctly, the setback would be little /manageable.

The vast majority of human history operated 100% renewable.

I think that depends on what you mean by history and what you mean by renewable. There is evidence that prehistoric civilizations caused lasting effects on the world around us, from mass extinction events caused from human expansion (see North American megafauna), including extinction of our closest cousins (other lines of homo sapiens, and other species of the homo genus), whenever our settlements encountered theirs.

Once agriculture came on the scene, ancient civilizations were modifying the land, domesticating animals, developing pottery and tools and making use of both renewable and non-renewable resources. With the rise of the bronze age, mining and other permanent resource extraction became the norm.

Plenty of what these ancient civilizations were doing were not sustainable or renewable. Almost every ancient civilization caused deforestation soon after developing agriculture. Plenty of societies relied on mining in an unsustainable way, exhausting the forests of fuel.

So if we’re starting with “history” being human civilization and settlements in the neolithic era, I don’t think that’s quite right. Even if you’re only talking prehistoric homo sapiens, there’s still evidence that we caused mass extinctions before we developed agriculture.

Of course, we did allow for a lot of reforestation, replenishment, and other rehabilitation of the land at times, but often that was not by choice of humans. Disease, war, natural disaster, and famine could cause major population collapse in a way that caused settlements to be abandoned, but that isn’t really what people mean by a renewable practice.

100%. You need a lot less raw material when you design things to be durable, repairable, interchangeable, and recyclable.

Couple that with combating the “everyone needs to personally own everything they want to use” notion that leads to overconsumption. Loads of things can just work through formal or informal libraries, e.g., no one needs to personally own a carpet cleaner; better to share a really nice one than have dozens of crappy ones in circulation.

They want to feel alive by always being near potential death. Because modern life is so unfulfilling, they want to create a world that basically cannot possibly be unfulfilling - managing to exist in it at all is a remarkable accomplishment.

They also accept death. Only in death do they have a name. Death is part of what they want, they want it to be always near, and when it actually strikes, this is an essentially holy event.

Thats not an aesthetic. An aesthetic is something you can take off, and put on a different one.

This is an ideology.

Utilitarianism is part of the ideology, but its ancillary, just a logical way of playing the game they want to play with death.

Taken at face value, the goal isn’t to be mischievious reprobates… that is the means chosen to achieve the ends.

The end they are working toward actually is the destruction of civilization.

Remember how the movie ends?

They blow up a bunch of buildings with a bunch of computers that have a ton of important bank records… in the 90s, you didnt have ‘the cloud’, having extensive offsite backups and physically distinct fallback clusters wasn’t unheard of, but it was much more rare than it is nowadays, less robust.

And, there are apparently Mayhem cells in many different cities around the country, possibly international.

If you interpret the story as… those buildings really did get blown up… that is a pretty credible step toward punching a hole in the finance system that underpins modern civilization.

What I’m trying to say is that I think they’re actually serious, they’re not cosplaying. Like, the Unabomber would be proud, maybe.

Its like if Aum Shinrikyo had happened in the US, in the 90s, with a different kind of cult ideology, but… these people are carrying out acts, toward a definable end goal, even if the means seem poorly thought out or unlikely to work.

They’re not primarily trying to survive. The whole point is that… the world they’re from, surviving is pointless, offers nothing real, the experiences are mundane and hollow.

The whole point is to change the world to make survival itself more challenging, more unforgiving, thus each moment of it is more rewarding, more stimulating, more satisfying. Doesn’t matter that there might be overall less of those moments, what matters is the less numerous moments mean more, feel like more.

Its really a kind of hedonism, actually. A masochistic and also de facto sadistic hedonism, a great reverence for struggle and pain and loss, that they want to be able to drown in and not be able to escape from.

… You have to assume that basically most of the story is just fully hallucinated, for it to only be cosplaying. If half of the shit described and depicted actually does happen, and it very much seems to because it happens to other characters and affects the world… yeah, the people following Tyler/Jack are literally willing to kill him to continue the plan if he reneges on it himself.

Even if Tyler/Jack dies, those other guys don’t, and they’re true believers, fanatics.

It’s a theory for now, we still gitta find proofs that it does radiosynthesis but we are sure that the fungus benefits from the radiation for sure tho (all other forms of life die at those levels of radiation, so the fungus has no predators to worry about)