wp.md

1. Whigpunk is to whig-ness (i.e., the belief in the improvability of humans’ material conditions) as cyberpunk is to cyber. It’s not for, it’s not against, it’s not inside, it’s not outside. It’s the observation of the friction and turbulence where the idea touches the world.

2. Two people who disagree about what whigpunk is and means can both be doing whigpunk. Whigpunk itself is not an explicit macropolitical stance. That said,

3. The tension in whigpunk that gives it power is about the idea of progress, and therefore time and ethics. Whigpunk is a home-on-the-road for people who have had the technoutopianism/Luddism/solutionism/legibility arguments many times without finding a comfortable conclusion.

4. One path to whigpunk is to think about the fine textures of big uncool things. Epcot is embarrassing because it’s infused with a naïve and colonialist vision; to contemplate the epiphenomena and physicality of Epcot is whigpunk.

5. Whigpunk today codes male. One angle of this is that it’s interested in the connection between white-collar ideas and blue-collar implementations, and the culturally visible people in white- and blue-collar jobs are men. In this way, there’s a certain amount of boys-playing-with-dumptrucks in the whigpunk scene. But the fact that washing machines changed politics by giving women more free time is whigpunk, Björk’s Post is whigpunk, My Little Pony is whigpunk, and Creation Under Capitalism is maybe The Whigpunkest Thing, broken images and all.

6. Whigpunk can be connected with trainspotting, with the New Aesthetic, with dataviz, with the present renaissance of person-scale urbanism, and with many other things. Whigpunk is apart in that (1) it’s not really bound in time; going down to the harbor to watch the ships unload is equally whigpunk whether it happens in 1650 or 2050, and (2) it’s inherently silly.