Dear dreamers and builders,
At Agartha, we’re on a mission to build a better world. But this song is a personal reminder of how beautiful things already are.
Since Nico and I first teamed up, we’ve grappled with balancing the BIG vision of a global Solarpunk society and the small practical steps required to get there. We’ve experimented, learned, and adapted time and again. Yet through the stumbles, epiphanies, and pivots… our core thesis, problem statement, mission, and principles that guide us remain consistent.
Below is the latest version of our manifesto. It encapsulates our purpose and deepest commitment to our community and the world at large. We know this vision will continue to evolve as we move forward with each small step. We hope it resonates, and perhaps inspires you to see things from a new perspective.
Want to make a difference, join forces, or just let us know your feedback? Please share in the comments!
Our mission is to accelerate the transition to a Solarpunk future by empowering a global network of builders.
Solarpunk is a technological and social movement. A vision, ethos, and aesthetic that poses a radical question: “What if the future is actually beautiful?”. It is an optimistic and creative form of rebellion, depicting a future where humans live in harmony with nature, technology, community, and spirituality.
Learn more about Agartha’s specific flavor of Solarpunk →
Our modern society is caught in an unsustainable, destructive loop: where many brilliant creators are subtly incentivized towards building and using extractive systems.
Underpinning this loop is a system design that produces exceptional economic returns at the cost of net planetary loss. This has contributed to a “Metacrisis“ among which we observe four failures:
The Incentive Failure: High-agency people are incentivized to pursue excessive status, power, and wealth. These are zero-sum games which result in an extractive social & economic system rather than planetary balance.
The Narrative Failure: A limiting set of underlying beliefs frames the situation as unsolvable, too costly, or the only way it’s meant to work. This limits possibility and discourages innovation.
The Coordination Failure: Mission-oriented builders are scattered, dispersed, and uncoordinated, leaving them disadvantaged against unaccountable totalitarian regimes, capitalist oligarchies, and centrally controlled / misaligned technologies.
The Ecological Failure: Our economic systems and technology have been designed and misused in ways that are accelerating ecological destruction and social decline.
How can we transition to a new societal system design? Who will build it?
There are countless people working on solutions to the metacrisis: regenerative agriculture, open-source hardware, aligned AI, community land trusts, sovereign coordination tools. The list of potential interventions is endless.
Agartha serves an emerging class of mobile, mission-oriented builders who are underserved by traditional housing, retreats, conferences, and accelerators.
Yet these Solarpunk builders encounter the same three problems:
They can’t find the right method. Launching any business is hard. Doing so while trying to create omni-win solutions in non-extractive ways, re-define how society operates with integrity, and stay economically viable is A LOT harder!
They don’t belong anywhere. Building against the grain is isolating. It’s a specific kind of hurt when people can’t understand to your ideas, reject your vision, or categorize you as naive. Conferences can feel sterile and transactional. Accelerators can feel extractive and homogenizing. Their hometown thinks they’re strange. There’s no room where they’re the normal one with similar values.
They can’t find the right collaborators. They need a co-founder, an engineer, a community builder, a mentor, the right strategic partners, someone who’s already solved this exact problem, their first customer, an investor. Where are they? How can they build trust with them?
The planetary problem is why the work matters. The human problem is what we want to solve.
Agartha works at the intersection of these challenges.
We can’t redesign civilization directly. We can build the conditions where Solarpunk builders can:
Live well balanced, healthy lives in cozy, loving homes
Connect deeply with value-aligned creators
Receive relevant and impactful mentorship, funding, and support
Solving the metacrisis requires thousands of viable, ethical, and scalable innovations that foster planetary regeneration.
A network of high-agency, compassionate, emotionally mature, collaborative builders is the highest leverage mechanism to accelerate this scale of innovation.
We can maximize the probability of success for each of these solutions by incubating them within ethical frameworks, high-trust relationships, inspiring environments, and a heart-centered culture.
Planetary Regeneration
Decentralized scaled composting
Regenerative local agriculture
Permaculture design practices
Resilient and decentralized food systems
Clean and abundant energy
Water purification
Waste removal / land renewal
Natural climate technology
Ethical Technology
Privacy focused and self-sovereign AI & robotics
Decentralized governance and cooperation systems
Open Source and Ethical Frameworks for software / hardware development
New micro-economies & abundance protocols
Any solutions that reduce reliance on centralized, authoritarian systems
Loving Community
Education: STEAM + Humanities, History, Philosophy
Parenting
Caretaking
Matchmaking
Intergenerational co-living
New economic models that promote community living, arts, and music
Spiritual Growth
Holistic wellness (Physical, Mental, Emotional, Spiritual)
Intentional Community Gatherings
Personal Growth
Cultural transformation
Consciousness research and embodiment
Agartha is focused on three key activities in order to cultivate the global Solarpunk network.
We host builder residencies and retreats: co-living and co-working with an intentionally curated crew. We hand-pick Solarpunk spaces: local organic food, easy access to nature, holistic health facilities (eg sauna, gym), maker’s spaces.
Our lifestyle is part of the curriculum: Default healthy. Loving and unhurried. Intellectually alive. Creatively vibrant. Regenerating the ecosystem as we go. Unashamedly fun. Safe and open-ended, letting genius emerge.
This is how trust forms at impossible speed, collaborations multiply, and projects take off.
The first step to rewriting the rules of society is reframing what’s possible. Solarpunk is a cultural movement, and movements begin with a story people can live inside of. Every real change started this way: someone names the problem, offers a solution, and enough people come to believe it. Belief is what turns energy into action: speaking out, stepping up, building, collaborating.
So we tell the story. We produce art that builds worlds, sparks the imagination, and inspires hope. We write essays on the Solarpunk solutions alive today. We curate a map of the permaculture villages, regenerative city spaces, and intentional land projects. We report from inside them with journalism from the ground and podcasts with the builders themselves.
But we also create the story that YOU get to live inside of! We curate immersive playful experiences and co-living homes, where you get to embody what it means to live a Solarpunk dream.
This is how possibility becomes visible, people wake up, and a tidal wave forms.
Check out the first episode of our podcast here →
We envision a globe filled with beautiful, interconnected points of light: a network of Solarpunk homes. Nodes where builders land, live, experiment, and build real businesses. Some we’ll own, most will be partners whose values resonate.
This network resembles the natural functions of mycelium: resilient threads, shared resources, interoperable work. One sophisticated yet elegant living organism. Each node in the network functions as a living lab: intentional co-living homes that double as R&D spaces.
This is where everything takes root.
Scale the proven residency model, with a rhythm of residencies, builder retreats, and year-round online cohorts that keep momentum between gatherings. A sustainable mechanism that continuously drives recruitment and networking.
Owning one place converts operational costs cost into an asset and gives the community a permanent address: a co-living hub, an event venue, and a working demonstration of what we claim is possible.
See the vision for our Solarpunk HQ →
Partner homes first, under revenue-share and certification: network reach without capital outlay. Owned homes only where our own events have already proven demand. Agartha membership ties it together, vouched members with access to any home in the network.
Dense, rotating populations of builders produce companies as a byproduct of living and working together. When something shows real demand, it incorporates and raises on its own. We hold founder-friendly rights and open those rounds to the people who backed us.
We are pragmatic dreamers. We get shit done, and recognize that progress requires incremental, grounded steps. We are constantly iterating and upgrading so we get closer to the target. And we keep in mind of those ambitious, audacious, but achievable goals as our north star.
Success is Redefined as the symbiotic flourishing of all sentient beings, not just the accumulation of capital.
Brilliant Creators are Realigned. We provide the safety, love, and values-aligned containers necessary for the world’s most capable creators to work on what matters.
Technology is “Deshittified”, transitioning from extractive models to open-source, privacy-preserving, and decentralized tools that are benevolent by design.
Planetary Regeneration is practiced by all our community partners: de-desertification, large-scale permaculture food forests, regenerative neighborhoods, clean and affordable energy for all.
Economic Abundance created through the businesses incubated (for builders, investors, and community members), flowing through self-custodial and distributed systems.
Measurable Increase in the Gross Global Happiness index, modeled after Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness framework.
We leave the world cuter than we found it. 💕
✨ Thanks for reading! Agartha is a builder network on a mission to accelerate the transition to a Solarpunk future. If you’d like to support our work and see our vision come to life, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or contributing to our Artizen campaign. 🙏 💕☀️
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.