Looks like it’s Sunday, and that means it’s time for another #Lifehouse thread. I’m intensely mindful that I’ve been talking about the book Quite A Lot lately, so I’m thinking of dialing back on the frequency of these posts a tad – you’ll let me know if that sounds right. But for today, let’s talk about one of my favorite aspects of the book, which is the chance it finally afforded me to affirm in my writing an intensely material, hands-on flavor of politics that descends from the DIY/DIT 1960s.
I kinda buried the lede yesterday: my next book “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World On Fire” is finally available for pre-order from Verso! It’s about how we organize ourselves as communities to survive the climate-systems collapse unfolding all around us, drawing on lessons from the Black Panther survival programs, Occupy Sandy and the Crisis-era Greek solidarity clinics straight through to municipalism in Spain and democratic confederalism in Rojava! https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2536-lifehouse
If you’ve been enjoying our conversations here about the Long Emergency, the #pragma, assembly-based systems of local self-determination, and the #lifehouse itself as a concrete implementation of #solarpunk values and ideas about the world, and as a way of sheltering ourselves against all the storms to come, I genuinely think you’ll find something useful in this book. 👊
Sunday! And that means it’s time for this week’s #Lifehouse thread. Last week we talked about the #pragma; this week I want to cover something that I see as at least as important to the idea of a functioning Lifehouse network or federation, which is the distinction between formal openness and a quality I think of as “invitationality.”
Anyway, you can read more about invitationality, and the other qualities that I think made Occupy Sandy so successful and such an excellent example, in the book. And I hope you’ll let me know about examples of this quality that you yourself have experienced, and maybe together we can try to identify some of the principles at work so we can put them to use elsewhere. See you next Sunday for another thread on the #Lifehouse, and how I see it working to support us in the time of troubles we face!
Every Sunday for the past month or so, I’ve posted threads previewing my forthcoming book “#Lifehouse” for folks who follow me here. A bunch of them asked me to make yesterday’s thread public, so they could share it with friends they thought might have an interest in it, and after some consideration that’s something I’m willing to do. So please enjoy this discussion of one of the ideas in the book I’m most hoping readers find useful: a neat little bit of social technology I call “the #pragma.”
I think possibly the best set of memorabilia I’ve seen in a box set. There are tour programs, posters, photos, badges. Great stuff. Even the back cover of the inner box is interesting.
Possibly my favourite (music aside, of course) is the Who’s Next | Lifehouse book. It’s very detailed with some terrific photography and I know it will provide hours of entertainment.
Then there is the small matter of 11 CDs worth of music to listen to. I know a lot of it, as I have Pete’s Lifehouse Box set and the #vinyl release of this new master, but hey, can you have too much Who?
So @adamgreenfield's concept of a #Lifehouse, a community hub for crisis-response and #MutualAid led to me writing an exploration of what @DoESLiverpool is, and how it overlaps with the idea.
Notes from a proto-Lifehouse - musings on makerspaces, a convivial future, and our pandemic response.
Well, beloved, it’s real. You can preorder my book “Beyond Hope” as of now. If you suspect that #MutualAid, #municipalism or the example of #Rojava suggest strategies to survive a hot, dangerous future, if you want to learn from examples ranging from the Black Panther survival programs to the solidarity clinics of Greece, or if you’re interested in a concrete working-out of #solarpunk ideas in the form of the #Lifehouse community resilience hub, this is the book for you. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Hope-Collective-Mutual-Emergency/dp/1788738357
Had an excellent introverted Sunday afternoon exploring some of the less-frequently-listened-to corners of my music collection and working on a blog post (provisionally) titled "Notes from a proto-#Lifehouse"