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.
Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that I was kind of a fuckup at the age of 13, dealing with life issues that included not having a stable place to stay and also what I’d pretty clearly now characterize as ADHD. I was getting bullied in school – not awfully, but enough to make it an unpleasant place to be – and had started to cut classes. Up to then an ostensibly “gifted” student, I landed a failing report card in my first semester of eighth grade, and one day just refused to go back.
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.”
Where agencies like the Red Cross distributed generic aid packages impersonally, and in a manner that inscribed a vertical savior/saved relation between people, the Occupy Sandy approach started with a natural conversation. (There were other salient differences in approach, too, as you’ll see in the book, but this is the one I want to drill into today.) When OS volunteers met someone who’d been displaced or otherwise injured by the storm, they started by simply asking: “How are you doing?”
However unwise it may be to present such a broad diversity of projects and aims with such brutal schematicity, I think it’s fair to say that most “open” projects – whether Wikipedia or the open-source hardware community or even many nominally “participatory” political formations – are merely open to newcomers in a formal sense. And very often, as I’ve seen & heard directly & for myself, the convenors of some such project wonder why there doesn’t seem to be the community uptake they’d hoped for.
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.”
@adamgreenfield I think this is a great idea. I mean, it's not new, but having a word, a specific way to talk about it, seems helpful. So, principals, and pragmas.
@Laura It’s not new, not at all! But I have found it very helpful, myself, to have an anchor for the idea, a way of talking about what we so often find difficult to address. I hope you find it as useful as I have.
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"