adamgreenfield

adamgreenfield, 1 year ago to random

Remind me: have we talked much, here, about my notion of the “convivial stack”? This is the idea that, to the greatest extent possible, community governance, the built environment and the technological surround should all, simultaneously be designed so that they are open, participatory and actively invitational; modular, user-modifiable and extensible; and reward experimentation?

adamgreenfield, 3 months ago to random

Can we not?

adamgreenfield, 4 months ago to random

I really appreciate, in spacefaring fiction, when the author has included a diagram of the ship or environment in which the action takes place. MacInnes – so good at furnishing “In Ascension” with vivid, telling description otherwise – hasn’t described the layout of the Nereus in a way that allows me to grasp where the characters are in relation to one another. In another story it might not matter; here it does.

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

The philosopher Ivan Illich, one of my go-to influences, died pointlessly and painfully from a tumor which could have been treated - that he could have had at least some respite from but which, in accordance with his beliefs, he refused treatment for. So we don't have to take him as gospel truth in everything. But I think he had a point about technology, and in fact complex systems more generally.

adamgreenfield, 1 year ago to random

My proposition to you: gay men, particularly if they identify as leather daddies, know how to age carefully and without surrendering their sexuality better than your average straight man does, and I could learn a thing or two from them.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

I wish more people used What3Words – I find it extremely helpful in coördinating meetups in large, potentially confusing public places (big parks, particularly busy intersections, airports, shopping centers, etc.), but folks always look at me like my head’s on backwards when I suggest it. https://what3words.com/

adamgreenfield, 10 months ago to random

So this is something I’ve just tripped over that tickles a certain part of my mind, that I also think a whole bunch of you would be interested in & probably have not heard of – it seems like it might be useful in mapping out the distributed functions and institutions of a local #solidarityeconomy or #circulareconomy. http://valueflo.ws

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

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, 1 month ago to random

In a low-diligence culture like the UK – a term I’ll explain shortly – overlaying digital systems (like these smart meters) over the processes of everyday life results not in efficiency or productivity gains, but in just the opposite: compounded failures that take extra time, effort and resource to correct. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/26/smart-meter-rollout-number-faulty-machines-leaps-great-britain

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

What troubles me still, a year and some after finishing “The Ministry For The Future,” is that this kind of just-so handwaving on Stan’s part was taken seriously – remains, if anything, the current gold standard for thinking through the contours of our crisis in speculative or imaginative form. But it’s ducking every question that matters, every last one.

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

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.”

adamgreenfield, 9 months ago to random

A good friend of mine thinks that the way I habitually structure sentences, with lots of clauses and parentheticals and so forth, is in itself diagnostic of ADHD. I find this idea intriguing.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

#Industrialmusic heads and others who would know: check out this very strange edit war on Wikipedia, revolving around the assertion that a Guadeloupean-French singer contributed to the first #ThrobbingGristle single, “United/Zyklon B Zombie.” This, to put it mildly, is news to me, and I know the history of this band fairly well. Does anyone know the story behind this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/1127251549

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

Started reading “A Half-Built Garden” a few days ago, and – apologies to those of you who’ve enjoyed it/recommended it to me – found it so awful that I haven’t gone back to it. I have detailed thoughts as to why this is, but honestly they don’t matter. Let’s just say this book is Not For Me, and leave it at that.

adamgreenfield, 1 year ago to random

Not yet 17, I disobeyed my parents and drove to the police barricades at the far end of Osage Avenue after nightfall, as close as I could get to the bombing – I needed to see it with my own two eyes. The overwhelming memory I carried away with me, though, was olfactory, and not visual: I promise you that nobody within a five-mile radius of West Philadelphia that night will ever quite be able to get the smell of that murder out of their nostrils. It’s 38 years gone by and it feels like yesterday.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

Year before last or so, as I may have mentioned to a few of you heads, I tried my hand at writing a short SF story. It was called “The Inheritance,” and, speaking broadly, it sucked. So I have a real operational sense of just how difficult it is to balance worldbuilding, character, dialogue, and plot in any literature of the fantastic, and my already-significant admiration for those who do it even halfway competently has only grown.

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

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.

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

So here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I live in the UK, where (as you may know) our National Health Service, the #NHS, is under severe strain. I believe a lot of that strain is intentional – designed to fracture the system so that it’s easy to privatize – but some of it is organic, and however it arises, it’s a real thing. With the need for access to care increasingly desperate, what I wonder is why people with healthcare skills are not setting up free clinics.

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

Last(-ish?) post for the day, before I go hang out with my partner and the cat and a good movie: who should I be following who you’re reasonably certain I’m not already following? I’m looking especially for folks actually building out “solarpunk”-style social and material infrastructure & community, triple word score for folks who are doing that in the “global South.” Thanks for your recommendations! 👊

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

Not that he was perfect, or anything of the sort, but I cannot express the joy it gives me to see Stafford Beer’s watchword “the purpose of a system is what it does” at long last pass into common usage, especially among folks with no obvious reason to know who Stafford Beer was. It’s been a vital analytical tool for me this past quarter-century, in all kinds of circumstances. #POSIWID

adamgreenfield, 9 months ago to KindActions

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

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

I’ll tell you what’s weird about turning 55: the implicit time horizon behind your decisions changes, subtly but profoundly. “Am I really going to get 25 years of value out of this thing I’m considering buying? Am I really ever going to read this book, if I’ve been carrying it from one house to another ever since college 35 years ago, and have never yet cracked the cover?” It’s clarifying, and sobering.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

OK, big conjecture time. Put pretentiously, this is my Grand Unified Theory of organic political response to crisis in North American and Western European societies: a generalized, free-floating sense of crisis tends to drive majority populations toward the nativist right, and the usual search for convenient scapegoats, but curiously, as a crisis intensifies locally, sentiment passes through some phase transition that activates, instead, instincts toward mutual aid and expressions of solidarity.

adamgreenfield, 9 months ago to random

I have to say this about Rebecca Solnit, and it will seem petty but I think it tells: she doesn’t get the details right. I opened her book on walking, and stumbled right out of the gate at her characterization of the Marin Nike site as (IIRC) an “ICBM silo.” I’ve never been able to entirely trust her again after that. And in reporting on matters like the climate, the details aren’t merely the details: they are the story. It matters. Make of that what you will. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/26/we-cant-afford-to-be-climate-doomers

adamgreenfield, 10 months ago to random

Learned about this organism this morning, courtesy of @abolisyonista: it’s a myxosporian endoparasite that may have originated as an endogenous cancer, and which – uniquely among the known varieties of Earthly life! –does not use mitochondria or aerobic respiration to power its metabolism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henneguya_zschokkei